The Onion Is Ours

Sermon-Year B Proper 17-August 30, 2009
The Cloud of Unknowing, "O God, our great companion, lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of your life and ours, that we may be faithful interpreters of Life to each other, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I hate to say this, but Jesus was wrong. It doesn’t happen very often, and I usually try to overlook it, but in this case-Jesus made a mistake. We should wash our hands before we eat. Is this so wrong? Of course not! My grandmother said it, my mother said it, and my wife says it-and that means that Jesus was wrong. The Pharisees tell Jesus that they caught his followers eating without washing their hands first. Why is that so upsetting to Jesus? What parent in their right mind would take Jesus’ side in this debate?
First of all, have you ever heard of the Washington Generals? That’s the team that plays the Harlem Globetrotters at all of their exhibitions. The Generals had a record of 6 wins and 13,000 losses over a 40 year period. THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO LOSE. The Pharisees are the Washington Generals of the gospels. So why is Jesus arguing with the Pharisees over something so mundane, so insignificant as hand washing? Doesn’t this seem a little, um, small and petty to you? When Gulliver traveled to Lilliput you know what the Lilliputians were fighting over? Whether you should crack your eggs at the small end or the big end. Seems rather, “small and petty” doesn’t it? So here is Jesus fighting with the Pharisees over something so minor, so trivial like cracking their eggs-and clearly Jesus is picking the wrong end of the egg.
When the Jewish people were taken into exile in 587BC by the Babylonians , they were not just defeated, they were destroyed. There was almost nothing of their culture, their history, their life, left. So when they returned to Israel 70 years later they had to work very very hard to hold on to their identity-and the primary way they did this, was by holding on to ancient rituals and traditions-things they had taken for granted- before they were taken into exile. Out of this group a reform movement developed called, the Pharisees. The Pharisees worked very very hard at keeping their Jewish identity. They believed that the best way to hold on to their Jewishness, to be faithful to God, was to keep the laws. Does this sound so wrong? Of course not. We applaud cultures who strive to keep their identity, we approve of keeping the law, right?. For the Pharisees, their goal was to maintain the separateness and uniqueness of Judaism. The Pharisees and their party represented about 5% of the Jewish people, but they were the good 5%, the powerful 5%, the religious 5%. The word Pharisee means “separate ones”. That was what Pharisees tried to do, to make their faith and practice better, to encourage people to obey God’s commandments, to push people to be more holy-is that so wrong? Of course not.
I have said this to you many times, the Pharisees didn’t think that Jesus was religious enough. He, or his disciples (which is how they could argue with Jesus), didn’t always keep all the religious rules and practices. This morning’s story wasn’t so much about not washing before they ate, it was about not treating things as holy. It was about not staying connected to the traditions. Is there anything wrong with that? Of course not.
But for Jesus it opened up a whole can of worms. What is the purpose of tradition? Why do we have rituals? What’s the point? And Jesus unleashes a torrent of teaching on the Pharisees, these Washington Generals. First he calls them a name, “you hypocrites” he calls them. Do you remember what a hypocrite was? They were actors in Greek plays. So he’s saying that they are playing a role-not being honest.
Then he says, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition”. Harsh words. He’s telling them that they’re holding people down, using the letter instead of the spirit of the law. They’re using the law to inhibit the Spirit. Harsh words. And he says, “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile." You know what Jesus is saying. It isn’t the law that gets us in trouble, it’s what’s in our hearts. It’s what we mean, what we intend, what is behind the actions. It is why we do something, even more than what we do. It isn’t breaking the laws and rituals that is the problem, it’s closing off our hearts to God. The Rev. Steve Kelsey recounts the story told in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, of the stingy old woman who sought, from the misery of hell, the lake of fire where she found herself after she had died, to be raised to the comforts and joys of heaven. “I wasn’t all THAT bad!” she asserts to an angel passing by. “What about the time when the poor beggar came to my door and I gave him an onion?” The angel swoops down and hovers just above the old woman, as together they look back upon that scene from her life. The woman had resentfully come to the back door of her grand mansion to try to shoo the beggar away, complaining loudly about the filthiness of his hands and face. “You don’t even wash before you come to beg?” Nonetheless, the woman had reached down into the bottom of her larder and produced a rotting onion that she handed over to the beggar.
“Well,” said the angel, “that should be enough to open the doors of heaven for you.” The angel lowers to her a rope with that very onion tied to its end. The woman grabs on, but as the rope is lifted, others in the lake of fire climb on, hoping to be pulled out as well. The old woman, alarmed by this, cries out, “Let go! Let go! It’s not you who are being pulled out! It’s me! It’s not your onion! It’s mine.” And just when she says, “It’s mine,” the onion snaps in two, falls out of the rope, and she falls back into the lake of fire. The angel weeps, as she flies away. If only the old woman had had it in her heart to say, “The onion is ours,” surely the onion would have been strong enough to have pulled all of them out together.
Rituals and traditions are important-and have an aim-to help our hearts. When they no longer do that, they no longer serve their purpose. Jesus is calling the Pharisees, and then the crowds-and now us- to see what is our purpose, what is our mission. Laws are good. Rituals and traditions are good. Routine practices and disciplines are good-as long as they serve the purpose of strengthening our hearts. The temptation is always to forget their goal, why we have them in the first place.
The Pharisees wanted to make sure that the good people, the right people, the ones who kept the laws, were separate. They forget the purpose of the law wasn’t to isolate Jews, to keep only the Jews holy, to separate them from the unholy- but to have them serve as a witness to the world of a loving, caring, merciful God. A God of Love. They… forgot.
We all forget. We get lazy. We take wrong turns. We separate ourselves. We make mistakes. Rituals, traditions, help us. But they are not the goal. They are the tools that we have to help us hold on to the truths.
A couple of years ago Deborah and I were on our way to dinner. We were stopped at an intersection and a car with pizza delivery flag on top of it blew through a stop sign , turned a corner and raced ahead of us. I followed the car into the parking lot of the pizza place and asked to talk to the manager. When he came out, I told him what his employee had done and how she had put people in danger with her reckless driving. He said he would take care of it. As I walked out, another customer turns to me and says, “when you pulled in just now you almost hit me-I think you should worry more about your own driving.”
In the opening of Fiddler On the Roof to introduce the idea, Tevye at one point says: “And why do we do this?(meaning keep all the customs) I'll tell you (long pause) I don't know. But it’s tradition!”
Some theologians call Jesus the most anti religious person to ever lead a religion. Anthony deMello tells this story: there was an Indian guru who would have meditation services every evening and his cat would always run into the temple through the middle of the meditators. So every evening before the service, the guru would tie the cat to the tree outside. Then the guru died and the new guru also had the cat tied to the tree every evening in the same way. When the cat died, the new guru had an assistant immediately go out and buy a new cat to tie to the tree in the same way. The new guru even wrote a manual on the correct way to tie the cat to the tree before meditation services. What are the cats that we are still tying to trees?
What are the ways traditions gets in the way of the heart? What are our blockages that clog the arteries to our hearts? Are the traditions in our lives helping us-or separating us? Did Jesus come into our lives, to improve our traditions, and rituals? Or to change our hearts? Today’s gospel isn’t about the washing of hands. It isn’t about cracking eggs at the right end. It isn’t about tying cats to trees or stopping reckless drivers. It’s about giving onions to beggars. It’s about keeping the main thing, the main thing. Today’s gospel is about having a religion of the heart, and about letting traditions serve that religion-and not the other way around.

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
7:1 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him,
7:2 they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.
7:3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders;
7:4 and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.)
7:5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?"
7:6 He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;
7:7 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.'
7:8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."
7:14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand:
7:15 there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile."
7:21 For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder,
7:22 adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.
7:23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."