Mark 7:1-9
Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 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.) 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?’ He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
“This people honours me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.”
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’
“This people honours me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.”
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’
Then he said to them, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! (NRSV)
“They
Like Jesus, But Not The Church: Insights From Emerging Generations,” Week Six:
They Think the Church is Full of Fundamentalists Who Take the Whole Bible
Literally
A
funny thing happened yesterday (in case it isn’t obvious, I scrapped the
original bit I wrote!). I was at my alma
mater, Lewis & Clark College, down in Portland, helping out with a
tournament the debate team to which I belong was hosting. Mostly, it was an excuse to see a number of
old friends who I do not get the chance to see very often anymore.
And
no fewer than three different people commenting to me—all separately and
independently of each other—how I am the only Christian pastor they manage to
be able to listen to.
This
isn’t a pat on the back. I’m trying to
convey this as humbly as possible—in one of my forays far outside the realm of
the church, where most of my friends are actively nonreligious, a pastor is as
rare a sighting as a unicorn.
And
that isn’t by accident—it is, in fact, by design. It is people knowing exactly what they are
doing—pushing any sort of organized religion far, far away. And it is precisely because of the stereotype
that one of my friends—unknowingly, but succinctly—put to me:
“Atcheson,
you’re the only pastor who I’m not convinced is a total (insert expletive of
your choice here)!”
So it goes.
This
is a sermon series for us to begin the fall season here in the life of the church,
and it is a sermon series that took us from September and into October. It challenged and maybe even distressed us a
bit…which I promise you is a good thing, even in the comfort zone of
church. In fact, church has become such
a comfort zone for us, and for many Christians, that an increasing number of
folks feel shut off from us because they worry that they do not speak our
language, or understand our thoughts, or follow our precepts. And that separation has not been easy on us,
as church memberships decline and the average age of remaining church members
increases. In the midst of these
sociological trends, a California pastor named Dan Kimball wrote a book
entitled, “They Like Jesus, But Not the Church,” in which he
documents—qualitatively, rather than quantitatively—the stereotypes that people
who live outside the church hold of us.
And none of those stereotypes are good.
Each week we will hear—through Dan—from a member of my generation about
how they see the church, and we’ll do so while also exploring what the Bible
has to say about it. And so we began the
series with a message with the theme of, “They think the church has a political
agenda, and “They think the church is judgmental and negative,” followed by,
“They think the church arrogantly claims that all other religions are wrong.”
Then we turned to the theme of, “They think the church is dominated by males
and oppresses females,” and last week the theme was “They think the church is
homophobic.” The last and final theme,
then, that sums up so much of what we have talked about over the last five
weeks is, “They think the church is full of fundamentalists who take the whole
Bible literally.”
As
Dan Kimball describes him, Gary is a thirtysomething young man who sings “in a
local band and works in a print shop…(He) grew up in the church but stopped
going when he was a teenager. He felt
that the church pastor was using the Bible to express his angst and his agenda.” This is what Gary had to say about Jesus and
Scripture:
“Jesus stood for strength and
character. He plowed the path to do
right. He was more than a Gandhi, I
believe he was raised from the dead.
Jesus was a fusion of the power of good and flesh that had a message for
people to do what is right and loving.”
He
continues:
“I tell you what is scary…it’s the
fundamentalist Christians who take the Bible literally and go on crusades and
campaigns to verbally beat the hell out of those who disagree with their
particular interpretation. I bet Jesus
is pretty pissed at them when they go and smugly claim Jesus is on their side
and behind all they say and do.”
Now…show
of hands, how many of you have, in the week between now and the last time we
worshiped together, gone out on a crusade or campaign to verbally beat the hell
out of people?
But
that’s what we’ve been up against all this time, and it is something I was
reminded of when venturing out to another circle of friends outside the church
for the first time in a long time.
But
Christian fundamentalism is in many ways the Pharisaic way of doing
Christianity—something that sprang up in response to perceived threats to the
faith.
The
Pharisees felt threatened by messianic leaders—especially Jesus—who claimed to
have the direct ear of God, because that implied that people no longer needed
the temple priests!
Christians
felt threatened, starting in the 19th century, by the Enlightenment
and the increasingly progressive nature of academic Biblical scholarship. And that mentality still persists today, with
students at Liberty University, founded by the late Jerry Falwell, being told
that they should not be educated beyond their obedience. In other words—that too much education is
harmful!
It’s
something that the Pharisees had a distinct interest in, too—to keep their
populace dependent on them, and their educations, and their
interpretations. It’s why Martin Luther
ended up becoming such a problem child for the Roman Catholic Church—if you
have everybody reading Scripture as opposed to just the priests, who the heck
knows what they’ll come up with next?
So
let’s revisit this story from Mark 7 in that particular light. The Pharisees, it should be noted, are not
doing this out of any altruistic concern for the health of Jesus and His
disciples—the notion of hand washing as a hygienic practice was still many
centuries away.
No,
what the Pharisees are talking about here is the religious ritual of
purification, which they elevate in importance here to try to discredit Jesus
and His disciples.
Why
would they bother doing this if they weren’t worried about Jesus and His
radical message?
More
to the point, why are they afraid of Jesus and His radical message?
I’ve
said it before, and I’ll say it until the day I die, the opposite of faith isn’t
doubt, it’s fear!
And
that’s what fundamentalism is created out of—it’s created not out of faith, but
out of fear. Out of our own human fears,
we create new traditions that we claim are divine in origin, but in reality are
anything but.
There’s
no Scriptural reason to celebrate Christmas on December 25—it’s something we
arrived at ourselves.
There’s
no Scriptural basis for the rapture—it’s something we cobbled together by proof-texting
Paul’s letters and the Book of Revelation.
And
there’s no Scriptural basis even for something as minor as wearing robes to
preach!
We
create these traditions and say that they honor God. And they may well do exactly that. But in doing so, we have to always be asking
ourselves if we are doing it for God or for ourselves.
Because
when we do the latter, that is when we get into trouble. That is where our traditions risk taking us
further away from God, because at that point, the church doesn’t exist to
glorify God, it exists, like the Pharisees did, to keep hold of what power it
has, and it creates threats in order to be able to do so.
Threats
like the ordination of women. Or gays
and lesbians. Or anyone who isn’t like
us, really.
But
Jesus did not rely on threatening those not like Him. He couldn’t—nobody was like Him!
And
nothing else is like the Church. Nothing
else can do what we do—offer people the grace and mercy and redemption and love
of God as revealed by Jesus Christ.
And
when God is so great, why should we feel threatened—or be threatening to—those not
like the Church…which is to say—everybody and everything?
Because
when we do so, what are we revealing about ourselves? Our character as Christians, the substance of
our beliefs, or, perhaps most importantly, the strength of our very faith
itself?
After
all…faith that can be threatened by one person saying something we don’t like probably
is not very strong faith at all.
Such
is the faith of the Pharisees. Let us
turn instead, as ever, to the faith of
Jesus Christ instead. May it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
October
14, 2012
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