Beyond the Rules

Sunday, August 30, 2015
14th Sunday after Pentecost

1 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around [Jesus], 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.”
  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.”
  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.” – Mark 7, selected verses

See also James 1:17-27.

In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote “A Letter from Birmingham Jail” to explain why he and others were breaking the rules. Besides being a fine example of King’s writing with some oft-quoted gems like “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” the letter is written from jail as a defense to the other “upstanding” clergy who thought his timing was bad and who questioned his breaking the law, especially when he was at the same time demanding that the authorities would uphold the new civil rights laws. It shouldn’t require the hindsight of 50 years later to realize that King and so many other less famous individuals broke the law because it was already too long to have been waiting for justice and because the laws themselves were inherently unjust. But at the time, it was certainly controversial. King, in his patience and wisdom, carefully lays out his argument for breaking the law and the difference between breaking segregation laws in nonviolent protest and their simultaneous call to uphold the new federal laws supporting equal rights. However, though the unjust laws had to be changed, I think King was aware that changing the rules was only a step toward something greater, toward a goal that we have yet to fully realize. King’s breaking of the rules had a goal beyond the law.

Now, Jesus and his disciples are not so much bucking an unjust law, at least not one to the extent of the segregation laws of 1950’s America, but they are calling into question the blind following of rules without awareness of what they are there to accomplish, without recognizing what is beyond. In response to their criticism, Jesus invites the Pharisees to consider what their rituals are really all about. There’s nothing wrong with rituals, but the ones that continue unquestioned, the ones that become more about orthodoxy than about inviting us deeper into the mystery of the divine are no longer serving their purpose.

I think it goes without saying that we are good at coming up with rules and getting a little too caught up in our own way of doing things. We do it as people who move through daily routines we’d rather not have interrupted. We do it as churches that have “never done it that way before.” We do it as societies that are sometimes sluggish to make changes to accommodate changing realities. We know we like our rules and traditions. They are a comfort when things get tough. They help give us direction when we aren’t sure where to start. All well and good. Rules help us find order in life, know when to cross an intersection, remind us how to behave toward others when we feel angry. Rules shape our days.

But the reality is that we encounter a great many things in our lives that do not play by the rules. The segregationists of King’s era weren’t playing by the new federal rules. Cancer doesn’t play by the rules. Natural disasters don’t play by the rules. Acts of gun violence that are committed in public places and land mines left where children play don’t follow any rules. Refugees fleeing drug gangs and extreme poverty in parts of central and South America or fleeing discrimination in Palestine or fleeing war-torn northern Africa, Syria, and Iraq, they demand of us going beyond the rules we have in place. And finally, what Jesus knows and what we have come to know, is that death doesn’t play by our rules either.

You can take this passage to be a scolding of the Pharisees for being strict about religious practice without the compassion or faith to accompany it. And that’s a message we probably need to pay attention to. We’re all guilty of that from time to time, myself included. But I think this passage is about more than that. More than a reminder to engage our spiritual practices in a way that is life-giving. I think this passage is about a God who is willing to go with us into the place where the rules no longer apply. Because all our traditions and even all of God’s good and helpful commandments, do not have the power to take us to the place where life emerges from death.

Religion, James reminds us, is not about figuring out what I’m supposed to do, about getting caught up in the conversations that only focus on ourselves and our own religiosity, but about getting up out of ourselves and dealing with the reality in front of us. Orphans, widows, strangers, refugees, vulnerable people. It’s about engaging, like Martin Luther King, Jr., the places where the rules have failed us. It’s about engaging a God whose mercy and love are not rule-bound. It’s about engaging a life of faith that takes us beyond the realm of rules.

Today we offer anointing for healing because too much of what we experience is beyond our control. We offer anointing because we do not have a set of rules to make you and this broken world well. We only have the power of God to work among us through prayer and oil, through conversation together, through fellowship around the coffee urn, and in study together of God’s word and world, in bread and wine and water.

The life of baptism isn’t about doing all the things you or your parents promise to do at your baptism. It’s about the promise of God to lead you through the places where there is no longer any guidance for what to do or how to be. It’s about the promise of God to lead us through the places of pain and grief and incomprehensible violence, through the cross and the tomb and the descent to the depths of human suffering, to lead us to the place of resurrection, which more than any other place throws all our structure and organization and rules right out the window.

It’s unsettling at times to have a God who doesn’t always follow the rules, but think we easily forget the mess that our world of rules gets us into and how desperately we need a God who will go with us into that mess and lead us through it. And so I’d like to close with a well-known poem by Shel Silverstein, which I think reminds us of our need to go beyond the realm of order and rules to experience the liberation that God is leading us to:

“There is a place where the sidewalk ends
and before the street begins,
and there the grass grows soft and white,
and there the sun burns crimson bright,
and there the moon-bird rests from his flight
to cool in the peppermint wind.

“Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
and the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
we shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow
and watch where the chalk-white arrows go
to the place where the sidewalk ends.

“Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
and we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
for the children, they mark, and the children, they know,
the place where the sidewalk ends.”

-Pastor Steven Wilco