Who Are You (Sermon)

“Who Are You?”

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/2/12

         Jesus has crossed the sea and gone to Gennesaret – again. To hang out with Gentiles – again. Some Pharisees and scribes show up. They have followed Jesus to Gentile country to catch him failing to live as a good Jew – again.

         This time the Pharisees take offense at Jesus’ disciples eating with defiled hands. Now understand, the Pharisees are not worried about those hands being “dirty.” The Pharisees and scribes watch as these self-affirming, practicing Jews press the flesh with Gentiles, and then sit down to eat without so much as a glance toward the heavens.

         This outrages the purists. Eating is more than a necessity of life. Eating is a revelatory, community event. Table fellowship is stir-fried in the oil of holiness because it is a moment in which human beings profess their absolute and grateful dependence on God’s gracious provision. We do not control the mystery that makes the earth grow the beans. All we can do is plant the seeds and bake the casserole. In ways more obvious than circumcision, kosher food laws distinguish God’s chosen people and remind them that they are a unique reminder of God.

         When we hear the Pharisees and scribes ask Jesus why his disciples so flagrantly dismiss Jewish custom, we can rephrase their question in three words: “Who are you?”

It is a matter of identity.

         Did any of you ever have a parent or grandparent tell you, as you left the house, “Now, remember who you are!”? To be sure, parents and grandparents often season that phrase with the salt of guilt. So, if we do forget who we are, maybe that salt will sting us with a reminder. When that admonition wells up from a heart that fears its own embarrassment, it becomes a kind of defilement. It tends to do more harm than good. But it can come from a place of love and belonging. In that case it reminds us that who we are is not a matter of laws that bind us, but of the community to which we are bound.

         In one respect, our present state of being, with all our flaws and foibles, is “who we are.” But the Gospel declares this to be an incomplete truth. It is incomplete because who we are cannot be separated from who we are becoming. So Paul writes to the church at Corinth: “If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”(2 Corinthians 5:17)

That new creation is a process. We are who we are becoming in Christ.

         I think the confrontation at Gennesaret is a clash between the traditional but fixed understanding of who we are as defined by the Law, and the unfolding understanding of who we are in our Christmas-Easter-Pentecost becoming.

         Now, the Pharisees deserve some credit. They serve as recipients and stewards of a tradition that aims to help Yahweh’s followers maintain a distinctive identity in a wildly seductive world. If that identity fades, Israel cannot fulfill her God-given purpose of serving as source and reminder of holy blessing.

         The Pharisees’ question comes from a place of deep commitment. Who they are as Jews is tied closely to what they do. Understanding this, Jesus turns the question back at them.

‘Well, just who are you?’ he says. ‘You act like a bunch of actors who are stuck in a script of your own creation. But your script…it’s kind of boring. It has no story line. It's all grammar, make-up, and mood lighting.

         ‘We may be in a script,’ says Jesus, ‘but it’s God’s script. And God’s script is a story, an open-ended journey. And neither God’s story nor our participation in it can be bound by any static tradition.

         ‘Bless your hearts, he says, ‘the Law has hemmed you in so tight, you're little more than the fear that you feel at any given moment. You've given up on Exodus. You're stuck at Sinai. You've stopped becoming the people that God calls and equips you to become.

         ‘Now listen,’ he says. ‘It's not what you fence out that makes you who you are. It's the outpouring of faithfulness or foulness from within that makes the difference. You reveal who you are and who you are becoming through your love for family, neighbor, enemy, and earth, through the ways you laugh at their joy and weep at their pain.’

         As followers of Jesus, you and I are not the rules we keep. We are the organic faith, hope, and love we enjoy and share.

         The World does not much care for real Jesus-followers. They’re dangerous, subversive. The World is okay with church folk, though. It is okay with folks who abide by rules and hierarchies and who impose such things on others by force of fear. The World is okay with folks who give to charity without asking why systemic inequities and dehumanizing poverty even exist. And The World seems to love it when church folk make their religion and nationalism synonymous.

         It is to this church folk part of each of us that Jesus refers when he quotes Isaiah, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

         When we open to the Christ within us, when we set out on the path of becoming rather than settling for the stagnant “is-ness” of who we “are,” The World will try to discredit or even silence us, because Jesus threatens the status quo of bankrupt power and violent injustice.

         Out of a becoming heart, there arises the identity-affirming, kingdom-revealing grace of God. Out of a becoming heart there arises courage to speak and live a world-transforming truth.

         We know some of the familiar names and stories: St. Francis of Assisi, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, Gandhi, Malala Yousafzai – people who looked the beast in the eye and called it out. And their courage continues to inspire us.

Rather than one of these stories, this morning I share with you a prayer by Ted Loder, a now-retired United Methodist pastor and transformational preacher. As I read this prayer, from Loder’s book Guerillas of Grace, examine your own life, and imagine the ways that God is challenging you to be and become more fully who you are as a human being grounded in Christ.

And remember, God is not through with you.

You are still becoming.

“Go with Me in a New Exodus”

O God of fire and freedom,
deliver me from my bondage

to what can be counted
and go with me in a new exodus

toward what counts,

but can only be measured

in bread shared

and swords become plowshares;

in bodies healed

and minds liberated;

in songs sung

and justice done;

in laughter in the night

         and joy in the morning;

in love through all seasons

and great gladness of heart;
in all people coming together

and a kingdom coming in glory;

in your name being praised

and my becoming an alleluia,
through Jesus the Christ.¹

¹Ted Loder, Guerillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle, Augsburg Books, Minneapolis, 1981. p. 117.