What Really Matters

Sermon for Sunday, August 30

Luke 11:37-44

Where in our daily lives is our religion most on display? I think just like the Pharisees of Jesus’s time, we place a lot of emphasis on the rituals of meal time. I remember a few years ago, Katie and I went out to eat at Taco Bell. When we got the food to the table, we bowed our heads to pray. In the midst of the prayer, as is my habit, I said, “Lord bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies.” Katie asked me after the prayer if I ever got the feeling that God heard me pray and said, “I can use that food to nourish you, but do you think maybe you could give me something a little better to work with?” This pile of beans and meat, grease and some cheap rice— truth be told I was there because it was meal time and because I wanted to enjoy the food, not for nourishment. Maybe a more honest prayer would have been, “Thank you for my relative health and the means to buy a meal out.” But that’s not usually what we pray.

In Jesus’s day, the Pharisees had a ritual of dipping their hands in water before a meal. This was not a hygiene thing, it was a ritual. And so they would have a bowl or basin of water near the table, and before host and guest would recline at their positions at the table, they would dip their hands in the water and say, “Blessed is he who has sanctified us with his commandments and commanded us concerning the washing of hands.” I remember growing up, my prayer at the dinner table every night was “Thank you God for everything in the whole wide world amen.” I remember it becoming so mechanical that it became, “ThanyouGoforevrythinginthewhowiworldamen.” And I remember being in Kindergarten and being tired from a hard day of school, having woken from a nap in time for dinner, when I went to pray and I opened my mouth to say “Thank you God...” and what came out was “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP.” My point is that if we aren’t careful, our piety can become rote and repetitive, and un-self-critical. This isn’t what the religious life is for.

Jesus enters the Pharisee’s house and tests him with a prophetic action. Jesus doesn’t dip his hands in the bowl, instead immediately taking his place at the table. Can you imagine if Jesus came to have dinner at your house and didn’t wait for the blessing before digging in, or if Jesus was your neighbor and he went outside and mowed his grass on a Sunday? That’s how the Pharisee would have felt about him not doing the hand washing ritual. But Jesus is setting a trap for the Pharisee because he wants to talk about the place of religious rituals, and what really matters.

Jesus points out in no uncertain terms that the Pharisees are too concerned with what can be seen, and counted, and noticed. He compares them to dishwashers who take extra care to get the outside of the dish sparkling, but don’t worry about the inside of the dish where the food goes. The question they should be asking is “What’s inside the dish?” Now pretty quickly Jesus makes it clear that he’s not talking about yesterday’s lunch. He’s talking about how our food gets to us. He’s talking about what we take into ourselves.

In the Talmud’s reflections and interpretations of the Jewish law, the rabbis said that there were three criteria by which you could judge a man: his cup, his purse, and his anger. The cup: where does your food come from? What nourishes you? How do you provide for yourself? I have a hunch that there are meals we cannot rightly bless and therefore ought not to eat. We ought to take care that our meals are not provided by the exploitation of the workers in the field. We ought to take care that the wait staff at our restaurants are taken care of, at least as much as we can. We ought to tip generously to those who bring us our food. We also ought to treat them well while we are in the restaurant, respecting them as people. We need to avoid certain restaurants that exploit their waitresses, making them wear certain clothes that put them on display. How we eat is a profoundly religious act.

Purse: where does your money come from and on what do you spend it? It is very hard to avoid economic exploitation in this day and age. I typed this sermon on an Apple iPad, many of the parts of which were mined and manufactured by people barely making enough to live, and at tremendous cost to the environment. But there is no such thing as a “Fair Trade Computer,” or if there is I haven’t heard of it. Perhaps the best we can do is to do what we can, and reflect and repent for the rest. How we make our money is also important. Almost one hundred years ago, Walter Rauschenbusch was a pastor in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, and one day he ventured out into the countryside and observed a devout Amish dairyman, a respected leader in his church. Rauschenbusch noted that the man would never have uttered a cuss word, but he was renowned for not being particularly careful to keep manure from contaminating his milk. That same milk was sold to provide nourishment for the children in his town. But that wasn’t the kind of thing his church got up in arms about. Surely the health of children ought to count for more than cuss words.

Anger: Jesus models for us what righteous anger entails. It is a concern for justice. We are tempted to say that Christians should never get angry, but we see Jesus turning over tables in the Temple and driving out the livestock there with a whip. There are a lot of things in this world worth getting angry over, but just like the cup and the purse, the test of our religion is in whether we get angry on behalf of ourselves or others. Jesus was angry about people being oppressed and exploited. Righteous anger is anger on behalf of the defenseless.

The challenge Jesus lays at the feet of his host is this: stop acting, and get active. I love watching sports movies, but I’m aware that Sylvester Stallone wouldn’t stand a chance in the ring against Muhammad Ali in his prime. Religion doesn’t consist in going to church and praying before meals. It’s not a show. James, the Lord’s half brother, says that “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). Jesus tells the Pharisee to knock off playing at religion, washing hands and tithing everything in his garden, and concern himself with justice and the love of God. That will transform his religious activity into religious action.

Author James Clear addresses the question of transformation by observing something about runners. A lot of people accomplish the goal of running a marathon and a year later are disappointed that their lives look the same as they did before. Clear says that is because their goal wasn’t big enough. A better goal, if you want transformation, is to become a runner. People who make that their goal start out slower, running perhaps five minutes at a time for a while. That’s all it takes to be a “runner” – any amount of running. If your goal is to run a marathon, all that means is working toward one long morning. But whether your goal is to be a runner or to be a Christian, the goal is an identity, not an event. And that becoming is a slower more beautiful process.

Let’s set our goal now: not to behave like Christians but to become Christians. This transforms our activities by giving them a weight beyond themselves. And the invitation is to start small. Our tithes and our alms, our acts of love... these can be small things that make a world of difference. Being a Christian is not about the signs in our yard or the jewelry we wear. It’s about becoming “like Christ.”

Sometimes real Christianity looks the same as the habit-formed piety I’ve confessed and condemned today. You’ll remember that I mentioned earlier that my childhood prayer became so routine that one night I got it confused with my ABCs. I once heard a story about a brother and sister playing church, and the boy, probably 7 years old, delivered the sermon, a fiery and impassioned story about Jesus and the need for repentance. When he finished, he called on his 4 year old sister to pray, and she bowed her head and very earnestly sang, “ABCDEFG HIJKLMNOP QRSTUV WXY and Z. Amen.” And her brother said, “What are you doing, that’s not a prayer, it’s the alphabet. His sister responded, “I gave Jesus the letters, now he can make them whatever words he wants to.” The test of our religion is this: can we learn to offer Jesus not just what we do, but everything we are? Do we trust him to put us in order?

You see, that little girl’s prayer was the same as my absent-minded childhood prayer at the dinner table. The difference was in her intention to communicate to Jesus and to her brother that everything she had belongs to Jesus. We don’t trust in our tithes or our good works to save us. We don’t live like Christians to earn a reward. At our best, we do these things in order to become the version of ourselves King Jesus wants us to be. And that’s what really matters.