Proper 17, Year B, 2015
As a college student in Tuscaloosa, I
regularly attended Canterbury Episcopal Chapel.
The worship service at Canterbury Chapel was fairly traditional. They used Rite II prayers, played hymns to
the sound of an organ, they used the right kind of wine for communion—Tawney Port. You know they did all the things good Episcopalians
are used to.
However, they did something in particular
that almost made me fly out my pew one Sunday.
I couldn’t stand it anymore so I went directly to the priest to make my
complaint. I told him, “Why are we using
the contemporary version of the Lord’s Prayer and not the real Lord's Prayer?!" You know the one Jesus himself said, the one that says, “Our father in heaven.” Our father can’t just be in heaven—he arts in
heaven—or something like that! I needed my thees and thous to pray!
Ken Fields, the chaplain at the time, sort of
chuckled and told me that he’d get right on it.
I didn’t believe him (he was a priest after all) so I returned the following Sunday, sat in the
front pew, and stared him down when it came time for the prayer. And you know what? We said the traditional form of the Lord’s
Prayer! I was well on my well to
becoming a liturgical snob—Don King can attest to this. I am also proud to note that Canterbury
Chapel still recites the traditional form to this day.
I wonder what your little quirk is when it
comes to the liturgy. What in the
liturgy distracts you from worshiping God?
I know I am opening the flood gates here. While I want to know, I can’t promise I’ll do
what Ken Fields did and change things up.
Maybe the more important question is why do these little quirks get in the way of
your encounter with God? You might
ask, “Why am I hanging on to these traditions
so tightly?” Maybe more importantly,
“What can God teach me through my little
liturgical quirk?”
(Resurrection Angel Mosaic at St. Paul's)
The religious traditions that the
church has created over the years, in all their particularities, do have the
power to move us to encounter God’s spiritual reality—a reality most of us can’t
get in touch with without religion. God
knows that we need religion to stay in touch with him so God calls us to worship
him in beauty and in truth—some use contemporary music with guitars, others
like more traditional music with organ, some like praise hour, others prefer a
more quiet and meditative style.
The traditions regarding worship that I
learned to embrace over the years are indeed vehicles to encounter God and God’s
spiritual reality; they do allow my heart, mind, and soul to grow into a deeper
knowledge and love of God. The use of
the traditional Lord’s Prayer was how I prayed to God. At that time, any other version of the Lord’s
Prayer created a distraction in the way I worshiped.
The structure and tradition that was found in
worship created and allowed for a sacred place in the midst of the chaotic life
of a college student. However, I soon
began to realize that I was worshiping our liturgy more than I was worshiping
our God. In a way, religion became a
means to and end when the human precepts that I held so tightly didn’t draw me
closer to the Word of God.
All this being said, I believe there
is great beauty and grave danger in
the way we as humans understand and create religious traditions in the Church. The beauty is seen in how religion has the
power to move us closer to the heart of God, to God’s reality. The danger is seen when religion is used to
push others away from the heart of God.
And God knows, we all know, how often religion has been used to keep
people out. I pray that God delivers us
from the same evil.
In today’s lesson we see that the Pharisees
and scribes respond to centuries of religious tradition when they ask Jesus,
“Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but
eat with defiled hands?” The Pharisees
and the scribes were not upset at Jesus because his followers ate using dirty
hands or because they had bad table manners but because they did not share the
same table tradition as according to Jewish tradition.
It would be easy to look at today’s
lesson and simply conclude that Jesus was right and the Pharisees were
wrong. Jesus was indeed right for
responding to the Pharisees question by saying, “You abandon the commandment of
God and hold to human tradition.” Jesus
is indeed noting how their religious traditions are attempting to push others
away from an experience with God.
However, when trying to understand this passage, it is important for us
Christians to remember why the Jewish people adhered to such strict laws and
traditions in the first place.
During a time when pagan religion was the
norm, the Hebrew people needed a way to show others that God had set them apart
from other nations. They needed a way to
show the world how their God was different.
In a society that worshiped false idols, they needed a way to preserve their
faith in one true God and maintain their identity as children of God. God wanted his chosen to do this not so that
they would hide from the world, rather so they would be inspired to be God’s
light in the darkness, so they would lead all nations into the light of God.
They kept to these traditions because it was
their understanding that right worship and obedience to the law led to right relationship
with not only God but also their neighbors—even their Samaritan neighbors. In the same way, we as Episcopalians adhere
to a similar ethos in our understanding of God as reflected in our liturgy and
worship—fundamentally we as Episcopalians claim that right worship leads to
right relationship with not only God but also our neighbors—even those who aren’t
religious.
Jesus remembers Isaiah and says,
“This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in
vain they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” Jesus is warning the Pharisees and all of us who
identify ourselves as religious people that we are prone to worship our
traditions over the God who calls us to worship.
Jesus is saying that when your religious
traditions call you to judge rather than to love, then you are missing the
point. If your traditions lead you to a
place of self-righteousness, then that might be a good time to re-think some
things.
The Pharisees do have one thing right—God is
calling his chosen to be different. God
is separating us and marking us as people of God. God is calling us to offer an alternative way
to live in this world—a way that leads to compassion and love and not condemnation
and judgment.
At the heart of our worship is the discovery
of a God whose love knows no boundaries.
At the heart of our worship is a God who transforms the unclean hearts
of all people—especially us religious people. At the heart of our religious traditions is a God
who calls us to live according to the spirit Jesus, a spirit of humility and
service and compassion and not a spirit of pride and self-righteousness because
we are in and they are out.
During my time at All Saints’ in Birmingham I
worked closely with someone who was the director of a non-profit. Her philosophy was simple. She was fond of saying, “Instead of figuring
out how to say no to someone in need, I try to figure out how to say yes to
someone in need.”
And to the people who came for help this was
good news because most of these people were used to hearing why they weren’t
good enough to get proper medical care, education, psychiatric treatment, and
so on. Even the people who were
eventually told no were grateful because at least they had been treated with
dignity and respect.
Ultimately, God’s call to set us apart is not
a call to create a group of people who are isolated from the world so that they
can live in comfort and prosperity. God
isn’t marking his chosen as different so we can hold our chosen status over the
heads of the lost and tell them why they aren’t good enough.
Instead, God call to worship gives us a vision of who God is and a vision God's dream that says
only when those who are isolated from the world, only when those who have been
told no again and again, only when the lost sheep are brought into the fold
will this world live in harmony. God
calls us to worship because God is trying to figure out a way to say yes to all
of us. And God has figured out a way
through the blood of Christ that draws the whole world to himself.
Our
worship of God will inevitably call us to encounter the unclean no matter who
dignified and beautiful our worship is.
First of all, our worship of God Almighty reminds us that we are unclean—our
own lies and hypocrisy are exposed when we come before the perfectness of God. Even those who look like they have it put
together on the outside are fighting a hard battle to keep clean on the
inside. But the good news is that Jesus sees
past our masks and even sees past those who are eat with defiled hands, and
touches our hearts with love.
God gives us religion not as a tool to
exclude people or as a tool for self-justification—i.e. I am a good church goer
and they are not. Rather, religion at
its best is a tool to draw us and others into the knowledge and love of God. And when our hearts know this truth, when we
know that God has taken hold of our lost and wandering heart, how can we stop
from reaching out to the lost in this world to tell them about the good news of
God in Christ?
Good news that says, God is trying to figure
out a way to say yes to all people, news that says no one is too dirty for God,
news that says you are loved no matter what anybody says about you—even the religious
people—and you know God loves you because God has given you the same name as his
Son—beloved child of God. Amen.
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