Three years ago, I was leading a worship workshop at my internship congregation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where my husband and I were spending the year learning about ministry and mission in a very different context. Only about 9% of the population of Malaysia is Christian, and Daniel and I were pastors at the only two solely English-speaking congregations on the peninsula. They were small but vibrant communities that loved God and loved worshiping Jesus.
As I was leading the worship workshop, there began a conversation about appropriate dress for worship leaders. It was lead by the patriarch of the congregation, a very loving, funny, and devoted man that we called Uncle Edwin. Uncle Edwin would joke about just about anything— except worship. He was very serious about God and very serious about what people should wear when they are worshiping God. He insisted that “young people” in the congregation could not possibly respect God if they wore t-shirts or jeans to worship. His intention was pure, I think— he equated respect with the way a person dresses, and I think that is, most of the time, a fair assessment, especially in a society that puts a lot of weight on what people look like. But then Uncle Edwin insisted that if a worship leader came to church wearing jeans or a t-shirt they should not be allowed to lead worship. He wanted to be the gate-keeper for who was allowed to stand in front of the congregation. All of a sudden, his good intentions began to push people away from leadership roles in the church and put up walls between him and the younger people in the congregation, including his two sons.
There was nothing wrong with Uncle Edwin wanting people to dress nicely for church. He was raised to dress nicely in order to honor God, and had likely raised his children to do the same thing. But eventually he started equating people’s clothing to their worthiness. He began judging them for what they wore and decided that some people deserved more love and grace from God based on how much respect he believed they had for worship. His simple belief about clothing started to put up a wall between himself and the people he was worshiping with. It drew a line between “us” and “them.”
That’s one of the ways we can gauge whether our practices are truly worth it or if they might be missing the mark a bit: do our practices cause us to build walls between ourselves and our neighbors? Or do they build bridges? If we begin to insulate ourselves from others— or worse, if we begin to hate our neighbors— then we have gone astray.
This is what happened with the Pharisees. The tradition that they were referring to was not a law written in Torah. It was simply something that had been passed down over time and had become embedded in the society and the practices of the Pharisees. And the ritual of washing hands before eating wasn’t a bad tradition. There’s obviously nothing inherently evil about staying clean. But we hear in Deuteronomy this morning that they were not to add anything or take anything away from what God was commanding. They were to pass the laws down to their children and children’s children without changing them.
But we all know that even between two generations, there are barely any traditions that are passed down without a little bit of tweaking. What happened over time was that people began to use that ritual of washing as a sign of who was “in” and who was “out,” the people who were “good” and abiding by the traditions, and those who were “bad” and ignoring them. Unlike some of the other traditions in Jesus’ time, this one was obvious to anyone who was around during meal time. They could clearly see who had washed their hands before eating and who didn’t. So instead of expressing the holiness of God, this tradition of ritual purity became a means of excluding people considered dirty or contaminated. The Pharisees began to do the exact thing that the passage in Deuteronomy warns them not to do. Not only did they add something to the statutes and ordinances given by God, but they used them not for love but for judgement.
Over time, a tradition that was supposed to lift up God’s holiness and sovereignty, became a way for the Pharisees and others to draw a clear line between “us” and “them.” This is the real trouble, and I think this is really what Jesus took issue with in this exchange with the Pharisees.
You see, I think this story is less about the things that defile us or how to stay clean, and much more about the fact that we are all unclean. We are all standing on even ground when we stand before God. We are all undeserving, all unclean and defiled. Jesus was really telling the Pharisees that the problem with this ritual purity was that when we become so entrenched in what we believe is “right” and “wrong,” we start separating people into categories of “us” and them.” And when that happens, we are tempted to judge, we become tempted to set ourselves above others. And eventually we may begin to believe that we are more deserving of God’s grace and love than others.
But when we start drawing lines in the sand, when we start putting ourselves over and against “those people,” God is always standing on the other side of the line. The order of God’s Kingdom trumps every single worldly order we try to come up with. When we start ranking the worthiness of people, God turns that list upside down and inside out. Our practices are not about what makes us good or pure according to the world, but they should about what prepares us for God’s Kingdom, some of the things we heard in Psalm 15 this morning— speaking the truth from our hearts, doing what is right, standing by our promise even when it hurts us, being merciful, gracious, and generous.
We do these things not to raise ourselves above others, but because it is how we will live in the Kingdom. We are called to live now how we will live in the Kingdom in the future— we pray it every Sunday… “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
The Pharisees thought they were preparing for God’s Kingdom by keeping the ritual purity traditions. But they were really using the laws to draw lines in the sand. They were using the laws to judge others and, in turn, determine who was worthy of God’s love and mercy and who wasn’t. But that’s not the Pharisee’s job. That’s not our job.
What Jesus was referring to when he called the Pharisees hypocrites and said they ignored the commandment of God, was the commandment that is above all other commandments in Jesus’ mind— love God with all that you have. And, if we remember Jesus’ words in the Gospel according to Matthew, the second greatest commandment follows the first: love your neighbor as yourself. Simply put, we cannot follow these two commandments by putting up walls between ourselves and our neighbors or drawing lines in the sand. We cannot attempt to love God and love others if we are busy judging them.
Yet we continue to do it. We continue to judge others for what they are doing or not doing. For the standards we have set according to this world’s order. We continue to set ourselves above others based on traditions that have been handed down over the years. Traditions that may have started with the intention of honoring or worshiping God, but have somehow been distorted into a measuring stick for who is worthy and who deserves condemnation.
We might ask why. Why do we continue to do this when we know it is bad for us and we know it is bad for our neighbors? Jesus tells us because it comes from within our hearts. There is something within us that bubbles up and causes us to be ugly to one another.
The good news, is that as ugly as we are to one another, no matter how many lines we draw, no matter how many walls we build, God loves us. God affords us the same grace and love that God gives to those we judge. And this doesn’t seem fair. Because it isn’t fair. It doesn’t matter what kind of rituals and traditions we think will make us or other people deserve grace. Because we don’t deserve grace. And we never will. We are only gifted God’s grace because Jesus, the only one who has walked this earth undefiled, was crucified on a cross and raised from the dead for the forgiveness of all people— on both sides of the aisle, on both sides of the wall. And more than that, as the Kingdom continues to break into the world, we have faith in a God who destroys those separations, who unites us and calls us all beloved. Regardless of who is clean or dirty.
This sermon was preached at St. Andrews Lutheran Church by-the-sea in Jacksonville Beach, Florida on September 2, 2018.
