Proper 17B

Aug. 30, 2009
Denise Giardina

Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

When I was a young adult, I lived for several years in a coal camp in eastern Kentucky called David, near Prestonsburg. I lived there because I was working on my novels Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth, and wanted the experience of living in a coal camp as I done in my childhood. David was a unique coal camp because at its center was the David School, which is an alternative school that has over the decades attracted national attention – you may have seen a PBS documentary a few years back on the school, which attracts young teachers from all over the country, and local students from a variety of backgrounds.

When I lived there the David School was fairly new, but then as now an attractive group of young people taught there, and since I was their age back then, I quickly became friends with them. Young people from the community were also attracted, and the variety was stimulating – if I can use stereotypes to describe it, hippies and hillbillies were hanging out together. And we were young. So we did what young people did – we worked, but then we partied, we drank and talked freely, played music, and danced.

I became friends with one of the young men who had grown up in a poor family in David. I’ll call him Darrell. Darrell often joined us in our parties, and drank and played music and danced and cussed. He also believed that Christians shouldn’t do those things. He wanted to be a Christian, because he wanted to go to Heaven. But not yet.

I tried to understand where Darrell was coming from. One night, at one of our parties, he explained it to me. He planned to follow his father’s example. His father had been a wild young man. He smoked and drank and cussed and partied. And then, when he turned forty and was, in his mind, getting old, and therefore close to death, he got saved. From that point on, Darrell’s father became a Christian and put away foolish things because, he thought, he was now too old to enjoy them anyway.

Darrell planned to do the same thing. Thus he could enjoy himself while he was young, but still ensure he would some day go to heaven.

But what happens, I asked, if you go out tomorrow and die in a car wreck? Before you could get saved and go to heaven? Darrell thought a moment and said, Well, that would be bad luck. But in that case, I would just have to go to hell.

Darrell reminded me of the folks I grew up around down in McDowell County, and those folk in turn remind me of so many Christians across the country and the world today. If one judged our religion by those folks, Christianity is one big prohibition, as in much the same way, are orthodox Judaism and conservative Islam. The Christians I grew up with were distinguished mainly by the degrees of their prohibitions. We Methodists were the most liberal – Methodists couldn’t cuss or drink, but that was about it. Other churches had progressively more rigid rules. In some you couldn’t dance, you couldn’t listen to rock music; in others you couldn’t go to the movies, or play cards; in others women couldn’t wear pants or makeup. In one church, at a place called Jolo in McDowell County, you had to pick up snakes, and somehow that one seemed to me the freest of all – I thought, back in those days, that doing crazy things is at least better than not doing normal things.

I thought of Darrell, and I thought of those churches in McDowell County, when I read today’s gospel. Darrell in fact had a great deal in common with the Pharisees. In today’s gospel, the Pharisees are worried to death because Jesus and his disciples aren’t following a dietary code. It has to do with washing hands and washing pots the right way, and so forth. So many details. But if the details are violated and food is taken with unwashed hands, or from the wrong pot, then the violators might be excommunicate. Because being saved, in this and all contexts, means being accepted, or cut off, from the community, and therefore from God. Let’s add up the list – no drinking, cussing, dancing, wearing makeup, or failing to wash your hands and mixing cooking utensils together unnecessarily.

Jesus rejects all this. His disciples do not have to worry about what they do, in terms of what they eat or how they eat it. Righteousness is elsewhere, and salvation has to do with something other than these picky details.

The epistle of James turns all this in a different direction. What we do does matter. “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves,” we are told. “For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.” In the epistle of James, what we do, or don’t do, is important.

This is a paradox. Some of my students might tell you that I like to emphasize the presence of a paradox. I think in fact that I may have mentioned paradoxes in my sermons before as well. A paradox means this – two opposites, both considered to be true.

Consider this paradox. On the one hand James – what you do is more important than what you hear. On the other hand, Jesus in the gospel of Mark. What you do is seen by many as the all important. But it is not so important as – something else. And what a challenge that must have been for the followers of Jesus, just as it would be for our beloved friends here in Appalachia, or in the United States, who are convinced that true Christians do not drink, cuss, party, or all the things that Episcopalians sometimes do.

How do we figure this out? I think it is in part about priorities. We must sort out what is important. Because if you look carefully, Jesus does not dismiss behavior as an issue. Rather, he redirects our notions of what is important behavior. He asks us to change our priorities. Eating with unwashed hands, or out of the wrong pot, is dismissed because it is trivial. The Pharisees, by the way, in their defense, had what were often good motives for enforcing these rules – they were trying to maintain Judaism in the presence of an alien ruling culture. Likewise, many of those today who push such rules, which extend from cussing and drinking to changing sexual roles and narrow-minded sexual ethics, are anxious and fearful about the changing cultural landscape around them. For some, cultural fears tend to calcify cultural prohibitions.

But Jesus redirects these fears to focus on the sins that are really important --- Theft. Murder. Sexual promiscuity. Greed. Envy. Slander. Pride. Even here, with Jesus, one also senses saving grace close at hand, as opposed to the Pharisees among us who would write the offender out of the community.

When thinking of these lessons, one particular example stuck in my mind, because my most recent novel is about the Bronte family, the famous writers, in England. The son of the family was Branwell Bronte. Branwell has been considered, through the years, to be a hopeless case – an alcoholic and drug addict. This was especially true in those days when addiction was not considered to be a disease, but was considered to be a moral failing. And yet Branwell Bronte the alcoholic had the courage, and the human decency, to sit with a friend dying of cholera, to comfort him in his last hours.

Branwell could not have caught cholera from his friend, because cholera is passed through contaminated water supplies, not through human contact. But Branwell didn’t know that, because that discovery was not made until a decade later. So Branwell sat with his friend, thinking he might die himself because of being there. And there he sat until the end.

What an example of today’s lessons – by the purity standards of behavior, Branwell Bronte, alcoholic and drug addict, violated every code. By the gospel standards of Jesus Christ, he passed with flying colors.

The epistle writer, James, speaks as I said earlier of people who are hearers only, who look in a mirror and soon after can’t remember what they are like. It seems to me that Jesus Christ calls us to look in the mirror, and remember what we are like, and what others are like. And the rest is little matter.