“Did You Wash Your Hands?”
Text:
Mark 7:1-23
© September 3, 2006 by C. Edward Bowen
Back
on May I attended a preaching conference down in
But
then I discovered who, or rather what, it was.
You see, that restroom had automatic faucets – the kind when you go to
wash your hands a motion detector can tell that your hands are there and the
water comes on without you having turn any handles. But not only were those faucets automated to
turn on the water at the right times, but they were also automated to start
singing “Row, row, row your boat.” And
apparently the idea for the faucets singing like that is because health experts
believe that most people don’t spend enough time at the sink washing their
hands. A lot of people just splash a few
drops of water on their hands, reach for the paper towels and then they’re out
the door. But health experts are saying
that you’ve got to spend more time with your hands in the soap and water to
really kill the germs that are there.
And one way they say we can make sure that we spend enough time washing
our hands is by singing “Row, row, row your boat.” The idea is that if we wash our hands for at
least as long as it takes to sing that song, then we’ll end up doing a pretty
good job of getting rid of the germs that are on us. And so if you ever go in a restroom and hear
someone singing, that’s probably why.
You
know, I always thought that if they ever wanted to do a nationwide advertising
campaign to promote handwashing, a really good spokesperson
for that would be Farrah Fawcett. If you just got a sinking feeling that I’m about to share
some handwashing puns with you, you’re right. Now I know that my puns make some of you bubble with enthusiasm, while for others
it gets you into kind of a lather,
and still others just think that my puns are all wet. Well, I don’t want to
leave you too drained, so I’ll clean up my act, so I won’t have to end
up scrubbing this sermon. Are those enough puns for you? OK, then I’ll throw in the towel.
All
right, now that I’ve got that out of my system, what exactly is going on in
this passage that we listened to today in the Gospel of Mark? Why were members of the religious group known
as the Pharisees in such an uproar with Jesus and his disciples about handwashing? Well,
we should start off by noting that when people back then washed their hands,
they weren’t doing it to kill germs, because back then in the first century
they didn’t have any idea what a germ was.
No,
the Pharisees had established handwashing as a kind
of religious ritual. It was a way of
symbolically saying, “The world is filled with a lot of uncleanness, a lot of
dirt, a lot of sin. And God, we look to
you to wash us, to make us clean, to make us pure.” And really when you think about it, that’s
not such a bad ritual to have.
You
see, across the years in Sunday school classes and in Bible study meetings the
Pharisees have all too often been made out to be the bad guys. All too often the Pharisees have been made
out to be a bunch of religious hypocrites who followed a bunch of legalistic
rules and who really didn’t even care about people.
But
that’s not the truth about who the Pharisees were. No, within the Jewish faith, the Pharisees
were a group that formed shortly before the time of Jesus and their main goal
was to help people find ways to put their faith into practice. As the Pharisees looked at things, most
Jewish people in their day knew the Ten Commandments, they knew what the Bible
had to say, but they seemed to have a hard time figuring out how to live out
their faith in their day-to-day lives.
So,
for instance, when it came the commandment about the
Sabbath, the day of rest, the Pharisees came up with extremely detailed
guidelines about what people were permitted and not permitted to do. They very carefully defined what kinds of
activities were allowed and what kinds of activities weren’t allowed, even to
the point of specifying how many steps a person could walk on a Sabbath.
Nowadays
we might be tempted to shake our heads and say, “How silly can you get? Weren’t they getting just a little carried
away coming up with so many rules?” But
look at us today. We’ve gone to the
opposite extreme where we have virtually no guidelines that we follow when it
comes to the Sabbath. And what’s the
result? The result is that very few
Christians today observe the Fourth Commandment, very
few Christians observe a day of rest each week.
But from God’s perspective, in the Bible, observing the Sabbath is
serious stuff, so serious that in the Bible God says that those who don’t
observe the Sabbath should be put to death.
So we might shake our heads at the Pharisees for giving the people of
their day rules to follow when it came to Sabbath observance, but they weren’t
doing it to be mean, they weren’t doing it to be killjoys. No, they were simply trying to help the
people of their day do a better job of living the way that God wanted them to
live.
But
even when people start out with the best intentions, like the Pharisees did, it
is possible to get too carried away. And
that’s what ended up happening with some of the Pharisees’ rituals. One that Jesus points out here in this
reading was a tradition called Corban. That meant if you had some money that you
intended to give as an offering to God, you would set it aside in a special box
or a special account so that you wouldn’t end up using it for some other
purpose. And when you think about, the
basic idea behind Corban wasn’t a bad one. Because a lot of people intend to give to
God, but before they know it, they end up spending that money on all kinds of
other things, sometimes on things they don’t really need, and then when it
comes time to make their offering to God, nothing is left, it’s all gone.
But
even though the tradition of Corban was basically a
good tradition, at times it got carried a little too far. For instance, apparently that tradition got
carried so far that if your parents showed up at your door begging for money so
that they could go and see a doctor, the rules said you couldn’t take your Corban money and give it to them – no, you had to turn your
parents away. And so Jesus said, “Hey,
how can you do that? God’s law, the
Fifth Commandment, says, ‘Honor your father and your mother.’ How can you go ahead and follow this Corban ritual you have and turn your parents away when that
means you’re breaking the Fifth Commandment, not to mention the lack of
compassion you’re showing for your parents.”
And
in the same way, just as that Corban ritual was
getting carried too far at times, so also was the handwashing
ritual getting carried too far. Because,
as we see in this encounter between the Pharisees and Jesus and his disciples,
some of the Pharisees were starting to say, “Hey, we wash our hands to show
that we are clean and pure in God’s sight.
That means that we’re good people – we’re people that God loves. And if you don’t take part in our ritual, that must mean that you aren’t clean and pure. That must mean that you’re not good
people. That must mean that you are
people who God disapproves of and rejects.”
But
the thing is that if you look at where this episode occurs in the Gospel of
Mark, it’s right smack in the middle of a period where
Jesus is traveling around outside of
At
Crestfield, our presbytery’s summer camp, every week
they had a different minister come and spend a week as the camp chaplain. And at the end of July, the final week of
summer camp, I was asked to go and be the chaplain. And one thing the camp added this year was a
communion service on the final night, led by the chaplain, something that all
the campers and their families were informed about before they came to
camp. But the day before the communion
service was to take place, the program director came up to me and asked me how
I would be doing communion. The question
seemed a little odd to me, but I briefly summarized for him what I planned to
do. And he said, “OK, that’s fine.” But I couldn’t help but wonder why he raised
the issue, and so I asked him.
And
the program director explained that one week this summer the chaplain stood up
in front of all the kids and made a rather stern statement to the effect that
if you aren’t baptized, don’t come forward for communion – if you’re not
baptized, you’re not welcome to take part – if you’re not baptized, you need to
just sit there while your baptized friends share in the sacrament. Well, guess what happened? Kids started crying left and right. They were traumatized. All week long at camp the kids had been
learning about how God loves them and how special they are to God, and all of a
sudden with those chaplain’s words the kids who weren’t baptized were basically
being told, “God doesn’t love you quite as much as you had thought, because
you’re not worthy to eat at the Lord’s table.”
Now
the thing is that from a purely theological point of view, that chaplain was exactly
right in what she did. From ancient
times the Christian church has taught that first people are baptized as a sign
of entry into the family of God and then they are allowed to share in communion. In fact, at one point Presbyterians took that
tradition even a whole lot farther than that.
Back during the period from the 1700s until around the early 1950s, many
Presbyterian churches, especially those that were a part of what was known as the
United Presbyterian Church, had what were called preparatory services. That meant that if communion was going to be
celebrated on a certain Sunday, on the previous Wednesday or Thursday night the
church would have a preparatory service to prepare the members to receive the
sacrament. And if you went to the
preparatory service you received a small metal token. And on Sunday when it came time to receive
communion, you would come forward and present your token to an elder and you
would be allowed to receive the bread and the cup. And if you didn’t have a token, you were
turned away from the table. If you
didn’t have a token, you were most emphatically not allowed to take part.
In
most respects, I think Presbyterian theology is right on target. But in this one area, though, I think we’re
wrong about something and actually the Methodists are right – and that’s not an
easy thing for me to say, because the Methodists are right about too many
things! But the Methodists are one of
the very few denominations where everyone is officially welcome to come and
receive communion, regardless of whether you’re a member or not, regardless of
whether you’re baptized or not, regardless of whether you believe in God or
not. Everyone is welcome to come and
receive communion in the Methodist Church.
Now
I understand that according to Christian tradition that has developed over
centuries and centuries, what the Methodists are doing is wrong. But if we go back to the ultimate authority
for our faith, if we go back beyond our tradition to the source, to the Bible,
I can’t help but come to the conclusion that Jesus welcomes everyone to come to
his table.
Just
read the gospels. Jesus doesn’t say to
people, “First clean up your act and then I’ll be your friend.” He doesn’t say, “First make a statement of
faith about what you believe in God and if it’s OK then I’ll associate with
you.” He doesn’t say, “First be baptized
and then come and eat with me.” No, when
you read the gospels, what you find over and over again is Jesus welcoming and
befriending the unclean, the unwashed, the unsaved and sitting down and dining
with them. And I can’t help but think, if that’s what Jesus did, how can we dare to do anything
different?
I
believe the risk we have with our traditions and our rituals is the same risk
the Pharisees faced. We can get so
caught up in our traditions and rituals that we start thinking that it’s our
traditions and our rituals that save us and make us fit for heaven. But the truth, of course, that it’s only God
who can save us. It’s only God who can
make us fit for heaven.
Our
next hymn today, “Rock of Ages,” is a favorite of many people, and I believe
that it really speaks to what this Bible reading is about. But since some of the words are a little
old-fashioned, since the hymn was originally written in 1776, I thought it
would be good for us to take a brief moment to consider what the hymn is saying
to us. And so if you would like, please
open your hymnal to number 227 so you can follow along.
In
verse 2, it says: “Not the labors of my
hands can fulfill the law’s demands; could my zeal no respite know, could my
tears forever flow, all for sin could not atone; thou must save and thou
alone.” In other words, no matter what
we try to do with our hands, no matter what we try to do with our lives, no
matter how many rituals and traditions we try to follow, we simply can’t live
up fully to what God expects of us – despite our best efforts, in some ways,
sin is still a problem for us – a problem that only God is able to solve for
us.
And
then in verse 3, it says: “Nothing in my
hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling; naked, come to thee for dress,
helpless, look to thee for grace; foul, I to the fountain fly, wash me, Savior,
or I die!” Here the hymn writer is again
reminding us that that it’s not what we bring to God that saves us, it’s not
our good needs that we bring to God that save us. No, it’s God, and
God alone, who can save us and who can wash us, who can wash us and take away
those stains from our lives that we would never be able to remove by ourselves.
We
come to the communion table today not because we are worthy, not because we are
pure, not because we are clean. We come
to the communion table today not because we have washed our hands and wiped
behind our ears. No, we come to the
communion table today because of God. We
come to the communion table today because of the love that God has for you, for
me, and for all of God’s people.