Pure religion

Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

When I was twenty I decided I needed to purify my life.  I was living in a house in Seattle with my oldest brother and a bunch of his bachelor friends, whose mutual interests were punk rock and beer.  I was working at a couple of low-wage jobs downtown, as an early morning janitor and a walking courier in afternoon.  I had a girlfriend but then she dumped me for a guy who drove for the Green Tortoise hippie bus line up and down the coast.  So I decided to start changing things.  I moved out of my brother’s house, and found a new place to live where I could have peace and quiet.  I quit the janitorial job, and started a training program in massage therapy.  And I went on a Macrobiotic diet. 

What this meant was that I got one of those electric crockpots and started cooking large quantities of whole grains, mainly brown rice and millet.  I basically lived on that, plus a lot of vegetables.  I did get some exotic soybean products like tofu, tempeh, and miso, and learned to cook with them.  I learned to like seaweed.  What I didn’t eat was anything sweet or fried.  I didn’t eat meat, eggs, or dairy products.  I hardly ate any fruit.  No bread, or potatoes.  I didn’t even eat peanut butter.  I was always hungry, and I was usually cold, but man, was I healthy.  At least I thought so until I went to visit my parents for Christmas.  My mother almost cried.  I got out the bathroom scale and found that I was down to 110 pounds.  If you’ve ever gone home for the holidays and been amazed at how much your mother can feed you, you can guess what the next week was like for me.  Needless to say, the Macrobiotic diet was over. 

And I didn’t really miss it, because it wasn’t really about the food.  It was about regaining control over my life.  It was about making a boundary, so that my body would be a space that only good things, only pure things, could enter.  And this is what the scribes and Pharisees in this morning’s text from the Gospel of Mark are all about.  Their scrupulous rituals of washing their hands, washing their food, and washing their dishes are not based on principles of hygiene.  They are about creating a space apart, a sacred space, a kind of preserve of holiness in the midst of a dirty, crazy world.

And this is one of the things that religion does.  Religion can draw a map of the world, a map with clear boundaries, drawn in thick, black lines.  Rituals, doctrines, rules of moral behavior can all serve to mark off a defensible space.  Sometimes it’s an actual physical space, like the precincts of a church or a temple or a monastery.  But it can also be a social space, like a denomination, or a congregation, or even a psychic and bodily space.   And for those who understand this religious map, those marked-off spaces are where you find holiness.   The people and the things inside the boundaries are holy people, holy things, and anyone and anything that comes in from outside must first be purified.  Religious traditions, and institutions, and authorities all work together to maintain the holy space, to defend it and keep it pure and uncontaminated by the profane world. 

But Jesus shows up with a different kind of religion.  His religion is the freedom of the human heart that is loved by God.   It’s a heart that doesn’t try to wall itself off from the world, because it knows that the dirt and craziness of that world are right there within itself, and that God loves it anyway.  Jesus meets the crazy people in the world, and touches them and calls the unclean spirits out of their souls.  He sits down at table with dirty people, with tax collectors and sinners, and eats with them.  Some of his disciples don’t even wash their hands.  But Jesus is not afraid of “catching something” that will make him unfit to enter holy ground.  He is not concerned with keeping any space holy but the space that God’s Spirit of love creates in our hearts, and for the one who dwells in that space the whole world is holy.

The Song of Solomon is a love poem which has been read in the Christian mystical tradition as an allegory of the courtship that Christ pays to our soul.  The imagery that comes to us from that poem this morning is of the lover’s infectious joy that draws us out of our enclosed spaces into freedom.  Like a gazelle or a young stag the beloved stands on the other side of the wall of our fears, peering in at the windows of our obsessions, peeking through the lattice of our need for control and saying “Arise, my love, and come away.”   This is the invitation that Christ speaks to us, to trust the one who loves us with such gladness and passion, to arise and go with him into the world as into a springtime of delight, into a wide-open sacred space alive with beauty, and pleasure, and joy.

The Letter of James describes the gift of Christ’s love for us as like a mirror.  We can get stuck there, gazing at the reflection of our own selves as we appear in the light of grace.  We can keep looking and looking, trying to hang on to the feeling of that first glimpse, and in this way the grace of God, the love of Christ, the forgiveness of our sins, the salvation of our souls, all the life-giving good news of the Gospel can become another prison, another enclosed, holy space that we have to keep pure.  But James suggests another possibility, the possibility of looking into that mirror, of gratefully receiving the grace of seeing ourselves as Christ sees us, and then turning and going away to serve.  That vision of goodness can be something not to cling to, but something to give to others.  We can walk in generosity and freedom, not turned inward in a hungry search for more and more holy experience, but open-hearted, allowing the love of Christ to flow through us to the world. 

There was another thing I did when I was trying to remake my life that autumn in Seattle.  I called a telephone number from an advertisement in the free weekly newspaper, and I ordered a set of meditation cushions.  A week or so later I got off the bus in an unfamiliar part of town and walked a couple of blocks to an old house, surrounded by a rambling but well-tended flower garden.  At the gate I met the woman I’d spoken to on the phone, and she invited me in and I gave her a check, and she gave me the things she had sewn—a round firm pillow and a thin square mat.  I carried them home on the bus and I got up the next morning before sunrise and sat down on my pillow and my mat and crossed my legs and started learning how to be in the world in a different way.  I never did become a massage therapist.  The macrobiotic diet you already know about.  But I still have those cushions, twenty-seven years later.  I even use them sometimes.

Jesus calls us to stop trying to create defensible spaces of holiness in the world.  Instead he says, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.  Let me give you holiness in the sanctuary of your hearts, a sanctuary that you sweep clean day by day with prayer, that you wash with tears, and consecrate with songs.  Enter that sanctuary and drink from its deep silence, and in that silence hear my voice.  Let me light a sacred fire there, the Spirit of love and compassion, and generosity to the world.   Take that fire with you, wherever you go, even to the dirty, crazy places.   And you will find that, even there, holiness comes out to meet you.”