Getting Our Hands a Little Dirty

Proper 17 Year B, September 2, 2018

I was in Iceland last month. I was traveling around the country on a fellowship and making a short film. At the end of my adventures in the wilderness I arrived back at the capital city, Reykjavik. After I’d packed my things up and gone through all of my materials I decided to take a walk through town. I found a little pub and went in for a beer. I’d stumbled into a local place and it was pretty packed. I saw a guy around my age sitting alone in the courtyard and I asked if I could join him. We started chatting and he told me that he’d been living in Iceland for about twelve years. He was originally from Croatia. We talked about Icelandic culture. We talked about the rugged landscape; the magical appeal of the mountains and the volcanos and the ancient lava formations. We talked about the weather and how different it was from where he and I were from.

We talked about the people too. We talked about friendly they were and how they seemed so accommodating and interested in others. We talked about how the entirety of the country felt so communal and concerned with the needs of others. It was this, my new friend told me, that attracted him to this country and kept him here for so long.

In the early 1990’s he was in a war. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia was busting up into smaller independent countries. My friend was born and lived his life in Croatia, a country that was returning to its largely Roman Catholic roots after the suppression of religion by communists. His mother was from a Serbian Orthodox family. His father was a Muslim from Bosnia. But they were Croatian and it was the Croatian army that drafted my friend to fight. For years he was on the front lines. Shooting people. Probably distant relatives, he said. Maybe even people he knew. He couldn’t be sure. The entire region was chaos and he’d been drawn into it as part of his national duty.

Although his parents were Orthodox and Muslim he hadn’t been raised with religion. He didn’t tell me how he happened upon a little New Testament Bible but he said he began to read it to pass the time on the front lines. This was the point in the story when he looked at me and said something along the lines of “I don’t know you. I don’t know how you feel about religion. But this is the point in my life when I decided to follow ‘Him’.”

He sat there waiting for a response from me and said, “You know? Him?” I kind of smiled and I said, “Yeah, I know Him.”

Something spoke to him on that battlefield. There had to be another way, he said. There had to be a way to honor life, to take care of one another, to respect the dignity of all people, not just a few struggling to maintain power. Something in the Gospels spoke to him and he decided that he would follow the way of this Jesus guy. So he put down his gun and he made a decision to change his life in a radical way.

He told me he wasn’t a religious person. He wasn’t Catholic. He wasn’t Orthodox. He wasn’t an Evangelical. In fact, he rejected the term “Christian” altogether. The term “Christian” had too much “baggage” he said. But he followed Him. He followed Jesus. “At least I’ve been trying to.” He said.

He didn’t go to church much either. He said that he tried to go back in Croatia but had found the people in the churches that he attended to be tribal and rife with conflict and hypocrisy. In Iceland it was hard to find a service in English. Almost everyone in the entire country speaks English but the language at the Churches is all in Icelandic[1]. But he wouldn’t let this discourage him from following the way of Christ, a way he committed to some 25 years ago.

It was a very meaningful conversation. We talked for well over an hour and I learned a lot from this guy.

He reminded me of another old friend. A very similar story. He was an old colleague. He too was in a war. In the late 1980’s the Israeli army had put a gun in his hands and sent him to the front lines of the first Intifada. Something similar happened. He had an epiphany if you will. Sitting up on a hill, obeying orders, shooting down at people he didn’t know, he couldn’t shake the question of “why”. Why were we doing this? From that moment on he began to read and reflect and look inwardly. This lead him to reading the Gospels and he found something that resonated with him there. To this day he reads the Gospels for insight and guidance. He’s the first to tell you that he will not take the label of “Christian” yet every day he tries to follow the Way of Jesus.

I also know some people that are very quick to tell you that they are “Christians”. They will tell you that it’s part of their identity. They go to church every Sunday, sometimes even Wednesday nights. They say they’ve accepted a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and accepted Him as their “savior”. But they’re not really sure what “savior” means. Probably afterlife insurance. Yet, they don’t seem to show a whole lot of love toward other people. In fact many of them have embraced the use of violence against others. They’ve created or supported political policies that don’t pay people for honest work or that deny them medical help, or even destroy the environment. They’ve shunned the immigrant. They’ve shamed their neighbor. They’ve made their own prosperity their main priority at the expense of others. Perhaps this was why my Croatian friend was reluctant to tell me that he followed the Way of Jesus. Perhaps he thought I wouldn’t know what that actually meant.

There are entire groups of people that tell us they’re morally superior. And yet, they behave in unconscionable ways. This is called social hypocrisy. Social hypocrisy is when hypocrisy has been ascribed to entire group of people. Religious, political… whatever. It is so prevalent that we ignore it. Recently I read that, “Our American culture has become so accustomed to social hypocrisy that we have dumbed down our social conscience.” There is almost a hypnotic quality to social hypocrisy. Being “two-faced” has become an acceptable way of life.[2]

This isn’t anything new. The prophet Isaiah saw it and Jesus reminded the Pharisees, the Church leaders of His day, of it. “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” Isaiah said.

You see, the Pharisee’s in Mark’s Gospel[3] reading today tried something on Jesus. They were always trying something on him. Religious leaders can be like this. If there’s some kind of threat to their power then they’ll jump on it in a heartbeat and try to discredit it. In this particular situation they saw that Jesus and his friends were eating with unwashed hands and started giving him a hard time about it. Now, Jesus didn’t have a problem with washing your hands before a meal, but he DID have a problem with a select group of people telling everybody how to do it for religious purposes and making a big deal about it. Jesus and his friends were travelers. They were working people, on the move. They ate when they could and if this meant eating with dirty hands then so be it. (Perhaps if there was more known about how germs spread back then he would have had something differently to say about it but that’s another story.)

No, Jesus is upset that these religious leaders are more concerned with the poor washing their hands than they are with the poor actually getting fed. He’s so upset about it in fact that he not only calls out the Pharisees on their hypocrisy, he also calls the whole crowd over to tell them about it too.

It’s not what we put in our body that defiles us, he tells us, it’s what comes out of us that is the problem. In other words, why are we so careful about all the little rules and minutiae of keeping up religious practices while we’re not doing anything to spread God’s love?

In the letter from James this morning we heard that If anybody thinks they are religious but they deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.[4]

Walt Kelly’s Pogo

Every single one of us on this planet is equal in God’s eyes. Every single one of us is loved. And every single one of us has been given the gift of God’s grace. We only have to open our hearts to let in. It’s the grace that extinguishes those selfish things we keep inside, in our hearts, those evil things that defile us. It’s like what Pogo said, “”We have met the enemy and [it] is us.”[5] But there’s an antidote. That antidote is grace.

Let’s be clear. God’s grace is free. We don’t have to earn it with good works or actions. There’s no way we cold possible earn something this awesome. Yet, we are called to live out the joy of this gift by sharing it with others. Let’s take that love and turn it around and pay it forward. As James reminds us, every generous act of giving is from God. … be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, this has not been my sermon today. This has just been some meandering reflections. Today YOU are the sermon. For you are the body of Christ in the world. You are the hands of Christ commissioned for the service of all of creation. How will you use these hands for the glory of God’s kingdom?

I pray that God increase in all of us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works.[6]

We won’t have to boast about the name of our religion. We don’t have to label ourselves. They’ll know we are Christians by our love.

[1] Icelandic is a very difficult language to learn. It’s an ancient Viking language. I attended a Eucharist at the Hallgrimskirkja cathedral when I was there. I didn’t understand a word but the liturgy was so very familiar that I was able to follow along without a problem. The congregation was very accommodating of me but I still got some interesting looks when I tried to sing the hymns.

[2] Preaching God’s Transforming Justice, Yr.B, p. 376

[3] Mark 7:1–8, 14–15, 21–23

[4] James 1:17–27

[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comic_strip)#%22We_have_met_the_enemy_and_he_is_us.%22

[6] Proper 17, Year B collect, Revised Common Lectionary

Written by

Filmmaker, artist, educator, and Episcopal priest. You can find my homilies here. (What’s the difference between a homily and a sermon? Oh, about ten minutes.)

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