Sermon Gary Jones Church of the Holy Communion

SUNDAY SERMON

August 31, 2003
Proper 17, Year B

Church of the Holy Communion
The Rev. Gary D. Jones

A friend of mine and colleague in the priesthood, King Oehmig, tells a story that helps me to understand a little better what Jesus might have been getting at in this morning's Gospel lesson:

It's the story of a devout Christian who decided to focus more intentionally on his relationship with God, and to do this he decided to spend several minutes each morning in prayer and meditation in his bedroom. The discipline not only took hold, it expanded to include Scripture and devotional readings. It was fruitful time for the man, and before he knew it, this sacred time alone with God expanded from ten minutes each morning to thirty minutes.

The man was delighted with his progress. He was feeling closer to God than ever before. It seemed he was more trusting, more at peace, more at ease, and the sense of gratitude he had for God's palpable presence in his life was astounding.

But a problem surfaced. It happened that the family cat decided to join the man during this sacred devotional time. Moments after he closed his eyes and entered into deep meditation, the cat would leap into his lap, startling the man out of his devotional stillness. He was fond of the snuggly, purring cat, but there was no denying that the kitty had become a major distraction.

So, the man came up with a solution. Just before settling into his sacred time with God, the man would leash the cat to the bedpost until he was finished with his morning prayers. This solution worked beautifully, and the man was no longer interrupted by the cat during this very important time.

The man had a daughter who observed her father's remarkable discipline in the spiritual life and who admired her father's sanctity - his kindness and his charitable ways and the perpetual sense of gratitude he seemed to have, just to be alive. So, the daughter decided that she, too, would follow a similar devotional practice each morning, first thing. Her discipline was much like her father's - she would get up every morning, fasten her cat to the bedpost, and then have her time for morning prayer and meditation. The only problem was that the pace of life had quickened considerably in her generation - she was so much busier than her father or mother had been - so she gradually spent less time in prayer than her father had.

The daughter had a son, and when the son grew up, he, too wanted to make sure that he preserved the cherished family tradition of daily morning prayer that had meant so much to his mother and his grandfather. But the pace of life in his generation had rocketed past that of his mother. His life was such a whirlwind, with so many commitments, that he simply didn't have the time each morning for the in-depth prayer and meditation that his family had practiced and cherished for so many years. So, he eliminated the Scripture, the devotional readings, and the quiet time for meditation. Eventually, he even eliminated the prayer. But, in order to keep up the cherished family tradition, each morning as he got dressed, he tied the family cat to the bedpost. (Synthesis, 1997)

The danger in any ritual, or tradition, however holy, is that form can replace meaning. The example of tying the cat to the bedpost is a simple one, but some religious traditions have behind them subtleties of meaning that are lost or obliterated over time. And the subtleties matter. The result is that what starts out as a means of grace can become a meaningless end in itself. We might even say that some traditions can even become silly, when they are unhooked from their original meaning. But in the case of religious traditions, any notion of silliness evaporates when zealous people insist on forcing others to conform to their traditional practices.

"Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?" This might not sound like a terribly important question to us, but it was loaded with accusation in Jesus' day. To translate this morning's Gospel lesson, we have to think of holy traditions or scriptural mandates that are important to us. Then we have to hear ourselves asking Jesus, "Why do you allow your disciples to violate these holy traditions and laws? How can you condone breaking with thousands of years of tradition?"

And so we might ask ourselves, Are there some examples from my own life in which I continue, out of respect for tradition, to tie the cat to the bed?

In the most recent issue of The Christian Century, the British NT Scholar, James Dunn, is shown pointing out that in Jesus' day, the good religious people, the rabbis, devoted a disproportionate amount of their attention to three areas of Scriptural law: dietary rules, Sabbath-keeping, and circumcision. This morning's vignette in the Gospel is an example of the concern about ritual cleansing and dietary laws; Jesus would also get into hot water over healing on the Sabbath; and Paul's letters are full of page after page of his valiant struggles with those who insisted that Gentile Christians must be circumcised.

Adherence to Scriptural mandates in these three areas was of exceptional importance to the religious people of Jesus' day, even though no one in Jesus' day would have claimed that keeping these laws was central to God's will for humanity. They all knew that the essence of the law and the prophets was the shema - You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind - this is what was even to be put on their doorposts. So, why would they be so hyper-vigilant about dietary rules, Sabbath-keeping, and circumcision?

Professor Dunn says the answer has to do with "identity markers" or boundaries. All human beings seem to have a need to know who is inside and who is out. We want to know with some clarity, what precisely is required? What is allowed and what is not? And so we adopt identity markers and pay extra attention to boundaries.

The idea, of course, is that the rabbis in Jesus' day are really not much different from the rest of us. The identity markers might change as the centuries change - we no longer seem to be especially focused on these three any longer - but each generation tends to focus on some aspect of the overall Scriptural mandates that is of special importance to them.

What happens in this morning's Gospel lesson is that Jesus sees a cat tied to a bedpost. Jesus sees what we're up to, and he understands. He knows what these holy laws and customs represent, and he understands why we become especially vigilant about some of them. Jesus sees these traditions as signs of our deep desire for

Meaning in life

Guidance and clarity in a world where people are following so many divergent paths

The cat tied to the bedpost, the ritual washing, the Sabbath-keeping, circumcision, … all of these are good practices; they are signs that we want to live good lives; we want to be connected to God and to each other in healthy, meaningful ways; we know how we all tend to stray, how our children will tend to stray, and so we seek some rules and boundaries that are good for us.

Jesus is not rejecting all of these things. He's only inviting us to go deeper - stop focusing on strict observance of rules and traditions; instead, look beyond them to see the larger reason for them in the first place. The point is not tying the cat to the bedpost. The point all along has been, how can we best grow in a deep, loving relationship with God and with each other?

And one of the ways Jesus seems to have gotten their attention was by allowing certain infractions. What if, instead of tying the cat to the bedpost, you put the cat in another room? This was the kind of thing that drove the religious people crazy. The idea that there could be another way, a way to be in deep, loving relationship with God that did not involve adherence to rules that were clearly mandated in holy law. The cat wasn't supposed to be put in another room. The cat was supposed to be tied to the bedpost.

Jesus didn't come to abolish the law, he came to fulfill it, so that we could focus on the revelation of God in Jesus, instead of focusing on the revelation on tablets of stone. The dietary rules, the Sabbath-keeping, circumcision, the cat tied to the bedpost… these are good. Jesus didn't come to abolish them; he just wanted to take us deeper. To give us a new heart. Jesus was after authentic transformation, a relationship with God that everyone could have, a relationship not based on law but on a desire welling up from within.

Of course, if the whole point is love, if the whole point is not staying inside certain boundaries but developing a love relationship with God, our lives are not going to have the clarity we all crave. Things could get messy once in a while, but that's just the way human relationships are, especially human relationships with God. But if our goal is to stay in relationship with God in Christ, by partaking of the Sacrament, by focusing on his life and teaching in the Gospels, and by developing disciplines of prayer, then it won't matter whether the cat is in the other room or tied to the bedpost. God will work God's power in us, if only we desire a relationship with Him and make the time to be with Him.

St. Paul put it this way, the law was our custodian until Christ came. The law was our guardian, our nanny, preparing us for the revelation of God in Christ. But now with the coming of Christ, everything has changed. The law, the nanny, is no longer the focus. The focus now is our hearts. And authentic religious transformation will be evident not in how well we keep the law, but in how well we love. This can be messy. But nothing can be more beautiful.

I'll close with a famous prayer by a monk named Thomas Merton, one of the most insightful spiritual guides of the twentieth century, and perhaps of any era. A man of deep devotion to Jesus and expansive charity for the world. This prayer of Merton's reveals himself as a human being who lacks the confidence of well-defined boundaries and the comfort of identity markers, but who is in the deepest communion with God:

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

Amen.

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