February 16, 2020 - Jesus Gives Us Clean Hearts - Mark 7:1-23

Jesus Gives Us Clean Hearts

Mark 7:1-23

Epiphany + 6 – February 16, 2020

“What Defiles?”

Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands.

·     This is the mantra we hear all through cold and flu season.

·     And boy, it’s been a bad one this year. Not just for flu (I’ve never known so many people getting knocked flat by influenza) – but my Facebook feed is filled with reports of strep throat and tummy bugs and pink eye – and one family I know even has a boy about D’s age who got diagnosed with scarlet fever this week (I didn’t even know that was still around!)

·     Not to mention concerns over the new corona virus

·     And so we wash our hands, and we, as always, keep hand sanitizer in the back of the sanctuary and I have some up at the front to use before communion

·     A little extra insurance to try to kill off anything we might share during the passing of the peace so I don’t share it with all of you! (my concern is health, not religion)

·     Traditions where pastor washes with a little cruet of water over bowl and dries hands – partly hygiene, but I wonder if it’s a part of what we see here

Pharisees and scribes in gospel have a concern for handwashing

·     Handwashing was less about hygiene for them, though it helped with that too

·     This passage, this confrontation with Jesus, has to do with ritual handwashing before meals

·     It was about tradition passed down from their teachers and elders

·     But even more than just tradition, it was a religious observance that set the Jewish people apart from all of the other peoples they had lived among

·     It was about identity – a way to say who they were, a reminder of the relationship they had with God

·     An outer behavior, a spiritual practice to help keep their hearts and minds focused on who they were in God (like the way we make the sign of the cross?)

·     And it becomes a point of contention, when some of Jesus’ disciples don’t follow this tradition of ceremonial handwashing

·     Disrespecting tradition, disrespecting God – becoming “common”, which is the root of the word translated “defile” here

·     Kind of miss the point of what living in relationship with God and neighbor should look like

·     Doing all the right things doesn’t ensure having a clean heart, just like washing our hands doesn’t always mean we will be able to avoid sickness

We can’t handwash ourselves into spiritual health

·    We don’t entirely understand this idea of defilement; we don’t have the same concerns for clean and unclean

·     But we know what it’s like to have evil intentions in our heart

·     Jesus reminded the crowd and the disciples that it’s not enough to control what enters into our lives, our hearts to try to keep our lives pure

·     It’s what comes out of a person that defiles

·     And oh, this list – fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice (greed), wickedness, deceit, licentiousness (promiscuity), envy, slander, pride, folly

o  Might be able to cross a few of these off the list of things to worry about, but none of us gets away from ALL of them –

o  Not even the doing, but just the intention!

·     And as the old movie goes, “The calls are coming from inside the house!”

o  The danger lies within; what is inside us already is what is making us sick

·     If the immune system isn’t strong, no amount of handwashing is ever going to keep us well

·     Gut biome and the role it plays in health – and need to feed it healthy bugs to combat the ones that will make us sick

o  And our spiritual gut biomes, well – Jesus says the bad bugs are ready to take over

·     Washing our hands does not clean our hearts – and so we are not able to be who God created us to be; damaging relationship with God and with each other

·     So then what do we do?

Jesus Gives Us Clean Hearts

·     He kind of leaves his disciples and us hanging at the end of this reading

o  After this, he’s off to Tyre and an encounter with the Syrophoenician woman

·     But we know that walking with Jesus, following Jesus changes our hearts

·     Though all of those evil intentions are within us, Jesus comes and gives us clean hearts

·     Or, if you’ll bear with me on the spiritual gut biome metaphor – Jesus is the daily dose of probiotics that repopulates our bodies with the good germs that we need to battle and overcome the bad ones

·     Not just an antibiotic, which kills off the good with the bad, but the probiotic that restores our system to a healthy state

·     And that doesn’t happen overnight

o  I mean, even people who have those dramatic conversions that some of us are so envious of aren’t immediately free from the struggles Jesus lists here

·     But Jesus is the one with the power to transform our hearts

·     To wipe out those evil intentions and replace them with love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and generosity and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control (those fruits of the Spirit)

·     In our baptisms, we die with Christ and rise to new life every day, trusting him to bring health and wholeness,

·     So do wash your hands. Do the spiritual practices that remind you of who you are in Christ

·     But do so knowing that it is Jesus and his love that changes us

·     Stay connected with him, so that all of these good intentions, spiritual fruits may grow and take hold in us, until our hearts and lives are set free and transformed. Amen.