272 Connections

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Connections”, originally shared on August 16, 2023. It was the 272^nd  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” may be a cynical but sometimes all too realistic description of how some people get ahead by the world’s standard. It’s also an excellent description of the Christian faith. Today, we’re going to find out why.

   Sally and I and our son James were in Maui in 1997. I swam for a competitive adult swimming club in the United States Masters Swim program and the Pan Pacific Masters Swim meet was held there, mostly in Lahaina. I swam my events in the early part of the day and the rest of the day we’d have to explore the natural beauty of the island. We visited a Lutheran church, saw the banyan tree, drove the road to Hana, toured a volcano, and lots of other things.

   The ocean had been red flagged that week because the wave conditions were choppy, but they let us swim the optional ocean race for Masters swimmers. We later met a guy who had broken an arm swimming in that race.

   On the last day we were there, I read an article in a local paper about how many surfers had needed to be rescued by the lifeguards that week.

   Maui is a popular tourist vacation destination and many people have visited there, but it is very expensive to live there. According to the article, most residents needed to work two and three jobs, so they didn’t have time to teach their kids how to swim. The tax base was low, so the schools didn’t have the funding to offer swimming lessons either. As a result, something like 90% of the island kids didn’t know how to swim!

   They loved to surf, though, and they had been using their surfboards as flotation devices! The rough surf that week meant that the leashes they used to attach themselves to their boards were snapping and so the lifeguards had to jump in and pull them out.

   These families are the residents who had nowhere to go and lost everything in the catastrophic fires there this past week.

   They will need our support. There are lots of ways to do that, and I don’t think you need any encouragement from me to do so.

   Having connections to a place and seeing places that we have visited now utterly destroyed makes the need there all the more real to us.

   The passage from the gospel of Matthew that we’re going to look at today contains two of Jesus’ parables, earthly stories with heavenly meanings. They are about personal connections, or the lack of them, that help us live the Christian life.

   They both have to do with the central purpose in life: living in a specific kind of connection.

   The first comes in Matthew 15:10-20,

   ¹⁰Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand: ¹¹it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” ¹²Then the disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?” ¹³He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. ¹⁴Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.” ¹⁵But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.” ¹⁶Then he said, “Are you also still without understanding? ¹⁷Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? ¹⁸But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. ¹⁹For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. ²⁰These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”

   The Pharisees were laymen (only men could be a Pharisee) who had done well enough and saved enough that they could turn the family business over to their son/s and spend the rest of their lives learning the religious Law that had been given by God to define Israel, and keeping that Law. They were highly respected, and every little boy wanted to grow up to be a Pharisee.

   And Jesus was always knocking heads with them.

   Why? Because their focus was on the letter of the Law, not the spirit of the law, and this first parable is a good example.

   The difference between the letter of the Law and the spirit of it is like the little boy who went into the kitchen and found his mom putting the icing on a cake.

   He asked her for a slice, and she answered, “No. You’ll spoil your appetite.”

   Not long after, his mother had to leave the room and when she came back, she found the boy stuffing himself with cookies.

   “What are you doing?” she said.

   “I’m eating cookies. You said I couldn’t eat cake. You didn’t say that I couldn’t eat cookies!”

   In this case, “Don’t eat the cake was the letter of the law.” The little boy was keeping the letter of the law, “Don’t eat the cake.” But the spirit of the law was, “Don’t spoil your appetite.”

   The Pharisees had concluded that as long as they did what the Law said, they were good with God. They were robotically keeping the letter of the Law. They were golden.

   The letter of the Law in this parable is, don’t do these things, such as the dietary laws, that will make you ritually unclean and therefore unable to participate in worship at the Temple.

   This parable isn’t about physical cleanliness. People wouldn’t know about germs causing disease for another 1900 years.

   The things necessary to be ritually clean came from the purity laws, many of which are in the Bible’s book of Leviticus, one of the primary books of the religious Law that the Pharisees studied. It’s the third book in the Bible and is about as far as a lot of people get after they’ve said, “I’m going to read the Bible, cover to cover!”

   Fun fact: the Sunday readings, or lectionary, that are read from the Revised Common Lectionary in the vast majority of churches throughout the world every Sunday, are set up so that you will hear almost all of the Bible, and certainly the entire history of salvation, if you come to church every Sunday for three years.

   The purity laws were written to define the identity of the Hebrew people, a people who had been plucked from obscurity and chosen by God to be God’s people. The were set apart from the other nations. They were blessed to be a blessing to the nations and a light to all people that God is, and that God wants all people to receive His blessing. Part of that blessing was the Law, given to God’s people as a guide to lead them to the life for which they were intended, a life defined by their relationship with God.

   They were a particular people, and therefore the purity laws were designed to keep them pure. They were not even to wear clothes made of two kinds of fabric.

   The dietary laws, keeping kosher, included things like not eating dairy and meat in the same meal, not eating animals that were not one kind of animal or fish or another but had characteristics of both.

   The spirit of the Law was its purpose to remind people that they were chosen. They were God’s people and that, in every way, they were a particular people, defined by God’s blessed law. Don’t be a different thing. Don’t even be two things. Don’t compromise. Be who you are.

   But that blessing was not an end in itself. God’s people were blessed in order to be a blessing to all people. All people.

   But God’s people didn’t see the Law as a blessing, people like the Pharisees had led them to see it as a burden. And God’s people didn’t keep the Law. At least not for long. So, Jesus entered human history to suffer and die as a sacrifice, to put things right, to restore the relationship with God for which they were created. The relationship that preceded the Law, as Paul points out when he says, in Romans 4:13,

¹³ It was not through the law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith. 

  Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness hundreds of years before the giving of the Law.

   The meaning of that faith as the product of a living relationship with the one true living God is the purpose of the second parable, in Matthew 15:11-28,

²¹Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. ²²Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” ²³But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” ²⁴He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” ²⁵But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” ²⁶He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” ²⁷She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” ²⁸Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

   A non-Jew, a gentile like us, received the miracle, the action that points us to the way that the world was intended to be and the way it will be again in the new heaven and the new earth. She was a foreigner, yet her daughter was healed instantly. Because of her faith.

   Her faith, her relationship with Jesus, fully God and fully human being, her connection to God was all that was necessary.

   Her daughter wasn’t healed by the woman’s faith, she was healed by Jesus, the agent of her connection of faith. That faith made her part of God’s people.

   Peter says, in 1 Peter 2:9-10,

⁹ But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. ¹⁰ Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy.

   We are God’s people and, like the Canaanite woman, we have received mercy. Why? Not by keeping the letter of the Law, not because of our good works, but “that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

   The purity laws are mined by people who want to devalue the authority of the Bible; they are thrown in our faces by people who ask, “Well, do you wear clothes made of more than one kind of fabric? Do you eat shellfish? Do you like a cheeseburger?” But let’s be charitable, they are misunderstanding of the purpose of the Bible.

   The purpose of the Bible is to lead us into a living relationship with the one true living God. It’s described in the climax of the Gospel of John, in John 20:30-31,

30Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

   It’s not what you know. It’s who you know. And we have been given the gift to know Jesus.

   There as been a lot of legal action regarding college admissions this summer. Who gets in and why? Students get in on their merit. Students get in on the basis of their life experiences.

   When our son James was in the college application process, his school invited an admissions officer from Stanford to come and explain how things work. She said that, contrary to popular belief, they didn’t look for well-rounded students. She said that their goal was to make well rounded student bodies, so that   a-typical abilities and experiences carried a lot of weight.

   And then there are the alternative admissions routes, like donating a big chunk of money. Or, being a “legacy”, that is, being related to people who attended that school. Legacies ensure that the right kind of people will be admitted and that they will support the school for generations. The supreme court is considering a case that could soon make that illegal.

   The Heaven admissions process is not based on merit, or on bribes, or on who your parents were/are. It’s based on grace, and that grace is given on the basis of the great gift of God revealed and given to us in the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.

    It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.

   All the Canaanite woman had going for her was that she knew Jesus. She was connected by the gift of faith, the connection to God we have been given by knowing God. The connection that brings us life in His name.

   The Christian life is not knowing stuff about God. It is in living from the inside out, in response to the gift of a living relationship with God. It is He who we know, and He by which we live.

   I mentioned last time that we were in Sitka, Alaska this summer and visited St. Michael the Archangel Russian Orthodox Cathedral. After we left the cathedral, we walked across the street to the Grandfather Frost Russian Gift Shop. There was a sign prominently posted in the window near the entrance that said, “We Support Ukraine.”

   They wanted people to know where their connections were.

   Because connections are important. They often define us.

   Jesus reminds us in today’s parables that we are called to obey the law in response to the gift of salvation, but not to let it define us. We are defined by faith in our connection to God. And that that connection is all that is needed for this life and for the life to come.