Pentecost 14 L22 B

Jesus has a habit of turning things inside out. Getting involved with Jesus should come with a warning label because, with him, everything gets reversed, turned over, and flipped around.

Jesus reminds me of one of the those teachers, maybe you’ve had one, that forces you to question the assumptions that you hold onto. Jesus seems to challenge every aspect of the ancient middle eastern society he lived in — and nothing is sacred. Not even the way that religion, faith in the God of Israel, is practiced.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is doing just that — he’s challenging his own religious traditions and he’s doing it with the toughest audience he could have found: the Pharisees, the religious insiders. The Pharisees spent all their time reading scripture and then interpreting its meaning for how to live. In general, this is a really good thing, right? After all, the bible doesn’t talk about everything. The bible, for example, is totally silent about cell phones, automobile safety, and genetic engineering. So people of faith interpret how to live out lives faithfully with those things. That was the Pharisees’ job, then. They interpreted how to live life faithfully.

They put a lot of time and effort into this work and Jesus shows up and turns it all inside out.

I have to admit that I can relate to the Pharisees here. After all, I’m a church nerd like they are. The certificate in my office claims that I’m some kind of religious expert — kind of like the Pharisees.

And I, also, would expect Jesus, as the Son of God, the heir to the thrown, the Incarnate Word to be a religious insider. I mean, wouldn’t you? Who who claim to be a more important insider than Jesus himself?

And since I’m a church nerd, I really want Jesus to be a church nerd, too.

But Jesus does not act like a religious insider. Jesus moves about from place to place with little regard for all the expertly crafted rules and traditions of his religion. For example, we just heard Jesus get in trouble because his disciples fail to follow the purity codes related to washing hands before eating. Besides the fact that washing your hands is just common sense, I’m sure the Pharisees had 101 intelligent and sensible reasons for requiring the purity restrictions that they did. And if Jesus really was a Jewish holy man, well, he should know and follow all these beautiful, pure traditions.

But Jesus does not follow them. And neither do his disciples. And here’s why: this religious tradition, like all religious traditions, was in desperate need of being turned inside out.

The Pharisee’s traditions and interpretations were totally focused inward. They were all about defining insiders and outsiders. Who is pure and holy, and who is not. And the thing that probably riled up Jesus more than anything was that the purity laws of his day were enforced so strictly that they made it basically impossible for poor folks to participate in worshiping God. Unless you led a privileged life, it was hard to avoid the so-called contaminants, and to eat the right foods, and to maintain ritual purity. The Pharisees worked so hard to define insiders that they pushed a whole lot of folk out.

It’s not just the Pharisees that do this.

Even from the very beginning, God is mindful of the outsiders. On the one hand, the new laws and traditions that God gave to the people of Israel made them unique insiders to God’s love. They were God’s people. On the other hand, God immediately called them to care for those around them. Even in today’s reading from Deuteronomy, when the law is first being laid down, God gives instruction to the insiders, but is also concerned for the outsiders. It’s because the temptation to push people out has always been with us.

… And continues to be with us. Lots of surveys and data suggest that a great deal of people avoid church because they’ve been pushed out. They see the way church folk treat other church folk, let alone how they might treat someone who’s been missing from church for a while.

Remember, I’m a church nerd, so it’s hard for me to say this, but we too often use words that only make sense to church folk (if they make sense at all) and then we refuse to explain them.

LCGS is an ELCA congregation formed by the merger of the ALC, LCA, and other acronyms. We host a chapter of WELCA, we support LDR, LWR, LOMF, and LIRS, and our denomination is a member of LWF.

Now, if you know all those acronyms you get a prize. (Hint: L is for Lutheran and they all have an ‘L.’) But to the average person in our community, that sentence just sounds like alphabet soup.

I hope you hear this: if you’ve been a member of this congregation for a while, it probably feels very warm and inviting. That’s because you are an insider here. That is not a bad thing, but … a newcomer may not necessarily feel that way. And it’s very hard to see that from the inside. Like every congregation, we are in desperate need of being turned inside out.

In our second reading today, from James, we hear: “Be doers of the word, not hearers of the word.” Hearing is about what comes in, but doing is about what goes out.

If James were writing today, he might say: don’t be faith consumers, be faith practitioners. A lot of people like to fancy themselves religious insiders, says James, but if you really want to be faithful, care for widows and orphans — which is a biblical code word for ‘outsiders.’ In other words, turn inside out.

Eww, but we don’t really like ‘outsiders.’ Or, we like them, as long as they stay outside. It’s not that we hate them, it just seems to be human nature that in order to be an insider, you have to make someone else an outsider.

And this is where Jesus changes everything. This is where Jesus turns everything inside out. Jesus, the ultimate insider, God’s own Son, moves in the opposite direction. Jesus chooses to become an outsider: falling out of favor with the religious experts, falling out of favor with the political authorities, and eventually being carried outside the city walls and crucified as an outsider.

Jesus loves us by becoming an outsider for us. Jesus is God turned inside out.

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Listen, our religion summed up in one word is Love: love of God and love of neighbor. It is always and only about love. And love is never about getting, it’s always about giving.

Just listen to Jesus say that “it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.” (Mark 7.21–22 NRSV)

The thing these evils all have in common is that they are all about wanting, craving, desiring, taking. They’re all about getting things and what we do in order to get them. When our lives are focused on getting we find all kinds of evil in ourselves.

Love works in the other direction. It gives, it sacrifices, it makes space, it sends insiders out to bring outsiders in.

And the one thing that we need the most, God’s love — God’s favor, God’s blessing on each of us as a whole person, a beloved child of God, no matter what has happened to us, what has gone into us, or what has come out of us — God’s love is no longer something we have to get or achieve.

God’s love is already ours. God’s love is already inside of each of us.

And Jesus calls us to turn inside out.