Sermon by the Rev.
Andrew S. Rollins
September 3, 2006
(Proper 17B)
Text: Mark 7:1 – 8,
14 – 15, 21 – 23
Title: “The Kind of
Help We Need”
Our Distance From
The Text
Today’s gospel reading describes a controversy between the Pharisees and Jesus. The particulars of this controversy reveal the great cultural distance between us and the people described in the Bible. The Pharisees accuse the disciples’ eating with defiled (unwashed) hands. For us, washing your hands is simply a matter of good hygiene. What we eat is a matter of nutrition. Neither is a question of spiritual purity, as it was for the Jews. Jewish martyrs were tortured and died for their refusal to eat pork. We will welcome back our students here next Sunday with a barbecue. So we begin with a lot of distance between us and this text from the Bible.
However, if we put aside the particulars of the controversy aside and consider the larger issue, we are, all of a sudden, on familiar turf. The real issue isn’t barbecue. The real issue is hypocrisy and the state of our hearts.
“Hypokrisis”:
Playing A Part
Jesus accuses the Pharisees of hypocrisy. And we are all familiar with hypocrisy.
I saw a bumper sticker this week that read “Look Honey. Another pro-lifer for the war.”
The word ‘hypocrisy’ is taken from the Greek word “hypokrisis” from the theater world. The word means the act of playing a part on the stage. Being a hypocrite is like being an actor on a stage. Like an actor, a hypocrite assumes a false identity.
The last parish I served was large and, on Sunday mornings, each of the five priests had their own microphone. After the service, we’d all gather in the vesting room to take off our robes -- white robes, representing spiritual purity. Several times a year an usher would run down the stairs after the service: “Someone’s mike is still on! Someone’s mike is still on!” The question is, ‘Why did that usher have to run?’ He had to run because of hypocrisy. He had to run because the priests were gossiping, complaining, backbiting, arguing, venting, and so forth . . . while we removed our white robes.
Jesus’ Diagnosis
Jesus accuses the Pharisees of being hypocrites: 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.’” Then, when Jesus is alone with his disciples, he says to them: 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.
Did you hear the repetition? The heart. The problem is the human heart. These evil things come from within
us. Jesus says the religious ‘image management’ of the Pharisees won’t work
because exterior changes never address an interior problem. The problem, Jesus
says, is rooted much more deeply in side of us. The source of the problem is
the human heart.
Beyond Your
Abilities to Change
It’s hard for us to accept the deep roots of the human problem. We believe, like the Pharisees, that we able to address the problem – whatever it is – by making some exterior changes ourselves. Jesus’ ‘heart disease’ diagnosis sounds much too severe.
The Meyer-Briggs Personality Inventory provides a useful analogy. The Meyers-Briggs folks say that every person is born with a certain temperament. They identify 16 of these distinct types, temperaments. You can identify your temperament by taking a simple test. It’s spooky to read about yourself. I’m an ISTJ (if you know that vocabulary): ‘the keeper of the institution.’ An ISTJ is characterized by decisiveness is practical affairs. We are guardians of time-honored traditions, dependable, good at following through. We value policies, contracts, standard operating procedures. This means that I sprang from the womb saying, ‘We need a policy!’ I can be spontaneous, but only when it’s scheduled.
Your personality type will make you look foolish also because it is hard-wired. You can never entirely escape it. People say that they’ve changed their personality type. But the Meyers-Briggs folks simply say you tested differently. You can learn to adapt. But you never truly change. Under pressure, you’ll revert back. Your temperament is so deeply ingrained.
Sin is like personality temperament. (I’ve been avoiding the word ‘sin’ as long
as possible. But that’s what we’re talking about.) Sin is hard-wired. It’s
genetic. You can’t get away from it. You’ll revert back to it under pressure.
It controls you. Be you Christian or Jew, covering it up doesn’t work. It will
erupt when you least expect it. All these
evil things come from within, and they defile a person.
Consider your own behavior. Are there not things that, despite of your best efforts to manage and control, continue to erupt into your life from inside yourself? No one wakes up and decides to be envious. No one starts their day by saying, “I’m going to yell at my wife at 9:00 tonight.” No one tries to be a clingy, selfish person. 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. These rise up from the deepest core of our being, the heart.
Operating On
Yourself
Our normal way of dealing with things is to cover up, to concern ourselves with the externals, with what people see. I’m talking about the Self-Help section at Barnes and Noble.
One of my favorite movies is Master and Commander.
There is a great scene in that movie where Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon,
is wounded by a musket ball. A shard is embedded in his side. He’s going to die
if it isn’t removed. Surgery on the storm-tossed ship is impossible. So the
captain, Jack Aubrey, decides to land on the
It’s a gruesome scene. Even the captain is a little undone by it. I don’t recommend you try this at home! There may be some external fixing up that we can do ourselves. Perhaps you can stitch up a flesh wound. But internal medicine requires a physician. Our wound, our disease, is internal. It’s down deep in the heart. The surgery that we need is much too difficult to do ourselves.
The Kind of Help
We Need
There is some area in your life right now that you cannot self-regulate. It is probably the area that you are expending the most energy covering up. It is the place that you would least like to have publicly exposed. I’m talking about the thing that erupts up out of the deepest part of yourself that feels completely beyond your control. I’m talking about the area of your life that you have not had any success self-regulating and now you’re covering up. Self-help, self-operating, hasn’t worked. This is also the area of your life that is most likely to put you on your knees before God.
This story of the Pharisee, the disciples, and Jesus could be described as a diagnosis story. Jesus tells them what’s wrong: it’s a heart problem. But he doesn’t, here, offer the cure. That will come later. All we’re given here is the diagnosis. But that’s good news, in a strange way. We have to have the proper diagnosis – no matter how severe – before we’ll be willing to seek out the Great Physician.
The one who tells us that these evils erupt out of a diseased heart is the same one who assures us, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners (Mark 2:17).