14 Pentecost Cycle B proper
17 August 30, 2015
Song of Solomon 2:8-13 Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
The Song of Songs is love poem often graphic in its depiction but also very honest about all of the ranges of experiences which characterize the near pathological state of being in love. The Song of Songs does not mention the name of God, so one might ask why it was included in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Bible. It may be undeniable that love is the very best expression to be found in human experience with all of the agony and ecstasy which accompany the desire of magnetism which occurs when two people are drawn to each other in such a profound and heightened way that it is difficult for lover to avoid user the poetic confession of divine providence. Since romantic love is so profound, it was regarded by those who were ancient wisdom teachers to be an appropriate metaphor for the relationship between a person and God. It could be that the wisdom teachers saw the performance of religion by many as being but boring routines and people had forgotten why they were involved in religion at all except as the cultural practice of obeying their religious authorities.
Where was the excitement? Where was the emotional engagement? Is a relationship with God boring and unexciting? Are we forced to admit that the best human romantic relationship is more exciting than our relationship with God? The wisdom teachers believed that one's relationship with God needed to involve an activation of the excitement of the energy of love. Worship of God is a focus of one's love upon God. If one reads the Psalms one finds singing and dancing and music and poetry, all of the excesses of ecstasy and that's just in "church" as it were. We perhaps have suffered from the severity of the puritanical and the result has been taking the ecstasy out of our relationship with God. If one were to predict the outcome a council of religious leaders worldwide today, one could doubt that they would vote to include the Song of Songs in their official Scripture.
It is bad enough if religious authorities take all of the fun out of religion; what if they go further and makes so many little rules that they make "official religion" the only religion and done for the convenience of those who are supported and given power by making everyone else keep rules which seem alienated from commonsense connection for living.
The portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth which we have in the Gospels is one which is governed by issues that have arisen in the young churches whose very identity is being formed by expulsion of members from the synagogues and the inclusion of Gentile followers of Jesus who were not being required to follow all of the rules of ritual purity of Judaism.
And one has to wonder if Jesus is being presented in light of what has begun to happen in the early churches. This is seen in the parenthetical aside in the Gospel reading today,
"For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the traditions of the elder." Why would Jesus and the disciples have to be informed about the traditions of the elders because they too were Jews? The parenthetical information tells us this is an early church looking to explain why many had become separated from the synagogue and why there was an opening for participation of Gentiles in this Jesus Movement.
The point of the Gospel is to highlight the fact that all laws are not equal in their importance to the life of humanity and in what is truly pleasing to God. Yes, it may be important to wash one's hands before eating and to brush one's teeth but can such be elevated to be the chief expression of "pure religion?" The writer of the Epistle of James wrote, "pure religion is to care of the widows and orphans in distress." In short, pure religion is to practice the hard love of caring justice. Religious law of the time divided things into what was pure or impure, defiled or undefiled. The rituals were expressions of dealing with states believed to be defiled. How could one be re-established into an undefiled condition? This was the religious issue.
It is a natural reaction to be downright obsessively compulsively disordered in our religious behavior when we stare inwardly and find that the inside of us can be so "defiled." Sigmund Freud said that the unconscious mind is polymorphously perverse. The prophet Jeremiah said the human heart is exceeding deceitful and who can know it.
The message that we have in the Gospel is that we can know the radical continuum of the human insides. We can know the ecstasy of the love recounted in the Song of Songs but we can also know our insides riddled by very selfish, wrongly motivated interests able to result in lots of things we could never be proud of.
So how do we deal with this incredible continuum of human possibilities of the human heart which can motivate every sort of human action?
The Gospel is a Gospel of Grace, deep grace, the kind of Grace which can create in us a deeper cleaner Heart, even the Heart of our lives being known by the presence of the Holy Spirit. And from the deeper heart of the Holy Spirit, the outer layer of our human heart can be trained in the worship of ecstasy towards God and so the energies of our lives can be brought to express pure religion in our thoughts and deeds.
With the Gospel of Grace of Jesus Christ who baptizes with the Holy Spirit, we can give up our external religious deeds as guilt responses to our own sense of defilement and we can embrace the positive notion of being sinners, who though not perfect, are perfectible as we are learning to respond to the Graceful Deeper Heart of the Holy Spirit.
May God give us the Graceful freedom to have some fun and joy in our faith and religious experience. Let us look to the event of the sublime within ourselves which will always help us tolerate what we are not yet in perfected behaviors.
For Christ's sake friends, lets go forth and have some fun, but let us extend the fun to as many as we can. Amen.
Where was the excitement? Where was the emotional engagement? Is a relationship with God boring and unexciting? Are we forced to admit that the best human romantic relationship is more exciting than our relationship with God? The wisdom teachers believed that one's relationship with God needed to involve an activation of the excitement of the energy of love. Worship of God is a focus of one's love upon God. If one reads the Psalms one finds singing and dancing and music and poetry, all of the excesses of ecstasy and that's just in "church" as it were. We perhaps have suffered from the severity of the puritanical and the result has been taking the ecstasy out of our relationship with God. If one were to predict the outcome a council of religious leaders worldwide today, one could doubt that they would vote to include the Song of Songs in their official Scripture.
It is bad enough if religious authorities take all of the fun out of religion; what if they go further and makes so many little rules that they make "official religion" the only religion and done for the convenience of those who are supported and given power by making everyone else keep rules which seem alienated from commonsense connection for living.
The portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth which we have in the Gospels is one which is governed by issues that have arisen in the young churches whose very identity is being formed by expulsion of members from the synagogues and the inclusion of Gentile followers of Jesus who were not being required to follow all of the rules of ritual purity of Judaism.
And one has to wonder if Jesus is being presented in light of what has begun to happen in the early churches. This is seen in the parenthetical aside in the Gospel reading today,
"For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the traditions of the elder." Why would Jesus and the disciples have to be informed about the traditions of the elders because they too were Jews? The parenthetical information tells us this is an early church looking to explain why many had become separated from the synagogue and why there was an opening for participation of Gentiles in this Jesus Movement.
The point of the Gospel is to highlight the fact that all laws are not equal in their importance to the life of humanity and in what is truly pleasing to God. Yes, it may be important to wash one's hands before eating and to brush one's teeth but can such be elevated to be the chief expression of "pure religion?" The writer of the Epistle of James wrote, "pure religion is to care of the widows and orphans in distress." In short, pure religion is to practice the hard love of caring justice. Religious law of the time divided things into what was pure or impure, defiled or undefiled. The rituals were expressions of dealing with states believed to be defiled. How could one be re-established into an undefiled condition? This was the religious issue.
It is a natural reaction to be downright obsessively compulsively disordered in our religious behavior when we stare inwardly and find that the inside of us can be so "defiled." Sigmund Freud said that the unconscious mind is polymorphously perverse. The prophet Jeremiah said the human heart is exceeding deceitful and who can know it.
The message that we have in the Gospel is that we can know the radical continuum of the human insides. We can know the ecstasy of the love recounted in the Song of Songs but we can also know our insides riddled by very selfish, wrongly motivated interests able to result in lots of things we could never be proud of.
So how do we deal with this incredible continuum of human possibilities of the human heart which can motivate every sort of human action?
The Gospel is a Gospel of Grace, deep grace, the kind of Grace which can create in us a deeper cleaner Heart, even the Heart of our lives being known by the presence of the Holy Spirit. And from the deeper heart of the Holy Spirit, the outer layer of our human heart can be trained in the worship of ecstasy towards God and so the energies of our lives can be brought to express pure religion in our thoughts and deeds.
With the Gospel of Grace of Jesus Christ who baptizes with the Holy Spirit, we can give up our external religious deeds as guilt responses to our own sense of defilement and we can embrace the positive notion of being sinners, who though not perfect, are perfectible as we are learning to respond to the Graceful Deeper Heart of the Holy Spirit.
May God give us the Graceful freedom to have some fun and joy in our faith and religious experience. Let us look to the event of the sublime within ourselves which will always help us tolerate what we are not yet in perfected behaviors.
For Christ's sake friends, lets go forth and have some fun, but let us extend the fun to as many as we can. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment