My Last Sermon Ever

 

Deuteronomy 4:1-2,6-9

Mark 7:1-8

 

            One of my seminary professors used to tell us, “It is better to have a little heresy in your preaching than to bore your congregation.” I hope I haven’t gone overboard with that advice.

            But boredom can be a problem with churches. I’ve heard kids say it many times over the past couple of decades: “Church is boring.” Admit it; they’re not the only ones. I’ve heard adults say it from time to time. I’ve been known to say it myself on occasion. Boring!

 

            I don’t believe, though, that we are stuck with a choice between being a faithful, proper church that bores people to tears or being a fascinating, entertaining bunch of performers. There’s a better cure for being dull than simply putting on a show.

 

            There’s a writing tip that I have given to people whose writing is dull enough to cure an insomniac. And that is, Remember the last lecture.

 

            When I was in college, someone came up with the best topic for a lecture series that I have ever heard of: it was called, simply, The Last Lectures. Professors were invited to speak for an evening on this premise: Suppose this is the last lecture you will ever give on this earth. Your last chance to pass on what you have learned in your life. What are you going to say?

 

            The results were amazing. It was no surprise that the really good professors had fascinating things to say. But it turned out that even professors that I would not have crossed the hall to hear suddenly became interesting. The dullest of speakers showed a passion that they had never before displayed. The last lecture series format forced them to wrestle with some burning questions: Are you a part of this creation? If so, do you have anything at all to contribute to it? When you leave this earth, are you going to leave anything worthwhile behind? Or will it be as if you never existed?

           

            When you look your own mortality in the eye, and ask, “Is there any real point to my existence?” you are hitting a nerve. When you focus on what really matters, you tap into intensity and urgency that grabs hold of the listener.

 

            It’s an excellent cure for boring writing or boring speech. Tap into what is really, desperately important to you. Tap into whatever it is that lights a fire in you that fire and you will give off sparks.

 

            Deuteronomy, to be honest, does not shoot off a lot of sparks. It is not one of those heart-pounding books that you just can’t put down. Reading most of it is like reading the fine print of your insurance policy or all of the pages of the instruction manual for your new cell phone. If you bother reading it at all, you’re probably going to skim over large sections.

 

            Why is so much of Deuteronomy such a dull read? Because many of the chapters are like a user’s manual and not a very up-to-date one at that. That’s not to say that what is written there is useless. All these procedures and requirements for sacrificing and arranging the worship setting, for resolving disputes, and for regulating the diet serve the function of putting things in order.

 

            Any society, any group, needs to create some kind of order so that life can run smoothly. The Israelites of early Old Testament times seemed to have a greater need than most to get everything put in order and into a uniform code.

 

            The reason for this has to do with establishing an identity. They felt called to be followers of God, in a world in which virtually everyone had their own idea of what God or gods were. In this setting it was easy to get confused about who God was and what God was trying to say. The people kept waffling between commitment to God and accommodating various other local deities such as Baal. In Genesis we read that even Rachel, one of the great matriarchs of the Old Testament and the mother of Joseph, packed away some of the family household gods with her on a trip. Maybe hedging her bets.

 

            It seemed the people were never going to establish any real and lasting relationship with God because they didn’t get to know God. They kept getting mixed up with customs and ideas that did not recognize God. The Israelites couldn’t tell the difference between God and the beliefs of all these other tribes and nations. Religion was getting all jumbled up in mixed messages that overshadowed the message of love and justice that God wanted to impress upon the people.

 

            In order for the message to take root, the people needed to pull away from all the distraction and confusion, at least until they could understand what was going on with God. They needed to establish an identity, separate from all the other groups, as a people who were committed to focusing on the truth that God revealed.

 

            How do you establish this identity? By giving the people clear rules and customs and procedures to follow that set them apart from other people. You enforce those rules and customs and procedures so that the people stay together  and focus on their commitment to follow and honor this God and no other. Under these circumstances, a confused people can start to discover who God is and what God has to say to us.

 

            That appears to be what the many strange passages of long-forgotten rules and rituals in Deuteronomy and Numbers and Leviticus are all about. There are two levels of law going on in the Bible. First, there are the separation rules, those regulations and procedures that the Israelites and only the Israelites follow as a way of establishing and maintaining their identity as a people committed to one God.

 

 

 

            There are countless rules and customs one could use to establish a distinct identity. For the Amish, it is avoidance of modern inventions such as electricity and gasoline engines. For some Christian groups, it is restricting communion to members only. For the Israelites it was avoiding pork and seafood. It was banning tattoos and rounding off of the hair on the temples. It was the practice of circumcision. It was lengthy requirements for building an altar, for preparing sacrifices, for what priests could wear.

            These things have nothing to do with morality, with right or wrong. There is nothing morally superior in doing it one way as opposed to another. These laws are not God’s plan for the world. They were a means of establishing identity for the people of Israel so that they could be set apart to focus on who God is and what God wants.

 

            These separation rules helped to create a committed people with whom God could establish a clear relationship. It was through this relationship that God that the people began to understand the second and more important set of law: the law that lays the foundation of God’s plan for creation and spells out the part we are to play in it. The identity laws served their purpose. Through the experience of these Israelites, we have grown in our understanding of what God expects of us in this world.

 

            I believe that most of the great disputes and fights within the Christian church are a result of confusion over the two types of laws. We have trouble determining which rules were designed for the Israelite people in their time and place to establish for them an identity in their culture as followers of God, and which rules are universal, aimed at everyone and in every time and place.

 

            That seems to be exactly what Jesus is saying in the Gospel reading for today. Jesus takes some heat from the Pharisees for not washing his hands before eating. This may be the only time in the Gospels where it’s hard to sympathize with Jesus.

 

            I remember as a kid getting caught in that situation many times. “Did you wash your hands? Go back and wash, with soap and wate,r before you come to the table.” I mean, really, washing your hands is a good thing isn’t it? What’s Jesus’ problem? This whole incident cuts the legs out from under that old “cleanliness is next to godliness” adage. Jesus’s speech certainly does nothing to support that claim.

 

            But we have to take into consideration that germs were unknown in that era, so hygiene is not the issue here. The washing that the Pharisees are concerned about is a ritual from their incredibly detailed ceremonial law. According to William Barclay, the amount of water used in washing had to be enough to fill 1 ½ egg shells. The water must be poured over the hands beginning at the tips of the fingers down to the wrist and then rubbed a certain way and then poured again beginning at the wrist and down to the fingertips. If you did it exactly right, you were holy; if you didn’t, it was a sin.

 

For the Pharisees, the old identity rules, the ones that separated their tribe from other tribes back at the formation of the faith, were the only ones that counted. They either never got around to focusing on God’s desires for creation or they had forgotten them. Their religion came to resemble a training manual or a congressional tax code. It was lifeless, boring—a story no one would read unless they had to.

 

            Focus on what is important, says Jesus. Compared with the big issues of love and justice, the details of a handwashing ritual don’t amount to a hill of beans. Here’s what I’m talking about, he says.  You guys are hung up on tithing. It is certainly a Biblical concept. As a way of ordering priorities, tithing is good. But you use your church tithe as an excuse to let your own mother live in squalor. You claim you won’t help her because you have to give the money to the church. 

            Don’t you see, the point of tithing is to make sure your priorities are right? You use it as a way to justify wrong priorities. You’d rather look righteous to the community than care for the one who brought you into the world and cared for you. That’s what you think God’s will is?

             

            We in the church today have the same problem that the Pharisees did of distinguishing between the hold Israelite identity rules of order, and God’s commandments. It is so tempting to come down hard on the side of identity laws, and when we do that, it makes us boring.

 

            Of course, we recognize the extreme examples of Israelite identity rules easily enough. Is this altar is made of acacia wood as Leviticus commands? It certainly is not built to the required specifications. We don’t insist that soldiers who marry be given a year’s leave of absence or that farmers leave the edges of all fields unharvested as required in the Old Testament. We see nothing wrong with wearing clothing of blended wool or linen, we sow different kinds of seeds in fields from year to year, we crossbreed animals, and we accept near-sighted pastors, all of which are condemned in Bible. We ignore those rules because we understand them to be identity rules for the Israelites in their formative years.

             But we get confused on a lot of other issues: women speaking in church, interfaith marriage, sexual prohibitions, divorce, how to dress in church, the status of priests. How do you keep from getting stuck there? How do we avoid the criticism of Jesus that we are more interesting in keeping human tradition than in doing what God wants?

 

            Follow the words of Jesus in our Gospel reading for today. Listen to what is most important in God’s design for the world and for you. Place that at the center.

 

            I hope I have not frustrated too many people in this congregation with my lack of passion regarding some of the details that go into running a church. Is there a way that the altar should be set up for communion? Is there a correct procedure for taking offering? Should a casket be open or closed at the church? Is there an order in which candles should be lit? Is there a certain kind of bread we should use at communion? Do we need flowers at worship?

 

            To be honest, many of these “ask the pastor” issues really don’t matter to me at all. I understand that we need to have some order, some procedures in place so that people know what to do, and so things run smoothly. We try to come up with procedures that will do that.

 

            But most of these are not right or wrong situations; for the sake of order, we need a way of doing things and we just happen to pick one.

           

            I don’t spend get worked up over these things because I’m trying to follow Jesus’ directive to focus on what matters. And when we have trouble remembering what matters, we would do well to remember the last lecture.

            What would we say if we knew this was the last thing we could communicate to the world? Would this issue even come up if I knew this was my last crack at leaving something behind?

 

            I have an idea of what I would say in my last sermon ever. The core of the Bible is that God loves the world and wants us to love in turn. That Jesus came into the world to show us this so that we can have life. I don’t want to repeat myself by giving the same sermon every week—that, too would be incredibly boring. But in every sermon I write, I try to tap into that core of belief, into the heart of that last sermon that I will ever give. Because if it is so important that I would put it in my last sermon, it’s important enough to say now.

 

            As a church, there are a great many details we must attend to, for the sake of order. We can all chip in our opinions. But let’s not get obsessed with the details, because that’s when we get boring. We become like the Pharisees caught up in the arcane and the trivial. Suddenly, the heart of our message is the proper way to drill a hole in a slave’s ear—Leviticus. We have nothing much to say that would be of interest to anyone but a religious junky. In short, we are boring. A church that focuses its attention on its bylaws is likely to be well-run. A church that knows its mission statement is a church that really has a chance to make an impact on the world.

 

            The last lecture, the last sermon is a useful exercise. Ask yourself, “Am I part of God’s creation? If so, do I have anything at all to contribute to it? When I leave this earth, am I going to leave anything worthwhile behind? Or will it be as if I never existed?

             “If I had one last chance to say something, to make a difference, what would would I say?” That’s what you need to be sharing with the rest of us. And when you do, you will have the rest of us on the edge of our seats.