X-Ray Vision?

September 2, 2012

Mark 7:1-23

Rev. Ericka Parkinson Kilbourne

7Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him,²they 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;⁴and 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.)⁵So 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?”⁶He 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;
⁷in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

⁸You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

¹⁴Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand:¹⁵there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” ²¹For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder,²²adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.²³All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

            Many of you may know that Mike, Hannah, and I had the opportunity to travel up North in Michigan and Wisconsin this past week, and we are all grateful for your willingness to offer time off for us to find renewal for our bodies and spirits!

We returned from our week long vacation on Friday night, and so naturally, I had it in my mind that we needed to go to the grocery store yesterday, in order to get ready for life as usual, and fully stock the apartment that had been left bare for a week.

            No, I didn’t think about the fact that it was the prime shopping day for everyone else in the city…it being a Saturday, the first day of the month and Labor Day weekend.  I just knew we needed groceries, I didn’t intend to go shopping with 1000 other people!

            No one was happy while shopping.  Couples were bickering at each other, children were arguing with their parents, parents were yelling at their children. Faces looked grim, worried, troubled, and stressed. I’m going to be honest with you, Mike and I argued on the way to the grocery store.  Of course, I can’t remember now what we argued about…but it sure was important yesterday.

            Everyone was walking around  looking for things to fill their bodies, to feed their families, or themselves for the week, some were looking at healthy options in the produce aisle, others were considering options with the potato chips and candy.  Regardless of their place in the store, most of my neighbors whom I met yesterday seemed troubled in some way.

            In this particular scripture, the Pharisees and scribes are deeply troubled about Jesus and his disciples-particularly about the way that they choose to eat.  You see, there were very specific washing rituals that were common for Jews at the time and these were supposed to signify ones devotion to God.  Yet, Jesus and his disciples did not participate in the rituals. And before the young ones get the idea that Jesus didn’t wash his hands before dinner, and therefore you don’t have to wash your hands before dinner…it’s commonly understood that they did wash their hands…just not in the specific religious way that was expected of them.

            And this made the Pharisees and the Scribes mad!  “How could he talk about God and about our religion, if he doesn’t follow the way that we have been taught?  How dare they eat in such a way that does not show honor to God and to God’s creation?”

            Jesus’ answer is one that, according to Mark, receives no answer from the Pharisees.  Jesus is known for these responses that leaves his listeners silent, contemplating, a bit rebuked, and perhaps ready for change.

            He quotes from Isaiah, asserting that the generation of religious leaders and followers with whom he’s speaking are ones who honor God with their lips..their actions, but not their hearts.  He asserts that their worship is in vain because they are teaching human precepts as doctrines.

            And then he gets to the heart of his statement.  He tells them that there is nothing that goes into the body that defiles…but it is what comes out…what defiles our humanity is the substance of our actions which come from within…from our heart…from our spirit…from our soul.  Not necessarily anything those scribes and Pharisees could really argue with. 

            The Pharisees and Scribes knew how to change their own and each other’s eating habits, in order for everyone to look as if they were connected with God…that their souls were nourished by God’s wisdom.  But it was another thing to deal with their own souls, and the souls of others.  The very thought of this left them speechless…left to walk away in anger, maybe, OR….to think, to pray, and perhaps to discern God’s leading in response to Jesus’ answer.

If you’re anything like me, there are times in your life when you want to make real changes.  You notice things on the outside that need changing…a cleaner house, a more trim shape, a more balanced family budget, a newer car…or perhaps just one that runs well, we look at our habits, what we eat, what we drink, how often we exercise, and we think that if we change these things we might feel better.  And we begin with these actions, these material objects, these outer manifestations of ourselves, and too often we end up disappointed…because nothing seems to be transformed.

            Jesus tells us that our very selves…our soul…exists within.  As I walked through Meijer yesterday, I wondered what I could see with X-ray vision as I passed by the mirror.  What was informing my grumpiness?  Sure, I like everyone around me was performing my human duty, my family duty, by shopping for and purchasing food for the week…to fill my body, to fill the bodies of my family.

            But, what was lacking?  What wasn’t being fed?

            If I had X-ray vision to look within my soul and the souls of those around me…I wonder what I might have found?  What might you find if you look within?

            A spirit which has not had the opportunity to truly sit and be in the presence of God?

            A soul which has been filled with so much  guilt or shame over the years that the words I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry continue to be said, but grace is hard to come by?

            An inner spirit struggling with both regret and resentment for things and experiences in the past…but not finding a place to safely put them…to move on…to live life with joy?

            An inner sanctum of the self that has not had the opportunity to seek God’s wisdom because the noises and the needs of the world have been so great and so loud that this particular inner sanctuary of the soul has not been entered in years.

            Next week is rally Sunday, the day when our Christian Education season begins. At 9am, the education hour, there will be Sunday school for pre-schoolers, elementary aged kids, and youth.  For adults, our regular Present Word Bible Study will continue in the library, an interactive faith study will be offered in the Edith Boyd Lounge, a New Members class will meet upstairs, and one of our Missional Transformation Discernment groups will also meet during the 9am Education hour.  For six-weeks, small discernment groups will be offered during the week on Monday mornings, Monday evenings, Tuesday afternoons, and two are offered on Thursday mornings.  The Presbyterian Women will meet on Saturday to learn about the new Bible study for the year, and they will continue to meet in Circles to discern the wisdom which comes from the scripture and from God’s leading in their conversations.  These are all opportunities for our souls to be fed.  For, while we will be studying scripture, using our brains and our intellect, all the while, God is present in that study, tending to our spirits.

            Especially in our discernment groups, the questions within the study will not focus just upon regurgitating the “correct answer,” just to recap the day’s scripture. The act of discernment is to identify, to hear, to listen for God’s calling to you, to us, through the reading of scripture, through the praying of prayers, through conversing about God’s word.

            How will God’s action in your life transform you from within? According to this scripture, when we are transformed from within, our relationships are healthier, we make wiser choices, and we live more peaceful and harmonious lives.  After reflecting on this scripture, and reflecting upon my own restless and sometimes grumpy spirit, I’m convinced that allowing God to transform my inner being is about as important, if not more important, than a weekly visit to the grocery store.  How about you?

Discovering God’s Dream

2 Corinthians 5: 11-21

11 Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we try to persuade others; but we ourselves are well known to God, and I hope that we are also well known to your consciences.¹²We are not commending ourselves to you again, but giving you an opportunity to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast in outward appearance and not in the heart.¹³For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.¹⁴For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.¹⁵And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.
16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view;^* even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view,^* we know him no longer in that way.¹⁷So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;¹⁹that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,^* not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.²⁰So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.²¹For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

            When I was four years old, I created a “Book About Me,” at my Preschool, Junior Village. In it, I drew a picture of myself, my family, my school, and included some of the songs we had learned that year, and also declared my favorite color to be red-which was to change several times throughout the years.  In this book, I also declared what I was going to be when I grew up: A Tennis Player, just like Chris Everett Lloyd.  Now, I have really dated myself as growing up in the 1970s and 80s!

            Often, we do ask the children around us, “what are you going to be when you grow up?”  Since those days in Junior Village, I was known to aspire to be an actress, a professional singer, writer, teacher, and therapist…and some days when I come to work, I wonder whether all of these have truly been attained in the profession of ministry!

            The question we don’t ask of children…and perhaps the questions we don’t ask ourselves, either, is this: what does God dream for your future?  Our daughter Hannah’s professional aspirations vacillate from day-to-day: sometimes she says she will be a very good clown, and other days she declares she will be a ballerina.  On the days she says she wants to preach like mommy, those are usually days when I’m struggling with writers’ block for a sermon, trying to go to two committee meetings at once, rushing back to the office from the hospital, and being aware that my office looks like a tornado hit it…and I answer the same way each time, “Be very sure that God is calling you to the ministry before you pursue it.”

            As I have reflected upon this response, I have challenged myself to rephrase the way that I speak about her call.  God could be calling her to be a clown, a ballerina, or a minister.  As I wrote in the newsletter this past month, those who are called are not just the ones in ministry or prophesy or in religious education, but all are called in the waters of baptism to respond to God’s grace through faithful discipleship.  Herbert Alonso has written, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life teling me who I am.  I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live…but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.” 

            I’ve preached about this subject before here in our congregation.   Each minister has some “pet subjects,” and one of mine is call.  When I preached about this before, many of you shared with me on the way out of the sanctuary that you weren’t quite sure yet what God had called you to do, and some of you tried to convince me that indeed there was no called from God for you.

            The scripture from 2 Corinthians was written by Paul in a time of pain. The context of this letter is weighty: not only had there had been conflict between him and many members of the Christian community in Corinth, but the members of the community were in conflict, as well. Not only is Paul in emotional pain from the weight of the human relationships crumbling around him, but he is in physical pain from the toll that the traveling has taken on his body. 

The messages from the world might have told him several things.  He might have gotten a message to simply GIVE UP!  Retire from this evangelism gig, get as far away from those bickering church folk of Corinth, Rome, and Ephesus, and everywhere else he was serving and writing to and traveling to and find a lonely island and relax for once!  Or he might have heard a message from the world that had to do with power and manipulation… “they won’t listen to you…well, make them listen to you, use fear, intimidation, that’ll set ‘em straight.”

Who knows what messages or temptations from the world Paul might have struggled with at this point of his journey.  What we do know is that this portion of his second letter to the infant church in Corinth describes the ways in which he hears God’s voice, God’s message, God’s dream.  And in those moments of being exposed to God’s will and call, he experiences and shares hope in the midst of the turmoil; his eyes are set upon God, through Jesus Christ.  “Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation, the old life is gone, a new life has begun.”  With God, writes Paul, a new hopeful future always awaits us, hope always reigns over despair, reconciliation always wins over enmity, and love has more power than might.

            Like Paul, we receive many messages and hear many voices that want to influence us.  The messages of the world that we receive daily are loud and are sometimes overwhelming for us all. As is written in our Bible study we’ll be using for the next six weeks, “every day in a wide variety of ways the world tells us who we are and how we are to live.  Depending upon the message we listen to, we are: physical beings who are to make ourselves sexually attractive, intellectual beings who are to accumulate knowledge, consumers who are to acquire possessions, workers who are to produce products, or pleasure seekers who are to gratify desires.  The list could go on and on.”  Every day, we are encountered with those who would want to influence us…who would want to define for us who are.

            As we declare in our statement of faith, though, first and foremost, the answer to question of who we are is: we are children of God.

            And as children of God, our task, our call, our vocation, and our joy is to own that identity and to discover the dream that God has for us.  Not to discover the dream that the advertisers have for us, not the dream that our boss has for us, not the dream that academic institutions have for us, not even, and this is a hard one…not even the dream that our children or parents have for us…and certainly not the dream our pastor has for us, but the dream that God has for us.  God may use parents, teachers, pastors, maybe even bosses, or even advertisers to get our attention, to steer us the right way, to open our eyes, or our ears, our hearts and souls, but our first and foremost focus of attention must be upon God and God’s dream for us, but our eyes and focus must be upon God in order to see all that God has to reveal to us.

            When I began ministry here, almost a year and a half ago, many people asked me, “what is your dream or vision for the congregation,” some even asked me, “what is your agenda for our congregation?”  I worried that my answer would seem weak, or that it might be heard as an easy cop out, some would wonder what I was even doing up here in the pulpit and behind the minister’s desk, and in the office of teacher and moderator if my answer was, “well, my vision is that together as Pastor and congregation, we will intentionally, and with prayer and Bible study, discern the dream and vision that God has for us together.”

            As is also written in our Bible study, “rather than a flight of fancy or wishful thinking, God’s dream is a vision of what is ‘really real.’  It is a vision of th wholeness of life, the healing of a broken world…the Christian community is not limited by the facts and trends of the current situation, but instead can imagine a new state of affairs not yet fully existing…learning how to truly see-to discover God’s dream for this time and place-is at the very heart of what it means to be the church. God has granted the Christian community a special sight, a spirit of wisdom and revelation that enlightens the eyes of our hearts to see the world as it really is.”

            We don’t have to be history majors to know that all too often, in the past, the larger church has given in to the temptations of the world and followed the calls of greed over frugality, power over equality, and manipulation over spiritual renewal.

            I guess we could live in that bleak understanding of the church and decide to live in despair that things will always be that way.

            Or we could open our eyes to ways in which the historical church has also had eyes to recognize and to follow God’s dream.  The church, made of both white and black Christians was the back bone, the voice, and the strength of the civil rights movement, so that our church ushers were no longer asked to keep people out, but to bring people in.  The church in South Africa was the inspiration for the architects of Apartheid and those writings and confessions still speak to the wider Christian community, calling into a dream of equality and reconciliation.

            Searching for and discerning God’s dream for us individually and as a community of believers is not easy.  God’s message is not splashed on a screen every ten minutes in 15 second sound bites while we are watching our favorite show at night, and besides the posters declaring John 3:16, it’s probably not found while watching our favorite team play ball.  It certainly does not live in our anxious or worried hearts, and is not found in our feelings of shame, resentment, or regret.

            Listening for and discerning God’s dream for us as individuals and as a community of believers requires us to intentionally begin our day in prayer, asking that our eyes might be opened to the vision God has for us, and ending our day in meditation, as we reflect upon the ways in which God spoke to us in our reading of scripture, in the quieting of our souls, and in the listening to the wise, of all ages, around us.

            Discovering God’s dream begins with really and truly believing that if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation, the old life has gone, and a new life has begun.”  The message of the gospel is in the power of the resurrection, that even in the despair of death, there is a new beginning and a hope for a future.  Discovering God’s dream means beginning the day in hope that God will tell you something new, will call you into something new, introduce you to a new insight or person of faith today.  Whether we are nine or ninety, God has a word for us today.

            Let us embark upon this journey with hope, discovering together God’s Dream.

                          

More than PR

I recently read the book, "Tweet if You Heart Jesus," by Elizabeth Drescher, as an assignment for a class entitled "The Gospel and Global Media."  This class was by far my favorite, most useful, and informative class in the DMin program at McCormick Theological Seminary (and I only took it "by accident!"  I had to sign up for it because I dropped an earlier class due to many pastoral needs in my congregation).

In Tweet if You Heart Jesus," I was challenged by the way that the author suggests that we pastors can offer pastoral care and biblical/theological/spiritual teaching and faith formation through digital media.  Up until this point, I had seen the digital media (namely e-mail and facebook) as public relations tools. I have (and still do) update the church facebook to alert the congregation to special programs and activities coming in the future, and I have created a list in my e-mail account through which I can e-mail every member with an e-mail address.  But the messages on the page and the e-mail had been 90% program-based, coming from my role as a "program director."  But, the challenge in "Click to Save," is that the messages can (and should be) spiritually based.  The author compared a tweet to the "word" that was sought when a person of faith came to visit the desert mothers and fathers in the Fourth Century CE.  When a faithful seeker would come to receive wisdom from an Abba or Amma of the desert, the wise would convey a short sentence, not a long diatribe. Within that sentence would contain the fodder for hours upon hours of prayer and discernment. The challenge of the author is for the pastor to offer a "word" through a tweet or a facebook status, or even an e-mail written to parishioners.  This section has challenged me to begin the day with a scriptural or theological message on the church facebook, offer a line or two of an upcoming sermon (asking for responses), or to share a faith-challenge through e-mail, facebook, and twitter.  Faith formation does not only happen in the pulpit or in the classroom; the world of digital media has become the place where we are growing in so many ways, why not in our faith?

And beyond the "word" offered, Drescher suggests that pastoral care happens in the "world" of    digital media.  The pastor becomes privy to the teenager who has recently broken up with his girlfriend, a member who has lost her mother, and a friend of the congregation who is frustrated and in despair through a failed job search.  While the pastor may encounter the information in a blog, a facebook status, or a tweet, she has the opportunity to follow-up with this information when next they meet in church or in another setting. The Pastor may also choose to make a phone call, text, or e-mail to offer words of encouragement.  This broadens and makes for more creative and connective ways to do pastoral care.

In response to my reading this section of "Tweet if You Heart Jesus," I have become more aware of my parishioners' statuses in facebook, and I have been more prone to respond in a comment or personal message in response.  I have heard myself begin a conversation, saying, "I noticed on facebook that you were struggling with...," or "I was so excited to see on facebook that...," or "I was wondering if you were OK when I saw on facebook that..."

I am convinced that digital media is not merely a public relations tool, and in my ministry, I will begin to use it in a more wholistic way.