Pentecost 15, 2024
Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9
Psalm 15
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
We humans have a thing about food. And I don’t just lately, or just here in the United States. Humans have always had a thing about food. Eating is about much more than just nourishment. Meals build community. Eating together breaks down walls and brings us together. If you think back through your life, many—if not all—of the more significant events involved food in one way or another. Birthdays, holidays, weddings, funerals, baptisms, confirmations, graduations . . . Life is kind of one long series of significant meals, with the time between marked by less memorable meals.
When someone starts or leaves a job, we have a meal, or at least some cake. Birthdays we have cake. Anniversaries, cake. Because cake is just the more convenient version of a meal. And people can eat it standing up. Cake is like short-hand for “meal.” And with the combination of flour, sugar, and eggs, we can see that most of the major food groups are represented here. We give someone a cake when a full-on meal is impractical, or impossible. In other words, though we want to provide a meal to mark an important event in someone’s life, sometimes a cake stands in as substitute for the big sit-down dinner.
Meals are important to us. We do not just eat to stay alive. There is a strong connection between food and significant events. Tomorrow is Labor Day, and I can’t imagine that I’m the only one who is planning to grill. I have no idea what else I will be doing tomorrow, but the one thing I do know is that there will be grilling. And the more grilling the better, in my opinion.
So, okay, you got my point by now: food means more than just food to us. And so we move to the next point: location, location, location. Do you remember the first time you ate at a friend’s house and they didn’t cook the food right? I mean “right” as in how you’re used to. For me, it was a revelation when, as a kid, I slept over at my friend’s house and his dad cooked scrambled eggs with milk in them. Scrambled eggs were supposed to be yellow, not off-white! Imagine my horror when I learned that this family boiled their pork chops! And ate canned vegetables instead of frozen. These people were making their food wrong, plain and simple.
If they wanted to make their food wrong, that was their problem. But, if they wanted their food cooked the right way, they would obviously have to come to my house. Come spend an evening in the Baum house of my childhood and my friend would see that hamburger is supposed to be thinned using oatmeal, and coffee is supposed to look like tea, and pizza is supposed to be made from a mix out of a box called Appian Way. I mean, that’s the way food was supposed to be made. Though I’ve outgrown those childhood understandings, the idea remains: You’re welcome to make your own food however you want, but I will not be attending your event if you make it the wrong way. Location and food are linked.
And that brings us to today’s gospel reading. You remember what we just heard? Well, what I should say is, do you remember the beginning of what we just heard? Since that reading ends with what sounds like a lot of bad news and condemnation, you might have forgotten how it began. The Pharisees and Scribes gather around Jesus. These are like, the hard-core religious people. They stand there shaking their heads and tisk tisking. And they ask Jesus, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?"
Now, of course, the reason they ask this might actually be that they want to help Jesus bring his disciples in line with doing things the way they’re supposed to be done. Jesus is Jewish, and a teacher of the Law, and he would want to be living up to the Law. At which point, we need to step outside the story for a second and talk about the Law.
For faithful Jews, the Torah is the basis of everything. That’s the first five books of our Bible. Genesis through Deuteronomy. According to Jewish tradition, all five of these books were given by God directly to Moses. They are the basis of Jewish community. The rules from God, given in the Torah, are sometimes called the Law of Moses. From God’s lips to Moses’ pen, therefore the most sacred rules for living. So sacred, in fact, that they need a barrier, what is called “a hedge.” There is a longstanding tradition of building a hedge around the Torah, for the people’s own good. The idea is that, in order to prevent a person from breaking the Law, we add layers of security to lessen the chance they will accidentally break the law.
Here’s an example: According to Torah, men and women are not allowed to be intimate with one another during . . . certain times of the month. So, a hedge is placed around that rule, saying that the couple also must not hold hands, or kiss, or even pass a plate across the table, lest one thing lead to another. Keep the Law safe by preventing our getting too close to it.
The point here is, there are rules about food in the Torah, but all this stuff about washing the pots and pans and hands is a ritual hedge that was added over the years by Rabbis. That’s why, as Mark says, the Pharisees are following the “tradition of the elders.” It is not the Law of Moses the disciples are violating; it is the tradition of the elders, the “hedge” around the Torah. And Jesus tells them, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human practice.” In other words, you ignore the beautiful Torah itself, and spend your time glorifying the hedge.
So, back to the hedge around food. All these laws about washing pots and pans and stuff would mean something very specific when it came to sharing meals with others. And here’s where location matters. Because I could invite someone to my house (where all the pans were meticulously washed according to the tradition of the elders), but I could not risk going to your house if you didn’t follow those same traditions. You could have dinner with me, but I could not have dinner with you. And that means, you could come and celebrate the big events in my life, but I could not come and celebrate yours. You can be there for me, but I cannot be there for you. The hedge is so high that it distorts relationships
That’s not the intent of the hedge, right? The intent is to prevent people from violating the Law of Moses. But the result is throwing one another under the bus called the “hedge.”
People get sacrificed to the tradition of the elders rather than being guided by the love of God. The Laws given on Mt. Sinai—the 10 Commandments, as we call them—are considered a gift from God by the Hebrew people. The Law of Moses is seen as a sacred bond between God and God’s people. So sacred that a hedge has to be built, a hedge that can become so thick that we can no longer see the gift that is hidden inside.
In a sense, Jesus is pointing out to the Scribes and Pharisees that they’re missing out on the gift because they’re focused on the gift wrap. They’ve become distracted from the beauty God intends because all their attention is focused on the system that was built to protect that priceless gift. It’s like walking through a jewelry store and only seeing the security cameras.
Now, we could draw a lot of conclusions from today’s Gospel from Mark. We could focus on the list of things that comes after that conversation. About how evil comes from within rather than without. We could talk about the evil things that people do and then talk about the need for redemption that can only be found in Jesus. But for today, I would like for us just to focus on the food.
I would like for us to go back to my first point. That we mark our significant days with meals together. We share meals with one another to make those moments holy in some way. And the more people we welcome into those celebrations, the more holy those moments become. Because the more people we include, the more our celebrations begin to look like the kingdom of God: The place where all are welcome . . . Regardless.
When we allow the hedge to become too thick, if the rules we set up to protect what we love turn out to be too high for others to see over . . . Well, it is our loss, my friends. We will have missed the beautiful gifts of God, because we are all standing outside the hedge, not inside.
May we always keep our hedges low, and may St. Timothy’s Church continue to be a beacon for those who are seeking to celebrate the most precious meal of all: The Bread of Heaven and the Cup of Salvation.
Amen.
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