Sermon — August 29, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
As the hurricane-that-wasn’t bore down on my in-laws’ home in eastern Long Island last weekend, where we were staying on vacation, some people made last-minute escapes back to the City or across the Sound to Connecticut. We hunkered down, buying gallons of drinking water in case the well shut down; stocking up on rice and beans, pasta and peaches; filling the car with gas and downloading the 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie and an entire season of Daniel Tiger onto my iPad. Natural-disaster kit complete.
And then, at the very last minute, I made my escape. Not along the railroad to Manhattan or across the water to Connecticut or up the highway to Boston, but far across the sea and the sands of time, to the world of 1980s Glasgow, because in between showings of Winnie the Pooh and trying to ward off cabin fever over the two-day storm, I was reading the 2020 Booker Prize-winning novel Shuggie Bain.
The novel tells the story of “Shuggie” and his family as Shuggie grows up from a kindergarten-aged boy to a young man living on his own. We follow Shuggie and his family from neighborhood to neighborhood of working-class, post-industrial Glasgow: from their in-laws’ overcrowded apartment to a decrepit house on the edge of a closed coal mine, where Shuggie’s father abandons them, and finally into a new neighborhood in the heart of the city, where Shuggie hopes and prays that things will be different.
Shuggie’s mother is a particularly complicated character. She suffers much throughout the story, often while trying to protect or provide for her children; but she also inflicts much suffering, including and sometimes especially on her children. She maintains a certain kind of dignity for much of the story, carefully maintaining her makeup and dressing well; but it’s not so much dignity as arrogance, snobbishness, trying to show that she’s not like those people next door, and it becomes stranger and stranger as her life falls apart. And most importantly, she’s unable to take responsibility for anything she says or does. Someone else is always wronging her; it’s always someone else’s fault, and as time goes on and relationships fall away, that somebody is often poor little Shuggie Bain, who’s the only one who really tries to love her.
It’s a dark story in many ways, a story of abuse and alcohol and the loss of innocence. But it’s also a strangely hopeful one. Not because it has a happy ending per se, but because Shuggie is and remains, despite it all, a compassionate and loving man, just as he was a compassionate and loving boy. For all his mother’s self-destruction, for all his father’s cruelty, for all his siblings’ selfishness in saving themselves and leaving him behind, when Shuggie finally escapes, he’s still able to love.
“There is nothing outside a person,” Jesus says, “that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” (Mark 7:15) There is nothing in the world outside you, in other words, that can make you unclean or impure or unworthy; it’s the evil that comes out from inside you that determines who you are.
This whole episode begins with a kind of strange argument over hand hygiene. When the Pharisees see that Jesus’ disciples are eating without washing their hands, they’re scandalized. And when they question Jesus, he’s harsh in response; he calls them hypocrites!
It may seem to us, of course, that Jesus and his followers are wrong. Of course you should wash your hands before eating. (And if there are any kids in the congregation: Listen to your parents! You should wash your hands!) Now more than ever, with eighteen months of hand-washing songs embedded in our brains and hand-sanitizer bottles still stashed all over the place, it seems more obvious than ever!
Jesus’ disciples, of course, didn’t know the first thing about viruses or bacteria, about the importance of washing your hands to prevent infectious disease. Handwashing wasn’t even common among doctors or nurses until the 19th century. What they’re talking about in the Gospel is a kind of ritual handwashing. When they talk about “clean” and “unclean” hands, those are religious, not medical terms. They’re meant to separate holy things and places from ordinary ones, not to promote public health. And it seems that Mark, probably writing for a non-Jewish audience, may be mistaken, or at least exaggerating. While he claims that “the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands,” (Mark 7:3) modern scholars of the New Testament and ancient Judaism have pointed out that not all Jews had adopted this practice.[1] “The tradition of the elders” Mark refers to is the particular teaching of certain sages and rabbis among the Pharisees; but it’s not a universal practice.
The priests in the Temple washed their hands before offering sacrifices; to do it before eating every meal is to imagine that the ritual practices of cleansing and holiness used in the Temple should be extended to all of life, and while this kind of rigorous holiness has always been attractive to some people, it was far more stringent than the letter or even the spirit of the law.
So on a very particular, historical level, Jesus is picking one side in a debate among first-century Jews about ritual practices. No, he says, you don’t need to wash your hands for dinner as if you’re offering a sacrifice in the Temple; God won’t strike you down for eating with impure hands.
But then Jesus goes on the offensive: you’re “hypocrites,” he says; you “honor [God] with [your] lips, but [your] hearts are far from [God.]” (Mark 7:6) You worship “in vain…teaching human precepts as doctrine!” (7:7) Our reading skips over the next paragraph, but Jesus cites another practice that the traditions of the Pharisees allow, in which a person can essentially abandon their responsibilities to support their parents in their old age by designating their wealth as a donation to the Temple. But this tradition, found nowhere in the Bible, violates the Fifth Commandment, to “honor your father and your mother.” (Ex. 20:12) Hence the hypocrisy: the Pharisees accuse Jesus of violating their traditions, while they themselves “abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” (Mark 7:8)
Now, all of this is somewhat interesting from a historical perspective, but maybe not that relevant either way. We’ll continue washing our hands, thank you very much, Jesus. And that’s okay, because it’s really just the concrete example of a bigger point: this practice of ritual handwashing is irrelevant, because “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile” them. (Mark 7:15)
He doesn’t just mean this in the narrow sense, that there’s nothing that we can touch with our hands that can make us impure, or that there’s nothing we eat that can defile us. There’s nothing outside a person that can do this. Nothing in our circumstances or our situations in life renders us unworthy of God. Nothing about the neighborhood we come from or the family we live in, nothing about the clothes we wear or the place we live or how well we keep up appearances can make us any more or less holy.
This is bad news, in a way, because it means the easy fixes don’t work. Little Shuggie Bain’s mother can’t make everything right just by applying a fresh layer of makeup and making sure there’s never a run in her tights. She can’t fix her family by moving them to a new neighborhood, where nobody knows who they are. The same old destructive patterns will emerge, because the neighborhood and its people are not what’s wrong with her; the problem lies within.
But I think this can also be very good news. It frees us from having to attend to the things that simply do not matter in the eyes of God, all the practices of appearance and respectability that make up the ritual hand-washings of our lives. But it also frees us from some of the pain of whatever has happened in our lives, because whoever we are, whatever we have done, whatever has been done to us, “there is nothing in all creation”—to borrow a phrase from Paul—that can “separate us from the love of God.” (Romans 8:39) There is nothing outside us that can defile us. But what comes out from us can.
It’s a challenging idea. It means that we are responsible for the things we do. Our flaws and broken patterns of behavior are not germs that infect us from the outside. They flow out from the inside. All the theft, adultery, greed, deceit, envy, pride, and folly in the world, all our sins large and small, can’t be prevented by washing our hands for two “Happy Birthdays.” They can’t be blamed on our parents or our spouses or our children or our friends. They are ours. They bubble up inevitably within us.
But so does grace.
And that’s the really good news. There are many things that flow out from our souls that can defile us, that can make us “look at [our]selves in a mirror,” to borrow an image from the Epistle of James, and not like what we see. (James 1:23) But there are many good things too, because God has “implanted” in us a “word” that “has the power to save [our] souls.” (James 1:21) God has given us a new “birth,” God has made us “the first fruits” of a new creation. (1:18)
God has already done what we prayed for in the opening collect today. God has grafted in our hearts the love of God’s name. God has nourished us with all goodness. God has brought forth and is bringing forth in us the fruit of good works, the spiritual growth that allows us to be “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” with one another. (James 1:19) God is increasing in us “true religion”—not the belief that our religion is the true one, but true religion, “religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father… to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep ourselves unstained by the world.” (James 1:27) Because the world can’t stain us—“there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile”—and what is inside us is not just a laundry list of evils, but the implanted Word of a holy and loving God.
[1]The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Second Edition, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 84.