The lectionary asks us to preach from Mark’s Gospel this morning.
It’s the 7th chapter and tells us of the day the religious rule
makers were offended that Jesus’s disciple had not washed their hands before
eating. Defiled hands, they called them.
Jesus
suggested that maybe these critics honored God, not with their hearts but with their
lips; that they had abandoned the commandments of God in favor of their
tradition. Jesus told them, that in his view, they QUOTE have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in
order to keep your tradition!
If ever the lectionary elves were to include writings other than
Biblical texts, other writings inspired by God in our Sunday morning readings,
I’d expect Don Quixote to be among them. By the way, I have found an
alternative to the Common Lectionary I’ll be preaching from. It’s entitled “Common
Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals.”
Meanwhile, back to Don Quixote who said what’s on the front of
your bulletin. “When life itself
seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is
madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be
madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should
be!”
These words about the spiritual
nature of madness were written by Miguel Cervantes in the early 1600s. Cervantes
knew his Bible. The Bible is filled with madness. Just consider how impractical
the choices made by Abraham to leave his family and his country and go to where
God told him to go; the impractical choice Moses had to make to leave the farm
and go to challenge the dangerous Pharaoh to his face and all the risks that
entailed; and how about Noah?
And what about the prophets who challenged
corrupt kings and queens? Madness. And Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego whom what God taught them ran afoul of a cruel king
trusted God enough to walk into the fiery furnace? Cervantes was speaking about
them all when he said through the voice of Don Quixote, ““When life itself seems lunatic, who knows
where madness lies?”
Don Quixote said that the decision
to surrender dreams may be madness. What dreams did Micah and Jeremiah and the
others surrender when God called them to say words that caused his family and
community to think him mad? What about the dreams the disciples had for their
lives when Jesus showed up and asked them to leave their boats and their
families and follow him?
What if Cervantes was right when he
said, “Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it
is, and not as it should be, then the maddest of all was Jesus of Nazareth.
Imagine the madness of Jesus.
Modern preachers have tamed him, attempting to mask the madness with an image
of a man holding a child on his lap while petting a lamb, they’ve striven to
remove the madness but there’s no escaping the fact that Jesus’s own mother and
brothers thought him to be mad because anyone who stood against tradition, as
he did, must be mad.
We see it in this morning’s Gospel
reading from Mark. It seems innocent enough. Religious elite of the day take
offense when Jesus and his disciples are seen eating without washing their hands.
Small thing to us today…but a really big deal to those whose job it was to
enforce tradition. Isn’t really about clean hands. Something deeper is at play.
Mark recalls the moment. The
Pharisees asked Jesus, “Why do your disciples not live according to the
tradition of the elders?” There it is. It’s about protecting tradition at
all costs. Jesus is direct though directness is a symptom of madness. He said
to them, “Isaiah was right about you hypocrites. And then Jesus quotes Isaiah.
This
people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do
they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines. ’You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
What got Don Quixote into trouble was reading all
those books about knights and chivalry and taking them seriously. They told
aspiring knights how they should live. Don Quixote made the mistake of actually
living that way. For Jesus, it was the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.
Harold Bloom wrote the introduction to a translation
of Cervantes’ classic, quoting W.H Auden referring to Don Quixote as a
Christian saint, calling the fictional knight “gloriously idiosyncratic.” Oh,
to be remembered as “gloriously idiosyncratic.” If any of you plan to speak at
my funeral, please make a note of those word. Gloriously idiosyncratic. And I
will try to live up to that calling between now and then.
Jesus lived, as do we, in times when religion often became a far
cry from the hope God has for the world, exchanging God’s story of the madness
of the prophets for a more timid belief in God, where religious rulemaking
prevailed rather than practical theology and risky teachings, rather than the
guide to seeing life as it is, and not as it
should be and the willingness to say and do something about it.
Much of today’s religion is as it was the day
Jesus challenged the religious elite of his day, when he understood that being
holier-than-thou was not the benchmark but that being Christ-like was and that
was seen by the holier-than-thou crowd as being madness.
According to Mark, Jesus told the religionists
that they have abandoned the word of God in order to hold on to their
tradition. So, what is Jesus saying to us 2000 years later? What matters in a life of faith? Which is more important:
following prescribed rituals or following the words of the prophets? What parts
of our daily living set us apart from people who see us as eccentric?
In Jesus’s time, it was what you wore, what you eat
and for males, whether you were circumcised that set you apart. What sets us
apart or do we even want to be set apart. It’s scary risky to appear to be
different, to walk a path others say leads to madness.
Some people have looked at this question and have concluded
that you can’t find God in a church. Most people, have for one reason or
another often connected to feeling that those of us in the pews each Sunday
morning are hypocrites who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
Last Sunday we had nearly 80 people in this
sanctuary. Last Sunday, many came to hear the old music which they associated
with the crazier times in their lives; times when people took risks to speak
out; times characterized by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, John Lewis and
others who put is all on the line. There was something about the opportunity to
hear and to sing the old songs of the days of protest that caused some who
don’t believe in going to church to show up here last Sunday and to stay home
today.
I fear they lump all of us Christians into the same
staleness and believe we worry about clean hands more than clean hearts.
Today’s Gospel reading raises the question of
ritualistic, traditional hand washing. This question is bigger than righteous
rule-following; this is about expanding membership in the family of God. Jesus
turns it around and says it isn't really about whose hands are dirty, it is
about who we see as unclean.
Jesus is not suggesting that believers leave
behind the rituals and the tradition. Indeed, he participates in much of it;
teaching in the synagogue, preaching and praying and sharing bread and wine.
For Jesus, it is a question of whether those
traditions and rituals are designed to leave someone behind. Do they draw lines
of exclusion or inclusion and I can tell you that many of those who were here
last Sunday and not today have been hurt by religionists who have used the
Bible and the rituals to exclude and while they came to hear the old songs,
they are unwilling to expose themselves to another hurt at the hands of those
who claim the authority of God.
If we want them to be a part of Highlands, we
have to give them a reason to believe we are as mad as those with whom they
marched and sang “We shall overcome” and
had a deeply spiritual feeling that through God and the teachings of Jesus, we
would, actually overcome.
Highlands is a community that seeks to be
faithful. The books you choose to study during our Monday book clubs would be
banned in some churches. Your level of theological curiosity opens your minds
to seek new learnings in a way that would not be accepted by many of the
modern-day traditionalists.
Next Saturday, when you gather here at Highlands to
prepare a place for Sanctuary, you are doing much more than cleaning a room and
moving furniture. By your faith-based actions, you are saying that we are
keeping our eyes on the prize, that we know we will overcome, that the times
they are a changing; you are proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ. Reach
out to friends. Invite them to be a part of the ritual of preparing that room,
friends you know to love God and others and might want to join us in
demonstrating it in real and risky ways.
They are out there and I believe they are longing
for a relationship with God and a faith community that is real and relational. The
want to know what it’s like to be a part of a Quixotic community, to be thought
of as mad and to share time with those who believe as did the errant knight
that, “When life itself seems lunatic,
who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To
surrender dreams — may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest
of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
Sharing Highlands is not to
evangelize as some faith communities do, but to be a gift to those who have
reason to fear church and need to know that we are here and we want them to
join us in tilting at windmills those who are as comfortable as we in being
known as “gloriously idiosyncratic.” AMEN
