Have you ever
heard of TED Talks? They are these short video presentations done by
individuals and posted on the web for all to see. These talks range in topic
from how-to’s to business and leadership techniques to expositions on new
inventions, and almost all of them are worth watching. They are hosted by the
non-profit company, TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and they include talks from some of
the best and brightest people from around the nation and around the globe.
I will never forget the first TED Talk that I watched. A friend had
posted it to my wall, and it was a short clip of man teaching the world how to
open a banana. He said that we have been doing this wrong for thousands of
years, and making a giant mess in the process. You see, when most people pick
up a banana, they cannot help but see the stem and think: handle. We might have
a few different methods for how to work this handle, but 99% of the time, we
use this stem to open our banana.
I’m fond of the method where you use your thumbnail to break the skin of
the peel before you pull it back so as not to risk bruising the banana if the
stem does not immediately peel back.
But apparently, by studying chimpanzees and other apes,
primatologists—that is, scientists who study apes—have discovered a much easier
and quicker means to open bananas. If you flip the banana over and simply pinch
at the bottom, the peel practically comes apart for you. There tends to be less
mess because most of the little stringy bits stick to this side of the peel and
peel away with it, and there is little to no chance of it bruising the banana.
This might seem like a random thing, but it blew my mind. I’ve been
opening my bananas wrong for years! Who would have thought?
But you know what’s weird? I don’t like to open my bananas the “right
way” even though I have now seen the light about it. It has been ingrained in
me from birth that you open bananas from the stem, and every morning when I am
getting breakfast ready, I pull off a banana from the bunch, grab it by its
stem, and pull.
It’s become a ritual for me, one to which I cannot help but stick. In a
weird way, its become a part of who I am. I am Wes Cain: banana stem puller.
Luckily, this ritual is not one that harms me or anyone else. I could
change it, and my breakfast might be in better shape because of it, but if I
never make a habit out of opening my bananas from the bottom, the world will
continue on as before.
This cannot be said about the people who stick to ritual for ritual’s
sake in our Scripture lesson today.
In our text from the Gospel of Mark, we find Jesus once again at odds
with the Pharisees and scribes. You see, some of the Pharisees had noticed that
his disciples did not stick to the ritual cleaning process that must be
completed before they ate a meal. Mark is kind enough to tell us, as an aside,
just how strictly the Pharisees adhered to their ritual cleansings:
“For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly
wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not
eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other
traditions that they observe, including the washing of cups, pots, and bronze
kettles.”
Isn’t it nice to know that the Israelites of old were germaphobes?
Now, on the surface, this doesn’t sound too bad, right? It is a
well-established fact that it is much more sanitary if you wash your hands
before you touch the food you are about to eat. You might know where your hands
have been, but do you know where everything you’ve touched has been? That’s one
of the reasons that I sanitize my hands before I touch the communion bread. I
don’t want anyone catching something because I gave him or her a germ.
Hand washing is good.
But you see, the Pharisees had taken ritual hand washing and set it up on
a pedestal. Instead of hand washing making your hands clean and ready to eat,
hand washing had become—among many other rituals—that which made your very
being clean. If you didn’t wash your hands then it wasn’t just your food that
was then contaminated, it was your soul.
And it wasn’t just with hand washing. They had taken the ritual cleansing
laws of Leviticus 11-26 and made it their goal to follow all of these to the
very letter. They had even contrived new rituals to follow that went above and
beyond what was written in the Torah.
Instead of simply washing their hands well before dinner, they would
scrub them until they were almost raw from fingertip to elbow. It would be like
me having to wash my hands as if I were scrubbing up for surgery every time I
broke the bread and lifted up the cup of communion.
It was much more than was necessary, and it was done for all the wrong
reasons.
Jesus reminds them and everyone else around him that it is not the
washing of our hands that makes us clean. We do not become dirty or tainted by
what we eat. How could we, when it goes into our stomachs and then out into the
latrines? No, it is what is found in our hearts and what is shown through our
actions that can defile us.
And one of the ways that this was happening was through the Pharisees’
vain pursuit of ritual for ritual’s sake.
Now, Jesus is not saying in this passage that you shouldn’t wash your
hands. He’s also not saying that you shouldn’t follow the statutes set out in
the older Scriptures. The purity laws of Leviticus were and are important for
the people of God, for they helped to keep the Israelites healthy and they set
them apart from the other people around them. We might not follow the purity
laws literally today, but the same fundamental principle applies. In all we do,
we should work towards wholeness and we should remember that as God’s people we
are set apart from the world.
We can eat shellfish and bacon, we can even get tattoos. But we must
remember whose we are, and always live in such a way as to bring glory to him.
And we, like the Israelites, have our own rituals to help us do this,
don’t we? We gather together every Sunday morning for worship and we engage in pretty
much the same structured service every time. We share a meal that we consider
to be holy, and every time I say almost exactly the same words before we share
it.
EUMC: We have fellowship time after every service.
CUMC: We have our Roast Beef Dinners twice a year and our UMW meets
regularly.
We also have individual rituals that are part of our Christian life.
Jessica and I spend time each night prayerfully recapping the day and thanking
God for everything that happened in it. We pray over each meal, and when I lead
it it’s usually a prayer spoken almost by rote that I don’t even have to think
about anymore.
We have our rituals, and they can be great things that serve to bring us
closer to each other and closer to God. The problem, though, arises when that
ritual becomes important in and of itself. The problem arises when we—most of
the time unknowingly—take God out of the picture and engage in the ritual for
the ritual’s sake. The problem arises—and this is maybe the worst one—when the
ritual becomes our God.
This can too easily happen. Church time becomes about sitting in my pew, singing my favorite hymns, doing things a certain way because that’s how we’ve always done it.
(The following
two paragraphs are my best attempt at remembering the words that came to me as
I was preaching)
And you know what, this might be a little of a tangent, but sometimes the
rituals seemingly most important to us have nothing to do with Sunday worship
but still have everything to do with our Christian life. This election year is
a good example of that. For too many, one’s faith is tied directly into one’s
partisan affiliations. Sometimes, we Christians even defame and belittle each
other because we hold to different political convictions. One day, we might
find ourselves asking Jesus why it is that some of his disciples do not live
according to the tradition of the Republicans, or why it is that some of
Christ’s followers would dare defile themselves by voting against the
Democrats.
I saw a political cartoon the other day that depicted Jesus riding a
donkey into Jerusalem. The caption read, “See! He must be a Democrat, because
he’s obviously not riding an elephant!” Well Jesus might have ridden a donkey
into Jerusalem, but he never voted in favor of a blue or red candidate, and he
for sure would never have aligned perfectly with either party. This ritualistic
bashing is never something in which Christians should engage.
In many cases, we’ve made these rituals of life more important than the
God they were originally meant to bless. But following Christ is not, nor has
it ever been about engaging in rituals. Following Christ is about a life lived
in relationship and communion with both the God who created us and the people
that enjoy God’s salvation alongside us. Following Christ is about engaging the
world through the radical, sacrificial love of Jesus, the Son of God who gave
his life in atonement for our sins.
So what are the rituals in your life that you feel God is calling you to
revisit? What is that sticking point you have that has become more important to
you than the God who is of highest importance?
Where is God calling you not to
wash your hands any longer?
Where is God calling you to turn the banana around?
May God help us all recognize those places, and may Christ’s words reach
out from their anchor in Scripture and speak to the heart of our issues here
today. Because worship is supposed to be savory, and we should never let ritual
get in our way of enjoying time with our God. Amen.
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