326 Clean Food

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Clean Food” originally shared on August 28, 2024. It was the 326^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   We can’t earn our way into heaven, but we can eat our way there. Today, we’re going to find out how.

   Well, we’re done with bread, the theme that ran through the last 5 weeks (!) of Gospel readings in most of the world’s Christian Churches. And maybe we aren’t. 😊

   Either way, this coming Sunday, we’ll for sure still be talking about food.

   We’ll be talking about whether the food we eat effects our relationship with God on a weekend that most people will be firing up their bar-b-ques.

   It’s the Labor Day weekend! The unofficial last day of summer.

   By Labor Day, the Monday holiday that celebrates the contributions of Labor to our culture and to our way of life, we’ll have learned how we can’t work our way into heaven, but we can eat our way there.

   How does that work?

   In Mark 7, Jesus has just fed the 5,000 and has continued his public ministry in Galilee. He is attracting the attention of the religious authorities in the big city, and they have come to check him out. And they find something shocking.

   Yes, being easily offended by the behavior of others is not just a 21^st century social media phenomenon. 😊

   That’s where we pick up the lesson, in Mark 7:1-5,

7 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, ² they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. ³ (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; ⁴ 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.) ⁵ 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?”

   The leaders weren’t criticizing his disciples, they were being critical of the disciples’ teacher. Jesus.

   And they weren’t concerned about poor personal hygiene.

   They were concerned with the religious Law.

   Pharisees were laymen (only men could be Pharisees) who had done well enough and saved enough that they could turn the family business over to their son or sons and spend the rest of their lives learning the religious Law that had been given by God to define Israel, and to 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 on its purpose, not the spirit of the law. They believed that their relationship with God was transactional. Jesus proclaimed that is was given to be transformational.

   They had made the religious law a burden to the people, and this reading from Mark 7 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 his face with cookies.

   “What are you doing?” she said.

   “I’m eating cookies. You said I couldn’t eat cake. But 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, that God was required to bless them.

   The letter of the Law says “don’t do these things”, such as the requirements of the purity laws that the Pharisees quote from Leviticus, in today’s reading from Mark 7, that not keeping them would make you ritually unclean and therefore unable to participate in worship at the Temple.

   These requirements are not about physical cleanliness. People wouldn’t know about germs causing disease for another 1900 years.

   Many of the purity laws 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!”

   The purity laws were given 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. They were set apart from the other nations.

   They were blessed to be a blessing to the nations and a light to all people. They were to be a message to all people that God exists, 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 to be a particular people, and therefore the purity laws were designed to give them daily reminders to keep themselves 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 were another kind but had characteristics of both.

   There was a reason for that.

   The spirit of the Law was 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.

   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 always experience the Law as a blessing. People like the Pharisees had led them to see it as a burden.

   That’s why Jesus seems so harsh with the Pharisees, as we see in Mark 7, continuing with verse 6,

⁶ 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;

⁷        in vain do they worship me,

teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

⁸ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

   The Law was given to lead people to a life-giving relationship with God. By the time of the Pharisees, people had made it an end in itself. It was complicated and burdensome.

   And God’s people didn’t keep the Law. At least not for long. They couldn’t earn their way to salvation. So, Jesus entered human history to suffer and die as a sacrifice, to put things right, to restore the relationship with God for which people were created. It was that relationship that preceded the Law, as Paul points out, 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 a reminder that, though we may be done with 5 weeks of bread in our Gospel readings, there is still bread that must be eaten, as Jesus says in John 6:51,

⁵¹ I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

   Jesus gave his flesh, broken and poured out, on the cross. We abide in Him and He abides in us. He is as close to us as the food that we have eaten becomes our body and blood. Jesus is the spotless lamb, the clean food.

   He is present in, with, and under the forms of bread and wine in Holy Communion. In that Communion, through a believing heart, by God’s grace, as 16^th century Church Reformer Martin Luther says, “The words ‘given for you’ and ‘shed for you for the forgiveness of sin’ show us that forgiveness of sin, life, and salvation are given to us in the sacrament through these words, because where there is forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation.”

   We can’t work our way to heaven, but we can eat our way there!

   Jesus says that we live from the inside out, that what we do is a product of who we are, and that what comes out of us is the life that comes from God or the sin that defiles us and separates us from God, in John 7:14-15,

¹⁴ Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: ¹⁵ there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”

   We grow food in our back yard: bell peppers, grapes, lemons, figs, tomatoes, onions, pomegranates, and assorted herbs and spices. They are mostly organic. Mostly. 😊

   But Jesus is the clean food. Jesus makes us pure, even though we sin.

   Our natural selves, our selves without Christ, our not born-again selves, not-new Creation, not-Baptized selves is what brought evil into the world, and what continues to bring it into the world.

   Our reading from John 7 concludes with verses 21-23,

²¹ For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, ²² adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. ²³ All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

   By contrast is the fruit of the Spirit, whose description in the Bible’s book of Galatians begins with the words, “By contrast” in Galatians 5:22-23,

²² By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.

   Paul ends these verses by saying that “there is no law against such things”. So don’t worry about the consequences of the religious Law. Be the Gospel.

   There is a difference between life in a relationship with God and life without a relationship with God, a stark difference. It’s not about you. It’s about Who you know.

   It’s been said that “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. That may be a cynical and sometimes all too realistic description of how some people get ahead today by the world’s standards.

   It’s also an excellent description of the Christian faith.

   Our biggest challenge in life isn’t our behavior, it’s the “you” that produces our behavior.

   The Christian life is not lived by how many religious laws you know. It’s lived in a living relationship with the one true living God. The Law is within you.

   Our transformed selves, our selves with Christ, our born-again selves, our new Creation selves, our Baptized selves are what point to the way things God made them to be and the way God will make them to be again.

   Labor Day is more than the de-facto beginning of Fall. It is a time for transformation, it is a time to refresh and renew, and for some it will be a time to reset. It’s also a time to repent; to turn around. It’s a time to remember who we are by knowing Whose we are.  It’s a time to reflect and to restore.

   It’s a time to commune with God in the only kind of food that endures forever, the food that has washed us and made us clean from Sin, the food that is Jesus Christ, broken and poured out, for forgiveness of sin, life, and salvation. It is a time to receive the clean food. Jesus. Broken and poured out for you.