Religious Abuse

Good Morning!  Grace and Peace to you from God our Creator, and Jesus Christ, our risen Lord.  To start off, I want each of you to look around you.  Just take a quick a look.  What do you see?  Do you see people? Do you see park benches and trees?  Well what we see isn’t the theme of our message today, but rather it is what we don’t see.  It is about the things we miss or skip over, the things that maybe we should be seeing, but in fact are not.

                In going over our gospel lesson for this week I was drawn inevitably back to my own childhood.  The thoughts of preaching in the park today drew me back to playing over at my cousin’s house in Conroe, Texas.  They had a fantastic pool that we would swim for hours in, and I remember fondly the time spent there playing games and eating probably a little too much food.  Every time we went over to my aunt’s house I remember the smiling faces of family, of my aunts and cousins.  Over time, however, I found out what was not there.  As I grew older, as I matured and put aside childish things and grew into the adult I would become I saw those years more clearly.  I discovered what was in the shadows, what lurked unseen as my aunts greeted me with a warm smile and let us play for hours on end with her children. 

                My aunts on my father’s side were Southern Baptist, and indeed, one aunt was actually a Holy Roller and spoke in tongues, but in truth, I never cared about any of that.  Christians were Christians to my young eyes and, yes, it was strange, but if that is what brought her closer to God who was I to get in the middle of that?  However, I found out their reactions to me were never so friendly or accepting.  My Dad you see was raised Baptist, too, but when he married Mom he decided to become Lutheran, and that was something his family never really forgave him for or me as it turned out.  My Dad was an apostate to them and I learned that they personally referred to him often as “Satan” and literally called me his Spawn.  When I went over to their house as a child, all I ever saw were the smiling faces there to greet me, but what I did not see was how those smiles turned to sneers when I was no longer in sight .  But it did not stop there.  Already prone to extremism, I found out in college that my aunts and even one of my cousins would gather together around the Bible and routinely and fervently pray to God for my Father’s death.  I am not joking.  When Dad’s road construction company grew and flourished they feared that if a Lutheran business person was successful it would only lead other people astray and into sin.  They prayed for God to judge my Father and send a message to all those other sinners out there so they would be afraid and return to God’s Word – which by the way they and they alone knew how to properly interpret. 

                There are still some things I don’t know about those times, some things still hidden from sight, but some things I do know.  My cousins, as they began to age, had less and less to do with me.  What was once fast friendship and family slowly eroded to silence.  But worse than this was my Father.  A man I knew who was hard-working and practical, whose determination knew no bounds and was obvious in his love for his boys and his family, over the years I watched him devolve into something heartless.  After years of working with brothers who put on that same fake face, that same false love but stood behind their wives evil intent, he became a man lost in his own anger, who cheated on his wife, threw away his business and his faith , and now is so estranged from his children he tells people that we are dead.  No, no that’s not entirely correct.  He tells strangers that I am dead, my adopted brother whom he raised from infancy he just says was never his.  In all honesty, there are times when I look back at what they did, at what my father became, and I wonder.  In those lonely moments before sleep embraces me, as my rational mind numbs and the shadows begin creeping inexorably into the room, I wonder whether as they fervently prayed for my father’s death if some dark terrible thing didn’t finally hear them and choose to act.

                You see, ladies and gentlemen, we tend to focus on what is seen, and quite frankly to an extent who could blame us?  Digging too deep in the human experience is to uncover things that are not so wholesome, in fact they are often ugly.  To not look beyond the obvious, however, is irresponsible, for God has commanded that we love the world and its people as they really are, not how we willfully choose to view them.  Such needs to be our attitude moving into our gospel lesson for today.

                On the surface, our story might seem that Jesus is making new laws concerning Jewish cleanliness and declaring all food clean.  Indeed, Christian Theologians from Justin Martyr down to Mrs. McGullicutty’s 3^rd Grade Sunday School class often use these stories to talk about moving from the Old Covenant to the New, but such a reading fails to look past appearances and see the betrayal and the outrage inherent in the text.

                Our story tells us that the Pharisees and the Scribes had gathered around Jesus and his disciples who were eating without washing their hands.  While 2000 years later we often paint Jesus’ long time foes as some kind of silent movie villain, the Snydely Whiplashes of a bygone era, the reality is these people were not.  The Pharisees were respected countrymen, a group dedicated to preserving Torah and the Jewish tradition in a conquered land.  And the scribes, they were the Bible publishers of their day, entrusted with providing new and accurate scrolls for the Jewish Community.  These were people that had earned the respect of their fellow Jews, and rightfully so.  To find suddenly what they think of you, to discover the smiles and the fellowship present when you were watching slip away into sneers and derision when you weren’t.  To at long last peek behind the curtain and see the whole story for what it was, the people for whom you honored and had only goodwill, saw you in turn only as unwashed filth.  With up-turned noses they declare the disciples to be apart from Israel, asking in a backhanded manner, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands as the gentiles do?”

                 And at this, Jesus is outraged.  He says 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;  in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as Doctrine.'  You abandon the commandment of God to love your neighbor and hold to human tradition." 

                In response to the Pharisees’ jab towards his disciples, a jab that was for all the world was not about faith but for being a working people who happened to get both hungry and dirty, Jesus accuses the Pharisees of being the very kind of Israelite that Isaiah preached against, a people willing to look holy and devout on the outside but inside were the furthest thing from it.  “So my disciples are terrible for not washing their hands, would you mind telling me what verse that was again?  You who are so knowledgeable of the Bible, please tell us where in Israel’s history did God ever require this of his people?  My disciples hands are full of dirt you say?  Perhaps that might have meant more if it came from someone whose heart wasn’t so full of rot.”

                It is here Jesus brings the crowds into the conversation and what began was a sly snide remark meant for a few is suddenly opened up for all the world to see.  He addresses his audience by saying something that we all thought was new but in reality was very old.  That there were wicked Jews who hid behind the religion of Israel to perform the deeds of their evil hearts was by all accounts not new, the prophet Micah reminded his religious audience that a thousand rams would not slake the Lord’s anger “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good… what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”  Likewise, the prophet Hosea who confronted the priests of Gilead and compared them to marauders, “God desires mercy and acknowledgment of Him rather than burnt offerings and sacrifice.”  What makes a man truly unclean, Jesus declares, has nothing to do with religious observance but the human heart, for out of that do all foul things come.

                I admit, this story hits me hard.  Not only is it because I have lived with Holy Bullies and shadowy headless monsters but I know that as Americans, indeed as a congregation, we know of this reality all too well.  People on street-corners shouting religion like bullets instead of applying gospel like salve, family twisting arms and spirituality so others conform to religion the way they like it, making ceilings and walls out of faith instead of floors that support.  But as disturbed as I am by this story, as terrible and ugly as the religious bullies are it disturbs me more that I can become it.  I can be the bully.  Yes, the same Peter cut by the Pharisees words in Mark was the same Peter in Acts whom God had to rebuke three times to not call Unclean what He has made clean.  This story hits home to all of us because we can see ourselves at every turn. We will live to be the Pharisee, the bigot who looks down on God’s children because they are different and we will use God’s religion as our excuse.  We will live to be victim, the faithful follower of God who will find ourselves in the shooting sites of the rotten.  But despite this, despite all of it I take hope, for though we can and will be the bully and the bullied, we can also be the Christ, the child of God who rises to the defense of his people and calling the evil out of the shadows where it thrives and into the light.

                That we need to learn these roles, that we as a Church must learn that are times we must stand up and be strong, times to sit back and nurse wounds, and even times to look down and be found guilty is self evident.  That we may need to risk taking a shot meant for another, that may need to be humble and let someone defend us who is better at it than we are, that we may need to be sorry even if we cannot see what we have done wrong, these are essential lessons for Christ’s church especially moving into the twenty-first century. 

As I talk around, as I keep in touch with seminary colleagues and even other church-goers, they tell me the same sad story – one of failure and frustration.  We talk and then the conversation turn to me, “Keven, how’s your church doing?” and I find I have an embarrassment of riches.  We’re growing!   adding members and having visitors, we’re helping people both at home and abroad taking care of orphans and mothers in need, we’re performing baptisms and interceding for people through Prayer, and let me tell you this Church has some spiritual oomph.  I’ve been here for over a year and every person I’ve put into that Prayer book has seen positive change.  These things are happening because of who we are.  They look at us, they look at the leadership of this church and the see Luther the priest and musician, Luther the teacher and scholar, and yes, even Luther the spitfire.  They say here is a place where people of vastly different understandings, philosophies, and background, and yet they put it all down to work together.  They look at you and see, here, here is a congregation that doesn’t care where I’m from.  They look at you and see soil to grow in, they look at us and see something else, they see home.  But if we are to continue this, if we are going to continue growing in the next decade we need to learn the lessons of our gospel story and learn them well and accept people for who they are because that is what Jesus did.

  And to do this, I have an actual practical assignment for you.  It isn’t homework, so we can all just calm down a little bit.  I have asked Pastor Don to include the Apostle’s Creed in our worship today, it is one of the earliest creeds of the Christian Church.  Before today you spoke it aloud and saw only what is there.  Today, as you read it, I want you to do the opposite, I want you to speak the words and notice what is not there.  I want you to see what the earliest church saw as important, and for the first time I want you to see what they did not.  In the creed you will see nothing on how you are to read your Bibles, you will find no trace of what to think of evolution or even what to think of other religions.  Indeed, I dare say that every major complaint and rift in the Christian Church over its two thousand year history, every fight that Christians bully each other over daily, you will find our forbears thought were extraneous.  To them all that was needed were the simple truths of God as our Creator Redeemer and Sustainer, for out of that lens of faith will all else be made clear.  It is not that they didn’t believe other matters weren’t important, it’s not that they didn’t disagree –sometimes they did so vehemently.  Rather, however, they believed that any important matters not in the creed would come in their own time as God would provide and it was not worth dividing the body of Christ.  Let us as Christians rejoice over what has united us for centuries and let us not be Pharisees over which people of good conscience may differ.  Amen.