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AProp15 Genesis 45:1-15; Psalm 133; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32, Matthew 15:(10-20), 21-28 August 17, 2008
Story of family dinner Many
of the children have started school already and some start tomorrow. It’s
good to see old friends again. To
get used to a new grade and new teachers. I
have a story about a family with two children in the first week of school. This
brother and sister were getting used to all the new things. One
evening it was time for dinner and they had a routine they followed. The
sister set the table – placemat, fork, knife, spoon, napkin. The
brother filled the glasses with ice, poured the water in and
put the glasses on the table just above the knives. This
night it was the brother’s turn to say the blessing. He
said his usual blessing without even having to think about the words. And
then the kids knew to put their napkins in their laps. Their
dad asked them how the day went. The
boy said, ‘It was okay’, but he didn’t tell his parents and his sister that
he got teased on the playground and embarrassed, and
he was worried about going to school the next day. Mom
asked, ‘Didn’t you have your first quiz in spelling today? How did you
do?’ The
boy said, ‘Fine.’ But he had missed four out of ten words and he was really
upset about it. The
mom turned to the sister and asked her how her day was. ‘Okay’,
she said. ‘We’re gonna get to use microscopes in science this year.’ But
she didn’t tell her parents and her brother that
she had seen a new girl coming toward her table at lunch and
she moved over so the girl couldn’t have a place to sit and she avoided
looking at her. And
the sister had an empty feeling in her stomach afterward and
she was still thinking about it. The
kids ate their dinner, helped clear the table, and went into the den. What
was more important – how
the table was set, whether the fork was in the right place? saying
the right words for the blessing ? giving
answers that they thought their parents wanted to hear? Or
whether the boy and girl talked to their parents and each other about
what was really going on? What
their minds were really thinking? What
their hearts were really feeling? This
is the point Jesus is making in our reading today. The
Pharisees knew what the proper procedures were for everything but
they had forgotten how to seek God honestly from their hearts. The
Jewish people had received ten laws from God when they were forming as a
people. Those
ten commandments were a compass for their life. But
as life got more complex, as they grew in numbers, as
they lived for a long time in exile among a different culture and religion, they
made more and more rules to help them keep their identity - detailed
maps to use with the compass. As
the people of Yahweh, they did everything they could to
keep themselves separated from other peoples and other religions. It
was like they were a person who takes precautions when
spraying a strong insecticide or going into a hazardous zone. You
would want to protect yourself from breathing in or swallowing or
even touching a toxic substance. This
is how they saw the foreign culture in which they were forced to live. And
so they made detailed laws to protect themselves so
that they would be a holy –whole and pure – people. So
that nothing would have leaked out or gotten in through
the protective covering of all the rules. This
was especially important when they went in to worship God. And,
even with us today, we feel we must be, or act, the
most perfect when we come to church. They
would not go into non-Jewish homes. They
would only eat food that their rules allowed. They
developed ritual cleansing if their bodies had become, in their understanding,
contaminated
by illness or exposure to things outside their strict boundary. In stressing that they should not mix with other cultures, they
were careful not to mix things. Wool
was not to be woven with linen. Only
one kind of seed could be sown in a given field at one time. Tomatoes
and cucumbers and beans could not be contained within one border. Everything
organized in like kind, like they were supposed to be. This
was especially true in food preparation and at mealtimes. And
so it was often around the mealtime that Jesus pressed and broke these
boundaries – eating
unclean food in an unclean home with unclean people without
going through the ritual washing of the hands. Did
he dislike traditions and the proper setting of the table? No,
of course not. For
him it is more about the spirit of things. He
knows the heart of God and the spirit, the true intention, of the law. And
he knows the core meaning of the ten commandments that
compass over which all the laws had been piled. Underneath
it all was to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, all our
strength, To
love neighbor, stranger, and enemy as we are loved, as
we are treated by God - with goodness, kindness, and mercy. Of
course, we have rituals that have lost the meaning they
were first meant to convey. A
long time ago in the history of Christianity, we began to do the same thing. Take
fish on Fridays for example. When
I was in elementary school in the ‘bible belt’ of north Florida, a
Southern Baptist child in a Southern Baptist town, we
were served fish every Friday. Now
I had no idea that this menu item every Friday came
from a time and a place far away and long ago. The
powerful experience of Jesus’ teachings and
the way his resurrection brought about new life in an incredibly explosive way
changed
the shape of peoples’ lives. Before
they would relive this experience every Easter and each Sunday morning, they
wanted to prepare for it, to
create room in their hearts, souls, minds, and bodies for his presence. So
they did things like devise Lent to spend 40 days as Jesus had in the
wilderness. And
they devised all Fridays as a little ‘Good Friday’ a little Lent to
get them mindful and prepared for Sunday. In
some places meat was a luxury, something worthy of giving up. So
meat became something they would give up on Fridays as
a reminder and a symbol of preparing to reconnect themselves to
receive the body of Christ on Sunday. Fish
was a lesser substitute for protein. Hundreds
of years later, the ‘ritual’ of not eating meat on Fridays is
carried out still by many people. And
it doesn’t occur to them at all that this custom arose to awaken a deep
desire to be ready to receive the presence of Christ at the Eucharist on
Sunday morning. All
they consciously acknowledge is that they are following a rule. And
at the extreme, they have been taught that that rule is more important than
other things that could be more true to their spiritual life. I’m
sure each of us could replace ‘fish on Friday’ with rituals we have, rules
we follow and don’t even think about why. And
so Jesus quotes Isaiah: This
people honors me with their lips -only
approved foods can pass through them- but
their hearts are far from me. Jesus
calls us to get to the heart of the matter of our lives. In
the context of eating he says: It’s
not what goes into your stomach that will make you acceptable to God. What
goes in, whether it is approved or not, simply
moves through your body and ends up down the drain and into the sewer. But
what comes out of your mouth, comes from your heart, where
the truth of your devotion and desire resides. It’s
good to have religious and cultural traditions. I
like pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and barbeque on the 4th of July. And
they can be very helpful tools to remind us of who we are. But
they are not meant to substitute or mask what is truly coming from your heart. We
tend to like to blindly follow rules and customs. People
these days are attracted to churches that
proscribe detailed rules for them. It
feels safe and sound to have a set boundary and stay in it. That
takes less work and less risk than really forming a relationship with God. A
true connection between the human heart and the heart of God is
a dynamic reality that requires that we be open
and vulnerable in our honesty with God and ourselves rather
than locked into staid patterns in our lives that
almost protect us and keep us from facing that Truth and that Way that
is so much larger and freer than rules or customs can ever contain. What
can we do, aside from families learning to speak from the heart to
one another at the dinner table? We
can practice our religion by intentionally getting rid of the layers going
down to that compass and opening up to God with
the desire to be honest with God and our self about where our heart really is. We
can practice being more mindful about the source of our thoughts, words, and
actions. Do
they come from that open and honest place where we tap into God’s heart? If
this is what we hold dearest in our lives, that journey into God, as
our pearl of great price, our hidden treasure, then
we’ll be surprised at what we’ve held onto that
we’ll find slipping from our loosened grasp down
the drain and into the sewer.
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