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August 30, 2009

“Beyond Tradition” James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23  Rev. Phil Blackwell

      College football season starts in earnest next Saturday. Ah, tradition. We will have to wait until November for “The Game,” Yale versus Harvard. And there are all of the other great rivalries: Army-Navy, USC-UCLA, Georgia-Alabama, Michigan-Ohio State, Wittenberg and Wooster. Okay, so the Division III rivalries do not carry quite the same glamour. But there in Columbus, Ohio, on a home football afternoon 102,329 fans, almost all dressed in scarlet and gray, go wild when the tuba player dots the “i” at midfield where the marching band has spelled out “Ohio State” in script.

      Others of us who dress in red up north of here in Madison do not have traditions as literate – just do the chicken dance, jump around to introduce the fourth quarter, and wave our arms as we sing “Varsity.”  Tradition is important.  I hesitate to mention the trauma when traditions are called into question, Chief Illiniwek downstate, for example.

      Well, Jesus is calling tradition into question in today’s gospel. This is a heated exchange. The scribes and Pharisees watching with an eagle’s eye the actions of Jesus’ disciples, find them vulgar because they do not wash their hands before eating. More than vulgar, unfaithful.  “Why don’t your followers honor the tradition of the elders? We wash our food brought home from the market. We sanitize the cups, pots, and kettles in the kitchen. We wash our hands. All of this is in accord with the dietary laws to avoid contamination.”

      Of course, they are right. We should wash our food before preparing it, and cleanse the utensils and the preparation surfaces, and always, wash our hands. I was one of those couple of dozen members of the church who took the food safety course in order legally to use our kitchen downstairs. Keep hot food hot, cold food cold, avoid contamination, and wash your hands.

      But what is at stake in this gospel showdown is not good sanitation but authority.  Who has authority in the community of faith? The old guard is scolding Jesus, “The law laid down by our forebears over the centuries prevails. This is the way that we do it as people of faith. And your band of disciples, Jesus, is disgracing the tradition.”

      But Jesus is ready to respond by quoting the prophet Isaiah. It is interesting that the faith of old was based on the Law and the prophets, and here one side quotes the Law and the other the prophets, setting one source of authority over against another.  “Isaiah was right, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” He is saying to the keepers of the tradition, “You scrupulously follow the dictates of our elders when it comes to outward cleanliness, but you are polluted inside.”  Jesus is calling them hypocrites.  Tradition is important, but it is not determinative.

      Last Sunday I sat with a group of young adults at the church while they discussed how it is that they read the Bible. We all make interpretations of the texts. We all evaluate the contents, most likely skipping over the Levitical laws about how to sacrifice a lamb and latching on to Jesus teaching us that to love God and our neighbor transcends all other requirements of the faith.

      One member of the group brought up the biblical injunction that women should be quiet in church. It is there in the Bible, but obviously it no longer is authoritative in our Methodist context. We have had ordained women clergy for at least sixty years, putting us ahead of some Christian bodies that still cling to the old tradition but puts us behind the Congregationalists by about 100 years. So, how did that come to be?

      That allowed me to trot out one of the most useful constructs of the Wesleyan tradition that I know, what we lovingly call the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral.”  John Wesley never called it that, but Albert Outler, the grand old Methodist historian of the 20th Century, teased it out of Wesley’s sermons and letters. The way to think about an issue of faith is to view it from four angles of approach: scripture, tradition, experience, and reason. 

      So, to the case raised in last Sunday’s discussion: the scripture is clear that men have the authority in the religious community, and women, while present, need to be subservient. No surprise there; it was a patriarchical society, plus men got to write the Bible. 

      It is easy to see, then, how the tradition grew for roles of women and men in the developing Christian Church. It was thought that not only should women not be ordained, they ought not to read the scripture publicly . . . nor teach, nor serve as a trustee, nor have any authority over men in the church. There still are church groups today who adhere to this tradition.

      But not United Methodists. Why? Well, for one thing those of us in the Wesleyan tradition always have read the Bible with a critical eye, acknowledging that some of the material is ultimate and timeless, and other parts are cultural and idiosyncratic. Also, while we have honored the tradition of the Church with creeds and ecumenical cooperation, Methodism itself was a challenge to the traditional authority of the state-dictated church, in our case, the Church of England. There is a bit of a subversive impulse built in to our very beginning.

      But much more important, is the role of experience. When John Wesley was growing up in the parsonage in Epworth where his father was the vicar, it was his mother, Susannah, who showed him what he needed to see. His father was in debtor’s prison in Lincoln (clergy salaries were a bit muted in those days), and the curate sent to fill in was terribly ineffective. So, it fell to Susannah to gather members of the parish in the kitchen of the parsonage and teach them. In the very place where she taught John and all of the other children during the week – Latin, scripture, reading, writing, mathematics – she taught the parishioners. And she excelled at opening the scriptures to them. 

      We can be sure that the Bishop and the curate disapproved. She had no authority to do this, but she had the gift to do it. It is said by some that when John Wesley developed a structure of small group meetings for the emerging Methodist network decades later that he had in mind as a model his mother’s sessions in the Epworth kitchen. And when he held his open meetings in the evenings not to conflict with morning worship at the parish church (after all, Methodism was a reform movement within the state church), he encouraged women to read the scripture publicly and to exhort, if not exactly to preach. He was loyal to the tradition, but as he saw it from the perspective of his own experience.

      And then, reason. The four angles of approach again: scripture, first and foremost, but also tradition, experience, and reason. If God created humanity in the divine image, which includes both males and females equally, as the first chapter of Genesis proclaims, and that God decreed that “it was very good,” then would it not be reasonable to assume that all of God’s creatures have the potential to witness to the love of God as imprinted upon their souls? Why would we want to dishonor the gifts of half of God’s human creation? It makes no sense.

      Now admittedly, it takes time for experience and reason to catch up with scripture and tradition. And in no way will either experience or reason nullify scripture or tradition. But, accuses Jesus of the scribes and Pharisees, when you place tradition above all else, you are hypocrites. We have seen just recently the protracted struggle that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has had as it moved last week to accepting gays and lesbians in committed relationships into full standing as ordained clergy. None of this is easy; none of it is automatic.

      Jesus is concerned about the integrity of a person, the purity that is in one’s heart more than of one’s hands. At one time, remember, Jesus calls these same authorities “whitewashed tombs,” gleaming on the outside but dead on the inside. It is not what you take in that defiles you, he says. It is what comes out of you.

      James got it right from our epistle today. Writing in the early years of the emerging church when everything was up for grabs, he said, “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” Simply to hear the word and not do anything about it is like walking past a mirror and glancing at yourself to be sure that you look okay. You know, give yourself the once-over. But those who do the word must stop and take a long look at themselves, and not the outward appearance, but deep down inside.”  Those who look into the perfect law,” James writes, “the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act – they will be blessed in their doing.”  What a wonderful phrase – “being not hearers who forget but doers who act.”

      Remember, the old purity laws were a means of setting one’s community off as being different from all other communities. It was not about hygiene but holiness. To be “holy” is to be set apart. And it was critically important in biblical times for the Jews, a beleaguered band of people who grew to understand themselves as the chosen ones of God, to know who they were. No intermarriage, no commingling of foods, no pollution of the sacred ritual with the introduction of foreign practices. Stay separate as a strategy for survival.

      Jesus comes along and blurs the lines. He eats with sinners. He heals lepers. He talks with women, even counts them among his disciples. He honors little children. He elevates the Samaritan to a hero. That is how he dirties his hands. It is not an issue of soap and water but of threatening the purity of the holy ones. And he says over and over, if you do the word of God you will get your hands dirty. Go ahead and do it; it won’t kill you.

      Tradition is important. Just look around you here at the Chicago Temple. These stained glass windows that embrace us in this sanctuary tell the traditional story of our faith. This pipe organ, our hymnals, our printed bulletins all point to our “traditional style” of worship. The clergy in robes, the altar front and center, the cross hanging for all to see, that all points to the authority of our tradition. 

      But, if we come in here to escape the world out there, if we come in here so that we will not be contaminated by the world, if we come in here to declare that we are different and better than the people out there, then we have made a mistake. And our reverence for tradition will not save us.

      If, on the other hand, we come in here to ask God to purge us of all that stains our souls, if we came in here to cleanse our hearts so that we can serve others with a purity that comes with faith, if we come in here to be fortified for everything that we will face when we leave here, then our tradition can serve us well.

      Tradition is important, but it is not determinative. We need not throw it out; we simply need to see it in harmony with the scripture, our experience, and reason. Taken all together may we find ways to not to be hearers who forget but doers who act. Amen.

Philip L. Blackwell
The Chicago Temple
August 30, 2009