Pr. 17, Yr. B
August 30, 2009
G. Hendree Harrison, Jr.
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Work on our insides
You know this scene.
Not long ago, a woman was eating lunch with some colleagues in the break room at her workplace. These co-workers, who are good people, were trying to bait the woman into an argument about health care reform. They were using all the usual, canned one-liners that we pick up from cable television news-heads, and bloggers typing away out in the distant blog-o-sphere.
I suspect that the woman would have happily engaged them in conversation had their intent been to have an even-paced, intelligent conversation marked by-- listening, asking honest questions, and rational conversing, but that’s not what her colleagues were after.
They were half-seriously and half-playfully, trying to draw her into an argument. They pushed and pulled, tugged and tried everything short of standing on their heads in an effort to get her to look up from her lunch and argue.
She wouldn’t bite.
And so, like frustrated fishermen, the argument bent co-workers fit a different bait to their hooks and cast their lines back at her.
“What about torture,” they said.
She was silent.
“Well, what about torture?”
They threw all their best torture stuff, at her, they hit her with the usual banal rationale for torturing human beings in time of war and conflict. They even made some stuff up, trying their absolute level best to get the woman to blow up, lose her head, and succumb to their efforts to get her to argue with them.
She stayed cool this woman I know.
Listening to her story I was awed at her calm.
After a few minutes of this tortuous exercise, in listening to these folks argue for torture, the woman put up her hand, just so, like to signal that she wanted in, she wanted to talk, and she said, “I don’t believe in torture.”
“What?!”
“You heard me. I don’t believe in torture.”
And she went back to eating her lunch. Her co-workers led out loud gasps, “That’s it?! We can’t say anything to rattle you!”
They laughed and left her alone.
Now, she didn’t say this about herself when she told me the story, but this woman I know is a deeply, thoughtful, Christ following Christian, and thus I suspect that she followed Jesus into that statement – I don’t believe in torture. I mean, she dug deep into her Christ focused soul for something to say and what came out was, “I don’t believe in torture.”
Now, my telling you this story is not to try to draw you into an argument about torture (I don’t think it will surprise you to know that I am against it too), rather, I think this story is a good story about cutting to the heart of a matter. That is, ignoring or sorting through all the surface fluff and throw-away stuff and digging right into the essence of a thing.
The woman’s friends were dancing around in their argumentative way, skipping along on the surface, wielding all the ordinary and distracting sort of shallow rhetoric on popular topics that really, only leads us round in circles and rarely reaches to any significant new height, or dives down to any rich new depth.
In contrast, the woman stopped the silliness, probably to the surprise of her co-workers, and cut into the heart of the matter, like cutting to the heart of the many layered artichoke, she revealed and laid bare her heart, and in her best, Here I Stand – voice, she spoke something from the very core of herself.
The statement, “I do not believe in torture,” was not a throw away surface level -ism, rather, it was a statement uttered from deep inside, like something from within her beating heart.
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In our gospel piece for this morning, Jesus is talking about things that come from the inside. He is in a bit of a back and forth with the Pharisees.
The Pharisees are not inherently bad people, rather, they’re actually church people like you and me, and, like you and me, they sometimes get their priorities a bit mixed up and they worry more about outside or external things, surface stuff, than maybe they should.
They, like church people sometimes do, get caught up in the ritual observance, in this case it’s hand washing, and they forget to tend to their insides.
Jesus said, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand, you’re wasting your time worrying and arguing over every little external, surface level detail of life and faith. If you want to spend your time in service to God, then worry over what’s happening in your heart.
What’s on your heart?” says Jesus.
Evil intentions? Murderous thoughts? Adulterous daydreams? Deceit, slander, envy and pride? Violence?
He might well have said to those church people then, and to we church people now, “I don’t care what you wear to church, I don’t care if you had a bath last night, what I want to know is this- Is there love in your heart?”
“And if you don’t have love in your heart…..if you are weighed down by some wickedness, if you have anger and greed slathered all over your seething insides, are you open to opening up your inner self to let me in,” says Jesus, “to let me in to heal your heart and clean things up?”
When I read this piece of our Holy Gospel, I feel self-conscious and sometimes caught up short.
What is on my heart? I wonder.
It’s an important question, and the answer could be a call to change my life.
Is my heart full of love? Is it soaked in sin?
Likely, for most of us, it’s a little bit of both, loving sinners that we are. Which means, that really, if we seek the Christian way, we don’t have much time for the foolish, irrational, unproductive water cooler arguing that everyone wants to drag us into, because we need all the time we have available to work on our insides, to dig out our sins, and inject love in -- so that we may speak love from the depths of our hearts.
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Now, don’t hear me say that we shouldn’t engage in productive discourse around the issues of the day.
Christians may well be called to help our society discern a peaceful, loving way forward on any number of issues.
And…don’t hear Jesus say that we shouldn’t consider exterior surface things at all, things like reverence demonstrated by dressing appropriately, and reverence put on by the ornaments, finery, and tools of our worship, like the elegant candlesticks, the bright silver of the chalice, and the soft familiar green of the altar frontal.
There is something deep and praiseful about putting on our “Sunday best,” no doubt.
Just know this: clearly Jesus puts more value on the love that resides on our insides. Clearly, Jesus is more concerned with stamping out the flames of anger that burn in our hearts, than he is with whether we stand, sit or kneel for the prayers, or whether or not the acolytes have on closed toed shoes.
One of the great things about the Christian way is that we can relax.
You know that, right?
We can relax, we don’t have to get caught up in every argument and silly name calling, back and forth, we can relax and take some time to search our insides, the depths of our hearts and our minds for the response or comment that fits a follower of Jesus Christ.
We can relax because -- we are loved beyond all measure by our good and Gracious God and we are assured, by Jesus Christ, that we will never be separated from him.
That’s a fact, so we can relax and work on our insides, so that when we do choose to speak, indeed we will speak love from deep within our hearts.
What if the next time someone tried to wrestle and drag you into an argument you answered like this: “Here’s the thing, I am a follower of Jesus Christ so I believe in love, loving God and loving my neighbor, so whatever answer or position fits inside of love, well, that’s my contribution to the argument, love.”
Amen.