A Fourth Church Sermon by Adam Fronczek

September 3, 2006 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Finding Our Way

Adam Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 43:1–7
Mark 7:1–8, 14–23

“Why do your disciples not live according
to the traditions of the elders?”

Mark 7:5 (NRSV)

When we truly encounter Jesus—incarnate and ministering among us,
crucified and resurrected—our fireproof hearts catch fire,
and in following him we come to know that obedience to God
which is perfect freedom, and we begin to find our way home.

William Placher
Jesus the Savior

In the sweltering heat of an African Saturday afternoon, five Namibian children, age nine, sat on a hard wooden pew in the small church with walls of corrugated iron and recited. I didn’t speak their language, but they said it so many times that even three years later I can still remember the sound: “nowa noway, nocasi nokay, nowhen awhoa no chien a chio” again and again and again. It was a Lutheran church, very close, theologically speaking, to us Presbyterians, and they were learning their catechism. Memorizing a catechism is a tradition that most American Protestant churches got away from some time ago. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, a catechism is a set of questions and answers traditionally used for teaching the faith. A catechism consists of theological propositions and passages from the Bible, and it winds up sounding a lot like a list of rules. I found out several hours later on that hot African afternoon what it was that those children were saying: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, his wife, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his donkey, or anything else that is your neighbor’s”—Exodus, chapter 20, verse 17.

Although I’ve read and done my best to understand them, I’ve never memorized any of the catechisms that are still included in the Presbyterian Book of Confessions, and I’m not really embarrassed about that: no one ever asked me to do so. But I will admit that I had mixed feelings, sitting in that church, listening to those children. I was aware that I was almost finished with my own schooling for the ministry as I sat and watched that old minister. For years, in just that way, he had passed down traditions from one generation to the next. He was teaching those children, in clear and exacting terms, what it meant to be a Christian, and there was something about that that was just beautiful.

On the other hand, I think we stopped memorizing the catechism for some good reasons. In part it may have to do with the way the catechism was often taught. Watching the old African minister snapping at those children conjured up other images in my mind, particularly my own father’s often-repeated story of standing in St. Hyacinth’s parochial elementary school, arms outstretched, holding a Bible on each exhausted hand. At some point, I think we concluded that practices like these might not be the best way to convince children of how very much God loves them.

There’s also what I think may be the larger issue: at some point we concluded that Christian faith is a bit too mysterious to be summed up in a list of rules, and depending on the situation, the rules might not always apply. “Thou shalt not kill” seems like a good rule of faith until you have to figure out how to end slavery or defeat Hitler, and in cases like those, even people of faith may need to break the rules.

It also bothers me to think that much of the hatred in our world can be connected to oversimplified propositions about faith. I’m sure that most of us were appalled a year ago when some religious leaders called Hurricane Katrina an act of divine retribution on the people of New Orleans. Around here we tend to say, “How could a person think that?” What you may not realize is that not too long ago, colonial Presbyterians, people in our own tradition, made similar claims about natural disasters, disease, wars with Native Americans. Those colonial Presbyterians were convinced that God was punishing them for not living according to God’s law. At some point, thanks be to God, we started wrestling with questions like those and decided that was a part of our neat and tidy theological tradition that was ready for a little nuance.

I think you know what I’m getting at here: I’m wondering what parts of the tradition we’re supposed to keep, where do we draw the line, because as we continue to allow our traditions to evolve, it seems like we’re less comfortable talking about what we believe than we used to be. If we can’t articulate our rules, our standards, our traditions, if we can’t apply them to our lives, how can we convince ourselves that what we believe is important, and how can we pass it on to someone else?

These questions are as old as religion itself. They come up in the Gospel lesson for today. The Pharisees, the religious conservatives of the day, notice that Jesus’ disciples have been ignoring some of the laws about food. You probably know that they had many laws about food. What to eat, what to avoid, how to grow and harvest and prepare the food, and how to prepare oneself to eat were all included in the food laws. Food laws had a noble purpose. Respecting God’s law in preparing for a meal meant acknowledging God’s presence, and being a follower of the law identified a person as one of God’s people. But something else had happened with the food laws in ancient Israel. By the time the Pharisees have this particular encounter with Jesus, they seem to have forgotten the part about God, and the laws have become ends in and of themselves, traditions used to uphold the social order. So the Pharisees, concerned about their tradition, ask Jesus, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” (Mark 7:5).

Jesus addresses the question two ways.

First, he challenges the Pharisees to remember what the law is about. Jesus quotes a passage from the prophet Isaiah: “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” (Mark 7:6–7). Jesus raises the question, “Is the law for you, or for God?”

It’s important to realize that this isn’t much of an answer; it wouldn’t have been satisfying to the Pharisees. The Pharisees get a bad rap for being the ones who challenge Jesus, but the Pharisees were pious, observant Jews. In most cases, they were keeping the law in order to acknowledge God; they just fell short from time to time, as we all do. So when Jesus calls them hypocrites, a valid response might have been, “OK, Jesus, we may be hypocrites, but what does our being hypocrites have to do with your disciples breaking the law? What’s wrong with the law, Jesus?”

Seeming to anticipate this objection, Jesus gives them a new teaching: “Listen to me, all of you, and understand, there is nothing that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” Jesus overturns the law. But the teaching doesn’t end there. Jesus gives a new teaching: “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” (Mark 7:21–23). Notice Jesus doesn’t just throw out the rules. He’s got rules of his own. He wants us to deal justly with one another; he wants us to speak the truth and act unselfishly; he wants us to treat our bodies with the honor they deserve; he wants us to forgive one another; he wants us to realize that we have choices to make; and he wants us to make choices that give life, not choices that take life from us.

Seems like a good teaching. I’m almost inclined to tell you to do it just because Jesus said so and quit early, but a couple of problems remain. For one thing, we live in a world where not everyone believes in Jesus, and for another thing, you may find yourself in a situation where one of Jesus’ teachings doesn’t seem to make sense. If we’re not willing to talk about those things, Jesus’ teaching isn’t much more helpful than the law it replaces.

I was considering how I might defend Jesus’ teachings if I didn’t believe in Jesus, so I called a rabbi friend of mine, and said, “Aaron, you don’t believe in Jesus, but you don’t obey all the food laws either, so what do you tell people when they ask you which laws are still important to obey?” Aaron said the problem with understanding the law is in translation. The Hebrew word, halakah, that gets translated “law” doesn’t indicate any kind of destination. Halakah means “a going” or “a journey.” To whatever extent the Pharisees treated the law as an end in and of itself, Jesus was right to correct them. A more succinct way to state this error, lost in translation, is that God gives us brains and expects us to think.

Christians actually think about law in a very similar way. Bill Enright, the pastor who raised me, calls the Ten Commandments channel markers. In this life, sometimes we feel like great ships on open seas, free to set any course we like; other times we feel like small sailboats tossed about by treacherous waters. “It’s the channel markers,” Bill used to say, “that invite me to live carefully, for life is a journey with choices to be made and values to be pursued and priorities to be set. We humans are not God’s puppets, we are God’s children, blessed with lives to be lived” (Channel Markers, p. 5).

The challenge for us then, as people of faith, given laws not as conclusions but as channel markers for a journey, is not just to figure out what to believe, but to figure out how to live. Just like in the time of the Pharisees, religion in our time has become a series of arguments about everything from abortion and homosexuality to Geneva tabs versus praise bands, as if any one of these was intended to be the central idea of Christian faith. But faith isn’t about a set of rules that allows us to choose the God best suited to our own purposes. We don’t get to elect God.

A lot of pastors and politicians want you to believe that Christianity is a party line. They’ve tried to make it into a listing of litmus test questions you have to answer as if they were ends in and of themselves, and they don’t want you to think about the nuance of it all. They just want to know if you’re in or you’re out.

We don’t have to play by their rules. We don’t have to play by their rules, because faith is not the product of agreeing to a list of static rules and traditions. Faith happens between the channel markers, which is to say that faith happens on the street. Faith happens in the way people think and act in Jerusalem and Darfur and Baghdad and in Chicago. Faith happens when you join a discussion about education reform in Illinois or when you sign up for a mission trip to New Orleans. Faith happens in the Community Garden over in Cabrini-Green and it happens when you volunteer to tutor a child at Michigan and Chestnut. Faith also happens in your homes with your own families and friends, not just because you learn what our traditions are, but because you think about what those traditions mean and you go out and do something that keeps those traditions alive.

God does give us brains, and there are choices to be made and things to be done, but even faithful, thoughtful people make bad choices, so God also gives us hearts so that we might know that while our brains often don’t get it right, God loves us still.

This morning we read responsively a passage from Isaiah. The people of Israel have turned their backs on God, forgotten God’s laws, lost everything they had, and gone into exile in a foreign land as an enslaved people. These people have no commonly agreed-upon message. So God sends Isaiah, a prophet, to remind them that God is still around, and Isaiah says to them, “Thus says the Lord: Fear not, I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters I will be with you. . . . When you walk through fire you shall not be burned. . . . You are precious in my [sight]” (Isaiah 43:1–4).

Still waiting for me to provide a succinct, clear message about what needs to be maintained in the Christian tradition? The old Southern pastor Will Campbell may have said it best when he was asked to sum up Christianity in ten words or less and he did it in nine: “We’re no damn good, but God loves us anyway.”

You’ll turn your back on God and God’s traditions probably every day of your life. No matter how many rules you have, no matter how many laws you observe, there will still be days when you wish you hadn’t said that mean thing to your spouse, when you wish you hadn’t had that one drink too many, when you wish that years ago you’d started yourself on a different path so that you wouldn’t be stuck today in whatever quandary you’re in. That stuff can often be remedied or even lived through, but it doesn’t go away.

Do you need to know a Christian tradition, a value, one that’s easy to articulate and true in all circumstances, one that you can cling to when you’re at the end of your rope? “Thus says the Lord: Fear not, I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters I will be with you. . . . When you walk through fire you shall not be burned. . . . You are precious in my [sight].” You are precious in my sight. Amen.