Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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You need to have been around a while to remember the hymn: "Higher Ground:"

Lord, lift me up, and I shall stand
By faith on heaven's tableland;
A higher plane than I have found,
Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.

Instinctively we believe life can be better, there is higher ground and we can find it. Animals don't think like that. Animals, as far as we can tell, are satisfied, to be what they are and to do what they do. There are no rights and wrongs in their world, no striving to improve. You don't hear cats saying, "You know, the world would be a better place if we didn't chase birds - maybe we should stop." Lions don't swear off zebras for the good of the jungle. Dogs eats dogs in the animal world, and never ask questions about it. But human beings have a moral sense; we believe there is higher ground, and lower (for that matter). There are ways of living that are better and ways that are worse. And sometimes we even make laws to keep people on the right track.

Dietary laws were their stock and trade, these big-time Pharisees from Jerusalem, who had come out to hear Jesus. They would decide, based on tradition and on their own convoluted understandings of the Ten Commandments, what was clean and what was unclean. What could be eaten and what could not. What was kosher. And when they heard Jesus mocking their laws, their traditions, saying (humorously) that it wasn't what went into a man's mouth that defiled him but what came out, they were appalled. Indeed, they were furious. The disciples asked Jesus, "Did you know how upset the Pharisees were when they heard what you said?" I guess they were upset. In Jesus words they saw their world collapsing before their eyes!
Pharisees referred to themselves, in those days, as "the leaders of the blind." Jesus said, if so, it was the blind leading the blind. And then he made his point (about what goes in and comes out of a person's mouth) again, and this time he said it straight out: "Eating or not eating certain foods, washing or not washing your hands - that's neither here nor there." It doesn't make us holy. Such talk was an earthquake for the Pharisees. They couldn't let it stand. It's no wonder they killed him!

We should remember that the Jewish dietary laws, at their origin, were good, were a step up, to higher moral ground, were an attempt to improve human life. In a more primitive time, when, presumably, people ate whatever they could get their hands on: having some rules about not eating what was impure or contaminated (or what easily could become so) was a step forward. Likewise, Sabbath laws, which the Pharisees also had barnacled with detailed interpretations, to the point of almost sinking the ship, originally represented a higher, humanitarian truth: we don't work people seven days a week, everyone gets a day to rest. Higher ground!
But, as you know, by the time of Jesus, dietary laws and Sabbath laws (and all the traditions attached to them) had become a great burden. More than that, Jesus said, they were leading people away from holiness instead of toward it. These laws and traditions had originally been vessels in which the Jews perceived and communicated the Word of God. But now the Word of God had been lost and the vessels were all there was.

Truth is, we need traditions, even though traditions are subject to every human weakness. Treasure always come in clay pots, the treasure is real but the clay is too. God's Word comes to us in and through traditions but, hopefully, it transcends them.
We're not too worried about traditions such as dietary laws, and Sabbath laws, and ritual hand washing today. Maybe we should be, but we're not. So let's look at some traditions that still carry weight and ask, "Have they become a burden?" Do they lead us to God or away from him. Christmas traditions, for example. Christmas carols are traditions, and so are Advent wreaths, and candlelight services. At home we have more traditions: Christmas trees, and lighting the house, and stockings on the mantle. Traditions like this, when they work the way they should, help us to perceive and communicate the miracle of the incarnation, God becoming flesh. But there comes a point when the traditions overwhelm there own truths. The gifts we give each other become more important than God's gift to us, or the gifts of the magi, which our gifts represent. The lights no longer represent "the light of the world." The tree no longer represents the evergreen love of God, even in the winter of our lives. And then the traditions, stripped of their deeper meanings, become a burden. A bunch of stuff that everyone says has to be done.
That's what Jesus was complaining about. Not the dietary laws themselves, but that they had lost their original meaning and had become burdens, mindless rules. They were "neither here no there," he said. Not bad, just irrelevant to salvation, and in the way!. People's standard of holiness had become not eating pork. But nobody gets into heaven by not eating anything! Nor by singing carols, nor by going to confession, nor by receiving communion. Jesus was intensely interested in real rights and wrongs, but utterly uninterested in ritual rights and wrongs. And it is here that he laid out a higher moral truth. What goes into us through our mouths, he said, just passes on through. But what comes out of us through our mouths tells what our hearts are like. And there it is. It is the intent of the heart that matters. One might heal someone on the Sabbath, even though healing was work, because the heart is right, the compassion is right, the love is right. We could pull an ox out of the ditch on a Sabbath, even though it violated the strict law of the synagogue --because our pity for the poor creature was right.
Our generation has surely suffered from an overdose of tolerance, what Henry Kissinger called "the excesses of freedom." Behaviors which used to be absolutely "against the rules" simply aren't anymore. Many of our old traditions about what was good and bad, right and wrong, are gone. A lot of people have been hurt as the result, but never mind. Simply trying to reimpose the old rules, the old laws, the old traditions - trying to force people into certain behaviors -- will fail every time.

We need to start talking about people's hearts. I'm a marriage booster. I think the old tradition of standing before God, family and friends, and promising to love each other exclusively and for ever, and not to quit when the going gets tough, is a great idea. I think living together without such commitment is not. But that's hard to sell these days. Marriage, in the experience of many divorced people, and in the experience of children of divorced parents, doesn't look so great. It looks like more of a burden than a blessing. What if, instead of appealing to tradition, we appealed to the reasons for the tradition and asked people about their hearts. Why wouldn't you respect the other person's life by making a promise? Why don't you have the self-respect to insist on such a promise, from your partner, for your benefit? Is it that you want to leave a door open? Are you preparing an escape hatch? Where is your heart in all of this? It's the heart that counts. Marrying for the sake of marrying, because it what's done, isn't a good idea either.

I was trying to manage a group of salespeople, and some of them weren't doing so well. So I would try rules: you will make twenty-phone calls a day to new prospects, and report them to me. And they would do it. But I had no way of measuring their seriousness or their enthusiasm on the phone. If their hearts weren't in it, they would fail, no matter how many calls they made. You will mail fifty letters each week to potential buyers. And they would do it, because I said to do it, because it was "the law," but if they didn't have the heart for it, they were doomed from the start. The Jews were still obeying the rules. They were kosher, but they weren't finding holiness in it. Jesus said they had to get their hearts right, or they would never find God. Many today are following the rules of religion, going to church, saying their prayers, making pledges, but their hearts aren't in it. Many of us ministers become Pharisees by telling people that's all they need to do. I pray that these people can feel afresh the Word of God, either in the old traditions of the church or in new one which they will establish. However it happens, the heart has to change. John Wesley spoke of "heart holiness." Not the holiness of the altar but the holiness one finds in one's closet. Not the holiness that brings praise, but the holiness no one knows about. Not the holiness that leads to boasting, but the holiness that saves.