What Comes In, What Goes Out A sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt At Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA On August 30 th, 2015

Transcription

1 What Comes In, What Goes Out A sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt At Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA On August 30 th, 2015 Mark 7:1-23 It is truly good to be back among you. I know many of you followed my blog while I was on the Camino, so you have a sense of some of what I experienced. Some of you came to the welcome home event at Judith s church last night, so you had a chance to hear us a talk a bit about our sabbatical journey as well. I will do a Real World, Real Faith talk on the 27 th at 11:20 to do some more sharing. And, of course, some of what I experienced and learned will make it into sermons in the future. Our text for today is from the Gospel of Mark, the 7 th chapter. It starts with a glimpse into the Jewish traditions of Jesus day around the proper way to prepare and eat food washing the hands, washing the food, washing the cooking vessels all being very important (then and now). It s a good thing to wash your hands before you eat. The Pharisees note that some of Jesus disciples aren t careful about those traditions and ask Jesus why. This creates an opportunity for Jesus and the author of Mark to make a point about what really matters in God s eyes and how the Pharisees had missed that point. Listen now for what the Spirit is saying to us in these words of scripture. 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! For Moses said, Honour your father and your mother ; and, Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die. 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) then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this. Then he called the crowd again and said to them, Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.

2 When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. 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, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. In the beautiful city of Barcelona, where my family and I spent a few days after we concluded our Camino journey, there is a place called, get this, The Jamon Experience. Located on Las Ramblas, a pedestrian boulevard, the Jamon Experience or Ham Experience is a combination museum, store, and restaurant dedicated, as you might guess, to ham. We passed by it at least twice a day walking to and from our Airbnb apartment. I think it was one of my daughters who said when we first saw it, We don t need to go in there. We ve already had the jamon experience. We had it every day on the Camino. It was true. Even though we didn t eat pork every day on the way and at least one of our family members didn t eat it at all ham seemed to show up at nearly every breakfast, and on the bocadillos we d sometimes have for lunch. Pork was almost always one of the options for the second course at dinner. It came to the point where even I grew tired of seeing it. As I ve wondered about why pork is so ubiquitous throughout Spain, I can t help but think it has something to do with Spanish history. Just as not eating pork had become a way for first century Jewish people to say we re not like those Gentiles who live around us, who don t obey our dietary codes. I wonder if eating pork and lots of it was a way for the Christian Spaniards to say, We are not like the Moors the invaders who came from the East with their own traditions and their own proscriptions against eating certain types of meat especially pork. So we re going to eat pork. Rules about what you can and can t eat, and how you eat, and sometimes with whom you eat find their way into many cultures. Certainly, the Pharisees of Jesus day and Orthodox Jews today for that matter would be horrified at having The Jamon Experience. So would members of many religions today for that matter Buddhists, Muslims, Jews. The Gospel of Mark sets up a conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees which begins with hand washing, and moves to an example of human traditions giving people an excuse to not do the right and compassionate thing for others. In other words, to avoid responsibility to care for their elder family members. I think the Gospel of Mark does this in part to set up the issue in the early church of the inclusion of Gentile Christians those who did not observe the Jewish dietary laws. It was shocking for a first century Jew to hear that it was okay to embrace and sit at table with those who had the Jamon experience.

3 To drive the point home, Jesus says, There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. It s not what you eat or how you eat it that makes you unclean unacceptable it s how you treat others that matters. So welcome Mark and Jesus seem to be saying welcome your Gentile brothers and sisters. Okay, yes. I take your point, Jesus. Nothing outside a person by going into them can make them unacceptable to God. Ham, shellfish, non-kosher dairy. But isn t it true that there are things that we take in that, while they don t make us unclean or unacceptable or unloved by God, can still make us unhealthy? A steady diet of pound cake and country fried steak won t make you unacceptable to God, but it will probably not do any favors for your heart and your arteries. What we take in really does matter. Of course, I m not just talking about food here. There are other things that we consume that can harm us. Ingesting bitterness and vitriol, viewing gratuitous violence, taking in material that objectifies women and men, listening day-in and day-out to voices that would call us to treat those who are different from us or with whom we disagree as less than human, exposing ourselves to a steady diet of resentment and rage doesn t that exact a toll on our hearts as well? These things may not make a person unclean they may not defile a person but they can make a person very mentally and spiritually sick. Vester Flanagan the 2 nd, the man who murdered those two fellow journalists in Roanoke this week provides a case in point. His manifesto, delivered to the press before he took his own life, shed light on how much time he d spent researching other shootings and shooters, how much time he dwelt on feeling mistreated, ruminating, chewing on all of this until he became, in his own words, a human powder keg. Such stories ought to make us stop and think about what we dwell on in our own lives and what we need to learn to let go, the sorts of media we tune into, and the types of messages that we consciously and subconsciously approve. When Jesus says, It is what comes out of a person that defiles, that matters to God, and that stuff comes from the heart, he s right. It is from the human heart the Hebraic seat of the will and intention that evil intentions come and the list of behaviors that are harmful to self and others is long. It is also true that it is from the human heart the heart opened to the Spirit that good intentions come, too compassionate action, love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. These come from the heart as well.

4 That is precisely the reason we have to tend to our hearts, to pay attention to what we let into them and to how we digest and process what we consume what we allow to pass through, and what we really internalize. The truth is, all of us get exposed to a barrage of material that is not helpful or healthful for us, whether we like it or not. So much input comes in day-in and day-out by way of words and images on screens and through headphones and by way sometimes of direct human experience with other live human beings face to face. We can t utterly avoid the negative, unhealthy inputs. We just can t. But we can do what we can to feed our hearts and souls with what is healthy. My Sabbatical journey with Judith and the girls was an exercise in tending my heart feeding my soul with good, wholesome input. Getting away for a time to come back refreshed. I m aware that this is extraordinary not everyone who works a job gets such an opportunity to step outside of that constant flow of input like I did. It s important to tend your heart nonetheless. As Judith told the crowd last night at the Welcome Home event for us at Trinity, we both believe we almost had to be pulled out of our day-to-day and put into a different, extraordinary world on the other side of the ocean and cut off from the inbox and so much else to really get the full benefit of sabbatical. If we hadn t done so, we d never have really gotten away. The sabbatical was sort of a detox. I don t mind telling you that it took a little while to really let go. But over time and relatively quickly, I could feel a peace washing over me. I no longer unconsciously reached for the phone that wasn t in my pocket. I started to relax into the experience and to become more and more open to what the journey had to teach me. The blog posts that I sat down to write relating our daily travels came so naturally, they were something I wanted to do. I began to notice things that I wouldn t have noticed before, to approach people I might not have engaged before. What a blessing. It was about midway through the Camino when I came upon Adam and Landi, two college students at Cambridge in England. They are both literature majors, and they were such a cute couple. Landi had grown up in church, Adam not so much. We had plenty to talk about and the conversation flowed so freely and easily that three hours passed in what seemed like minutes. We talked about relationships and literature and theology, about Chaucer and the abrupt original ending of the Gospel of Mark. Near the end of our time together, when we neared the village where I d be meeting Judith and the girls for the night, I shared, You know, sometimes I get a little anxious. Adam looked at me and he said, Really? Because you seem like the most Zen person I have ever met. I shared that with Judith and the girls and they laughed way longer than you did. What caused that to happen? A steady diet of peace songs of peace sung with a group of Germans in Latin: Dona nobis pacem, dona nobis pacem, dona nobis pacem grant us peace. A steady diet of encountering the other and finding in them not a stranger or an enemy but a fellow traveler and quickly a friend.

5 A steady diet of paying attention to what was going on right in front of my face. Imagine that Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt: The most Zen person someone has ever met. I still can t believe it. That s what happens when you tend your heart Because it is out of the heart that evil intentions come And it s out of the heart that good intentions come, too. Peace. Let it Be. Amen.