“Where Our Hearts Are”

“Where Our Hearts Are”

Psalm 15   James 1:17-27    Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 1, 2024 rm

Pastor Andy Kennaly

Sandpoint, Idaho

This weekend's Labor Day Weekend. Our country celebrates the worker, the value of honest labor, and the benefits of being industrious. Having a national holiday is one way of saying “Thank You” to everyone who works so hard to make our country a good place to live. Maybe we can take this political, cultural holiday and glean some lessons in a spiritual sense that help us as people of the Church learn about Christian vocation and living out our faith.

Matthew Fox writes, “Good living and good working go together. Life and livelihood ought not to be separated but to flow from the same source, which is Spirit. Spirit means life, and both life and livelihood are about living in depth, living with meaning, purpose, joy, and a sense of contributing to the great community. A spirituality of work is about bringing life and livelihood back together again.” (The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood for our Time, Harper San Francisco, 1995, Pulpit Resource Vol. 28, No 3. Year B, 2000).

This sounds great!  Work sounds potentially so pure and uplifting. But he also says this: “Work is also capable of creating the dark night – when, for example, our work contributes to the devastation of the planet, to the despair of the young, to hoarding when we ought to be sharing, to control and power games instead of celebrating, to putting people down instead of lifting them up, to injustice instead of justice.”

I also recently heard that industry leaders like a 40-hour work week because it keep workers so busy with work that in their personal lives they are exhausted, thus becoming consumers as they seek entertainment and other forms of distraction. They spend their evenings watching TV with much exposure to commercials.

So, it seems work can be a good thing, but it needs to be trained and monitored so that its outcome is a benefit and not a detractor for deep, meaningful life, both for the worker and for the larger community. In our passage from James, it sounds like the same is true for religion.

True religion involves a purity of heart before God, along with actions to help others, especially the poor and most vulnerable, all the while not getting drug down by the ways of the world.    Looking closer at James, there are a few words that shine for us this morning.

One of the thoughts involves God, as verse 17 mentions generous acts of giving, perfect gifts, and how God's nature is unchanging: God is always good and perfect. In God there is no variation or shadow due to change. God is always good and perfect. Another way of saying this is that with God there is no variation due to a shadow of turning.

You've seen time-lapsed photography that shows very quickly an entire day go by? The sun moves across the sky, shadows shift as the day goes along. The moon comes up and those moon shadows change throughout the night. Everything in our world is in motion. Our planet spins on axis and orbits around the sun, and this is continual. Seasonal patterns are experienced because our globe sits at an angle relative to the sun throughout the year. Day comes, day goes, night comes, night goes, seasons come, seasons go, years come, years go, even eons come, eons go. But God is always there and there is no shadow of turning with Thee, Lord of All. It’s like that old church hymn, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, which sings in the first verse,

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father, There is no shadow of turning with Thee; Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not; As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be. Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness! Morning by morning new mercies I see; All I have needed Thy hand hath provided; Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me! (Thomas Obediah Chisholm, 1923, William Marion Runyan, 1923, Copyright 1923, Renewal 1951 by Hope Publishing Company, Carol Stream, IL. Reprint permission under ONE LICENSE #705893-A).

The goodness and amazing majesty of God, along with the unchanging, constant posture of giving good gifts, perfect gifts, generous gifts, as life unfolds within the word of truth, this is what healthy religion claims.

There is a human side to this passage from James, the side that involves moving shadows, constant change. I like how someone pointed out to me years ago that people have two ears and one mouth, and we can take a lesson in communication simply by God's design of our bodies. Two ears, one mouth, twice as much listening as talking. We live in a world that likes noise, likes to sell itself, feels the endless need to talk and get heard and promote or defend its own interest. Our egos are often in monologue mode.

But to listen is not learned as well, and even when we hear somebody talk to us our mind is often already formulating what it is we want to say in response, rather than just listen to them, really hear them, and sit with their words as they soak in.

In James we read in verse 19, “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.” Speech and anger are linked, as if when we get mad our mouth takes the parking brake off and just starts to roll. James uses some intense words to describe this speech. Sordidness. I had to look that one up. Sordid means “disgustingly mean.” James also talks about the “rank growth of wickedness.” Rank has to do with an awful stench, not the kind of growth you want, especially in wickedness, which looks to give others the worst. It's no wonder the book of James is written as a paraenesis, the Greek word for warning. He's trying to get people’s attention so they heed these lessons.

Thankfully these lessons lead somewhere, and we're not stuck with this terrible side of anger. We can actually learn from anger and rid ourselves of these outcomes. How? By welcoming “with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.” It’s right there in verse 21. That's the part people often reject, thus the warning.

Meekness is something not promoted in our world. Meekness doesn't have a national holiday dedicated towards its benefits. No one shoots off fireworks to celebrate meekness. Being mild and submissive, meek, is how we are to approach welcoming the implanted word.

Implanted.  God's word is given to us, implanted within us, but to notice it we need to get out of the way. To open the door and welcome it, meekness is a key. This perfect God that offers good gifts does so when invited and doesn't force God's self on us. Even more reason to listen.  We are very good at trying to tell God what to do or how to do it, but to listen for God, to seek God's word implanted; this is possible because our nature is more connected to God's nature than we may realize most of the time.

So far, we have a couple thoughts. The goodness of God and receiving that goodness with humility, meekness. But James the brother of Jesus is warning his readers that hearing God's word should lead them to be doers, not in deceptive ways but in life giving ways.

Jesus says much the same thing as he's confronted by the establishment: Pharisees and some scribes attack the behavior of the disciples, as they eat without the ritual of washing their hands. The religious leaders see this as a violation of purity laws the Jewish people have lived with as part of their tradition. Jesus says the Pharisees and scribes have abandoned the commandments of God and simply hold to human tradition, then gives a lesson to the crowd about how the human heart is what defiles things, rather than externals like not doing the ceremonial washing of hands. Evil intentions come from impure hearts and no amount of hand washing is going to change that. Jesus, like James, points to God as the one who provides cleansing if we open our hearts and submit to God.

This scene of Jesus is an example of what James describes as true religion. “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” (verse 27).

In the time of Jesus the religious leaders were very caught up in the rituals of purity, which includes both the full body immersion of ritual bath and the repetitive washing of hands. The high priest in Jerusalem, for example, would a bath two, three, sometimes four times a day to ritually purify himself from the world. Jesus knew the high priest lived in one of the most expensive homes in Jerusalem, and it had running water, indoor plumbing, and more than one bath. He knew this high priest went to the temple regularly but would take a bridge from the residential area to the temple area, so the high priest could avoid walking the road with common people. If the priest would touch common people, then he would consider himself ritually unclean, so he'd take what we would call the skywalk to get to the temple.

It's not about us keeping ourselves pure. Life isn't about putting ourselves in front of, or above, others for the sake of appearances before God. Life isn't about forcing our way and getting angry if that way doesn't happen. External things don't provide meaning or fulfillment. We might think they do, and they might try. But internally, we discover purpose and joy when we submit ourselves to God's loving presence, when we accept that we are accepted. It's God who cleanses our hearts, it's God who gives us life, it's God who holds all things together, and it's God who invites us to listen for the word of truth, the word of life.

There is a spiritual tool one could practice called an examen and it takes place at the end of each day. This exercise helps us become more aware of when we encounter the risen Christ in our own lives. Here's how it works:  Become quiet and ask yourself questions like these: What were the energy points in my day? When did I receive life? When was life drained from me? When today did I give and receive the most love? The least? What moment of the day did I have the most sense of belonging to myself, to others, to the universe, to God? What moment did I have the least sense of belonging? End the examen by thanking God for the many ways, seen and unseen, that Jesus was with you that day.

This is a spiritual discipline, a tool to help us learn to listen. May God bless us and use us for the spiritual work of true religion that loves God and loves others as ourselves. May God be glorified now and forever, Amen.