The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Song of Songs 2:8-13; Ps 45:1-2, 7-10; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
The Rev’d Dr. Deborah Meister, ODM
When I was studying to be a priest, my roommate was the daughter, grand-daughter, and great-grand-daughter of pastors in the Evangelical Free Church, a conservative denomination prevalent in the American West. At some point in those years, her father decided to earn a Doctor of Ministry. The application mostly focused on his resume, but there was one long essay to write: “What is the greatest impediment to your ministry?” Robin prayed on, then boiled his response down to seven words: “Sin. My own and that of others.” Needless to say, he was admitted.
I didn’t know it yet, but his words pointed to a profound truth. We who seek ordination tend to be helpers, people who want to do good and to love God. But ministry involves learning a lot about sin — from others and from looking in the mirror. I have been privileged to pastor some amazing parishioners: people whose joy, faith, and capacity to love and to make a difference humble me every day. But I have also seen people treat one another terribly, both individually and in groups. I have learned the ways that ego, the desire for domination, and unhealed wounds can propel people to harm one another and the things and people they love. I have listened to people speak about adultery, addiction, pornography, prostitution, their daily failures in love, and the fear that has kept them silent when they saw people do terrible things. And I have seen the astonishing beauty in people who can name these things because they want to change, because they have had the courage to look at their lives and see who they are and refuse to let go of the person they were meant to be.
Perhaps that’s the experience which leads Jesus to the moment we see in today’s Gospel. When the Pharisees see Jesus and the disciples eating, they object that some of the disciples had not first washed their hands. It’s easy to hear this as the invocation of a judgmental God, something like a glorified Kindergarten teacher who sets up a world with well-defined rules and rewards the students who follow them with a gold star at the end of the day. But let’s look past that for a moment. Because the claim that God cares about whether we wash our hands before eating reveals a God who is intimately involved in our lives. Not vaguely interested. Not ethereal. But real and present, active in our day-to-day, caring for our welfare as much as or more than any human being. The ancient teachings that regulated what people could eat, the kinds of fabric they could wear, how to cure disease, what to offer in thanksgiving for your harvest — these were not a thicket of laws to catch out the careless, but signs of God’s engagement in our lives.
We in the church talk a lot about the love of God, but I suspect that for many of us, it remains a bit ethereal and vague, at least compared with the human love we know. Human love is fleshy and tangible. It washed our bottoms when we were babies, holds us when we have bad dreams. It takes shape in life-long loving relationships, where the everyday struggle to manage work and life and carpools and children and even the inevitable fights take place against a backdrop of acceptance and forgiveness. It ties us to our friends, enables us to laugh over the telephone, helps us know whom to call when we need a shoulder to cry on. Divine love seems a bit pallid beside this, intangible, unknowable, a claim in which we put some of our trust, while working like mad to ensure we don’t have to rely on it.
When Jesus responds to what the Pharisees have said, he does not reject the rules per se. He rejects their interpretation of the rules. The Pharisees had accused the disciples of eating with “defiled hands” — implying that the rules were not about relationship, but about some kind of purity. Jesus does not even reject the idea of purity — but he does redefine it, saying, “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” (Mark 7: 18, 20-21) He reminds the disciples (or teaches them) that purity is not a matter of observing ritual; it’s a matter of the heart. As such, it is essential. We all know, from the Sermon on the Mount, that it is the pure of heart who will see God.
But if evil intentions come from within the heart, how do they get there? More importantly, how do we make them go away? The classic answer is that evil intentions come from sin, and they are made clean by grace. In everyday language, none of us grew up in a perfect world. Many did not have families in which love could be taken for granted; even those who did have grown up in a world where violence, greed, competition, and the degradation of self and others were not only present, but often valorized. All of us have learned habits of the heart which run contrary to the generosity, kindness, simplicity, and gentleness of the Gospel — and only God can carry out the healing which we need.
That’s why I love todays’ first reading so much. It seems to call me into a gentler world — a garden overflowing with blossoms, a place where the trilling of birds might encourage my heart to rise above the burdens and worries of this world, into a place of hope and of promise, of a deep and restorative peace.
Some of you may have been surprised by this reading: certainly the Song of Songs is surprising — a long, lusty love poem dropped right into the heart of Scripture. It follows, and implicitly judges, both the worldly wisdom of Proverbs and the world-weary cynicism of Ecclesiastes. Interpreters have struggled to decide what it means (because, of course, it could not possibly be what it actually seems to be: a frank celebration of erotic love). The ancient Hebrews had a generations-long discussion about whether it should even be in the Bible — a discussion which was resolved only after Christ’s death, when Rabbi Akiba claimed (rather astonishingly) that “The whole world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the writings are holy but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” (Babylonian Talmud)
For ancient Judaism, the Holy of Holies was the place of divine encounter, the room in the center of the Temple where the High Priest went, once a year, to view the Ark of the Covenant and speak with God face to face. Only the High Priest could enter. So Akiva was saying that, somehow, this erotic poetry was a place where any reader could encounter the living God — God untamed. God who comes not as our legislator or our judge, but as our lover — the God who loves our souls.
There is in you — in each of us — a still point, inviolate, beyond the blandishments of politicians, advertisers, influencers, social media, and the accumulated wear and tear of our lives. That still point is our true self, the place where we dwell with God, and it is our essential freedom, the place where we are “unstained by the world.” (James 1:27) Each of us has it, but for some of us, it can be hard to get to — because we have to believe that it is there, and many of us do not believe that we are worthy of being God’s home.
The theologian James Alison notices that while we speak of God’s love, that can often have a feel of duty: God loves us because God has to love us. Because God has to love everyone. He wonders, “Can you imagine that God might like you?” To like someone is to choose them: to enjoy their company, to want to be with them. We can love someone in spite of who they are, but we like someone because of who they are. 1
That’s why Song of Songs is so important — mystics from both Judaism and Christianity see it as the most profound description of the love between Christ and our souls, between Christ and you. The love it reveals is not dutiful, but passionate — an erotic game of hide and seek in which lover and beloved seek one another, sometimes as seeker and sometimes as one sought. They entice and lure one another; they flee and hide; weep and rage; come together in delight. Human love, it turns out, is not more fleshy, more real, more present than God’s; it is the mirror of divine love. In learning to trust one another, we are learning the trust which will allow God in.
When Jesus teaches that the pure in heart will see God, those who hear him are, in fact, looking at him — seeing God. They just don’t know it yet. That is, of course, a paradox — the paradox. God already dwells in our souls, but we do not always have access to our true selves. So often, we live from damaged scripts, speaking the expected words rather than the authentic ones, guarding ourselves from the authenticity we both fear and crave. We just can’t make ourselves believe that the person we really are is someone God might want — or even someone other people might want. But to God, we are beautiful, even in our brokenness — and that love transforms everything.
A few weeks ago, I came upon Edwin Muir’s magnificent poem about the Transfiguration. The part I want to share with you describes when Jesus and the disciples come down from the mountain, back into the world of everyday:
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse-heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those entangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
We may think that we are seeking Jesus, (you may have come here today to seek Jesus, or at least to figure out whether this God stuff might have something to say to your life) but always, God is seeking us, walking within and among us, calling us to step out of our dungeons and be free. There he stands, just past our wall, peeking in at the windows, looking through the lattice. Beyond the thousand defenses we erect to keep God out, God is there, loving us, seeking us, desiring us to be with him. Like Dorothy in her ruby slippers, we have had the power to go home all along. “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”: those words are for you. Will you turn the key in the door, walk away from the damaged land (which has no power to hold you there), and let yourself out to play?
- Paraphrased from classroom teaching, Oxford, Summer 2023.