Sunday, October 14, 2012

This Week's Sermon: "Human Traditions"

(A programming note--as I will be attending a regional conference this week, there will likely not be any new posts here until I return.  Look for new posts beginning next Monday or Tuesday! -E.A.)

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.’
 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

No comments:

Post a Comment