Deep Change
Mark 7: 1-24 (selected verses)
A Sermon Preached at Centenary United Methodist Church
Richmond, Virginia
September 2, 2012
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Jesus offers us authentic, inward change that reflects the
love of God to the world.
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As some of you know, I attended college at Oral Roberts
University. One of the interesting
memories I have of being there was the way meal tickets were distributed each
month. ORU had a dress code. Girls were supposed to wear dresses to class,
guys had to wear ties. It was rather odd
to see guys in blue jeans, polo shirts and ties. They met the letter of the requirements, but
I’m not sure that was the look the requirements sought. For the guys to get their meal tickets each
month, you had to go through hair check.
Your hair was supposed to be no longer than the middle of the ear and it
was supposed to be off your collar.
You’ve never seen so many interesting ways for guys to lower the collars
of their shirts. Occasionally, someone’s
hair would be a bit too long, either because they hadn’t taken time to get a
haircut or because they simply didn’t want to.
So, if someone’s hair was too long, to pass hair check and get the meal
ticket, some guys would put on their best three piece suit, pull their shirt
collars as low as they could get them, and get their biggest black leather
Thompson chain reference Bible.
Surprisingly, this often worked.
Somehow, the external appearance of piety made the examiners of the hair
length think that, even if the hair was a bit long, this was a person of great
spirituality. How could you deny a meal
ticket to someone like that?
One of the things we
get better at the longer we’re around the church is how to look, act, and speak
like we’re really religious. We learn
how to give the impression that we have it all together, that we are righteous,
holy, and pure. We know there is a
certain way to act, speak, and look when you’re in church. But that outward appearance may not always
reflect what’s the real state of our heart.
In fact, we often begin to assume that if things look outwardly proper,
that we are in fact all right inwardly.
One of the main tenets of Jesus’ teaching was that it was
not the outside appearance of a person that mattered, but the inward state of
her soul. It wasn’t whether an
institution observed all the niceties of religious tradition, it was whether it
reflected real love for God and neighbor in all that it did. Jesus was challenged by the religious leaders
of his day because his disciples did not scrupulously observe the tradition of
ceremonially washing their hands prior to eating. Jesus not only criticized these pious folks
because they had gotten obsessed with the letter of the law rather than
focusing on the great principles on which it rested. He said, “Listen to me, all of you and
understand. There is nothing which goes
into a person from outside which can render him unclean; but it is the things
which come out of a man which render him unclean.” He continues “Do you not understand that everything
that goes into a man from outside cannot render him unclean, because it does
not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and it is then evacuated from him by
natural bodily processes? What comes out
of a man, that is what renders the man unclean.
It is from within, from the heart, that there come evil designs,
fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetous deeds, evil deeds, guile,
wanton wickedness, envy, slander, pride folly.
All these evil things come from within, and they render a man unclean.”
Some have said that though it may not seem so to us now,
this may well have been the most revolutionary thing Jesus said in the New
Testament. The tradition of the elders
which had developed layer after layer on top of the law put much emphasis on
how what went into a person could make them ritually and ceremonially unclean,
thus separating them from God and the community of faith. Do you remember the long list of animals in
the book of Leviticus that are called unclean, and thus forbidden for human
consumption? Just how serious this was
taken is revealed in an incident recorded in a series of books called Maccabees
which is found in what we Protestants call the Apocrypha. The Syrian king, Antiochus Epiphanes was
determined to destroy the Jewish faith.
One of the things he demanded was that the Jews eat pork. The Jews died in their hundreds rather than
do so.
“Howbeit many in Israel were fully resolved and confirmed in
themselves not to eat any unclean thing.
Wherefore they chose rather to die, that they might not be defiled with
meats, and that they might not profane the holy covenant; so then they died.” (I Maccabees 1:62-63)
Second Maccabees chapter 7 tells the story of a widow
and her seven sons. It was demanded that
they should eat swine’s flesh. They
refused. The first had his tongue cut
out, the ends of his limbs cut off; and
he was then roasted alive in a pan; the second had his hair and the skin of his
skull torn off; one by one they were tortured to death while their aged mother
looked on and cheered them on; they died rather than eat meat that was unclean.
Now, I don’t think
that Jesus really wanted to deny the sacrifice that people like this had made
to preserve the purity of their faith as they understood it. But you can see that when Jesus said, it’s not
what goes into you that defiles you, it’s what comes out of you that reveals
the kind of person you really are—some folks who knew the sacrifices made to
preserve ritual purity were deeply offended.
Jesus appeared to be making light of some of their most cherished
memories and traditions. Indeed, Jesus
is suggesting that their loyalty to these traditions is preventing them from being
truly faithful and obedient to God. That
really angered them.
Do you begin to see why some people resented Jesus so
deeply? So much so that eventually they
wanted to kill him. He not only wanted
to enable people to change from the inside out, but he was calling for the
transformation of a whole tradition that in his eyes had become legalistic and
dead and was no longer a vehicle to encounter the living God but a barrier to
that kind of encounter.
Friends, let’s think
for just a moment about how we view our tradition and how we feel about
change. Do we see our history and
heritage as a gift on which we can build and create something new, or do we see
it as a relic to be preserved at all cost?
Do we see our duty as following Christ’s command to share the gospel
with the world or do we see ourselves as custodians of customs?
I came up with the
title of this sermon when I came across an article about a book that’s
influencing many organizations and the people who lead them. The book is entitled Deep Change.[1]
The author, Robert
Quinn, has studied what it takes for ineffective businesses and other
organizations to be transformed. He
thinks it is a fallacy to think that incremental, gradual change lasts, because
it is easy to undo the changes. In essence
these changes in an organization are usually only superficial. For an organization to be transformed, the
individuals in the organization have to undergo a deep change in their
long-held attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. In other words, if we don’t become
different people, we can’t expect our business, our family, or our church to be
any different.
For a person within a stale, complacent, dying organization
to respond to the challenge to lead or initiate change is a dangerous
task. Quinn says that people who feel
called to this kind of transformation often feel like they’re walking naked
into a land of uncertainty. Responding
to the challenge to lead a group of people in transformation can be terrifying,
he says, often leading one to a dark night of the soul.
Is it any wonder that so many of the people God called to
speak for him or to lead people in a new direction were so reluctant? Moses knew how hard it was going to be to
take folks used to the certainty of enslavement to the freedom of the promised
land. Isaiah and Jeremiah knew that they
would not be widely loved if they challenged the rich in the way they treated
the poor and pointed out to the people all the ways they had forgotten
God. Jesus is remarkable for so many
reasons. Here in Mark’s gospel, he’s
remarkable because he has the courage to challenge the leaders of the faith he
loved so much to focus on the essential principles of their faith rather than
the external trivialities. He was
calling people to be deeply transformed and changed, filled with the love and
presence of God, so that they could give that love to others.
There was a time, I’ll admit, when I believed that the kind
of changes the church needed to be effective were changes in style, strategy,
and tactics. Different forms of worship,
different methods of communication, new forms of architecture. The story of how I gave up on that way of
thinking is longer than we have time for today, but let it suffice to say now,
that I think the kind of change we need to undergo to be God’s people in the 21st
century has little to do with style, and more to do with substance, less to do
with strategy, and more to do with spirituality. (Talk about deep structure of worship).
I think this is what frustrated Jesus with the elders of his
day—they were just seeing the surface of things. They’d forgotten the skill of looking deeply
into people, their society, their government.
They’d become like many people in our time who make decisions not after
careful thought about their own convictions or painstaking attempts to get the
facts, but instead are easily swayed by the repetition of one negative ad, one
televised image after another. If our
nation faces a crisis, I believe it is a crisis that arises from our loss of
the capacity to think deeply about the great problems of our time and to speak
carefully and compassionately about our convictions with those with whom we
agree as well as those with whom we disagree.
We face great problems but are more interested in labeling our enemies
and yelling at them. And we’d never be
caught dead by agreeing that on many of the great issues that face us, in
reality we often agree on more than we disagree. That doesn’t make for good TV—people sitting
around agreeing or talking to each other civilly and respectfully!
A story is told about a newly ordained minister who went to
serve his first church. He noticed that on the first Sunday, when he said the
prayers, the congregation on the left side of the church stood at the beginning
of the prayers, and the congregation on the right side remained seated. The
young minister thought this was a bit odd, but he kept going in the
prayers—until he began to hear some murmuring between the two sides, then the
murmuring turned into grumbling and then people yelling at each other,
proclaiming that they were doing the right thing when came to the tradition of
the church.
Distressed by what he had seen and all that was taking
place, the young pastor went to seek the council of the former, now elderly
pastor, who had served this congregation for years. He asked him, “So is it the
tradition of the congregation to stand during the prayers?”
The older minister, whose memory was now failing, stroked his beard, replied, “No, that is not the tradition, as I recall.” “So, the tradition is that they remain seated during the prayers?”
The older minister, whose memory was now failing, stroked his beard, replied, “No, that is not the tradition, as I recall.” “So, the tradition is that they remain seated during the prayers?”
To which the old minister responded, “No, that’s not the
tradition either.”
The young pastor threw his hands in the air in exasperation,
and said, “There must be some solution to this! The way things are now, half
stand and half sit and all end up screaming at one another during the prayers.”
The old pastor’s face lit up in a smile; he lifted his
finger high into the air and said, “Ahh, yes! Now I remember—that was the
tradition!”
When we look only at the surface of people, or the church,
or the world, we miss out on so much. We
run the risk of missing out on the deeper realities that usher us into the
realm of truth, liberation, and life!
In a few moments, we come to remember the price paid by the
one who came to call the world to be deeply changed by the reality of God’s
love and presence. We can’t help but
remember that this offer was rejected—Jesus’ offer of transformation, his
criticism of trivial rituals that obscured the central principles of love of
God and neighbor, so offended the defenders of the status quo that they put him
on a cross.
But we remember that in the end, his faithfulness to God’s
vision for him and the world resulted in the vindication of that vision when
God raised him from the dead. We can
make the mistake of viewing the sacrament of communion simply as a duty to be
fulfilled, an empty ritual to be observed—or we can come expecting to encounter
the one signified in the bread and wine—Jesus himself. We can come looking more deeply into this
moment, beyond the bread and wine to the one who himself is the source of all
life. If our hearts and eyes are open,
we can be changed from the inside out.
And with God’s power at work in us, God will use us to bring the deep
changes that bring life to our city!
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