The Heart of the Matter

Jesu Juva

St. Mark 7:14-23                                                                

August 29, 2021

Proper 17B                                 

 Dear saints of our Savior~

          It’s tough to find a religion that doesn’t have a use for food.  Food and religion go together, it seems.  Even the ancient pagans had their feasts and festivals.  There was the annual Passover meal in the Old Testament—along with numerous other sacrifices of grain and animals (which would usually end up being eaten by someone).  In the New Testament we have the Lord’s Supper—a sacramental meal at the very heart of our faith.  And, it’s also true, that we can’t overlook all the potlucks, Easter breakfasts, and Lenten suppers which are synonymous with church basements and fellowship halls everywhere.  Food and religion go together.

          In fact, a lot of people can get downright religious about their food.  Foodies and dieticians can be rabidly religious, blessing every delectable morsel as if it were manna from heaven.  Some people see a cosmic struggle between good and evil playing out on the plate in front of them three times a day.  There are good carbs and evil carbs.  Good fats and evil fats.  Gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, sugar-free.  It can become a kind of religion that says, if you put the right kinds of good food in your mouth, you will be pure, holy, and healthy.

          Today’s holy gospel plays out in the shadow of the Old Testament, which placed strict regulations on what you could not eat.  To put this in a way that you Wisconsinites can understand, OT dietary laws boiled down to this:  no Neuske bacon, no Usingers bratwurst.  Your Friday fish-fry was okay as long as the fish you were frying had fins and scales.  But Red Lobster would be off-limits, along with shrimp, scallops and crab.  The reason for these rules is debatable.  But this was part of what made Israel distinct and set apart as God’s holy people.  And the purpose of this distinct, holy people was to bring forth the Messiah.  And once that happened, all those dietary laws had served their purpose.  Israel’s fast was over; and the feast of salvation had begun in the person of Jesus Christ.

          And that brings us to this morning’s holy gospel.  Last week Jesus took on the misguided notion of the Pharisees that hand washing was the way to make your heart clean and to purify your soul.  This week Jesus takes on those who believed

that food could do that—that eating the right foods could make you clean and holy and pure; and that eating unclean food like shrimp and bacon made you unclean and unholy.

          But Jesus said, “Not so.”  There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.  In other words, it’s not about food, it’s not about what goes in, but what comes out.  This must have left everyone scratching their heads.  This wasn’t what they learned from their parents.  This wasn’t what the rabbis taught. Jesus was giving them a new and radical way of understanding how a person becomes clean or unclean—pure or defiled.

          Jesus then gave the disciples a bit of a biology lesson—a rather sophisticated biology lesson for first century ears.  What goes into a person from the outside can’t defile him because it never touches the heart.  Food doesn’t affect the will.  Food doesn’t shape our thoughts, words, and deeds.  The food we put in doesn’t affect that.

          It turns out, there’s something already inside of you that defiles you.  There’s something already inside of you that does corrupt and taint your thoughts, words, and deeds.  It’s not what goes in, it’s what comes out of your heart.  It’s what’s already there.  We call it original sin.  And it manifests itself in all kinds of actual sins. Jesus goes to the trouble to make a list, just to be sure we understand:  Evil thoughts.  Ever have one of those?  Sexual immorality.  Dare I ask?  Theft, murder, adultery, coveting.  Ever been an issue in your life?  But wait, there’s more: Wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness.  It’s quite a list.  And can anyone dare say that this list doesn’t hit close to home in some way?  And if you did dare to distance yourself from that list, well, you would be a liar and the truth would not be in you.

          Where does all the evil in the world come from?  Not from foods, but from the human heart, corrupted to the core by sin.  Original sin is the total corruption of our human nature that we inherited from our first parents.  For me, original sin used to be just an abstract concept—just a theoretical, hypothetical doctrine.  I accepted original sin the way a person might accept the theory of relativity, E=MC2—sure, sounds good to me.  But then I became a parent.  Nothing pounds home the universal truth of original sin better than having children.  For you don’t have to teach your children how to lie.  You don’t have to teach them how to covet.  You don’t have to supply them with evil thoughts.  All that sinful stuff—it just comes naturally.  Children have to learn how to sit up and roll over and say “please” and “thank you.”  But no child needs a lesson in sinning.  Every child has a limitless supply of sin in their very own hearts—which they inherited from their parents.  That’s the sad reality of original sin.

          What we all need is a new heart.  And food has nothing to do with it.  Fast all you want.  Follow the strictest diet.  Food won’t touch the heart.  Food can’t fix an unbelieving heart.  Only God can fix it.  Only God can give you a new and clean heart—a heart that beats in sync with the Holy Spirit—a heart set free from sin and death—a heart turned not toward evil but toward God—a heart not centered on self, but on God and your neighbor.  That’s the heart that Jesus Christ died to give to you.  The purity our hearts don’t have, the holiness our hearts don’t have—that purity and holiness can only come from Jesus, God’s pure and holy Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.  He became defiled with your sin.  He became unclean with your unrighteousness.  He bears it all away so that you don’t have to bear it.

          When you were baptized God the Holy Trinity gave you a new heart, a clean heart, a contrite heart that confesses the mess of sin and receives the gift of Jesus’ blood-bought forgiveness.  This new heart draws strength from the Word and promises of God.  This new heart is sustained and strengthened by the body and blood of Jesus.

          But as you well know, the old heart is still there.  God hasn’t yet completed the transplant; instead, the old heart and new heart are right there together.  We are at the same time saints . . . and sinners—clean and unclean—holy and defiled—good and evil.  This means that we live in a terrible tension.  But we also live beneath the cross of Christ’s forgiveness.  This means there’s never a time when we don’t have sin that needs forgiving; it means there’s never a sin that our Savior cannot forgive.

          Food set the Israelites apart in the Old Testament.  But there is also a food that sets you apart today.  There is a food that goes into you and sustains the believing heart.  There is a food that makes you holy.  It’s the food that Jesus gives you.  The bread that is His body.  The wine that is His blood.  This meal actually makes you holy, in a way that all the OT rules and regulations never could.

          For those who believe, all foods are clean.  All foods are a gift from God—given to be enjoyed and to strengthen us for service in our daily vocations.  Go ahead and eat healthy (or not).  Count your calories and carbs (or not).  But do not forget that though faith in Jesus, you have a place at the feast of feasts—at the marriage feast of the Lamb in His kingdom, which has no end. 

          

     In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

 

When Tradition Goes Bad

 

Jesu Juva

St. Mark 7:1-13                                                                         

August 22, 2021

Proper 16B             

 Dear saints of our Savior~

          At some point over the next few weeks, school age siblings will stand together on front porches, wearing new clothes, sporting new backpacks, and brandishing sharpened pencils.  And someone—usually Mom—will take a picture.  The first-day-of-school picture is a tradition for many families.  It’s a way of marking time—a way of measuring just how quickly those children grow up.  Traditions like this one serve a good and loving purpose.

          Traditions are terribly important.  Tradition can be a way of carrying something forward from one generation to the next.  Every family has traditions.  Schools and sporting events have traditions.  The church—this congregation—has traditions.  Pastors often joke that it’s easier to change a doctrine than to change a tradition in the church.  It’s risky to mess with tradition.  The pastor who unilaterally changes the time of the Sunday service or, the pastor who decides to omit the singing of “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve—well, such a pastor shouldn’t be surprised when a mob with pitchforks and torches begins to gather on the lawn in front of the parsonage.  Why?  Because that pastor is tinkering with tradition.

          The power of tradition is undeniable.  And that power can serve a positive purpose.  G. K. Chesterton wrote of how tradition gives a voice to our ancestors—to those who have gone before us.  He called tradition “the democracy of the dead. . . . Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant [group] who merely happen to be walking around.”  We do well to recognize the positive power of tradition, especially at a time when our culture is abandoning traditions once held sacred, opting for the un-traditional when it comes to marriage, family, sex, and the sanctity of life.  Tradition ensures that those who came before us—that those far wiser than us—that they still have a voice.  And only a fool would ignore that voice.

          But today’s text from Mark 7 has a slightly different take on tradition.  Tradition can take on a life of its own.  When tradition becomes the most important thing—when manmade traditions are elevated over and above the clear commandments of God—well, that’s when tradition goes bad.  That’s the trouble with tradition.  That’s why Jesus accused the Pharisees of rejecting the commandments of God in favor of their own clever and convenient traditions.

          Let me tell you about some of the ways tradition can bring trouble.  One danger is that we make tradition into a museum or, worse, a mausoleum—a collection of dead and dusty things that people come to look at and maybe admire—but never pick up and use.  It’s like when Lutherans take the traditional point of view that the Bible is the Word of God—“Here I stand, I can do no other.”  But when those same Lutherans never open their Bibles to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the contents, well, that spells trouble.

          At other times, tradition can become a hiding place when we’re afraid.  When “change and decay” all around we see—when the whole world is coming apart at the seams—it feels good to hide behind what’s old and familiar and comforting.  It’s a kind of nostalgia, like going back to your old hometown and sleeping in your old childhood bedroom when you just can’t handle reality.

          Tradition can also lead us away from God and away from His will.  That’s what happens when tradition takes over—when tradition hijacks the faith once delivered to the saints.  That’s what Jesus encountered in this morning’s holy gospel.  It all began with the observation that Jesus’ disciples were careless about washing their hands.  The tradition was that you did not eat until you had ritually washed your hands.  (And the word used here for washing is actually “baptize.”)  And not only were you supposed to “baptize” your hands, but also your cups and pots and pans and even the cushions you sat on.  This washing had nothing to do with good hygiene or viruses—the way your mother used to remind you to wash your hands before supper.  This was “religious hygiene,” an attempt to be spiritually pure by your own doing and washing.  This is precisely how the Pharisees operated.  They were steeped in tradition and in self-purification.  They had come up with 613 traditions to do—and not do—in order to make themselves righteous and pure before God.  Tradition had taken over.

          But for Jesus, tradition is always trumped by faith.  Repentance also trumps tradition.  And so Jesus promptly skewered all 613 traditions of the Pharisees with one deadly sentence of Law from the Prophet Isaiah:  This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.  It’s kind of fun to watch Jesus level the opposition, using their own playbook to do so. 

          It’s fun, that is, until you realize how often we do the very same thing.  We honor God with moving lips but our hearts are somewhere else—at work, at play, at brunch, on the golf course, up north.  We treat the divine service like tailgating fans at Miller Park—casually arriving late, and then leaving early.  We put in our time, do our religious duty.  But our hearts are far from the Lord, even on Sunday morning.  We sing our hymns, we speak and sing every word as it’s printed in the official hymnal of the LCMS.  We say all the right words and all the good words.  BUT, these wandering, hardened, unbelieving, ungrateful hearts of ours are always roaming somewhere else.  That’s the hard reality of our sinful hearts.  And it’s awfully easy to use tradition to build a wall around those hearts so that no one, including God, can get to them.

          Whenever we use “tradition” to get in good with God, or to justify ourselves before God like the Pharisees did, we have slipped into a kind of idolatry where our lips are close to God, dripping with all the right words, but our hearts are all tied up with self-purification and self-justification.

          The Pharisees had an interesting religious tradition:  If you devoted your entire investment portfolio and savings to God (if you declared it to be “Corban,” given to God,) then you were off the hook for supporting your aging parents.  You could get away scot-free with dishonoring your mother and father—with not lifting a financial finger to help them—with keeping all your money for yourself—just by applying a thin veneer of religious tradition.

          We’re pretty good at schmearing that same religious varnish all over our own sins—to dress them up and excuse them—whether it’s our sins of sexual immorality, or justifying some petty theft, or our drunkenness, or our gossip, lies, slanders, anger and pettiness.  But when your main concern is justifying yourself—you just may lose the justification that Jesus gives by grace, through faith, for His own sake.

          The Pharisees missed it.  With all their religious regulations and traditions, they missed the one needful thing.  They missed Jesus.  They missed the mercy of God that was theirs in Jesus.  They missed the true cleansing and purification that all their ceremonial washings and baptizings could never achieve.  They missed the most wonderful thing God has ever done, and will ever do, for the world—the

sending of His beloved Son in the flesh to be our Savior—to suffer and die in our stead, and to open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.  They were so busy with their traditions that they missed the great good news that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—not saints!—that He had come NOT to call the righteous, but sinners.

          They missed it; but you don’t have to.  For when you cut through all the clutter of tradition, what’s left is the clear and simple command of God:  “Repent.”  Turn.  Do a one-eighty.  Come to a new way of thinking—a way of thinking that clings in faith to the clear words and promises of God.  Take refuge in the washing that God Himself has established to name you and cleanse you as His own dear child.  For your baptism is so much more than a quaint tradition.  It is the power of God manifested daily in your body and soul.  Eat the bread that is His body; and drink the wine that is His blood, as He bids us do in His own testament. For the Lord’s Supper is no mere tradition.  It is sacred sustenance for body and soul that will sustain you in faith to the life of the world to come.

          In Jesus—with faith in Jesus—you DO ACTUALLY keep the commandments of God.  For by faith you now have Jesus’ perfect record of obedience as your own perfect record.  That perfect record can never be achieved by what you do, by how good you are, or by the traditions you keep.  It is simply a gift, poured into your heart by the Holy Spirit.  May our Lord bless your receiving of that gift now and always. 

          In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

M Is for Mary

 Jesu Juva

St. Luke 1:39-55                                                                

August 15, 2021

St. Mary, Mother of Our Lord                            

 Dear saints of our Savior~

          When it comes to Mary, the mother of our Lord, the artists usually get it right.  For while the Blessed Virgin Mary has been the subject of paint brushes and canvasses too numerous to count, Mary alone is almost never the subject of a

painting.  If you’ve set foot in even one museum of sacred art, then you know that nearly all paintings of Mary are paintings of Mary and Jesus—the Madonna and child, the Mother of God and the Son of God.  Yes, the artists usually get it right.

          And what’s true of all those paintings is also true for this day on the calendar of the Lutheran church.  It may be the feast of Saint Mary—but it’s not about Mary alone.  It’s not about the glorification of Mary, or about her enthronement in heaven where she stands at the ready to manage all of your prayer requests.  Nope.  We set aside this day not to magnify Mary, but to join Mary in magnifying the Lord.  We rejoice with Mary in her Son, our Savior.  We set aside this day to remember how in the fullness of time, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

          Mary was from Nazareth.  In Nazareth is the Church of the Annunciation.  It’s modern—built in the 1960s—right on top of the traditional site where the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would be the mother of God’s Son.  And the design of this church is all based on the letter “M.”  When tourists ask about the letter “M” in the design of the church, tour guides like to say: “M” is for Mary, and much, much more. 

          The “M” of Mary also stands for “mystery.”  There’s much mystery about Mary.  The gospel-writers tell us almost nothing about her.  We know nothing of her life story up until that day when God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, “to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph.”  And that’s it!  We don’t know what she looked like, whether she was rich or poor, or whether she was in her teens or twenties.  We just don’t know.  The Bible doesn’t tell us.  As far as Mary’s life goes, there’s a lot of mystery.

          Much of the mystery about Mary is probably intentional.  The Holy Spirit was wise to withhold all the details about Mary.  Here’s why:  If the Bible told us that Mary was very smart, we might be tempted to conclude that God chose her for her intelligence.  If the Bible told us she was poor, some might conclude that God chose her because of her poverty.  Or if the Bible said that Mary ran an orphanage and a soup kitchen, some might think that God chose her because of her good works.  In other words, we’d always be tempted to think that Mary somehow earned or deserved to be God’s special pick.  But I’m here to tell you that the M in Mary does not stand for “merit.” 

          Mary’s life is a mystery because it forces us to see that God makes His choices, not based on merit, but on grace.  Mary neither earned nor deserved to be the mother of God’s Son, but that special role was given to her, all by God’s grace.  Hail, Mary, full of grace!  And the very same thing holds true for you and for every child of God.  God has chosen you to be His own—not because of who you are, but because of who He is—because He is a God of grace and mercy, who always chooses the least and the lowly and the most unlikely.  He chose you and gave you the gift of faith in His Son—not because there’s any merit or worthiness in you—but because of His fatherly divine goodness and mercy.  All generations call Mary “blessed,” not because of what she did—but because of what God did for her and through her.  And in the same way, you too are blessed.  M is for Mary.  M is for mystery  . . . and more.

          M is also for “memory.”  How good is your memory?  Is it like a steel trap?  Or more like a sieve?  The ironic thing about the human memory is that we always seem to forget the things we want to remember . . . and we always seem to remember the things we’d like to forget.  Anniversaries, passwords, and locker combinations need to be remembered, but we often forget them.  But the embarrassing, sinful and hurtful things we’d like to forget about—the memory of these things lingers long for many of us.

          The M of Mary is also for “memory.”  Part of Mary’s song we heard today has to do with memory—with God’s memory to be precise.  Mary sang in her Magnificat about the Lord:  “He has helped His servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, . . to Abraham and his descendants forever.”  What that means is that God remembers His promises.  When the Lord promised Adam and Eve that the woman’s offspring would crush the head of Satan, the Lord didn’t forget.  When the Lord promised an old man named Abraham that he would have a son—that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky—the Lord didn’t forget.  When the Lord promised David that one of his descendants would rule and reign over an eternal kingdom, The Lord didn’t forget.  And when the Lord promised you in the waters of Holy Baptism that He would never leave you or forsake you, He hasn’t forgotten that promise and He never will.  And the proof of God’s great memory is found in Mary’s Son, Jesus the Christ.

          In Jesus, God remembers all His promises—not only the promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—but also to you.  For in Jesus God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting your sins against you.  In Jesus, God has adopted you as His own dear child.  In Jesus, God has destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.  In Jesus, your sin and shame were nailed to the cross.  Your ugliest deeds and your most regrettable words—your trail of lies and broken promises—all the awful things you wish you could forget—in the blood of Jesus they are washed away, atoned for, forgiven.  Because of Jesus, your God says to you, “I will forgive your wickedness . . . and I will remember your sins no more” (Jer. 31:34).  M is for memory—for God’s memory.  He remembers His promises and His mercy.  But your sins He remembers no more.

          M is for Mary, for mystery, for memory, and more!  M is also for “magnify.”  Mary sang, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”  When you magnify something, your perception of it gets bigger.  When you use a magnifying glass for reading, the letters on the page don’t actually change size; but what changes is your perception of the letters—they’re larger, bolder, magnified.

          We so often magnify the wrong things in life—the sins of somebody else, the flaws and failures of others.  It’s easy, too, for me to magnify my own suffering, my own troubles and disappointments.  We’re naturals when it comes to magnifying all the unfairness of life and all the crosses that we bear.

          But rather than make those things loom larger, Mary invites all who follow her Son in faith to magnify the Lord—to let His promises fill our ears and hearts—to let His grace and mercy be at the center of our lives.  Mary’s song—the Magnificat—takes up eleven verses in Luke chapter one.  And in those eleven verses, Mary refers to the Lord’s deeds and actions no less than eleven times.  Mary doesn’t sing about herself.  She didn’t magnify all the fear and uncertainty that she must have been feeling after hearing the angel’s message.  Instead, she magnified the promises God has kept, the mighty deeds He has done, the mercy He has always shown.

          Beloved in the Lord, let’s magnify with Mary.  After all, those promises and those mighty deeds and that mercy are for you, as well.  In Mary’s Son, God has made you His own child.  And now neither life nor death can separate you from His love.  M is for Mary—and so much more.  On this day we thank God for the mother of our Lord Jesus.  Blessed is she; and blessed is the fruit of her womb, Jesus. 

          In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.