| Sermon for Sunday, August 28, 2005
Where Does Evil Come From?
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Scripture: Mark 7 1 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, 2 they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. 3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4 and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles. ) 5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" 6 He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, "This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; 7 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.' 8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition." 9 Then he said to them, "You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! 10 For Moses said, "Honor your father and your mother'; and, "Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.' 11 But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, "Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban' (that is, an offering to God )— 12 then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this." 14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile." 17 When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 He said to them, "Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, 19 since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?" (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20 And he said, "It is what comes out of a person that defiles. 21 For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22 adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person." 24 From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 25 but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. 26 Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27 He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." 28 But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." 29 Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter." 30 So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. 31 Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. 32 They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33 He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. 34 Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened." 35 And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36 Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 37 They were astounded beyond measure, saying, "He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak." Sometime this last week I heard Lance Armstrong quoted about the latest charges that he has used performance-enhancing drugs. He was denying those charges, as he has consistently done for years, but in his denial he talked about his amazing recovery from cancer—a recovery he learned later from his doctors that they only confidentially gave him a very small chance of actually making. In his response to the doping charges and in characterizing his recovery, he used the term “miraculous”. It was not a word I had heard him use before and I was struck by his using it— because I think it is a good word to describe his journey and his healing. We sometimes get off on the wrong track when we look at the stories in the Bible about Jesus healing people and try to figure out HOW that could have happened. The point is that there are still stories of healing and recovery that may not fall into our logical categories and can be called miraculous. I can identify with one of those in the last portion of chapter seven of Mark today where Jesus works with a man who had a speech impediment and Jesus made the man whole. I have a story like that also. When I was in college I had a very visible role on our 4000-student campus. I was vice president of the student body/government one year and president the following year. I moved from that role of visibility to go on to seminary where there were lots of very bright people and where I was a little frog in a big pond of people much more capable than me. And during seminary a speech impediment I had had in junior high and high school returned in a very embarrassing way. I was a stutterer as a teenager. I tried to overcome that by being in some very visible leadership roles in my church group—taking the lead role in one of our youth group plays, for instance, even with my stuttering. During college I didn’t have much of a problem but the stuttering returned with a vengeance in seminary and there would be times in our Hebrew language class when I would just be frozen and could not conjugate the verbs when it came my turn. In a class on Methodist history I remember being so frightened and ill at ease that I could not even answer the role saying I was present. My professors were sympathetic and concerned—and rightly so. You would not want a preacher who stutters! Just think how long the sermon would be! Some people think they are too long now, and that would be much worse! The school of theology faculty sent me to the speech department at SMU to get me some help and I had some weekly appointments there for a while, but I did not make much progress there. Stuttering is complicated and with me it was more a matter of self-confidence and self-esteem than a mechanical problem with brain and mouth. What did make a difference for me was a year we spent off campus from seminary in an internship program that let me serve as a campus minister for a year at Montana State University in Bozeman. It was a formative and pivotal year for both of us. It introduced us to the Rocky Mountain West for the first time. I had a chance to really be in ministry with some exemplary Methodist ministers and learn from them. And I had a chance to conduct worship services and experience some successes in teaching and preaching. Guess what happened. My confidence grew; my self-esteem grew. I became less worried about my speech impediment. And somehow, that speech impediment mostly went away. When I came back for my final year of seminary at SMU, I was able for the first time to stand up in a chapel service with all my fellow students and with my professors whom I had been so intimidated by and read a passage of scripture out loud—leading the service—something I had been too frightened to do in my first two years. I cannot explain exactly how that happened. I am glad it did! You would not want a minister who had the stuttering problem I had back then. People who knew me from my early years of seminary and saw my impediment might call it close to “miraculous”. I believe it was the work of the God who called me into this ministry and who also calls each of us into the kind of ministry God has in mind for each of us and who will provide the resources and means for us to be faithful—just as he did for famous people like Moses who also had a speech impediment and told God that God should just find someone else! Do you remember what God tells Moses when Moses offers his excuse? Don’t worry Moses, I will find a way to utilize you even with your impediments. Jesus touches a man with a speech and hearing impediment in Mark 7 and sets him free to serve—and Jesus still can do that. Let’s go back to the start of this chapter. Jesus immediately gets into another kerfluffle with the religious leaders, the Pharisees. Who were the Pharisees? We have run into them several times already. They were good and sincere people who wanted to do the right thing—but they became too rigid and rule obsessed and legalistic. They divided the world into the pure and the impure, the righteous and the sinful, and if you were not like them, you were impure and sinful and you were NOT part of the family of God. We placed an explanation in the bulletin about the religious groups and political groups in first century Judaism so you can understand them better. The Pharisees were looked up to by some people but Jesus had his most trouble with them; his most frequent arguments with them! Jesus was “not religious enough”—at least by their standards!! In this passage from Mark, Jesus calls them hypocrites, phonies, play actors. The Greek word for hypocrite sounds almost the same as the English word and it derives from the theater of Greek culture. It is a word for an actor, one who is pretending to be someone. The comments Jesus has for the Pharisees in Mark are actually mild compared to how he verbally attacks them elsewhere. In the gospel of Luke he tells a story about a Pharisee and a tax collector who both go to the temple to pray. The religious leader says a prayer something like this: God, you are so lucky to know me! I follow all your laws, I worship regularly, I tithe, I fast twice a week. I am so not like all those other dirty, impure, sinners. The tax collector’s prayer was humble and simple: Lord, be merciful to me; I am a sinner. Jesus said, it was the sinful tax collector who went away reconciled with God—not the super religious Pharisee. And in Matthew’s gospel Jesus’ words are even harder on the spiritual leaders. He says they are like whitewashed tombs; they look OK on the outside and inside they are rotten and full of corruption. Or they are a like dirty cup that looks OK on the outside and inside is filthy. Remember, these are the respectable folks, the church going folks, that Jesus has these scathing words for. No wonder they were so threatened that they were plotting his death. In Mark’s gospel when he attacks the Pharisees he does so by quoting his favorite Old Testament prophet—the one Jesus quotes from the most: Isaiah. “You people are just honoring me with your lips instead of with your lives.” You are just doing lip service, God says. I expect you to show in your lives, in your ethics, in your behavior that you are my people. One more thing about Jesus’ attack on the Pharisees: he criticizes them for being insensitive to their aging parents. He tells them they are neglecting their parents by falsely and piously setting aside some of their resources for the Temple and then letting their parents suffer because they have wrongly designated those resources elsewhere. They are breaking a commandment, Jesus says, about honoring father and mother, and they are trying to appear to be religious while they do it!! There are two other elements of this chapter I want to look at together. Jesus is trying to get some retreat time again just like he did last week. This time he goes 120 miles north in the region of Tyre and Sidon—Gentile territory again, and does not want people to know where he is. It does not work. He just can’t get away from people who need his help. This time it is a Gentile woman who asks for healing for her daughter. This is a fascinating interchange and it may give you a picture of Jesus that is new for you. What happens? Jesus says that “the children should be fed first and that it is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Who are “the children”? Who are “the dogs”? The children are the Jews and the “dogs” are the Gentiles! Can this be Jesus saying this? Scholars try to soften this passage by saying that Jesus was just mouthing some words that he did not really believe but that his disciples believed and he was saying them out loud to show how cruel they are. Or he was using words he did not believe to make a point. Others say that it is possible that Jesus thought at first that his primary mission was to the Jews and not the Gentiles, and that this woman helped him broaden his mission and change his mind. The problem with that by this time in Mark is that Jesus has already reached out on several occasions to the non-Jews and has begun to include them in his mission! He has broken down barriers several times before he does so by healing the daughter of the woman who approaches him while he is on vacation! You can choose whichever perspective you like. I am not personally bothered by the notion that Jesus’ idea of mission and calling grew and developed as he developed. Our ideas grow and develop as we listen to God over the years and if Jesus is truly human, as the Bible says he is, then his mission grew and changed also. The last thing I want to look at in chapter seven is Jesus teaching about where evil comes from. He is being criticized again by the Pharisees. His disciples are not following their rules about the proper rituals for hand washing and for washing utensils. This is not so much about hygiene as about following the details of the law. Jesus uses the occasion to speak to his disciples then about where evil comes from. What is most interesting to me is the list of behaviors that he names that seem to be what he is concerned about. I have placed a list in your bulletin of the twelve destructive behaviors or sins that Jesus names here and I have also placed a list of virtues or positive values that were named in a world wide gathering of 650 leaders ten years ago when those leaders were asked to rank order from a list of fifteen. The list is very similar to other exercises where groups of people from our country and other countries—across many religions—have done a similar rank order. Your assignment over lunch today is to look at both the lists and make some comparisons and see if you see any parallels. You might even make your own lists of the most destructive behaviors you can think of and the most important virtues and positive values you would want people to live by. Let me just offer one observation about the list Jesus gives us. The emphasis is different from what I often hear from TV evangelists or others on the religious right. It seems to me that there is a lot of concern from some spiritual leaders about sexual sins and sexual immorality. I share the concern that we are seeing a coarsening of culture in our country and that people should be treated as people and not as sex objects. What I notice, though, is that some Christian leaders when they address those sexual sins think they have exhausted the destructive behaviors to be concerned about. Jesus’ list tells me something else. Out of the twelve behaviors that Jesus names as destructive or sinful, three of them have sexual nuances. That leaves nine others that are contrary to God’s ways. There are obvious acts of wrongdoing like theft and murder. But Jesus is also concerned about arrogance (we would know that of course from his story about the two men who go to the temple to pray. The arrogant one leaves unreconciled to God). He is concerned about greed, though some people think greed is an all American value. He is concerned about dishonesty or deceit—not being truthful. He is concerned about people who are envious or jealous or covetous. I think this is a pretty good list of what we should be concerned about also—not just the ones that have to do with sexual immorality but about all these other kinds of immorality also. What would our culture be like if we tried to address all of those behaviors, or if we took the list of virtues like the list before you beginning with honesty, compassion, responsibility, justice, tolerance and so forth, and we all worked to instill those in children, youth and adults? Jesus tells us that the evil behaviors come from inside, from our hearts, from when our hearts are misaligned with God and with the best in ourselves. I think he would also say that the good behaviors will also come from us when our hearts are in touch with God and with the best that God has created us to be. That is why Jesus came, isn’t it, and that is what we are all about as his church. God, we give our hearts to you again just as these new members are doing this morning, and pray for you to form us and form our hearts after the example and teachings of Jesus our Lord. Amen. |
