Sermon preached by the Rev’d Fredrick A. Robinson
The 13th Sunday after Pentecost
Remember all of the hullabaloo about putting a new bridge over the bay? That tempest is over and we now have that beautiful bridge that has become a distinguishing structure for Sarasota. Drive over it, day or night, and there are people enjoying it by walking, running, or cycling. In this place where we don’t have mountains to climb, at least we have the bridge—Mt. Sarasota!
We have discovered the importance of keeping the body fit, and people are living longer and healthier lives because of it. I work out five days a week at the Y by playing racquetball. We start at 5:30 in the morning when the Y opens and we finish around 6:45. At 5:30 people are waiting for the doors to open in order to lift weights, take spinning classes, do yoga, play racquetball, or swim. There are some really serious physical fitness folks out there!
And related to that is all of the stuff people take to have a healthy lifestyle: vitamins, cholesterol lowering drugs, herbs to counteract the negative effects of cholesterol lowering drugs, blood pressure medicines, medicines to make the bones stronger, the blood thinner, the skin tighter, and the hair thicker. We are a society that wants to feel good and look good, even if we’re not so concerned about being good.
And then there’s cleanliness! We could have a miracle today. If we took up a collection of all of the containers of hand sanitizer, I’m sure we would have enough to wash everyone’s hands and have twelve baskets left over!
The way we treat health in our society has become a religion, without ever calling it that. St. Paul said that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and we should be good stewards of the bodies God has given us, but for many their bodies have become idols, replacing the worship of God with the worship of his creation. As with people in every age, we are prone to idol worship, and this kind of idol worship is perhaps the worst of all: worship of self.
As was frequently the case, the Pharisees in today’s Gospel gave Jesus a great opportunity for teaching. And, as was always the case with the Pharisees, who had rules for every aspect of life, they had an elaborate ritual for the washing of hands before they ate. These rules were a part of the religious tradition of the Jews. Jesus did not require his disciples to follow the rules for cleansing their hands before they ate, and that drew criticism of him from the Pharisees, who noticed that at least some of the disciples ate “with hands defiled.”
Jesus responded to them by calling them hypocrites, quoting Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrine the precepts of men.” In other words, they were majoring in the minors. It may be a good thing to wash your hands before you eat, but whether you do or not doesn’t give you a right relationship with God, and not doing it certainly doesn’t defile you.
Every now and then someone will say something to me like this: “I believe in God, but I’m not into organized religion.” In fact, many of Christianity’s foes will put it in the same terms. The culprit is “organized religion.” My first response to such a challenge is, “Then Redeemer is surely the place for you. We’re not that organized!” But that criticism of organized religion isn’t that far from what Jesus was criticizing in the Pharisees, for they certainly represented the organized religion of that day. All too often, the Church is no different from the society around it. By “Church” I mean Christians, members of the Body of Christ. If Christians don’t behave any differently than non-Christians, and at times worse, then society has every right to say, “What’s the point?”
Even in this pagan society in which we live, most people know that Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek. Forgive your enemies. Do good to those who persecute you.” When they hear Christians gossip; when they see Christians suing one another in court; when they see Christians behaving promiscuously, cheating on exams, engaging in dishonest schemes; they have every right to question the institutional Church. I fear that Jesus would say the very same thing to us today that he said to the Pharisees: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”
But isn’t the Church about grace, you ask? If you have to be perfect to be part of the Church, we’d all be doomed. We might as well spend our Sunday mornings walking the bridge.
Yes, the Church is about grace, grace that changes the heart, grace that transforms a life, one life at a time. As much as we might like it, we cannot escape the call to be different, but that difference does not lie in doing the things of faith without letting God touch one’s heart. As Mary Ann Tolbert says, in her book Sowing the Gospel, “if the heart is God’s ground, nothing else is required; and if the heart is not God’s ground, nothing else will suffice.” And so, we say the words of Psalm 51, “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.”
There is no escaping the fact that the Church is an institution with people who bring discredit to it. Each of us, in one way or another, has fit into that category at some point, so we had best not spend our efforts at condemning others, but at looking into the mirror, making use of the forgiveness that God offers to amend our lives. But have no doubt about it, the institutional Church, whether one wants to call it organized religion or not, is of God. God established it through his Son Jesus Christ, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. It is the means by which God has chosen to bring salvation to the world. St. Cyprian in the 3rd century said, “He cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother.”
And how does God bring about that salvation, in spite of the many examples that can be given to the contrary? One life at a time, one soul at a time, in a process we call conversion; which means changing the heart of a human being. And it works! For every example of the Church’s failing you give, I can give you ten examples of lives changed, of people who live their lives of faith because of the love of God shed abroad in their hearts. Perfect people? No. But people in whom God clearly is working his salvation.
That’s why we should be here today and not walking the bridge. We are on a bridge much more exalted, that bridge that is called Jesus Christ, the way, the truth, and the life.