Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.
(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, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.)
So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
On Tuesday, I got really angry. I love my son dearly, but Clive will not stop climbing on anything, everything. The chairs, tables, the kitchen counters; he’s sneaking and oddly daring for being my son. Tuesday he climbed on a chair, then on the kitchen table for the 52nd time in the last hour. I was angry and grabbed him off the table and, getting as close to his little ear as I could, told him to stop climbing on the table.
As soon as I let go, he pouted his lip, cried big tears, and I felt terrible. After putting him to bed, I turned on the local news. The first story was about how three children in Indianapolis, five years old and younger, had lost their lives from finding a gun and accidentally firing it. And I thought if I should be outraged about anything, it shouldn’t be my son acting like the toddler he is, but rather that toddlers are losing their lives from completely avoidable situations.
What makes you angry, outraged even? Is it the high cost of living that only seems to be getting higher? Is it that suicide among young people continues to grip our community? Is it that it's easier to get a gun in Indiana than to adopt a pet, in most cases. Whatever the source, what do you do with your anger? For many of us, anger is a motivator, a catalyst in our lives. We hear something, see something, that hurts us or someone we love or experience something that we know isn’t right and we feel compelled to act.
Action, what we do with our lives, is the main concern for both Jesus and James today. And it's tempting to think that this righteous anger, this outrage over something that isn’t right in the world, is a good thing.
It was for Cecilia Munoz; her outrage did a lot of good and got her pretty far in life. The source of her anger came from a dinner she had at 17 with her parents and a close friend. The year was 1980 and the conversation at the table focused on the wars going on in Central America and the involvement of the US.
After dinner, Cecilia’s good friend looked her in the eyes and said that if the US were to ever go to war somewhere in Latin America, he believed that her parents belonged in an internment camp just like the japanese-americans during WWII, because they were immigrants from Bolivia (a central american country).
She couldn’t believe someone who knew her, knew her parents, who sat at their table for meals, could say and believe such awful things about her parents. She was outraged and, as she wrote in an essay, that outrage became the propellant of her life, driving her right into the immigrant rights movement, fighting for people whose story was a lot like her parents. And according to Cecilia, “a little outrage can take you a long way”. It took her to Washington, then to the white house, and even becoming a MacArthur Fellow for her work with helping immigrants.
Isn’t this what James is talking about when he says be doers of the Word, not just hearers?
We hear God’s call to welcome the immigrant and the stranger, to care for the weak and the vulnerable, the orphan and the widow as James puts it, and then we do those things.
That's what God wants from us according to James. Does it matter if anger is the fuel that gets us to do the right thing?
Well Cecilia has a warning, “anger has a way of hollowing out your insides”. For every fifty families she would help, she could only think of the five who didn’t get the documentation they’d hoped for. The defeats were more than the victories, which is often the case with any injustice or problem out in the world. And anger could only take Cecilia so far before it started carving out her soul.
Or as theologian Fredreick Buechner puts it, “Of the 7 deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun… in many ways anger is a feast fit for a king. The main drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you”.
Our outrage at the problems, struggles, and pains of this world are not misplaced. We should get mad when we see our neighbors being harmed, when we witness the misuse and abuse of creation, when we hear the cries of the poor and brokenhearted. Those same things anger God!
Yet, when anger is the source of our action, the fuel for what we do out in the world, it will eat us up. The problems are too great, the struggle too strong, the hurt too deep for anger to be the motivator.
It won’t sustain us for the work that God calls us to nor does it accomplish what God desires, at least that’s what James thinks. Which is why he says we must be slow to anger, because it will feed us for a little while, but then it starts to carve a hollow place in your soul.
Yet what of Jesus, he seems pretty angry with the Pharisees, calling them hypocrites! And what about that other time he flips tables over in the synagogue? What is that if not outrage? Yes this is true, Jesus certainly gets angry. But it’s good to remember or be reminded that we aren’t Jesus and his ways are always higher, better than our ways, Isaiah reminds us. Jesus' concern though is with actions too and what motivates them, just as James is, but from a different perspective.
While James tells us that anger shouldn’t be the catalyst for our actions, Jesus is worried that our actions are simply going through the motions; that we do what’s considered the right thing, but one’s heart isn’t really in it, saying the right words but it’s all lip service. The Pharisees weren’t wrong for following the tradition of washing hands. But, Jesus is angry because they cared more about the tradition than they did their neighbors and God’s instruction to care for them.
Is that not still the same today? We hold to all sorts of traditions, all sorts of ways of doing things, over caring for our neighbors, with one glaring example being gun violence. We hold so tightly to human tradition, this right to arm oneself that we either forget or outright abandon God’s commandments, like don’t kill, love your neighbor, and protect the vulnerable.
It’s not enough to extend thoughts and prayers after the next act of gun violence or mass shooting if we are unwilling to forget human tradition, advocate for gun reform, and hold tight to God’s commandments. If not, it’s all lip service.
So if it’s neither anger nor tradition that motivates our action, what should?
Cecilia Munoz says anger didn’t eat her away completely because that hollow place carved by outrage got filled with other, more powerful things, things like: compassion, faith, family, music and the goodness of people around her. These things filled her up and tempered her outrage with a deep sense of gratitude.
Anger, righteous or not, rarely produces what we want. Clive still climbs on tables after all.
So, what fills you up with a sense of gratitude? What are those things more powerful than anger that sustain your action?
Thanks be to God for every generous act of giving, every perfect gift that comes from God, filling the hollow place hewed by outrage and anger. May we all be so overwhelmed with gratitude for the good, more powerful things of this life: faith, hope, love, family, music, joy, that we can’t help but be doers of God’s word.
Perhaps then we will accomplish not only what we want, but what God wants too.
Amen
