Christ Church Riverdale

12 Pentecost                                                                                        August 31, 2003

Deuteronomy 4:1-9; Psalm 15; Ephesians 6:10-20; Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23

You and I are naturally inclined to look for comfort in our lives.  For instance, I like to begin each day the same way.  First, a glass of orange juice with the front page of the paper while the coffee brews.  At least two cups of coffee before walking the dog.  When I go to the movies, I usually sit on the same side of the theatre near the aisle.  When I go to another church, I will sit near the front and, if I were a parishioner, I would sit in the same pew each Sunday.  I find this comforting.

Families create rituals, particularly at holidays.  In my first job, the rector’s family always had oyster stew on Christmas Eve.  It was their tradition.  Sometimes, we start calling these habits traditions the second year we do them.  We need rituals and rhythm in our lives.

We need a sense of permanence, even when we know that nothing we can see lasts forever.  Faith, hope and love abide, but not my traditions.  Woody Allen writes: “Tradition is the illusion of permanence.”  There’s nothing wrong with that.  I need my illusions, and I embrace my defenses.  They keep me sane.

But there comes a time when traditions have to be challenged.  Jesus challenged the traditions of his own religion, and his challenge was so threatening that his life was put in danger.  In today’s gospel, he is criticized by the Pharisees for not following the traditions of his ancestors in the ritual washing of hands.  Jesus confronts the Pharisees, saying they are only concerned with the outward things.  In our own day in the Episcopal Church, the outward things might be where the altar is placed or whether there is a pulpit in the church or whether the language is 16th century or contemporary.  The outward things are important to us, but more so sometimes than they ought to be.  Jesus says to the Pharisees, “You leave the commandment of God and hold fast the tradition of men.”  For Jesus, the commandment of God was the commandment of Love: “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another.”

So much of what we do is tradition.  The word tradition means handed down or handed over, and the question becomes whether what has been handed down is an eternal commandment or a convenient ritual or custom.  Ordaining only men was a tradition which our denomination decided to abandon as not being a commandment of God and not appropriate in a culture where women’s rights are recognized.  The same question applies to human sexuality: are customary and traditional norms also God’s command or intention?  In Africa, polygamy is allowed in some Anglican communities by consent of the Lambeth conference, but the same bishops who affirm the need for polygamy deny our church’s right to decide issues of human sexuality in our own culture, in the Episcopal Church in the United States.  What does love require?

In the gospel, Jesus declares that evil is within our own heart.  Breaking the traditions of ritual eating and ritual washing is not in itself evil.  If evil is from within, then we are responsible for our actions.  The prophetic tradition adds to this that evil can dwell within systems of governance and within communities, where God’s will is not done, justice is wanting, and the poor find no help.

On Thursday evening, I watched a program about outer appearances.  The ABC program is called “Extreme Makeovers.”  Two women, unhappy with their outward appearances, win face lifts, nose alterations, liposuction, cosmetic dental surgery and breast enhancement from the producers of the show.  They are ecstatic on camera, even when they seemed almost mummified and in pain after the operations.  When it was all over, they returned home glamorously made up, beautifully dressed, and transported in stretch limousines.  The whole thing made me sad.  It reminded me of the old show from the 1050’s, “Queen for a Day.”  What about the next day?  What about the fundamental life issues?  I have no doubt that cosmetic surgery is sometimes appropriate, but what of the heart?  What value to we give to inner beauty?

I will never forget my spinster great aunts, who were shriveled and lined and missing teeth.  They lived rent free in a stone cottage on  property my grandfather owned.  Aunt Emily worked briefly in his insurance business to qualify for social security, but otherwise they depended on the kindness of the family.  Emily was a church lady.  Aline, the other aunt, never worked.  The story I heard was that, as a teenager, she had never recovered from a love affair.  She was sent to Johns Hopkins from the mountains of North Carolina for psychiatric help and returned to live out her life in the family.  When you knocked on their door, boy, did you get a cordial reception.  They were full of stories and concern about you and questions about your life.  I loved going there.  There was something beautiful about them, in spite of their gauntness and lack of glamour.

After the “Extreme Makeover” show, I watched a program about Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” at the 1963 March on Washington.  What a contrast to “Extreme Makeover!”  I had watched the speech in its entirety on the Newshour earlier in the evening, and, watching it again the second time, I again wept.  I wept at the hopeful words, in the knowledge that he would be killed but that his work would not be in vain.  I wept that the dream is worth having, even when it is not fully realized.

I have read that King’s struggle was not only in Civil Rights, but also in his personal life.  We all struggle.  What is clear with Dr. King is his assurance that in his commitment to Civil Rights God was guiding him.  There is a beauty in his heartfelt words, a beauty which derived not from glamour but from struggle.   A beauty that he could say with conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive, having experienced it.  A beauty that sprang from the heart.

When I was in the 8th grade, my English teacher remarked that he did not consider Elizabeth Taylor beautiful.  At this time, she was at the height of her loveliness.  He said that he considered more beautiful those whose faces showed the character resulting from a life fully lived.  I doubt that we were reading Keat’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” but the words apply, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

What truly matters?  Not the outward things, which are passing away.  “In his first letter, John summed it up by writing, “Little children, let us love one another, for love is of God.”

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