On
Thursday, Jo and the kids and I took the train to London to see the West End
production of HAMILTON. HAMILTON is a musical about several of the Founding
Fathers of the United States of America. It is a story about ideas, and
identity. The first half is concerned with differing ideas about whether the
thirteen states should continue to be a British colony or fight for their
independence. The second half is concerned with competing ideas as to whether
the newly-independent states should be essentially autonomous or be forged into
a nation with a strong centralised government. At every point, the outcome is
in the balance; the way forward, an experiment in what it means to be a good, a
just, society. Oh, and by the way, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Our
readings today are also all concerned with what it means to be society worth
living for. The first, from Deuteronomy,
is set when the Israelites had been liberated from over 400 years of Egyptian
ownership. But the question now is, what comes next? God gives them a legal
framework, more, a constitutional framework guaranteeing freedom; and Moses
prepares them to move on without him, to enter and occupy their promised land,
by urging them not to forget their founding constitution: to make it known to
the generations to come after them. It is, essentially, a matter of justice.
And the Jewish law really is an embodiment of justice, not only as understood
in its day, but that has stood the test of time.
The
law is summarised in the Ten Words, or Commandments. They begin by warning
against idolatry, the taking of something good and placing it on a pedestal: still
relevant today, in a world full of idolatry, including the promise of salvation
in the political left or right. Our contemporary idolatry includes humanism,
the belief that humans are infallible, causing us to bay for the blood of
anyone who lets the side down. We see the cost of that idolatry when the
learning-journals junior doctors are meant to keep in order to help them become
better doctors are used as evidence against them in their being struck off for
making a mistake, paralysing many such doctors with fear. Another example would
be neo-liberalism, the belief that salvation is to be found in the free market,
through competition. But the free market is a god that enslaves and devours us
all, bringing everything crashing down.
The
Ten Words go on to attend to rest — we are not machines; to safeguard respect
for and care of the elderly; to pursue the embodiment of loving your neighbour;
and the essential importance of truth-telling — so relevant in our Age that has
made a virtue of ‘post-truth’ relativism. And as this law is worked out in
practice, we discover that it takes in sexual abuse — so relevant to our times
of #metoo and #churchtoo and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
(IICSA). We discover that it takes in public health and diet. We discover that
it takes in the demolishing of sub-standard housing and the rehoming of people
in adequate housing — still relevant down-wind of Grenfell. I could go on and
on.
Some
Christians speak of this law as if it needed to be swept away. But Jesus
himself unambiguously stated that he had come not to abolish the law, but to
fulfil it. And in our second reading this morning, Jesus’ brother James writes
that this law is perfect, the law of liberty, and encourages his hearers to
look into it deeply and often, for there we see reflected for us our identity
in the world. Like Moses, James urges us not to forget that identity, but to
live out in practice what it means to be a good, a just, society.
Now,
just before I turn to the Gospel passage, let me return for a moment to
HAMILTON. Its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, has described it as ‘a story of
America then described by America now’. He saw, paralleled in the unlikely
life of Alexander Hamilton, the complicated and unlikely lives of many
Americans today. In response, he crafted a hip-hop retelling of history,
hip-hop being a form of ‘writing about your struggle, and writing about it so
well that you transcend your struggle’. And then a multi-cultural cast tells
the story.
And
that same process, I would suggest, is going on with Mark’s gospel. Mark is
recording Peter’s memoirs, depicting the life of Jesus. But Mark is writing for
a revolutionary community in Rome, Christians come together from Jewish and
Gentile cultural backgrounds, trying to work out what the church should look
like, what their identity ought to be.
The
passage we heard read today describes an episode, the clash of two very
different ideas concerning how the Jews ought to construct and protect their distinctive
identity, in the context of military occupation by the global super power. But
it also resonates with the same challenges the house churches in Rome were
wrestling with, at the very heart of the Empire. Unfortunately, the Lectionary
skips over those verses, but you can look them up for yourself later. All that
said, let us turn to our passage from Mark.
The
presenting issue is that Jesus’ disciples are eating without washing their
hands. We’re not talking about the way your mother used to send you back from
the table to go wash your hands when you’d come in from playing in the dirt
outside. This is not a hygiene issue. The group challenging Jesus here were
particularly concerned that it was possible to offend against God’s law even
without knowing it. You sit down to eat bread, but you cannot know for certain
the provenance of that bread. You cannot know for certain that the grain wasn’t
harvested on the Sabbath, the day of rest. You cannot know for certain that the
family who sold you the grain observed the Sabbath. Observant though you were,
you might be inadvertently both flouting the Constitution and condoning other
people bringing the Constitution into disrepute. And so, this particular party
had come up with a million and one ways to make sure that they remained, by
means of ritual, inside the law. A kind of legal loophole, as it were. Not to
get around the law, but to stay within it.
Except,
as we have seen, the heart of the law, the purpose of the law, was embodied
justice. And these brilliant men had got themselves so caught up in their words
that they were paralysed to act justly. In fighting-talk dripping with irony,
in more verses the Lectionary skipped over, Jesus points out that they work so
hard to keep the law that they break it. In contrast, Jesus was not so much
concerned with the theory of the law, as with its outworking. Jesus regularly
got his hands dirty, so to speak, rolling up his sleeves and laying his hands
on the sick and the dead, restoring health and life. And here, Jesus brings us
back to the law he came to fulfil, listing what it looks like to set the law of
liberty aside. It isn’t good. When we do so, we defile both ourselves and
others. As James puts it, we forget ourselves, we forget our identity.
What
does this mean for us, today? Permit me to offer some initial thoughts to
stimulate our thinking.
First,
we are called to be a community that embodies justice, a people who model what
it means to be a good, a just, society to the rest of the world. Moreover, we are
called to do so confidently, not timidly. May be today some of us need to ask
God for boldness.
Second,
we need to recognise that we don’t always live up to that. We aren’t better at this than our
ancestors, who also failed many times to live up to the ideal, but who didn’t
give up. We need to examine our hearts regularly and repent where the Holy
Spirit convicts us. Of what is the Holy Spirit convicting us today — whether personally;
as families; or collectively?
Third,
we live in a time of complicated interwoven stories and an age of competing
ideas concerning how we ought to live; and, yes, in such a context we will lose our distinctive identity if we
forget to tell our story, over and over again, refusing to forget, determined
to pass the world we are called to create on to our children. We have done some
of that Tuesday by Tuesday through August: how might we build on that moving
forward? How will we include our children in our pursuit of a just society?
Fourth,
how we eat and who we eat with is a justice issue. One that goes far beyond
standing side by side to eat the bread of life and drink from the cup of
salvation. It takes in projects such as the community gardens at St Peter’s and
in Hendon that some of our congregation are involved in. It takes in the
Community Kitchen that has just started here (to begin with) once a month,
offering meals for whatever people are able to give as a contribution, and teaching
basic kitchen skills. It takes in inviting strangers into our homes and to our
tables, so that strangers are transformed into friends, into family. I commend
these things to you, in whatever capacity you can support them. This is very
much what it looks like to recognise that God has brought us together in this
place to be an experiment in what it means to be a good, a just, society … and
in response, to get our hands dirty, and be known for it.
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