One of the main reasons I enjoy following the lectionary for my preaching schedule, is that it forces me to struggle with what God is trying to say through those particular stories within the assigned passages. If you’re not familiar with the lectionary, it’s a 3-year listing of different bible passages which most churches and ministers use to plan their worship services. Sometimes the passages contrast each other, and sometimes they complement each other. Sometimes, like today’s scripture from the Old and New Testament, the passages lead into one another.
I think that in order to better understand today’s correlation between these two stories, we need to take a look at why Deuteronomy was written. 21st Century theologian and well-respected author, Allan Boesak, reminds us that the entire bible is written as humankind’s response to God’s work in the lives of the Jewish and Christian people while they were either under the oppressive rule of another empire or had just come out of such oppression. In the Old Testament those Empires included the Assyrians, Babylonians, and the Persians. In the New Testament it was the Romans.
This fact helps us to recognize how and why the bible is written using the language and imagery it does. When the authors write stories which say “God is the greatest of all gods,” it’s in response to having other gods forced on them, responding with stories that show how their god is better than the gods of their oppressors. When the authors write, “God has turned God’s back on us,” it’s in response to the times when they are forced out of their lands and therefore unable to see God in their temples. Then, like in today’s reference to the laws in Deuteronomy, the authors are finding a way to unify, and keep united, a nation of people who have been literally dispersed across the world.
The Deuteronomical laws were written in order for the Jewish people to be able to live as one people, under one God, unified by a common set of laws. The laws themselves, while important, are not what the focus is supposed to be on. Rather, the focus is supposed to be on living in such a way as to take care of one another through mutual respect of personhood and property, while never forgetting the God who is at the center of the reason they still exist as a people. It is on the intent of the laws which our passage from Deuteronomy asks the people of Judah to focus.
The stories of the Hebrew people told in the historical books of the bible are interesting, to put it mildly. While some of those stories only give us a surface understanding of what life for the people of Israel were and how their kings ruled, other stories give detailed accounts of bloody battles fought with courage, strength, and determination. Today I want to point out just a brief account of what happened leading up to what is known as the Deuteronomical reformation of Josiah’s reign.
King Josiah became king of Judah at the age of 8, taking over from his grandfather and father’s reign of 77 years during which the worship of Yahweh was replaced with the pagan religion of the Assyrians and the worship of Baal. Josiah’s great-grandfather, Hezekiah, tried desperately to reform and hold together the covenant made between Yahweh and his people, but in the end could not overcome the influences of the Assyrians.
However, Josiah took the throne at a time when the Assyrians were all but defeated and held no more influence in that part of the Middle East. So, in the eighteenth year of his reign, Josiah made a decision that it was finally time to renovate the temple in Jerusalem to rid the symbols of power laid by those who worshiped a different god. He asked the high priest to count all of the money in the temple treasury in order that they would know how much they had with which to purchase the materials necessary to tear down the altars and statues which currently occupied the temple.
In the process of looking for all of the temple’s wealth, the high priest makes a discovery which he calls the “Book of Law”. Old Testament scholars believe those writings to be what we see in Deuteronomy 12-26; a listing of the covenants made between Moses and the Hebrew people. After hearing the words written in this book, Josiah gathered all the people of Judah and read them the same words, declaring that they would now follow the words of this book of law and the rest, as they say, is history.
Now, let me clarify something – the laws found in this book were meant to do a few very specific things: to condemn the paganism of Josiah’s grandfather and father, centralize worship in Jerusalem, and warn the people as to an unswerving loyalty to the covenants to God alone. In other words, the newfound book of the law would be used by Josiah to help him once again unify the Jewish people under one God.
Now we fast forward to the time of Jesus. As does happen in the passage of time, the purpose of Josiah’s reformation got lost in translation. Instead of unifying all of God’s people under one God, the laws were being used to separate those whom the temple elite considered unworthy of being in God’s presence. These people were what the priests, scribes, and Pharisees of the New Testament called unclean.
If we remember, Mark was written during a time when Christians were being heavily persecuted. The Emperor Nero had declared the absolute elimination of all Christians while Rome found itself fighting a Jewish uprising. Jerusalem was yet again under siege and on its way to destruction.
The Gospel of Mark, then, is written in response to what is currently happening to the Judean-Christian people; they are being chased from their ancestral home as has happened many times in their history. The Gospel of Mark is meant to be something these Christians can focus on as their lives are disrupted. It is Mark’s way of providing a central focus for Christians, just as it was Josiah’s way to make the Book of the Covenant the central focus for the Jewish people almost 700 years before.
The difference between what Josiah did and what Mark proposes is this: it’s not the law in which God’s people should put their focus; it is the life and teachings of Jesus Christ we now must put at the center of our lives.
In today’s passage from Mark we see how Jesus is being condemned for allowing his disciples to eat their meals without first washing their hands. While I agree that something like this might be unsanitary, I really wouldn’t call it a crime. But, according to the laws being observed in Jesus’ time one had to wash their hands before eating. A law is a law. After all, it is the laws of Moses which has kept God’s people together for all these centuries, right?
Jesus is quick with his rebuttal. He says, “Isaiah really knew what he was talking about when he prophesied about you hypocrites.” Is it by chance Jesus quotes Isaiah? Not at all. You see, it was Isaiah who prophesied during Josiah’s great grandfather’s reign in Judah and it was Isaiah who prophesied Josiah’s eventual kingship and restoration of the people’s focus on God in their lives.
Jesus is reminding the temple elite, while teaching the infamous crowds of Mark‘s Gospel, that the intent of the laws were to unify people under one God. By quoting Isaiah’s warning that, “You ignore God’s commandment while holding on to rules created by humans and handed down to you,” Jesus reminds the temple elite, and those crowds, that they have forgotten the intent of God’s laws – to love God with every fiber of their being and to love one another and our selves in the same way.
Last year, Kapolei High School began a GSA Club. GSA stands for Gay-Straight Alliance. It’s a club for those who are struggling with finding a place where they can be accepted for the choices they make in their personal lifestyles and for those who support them. It’s a club that prides themselves on being a safe space where those who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Straight or Transgendered can come and know, absolutely know, that they will be amongst people who accept them for the person they are, not for the people society labels them to be.
I was honored when they asked me to be their club advisor. We started the club with a small group and as the year went on we grew, finding more and more people who joined our group not because they identified as LGBT, but because they knew they could be in a place free of judgment.
I have been asked to be their club advisor again this year. Those in the club know I’m an ordained minister, and they also know that doesn’t mean anything as to my abilities to be their advisor. In fact, it’s because I’m a minister that the members of this club like having me as an advisor.
The other day I was talking to one of our girls who identifies as a transgendered male. I mentioned our club and asked her to stop in and see if it might be something she would want to join, mentioning that being in a club looks good on college applications. She said she would think about it.
What I didn’t notice is that sitting close by were two other girls, one with whom I developed a good relationship with last year and another I’ve just begun getting to know. As I went back to my little desk area I could hear them whispering, “Ask him. No you ask him. I don’t have to ask him, I already know.” It was kind of funny and made me smile.
I sat on my chair and looked at the two girls asking them what they were talking about. The one who didn’t yet know me well began the conversation slowly. She wanted to know about the club, what kind of stuff we did and who was invited. I told her we mostly just met every other week to talk about any issues the club members might be going through either at school or at home. I told her we’re just getting started and we hope to do some outings this year, maybe to the movies or something like that.
I then told her that all people were invited. I can still see the look of puzzlement on her face when she mumbled her next words. “But,” she softly and shyly said, “How can you be the advisor for this club if you’re an ordained minister?”
I looked over at the other girl, who only smiled widely because she knows what my views are on the rules some Christians put on ourselves. I replied, as gently as I could, that it was a struggle for me to come to the place where I am now in my beliefs, and I know that for a lot of Christians the struggle continues. We’ve been taught for so long that there is only one way to be a Christian, and if we don’t follow that way we’ll find ourselves suffering the worst afterlife anyone can imagine.
She opened up a little more and talked about how her parents were those kinds of church-goers, the kind that condemn a lot of people because of the laws in the bible. I told her that was ok, for them, because that’s where they find their comfort in God; that it was a strict adherence to the laws which helped them get through their faith. She then told me she stopped going to church because she had a difficult time with the hate towards people who were considered outsiders, or to use the language of Mark, unclean.
Instead of continuing the conversation down this path, I felt God nudging me to talk about the first time I was led to look at the bible in a different way. I mentioned that a lot of what some people see as the definition of how relationships are supposed to be come from the story of creation found in Genesis 1 and 2 – the creation of man and woman as life partners.
I continued by asking them to take a look at the story most used, the one in Genesis 2 and how God decides that Adam needed a helper as a partner. God, in God’s intimate compassion for the man, tried to find a partner that could help man through life’s journeys. Unfortunately none was found through co-creation, or the creation of something outside of man. Instead, God finds a way to make a partner for man creating one from within man himself. For this man, for this particular image of God, the partner that was created from his own bone and flesh was a woman, who he would take as his life partner.
Then I mentioned to her that as we moved through my Old Testament classes in Seminary, I was taught that Genesis was most likely written down in its current form some time during the 5th or 6th Century BCE, a time when the Jewish people were being exiled from their land and forced to disperse and settle in lands far from one another. I then told her that it would make sense that in a time when the Hebrew people were in trouble of losing their culture, a verse or two would be added to their creation story to ensure the procreation of their people, hence the verses about a man leaving his family and clinging to his wife.
At its root, creation of man and woman really has nothing to do with marriage, and more to do with God’s love for humanity that a suitable partner for mankind is found in order that we all have someone with whom we can share our life’s journey.
They both sat there in complete silence until one of them asked, “Why don’t they teach this in all churches?” To which my answer was I don’t know. But it’s something I teach, and it’s something I hope people would at least be willing to listen to and have a discussion about. They both looked at each other and said, “That’s the kind of church I want to go to.”
Sometimes we allow the rules which man has passed down to get in the way of truly living by the intent of the laws which the reformers of Josiah’s time meant to teach us; the laws which allow us to live in such a way as to take care of one another through mutual respect of personhood and property, while never forgetting the God who is at the center of the reason we still exist as a people.
It is in these laws, the laws which require us to find a way to bring all people together, that God asks us to live. So, respect one another’s choices, seek to understand rather than condemn, and in the end if common ground can’t be found, love unconditionally anyway.
God is with us all. Amen.
