Sermon

A Little Dab’ll Do Ya

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

See if you resonate with any of these scenarios:

You’ve worked hard all year in school, and have been rewarded with a report card loaded with A’s...and one A-minus. You show your report card to your parents who say, “Oooh, too bad about that A-minus.”

Second scenario:  You’ve just brewed yourself the perfect cup of coffee and poured it into your favorite mug. You add in your customary dollop of half ‘n half, only to discover that it had gone sour, and you now have little curdled flecks swimming on the surface of your beverage.

Third scenario: You’ve got an important meeting, so you’ve put on your Important Meeting suit and tie. Moments before the meeting begins, you discover that you’ve managed to dribble ketchup down your tie and onto your trousers.

Fourth scenario: You’ve got some strange computer glitch, so you summon the tech guy to figure it out. He’s hard at work on your desktop keyboard when suddenly he sneezes into his hand, and immediately resumes working at your keyboard.

Four scenarios, four silly examples of a little bit of wrongness diminishing, contaminating, blemishing, or infecting that which was otherwise whole and sound. Truly, the capacity of impure objects to defile is disproportionately powerful. In the words of that 50-year-old ad campaign, a little dab’ll do ya’.

And we need to keep that in mind when we encounter our gospel passage for today. Jesus has fed the multitude with five loaves and two fish. In John’s gospel, where we’ve been living for the last five weeks, this miracle – or better – sign that Jesus performs is followed by him teaching that he is the true bread come down from heaven. But in Mark’s gospel, the feeding of the 5,000 is both preceded and followed by Jesus encountering situations loaded with uncleaness, impurity, the very forces of chaos itself. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus does more than flirt with impurity. He takes on impurity with impunity. For heavens sakes, he fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish. What the heck was he doing? Had the people purified themselves first before eating? What about the hands that made the bread and brought it to the picnic? Were they pure or defiled? What about the hands that caught and cleaned and cooked and handed out the fish?

I’m not being facetious here. Jesus was on dangerous ground, and not because the Pharisees were a bunch of first century neurotics obsessed with law and order. The Pharisees were the heirs of a tradition that taught that the Law of Moses was for them the perfect revelation of how they are to live in relationship to God. God called his Chosen People to be a holy people, set apart from the Nations, and despite how the gospels often characterize them, the Pharisees were NOT de facto hypocrites, more interested in rules than in God. What they were was passionately devoted to God as they understood him. Not for nothing do we read that passage from Deuteronomy today. God tells Moses – the archetypal hero of the Pharisees – that they are to add nothing to the Law as it had been delivered nor take anything away. I stress this so that we can be clear that the Pharisees were more than the straw men that the gospels often portray them to be. In spirit and in truth, they had more in common with Jesus than not. Or, to put a finer point on it as one contemporary writer did recently, the Pharisees are less the enemy of Jesus and more like his brothers. And if any of you has a sibling, you know that there’s no kind of fighting like the kind you do with your sibling.

Make no mistake: in Mark’s gospel, Jesus is very much aware of all that can separate a person from the reconciling love of God – illness, disability, ritual uncleanness, demonic possession, sin and all its far-reaching consequences. It’s just that his world view is the mirror image of the one his brothers the Pharisees see. God’s chosen people – and by extension, God himself – need not be shielded from that which contaminates as though the forces of chaos are somehow mightier than God himself. Rather, the reconciling, healing, tender-loving kindness of God has the power to vanquish the chasm that separates humanity from God, and Jesus means to model that compassion again and again.

It’s easy to exteriorize evil. It’s both easy and tempting to point to situations or behaviors or groups of persons or political or economic ideologies and say in essence, “There. That’s the problem. Get rid of that, draw a boundary around that, and we’ll all be better off.” The Pharisees weren’t the first to invent this type of response to dangerous or inconvenient circumstances, and they weren’t the last to employ it, by any means. The challenge for us, in approaching today’s gospel, is to hear Jesus’s gracious invitation to look at things differently. Jesus demonstrates again and again that no one is too lost or too unclean or too sinful or too contaminated to be beyond his care, and by extension, beyond the care of those who follow Christ. See, if the evils that Jesus enumerates as proceeding from the human heart are injurious to right relationship with God, might it not be true that the virtues that proceed from the human heart also have power – perhaps power to heal and restore? It is possible, Jesus teaches us, to live in such a way that something that the world writes off as irredeemable is transformed into something bearing witness to God’s power to redeem. [I owe this evocative sentence to Sarah Dylan Breuer, whose blog, www.sarahlaughed.net, I periodically read.]

We know a little bit of ketchup wrecks an entire necktie. We know what damage a microscopic virus, such as the one that causes swine flu, can wreak on an otherwise healthy human body. Not for a moment am I suggesting that Jesus denied that harmful stuff is out there, nor am I suggesting that we should either. But wouldn’t it be amazing if we also chose to live in the manner of Jesus – living as though we believed that a little bit of compassion wreaks havoc on suffering in the world? Would it be amazing if in addition to our children sitting through DARE classes in school and being inoculated against measles, mumps and rubella, we sought by word and action to teach them justice, and to inoculate them against hatred in all the forms it can take within the human heart?

The challenge for us, in approaching today’s gospel, is to hear Jesus’s gracious invitation to look at things differently. Jesus demonstrates again and again that no one is too lost or too unclean or too sinful or too contaminated to be beyond his care, and by extension, beyond the care of those who follow Christ.

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral