Have We Washed Our Hands?
Good Morning Friends,
The scripture of the day lays out the Terms and Conditions that God laid down for the first couple in the Garden of Eden. So too today there are rules by which we must agree to abide to receive the benefits of belonging to a group. Often in this regard there are items we have never read or understand. We make the mistake that it is always something external when the real challenge is internal. We confuse the law and tradition…privilege and peace. Still, since it is the height of the Flu Season it makes one wonder about the relevance of today’s double-edged question for the church community. Have We Washed Our Hands?
Scripture: Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, “Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For 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 7:14-23 (NRSV)
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17 (NRSV)
Message: Friends, we are to grow in civility through the joy and pleasure of imitating God in the planting of gardens while realizing that not everything is meant to be consumed and not everything brings a lasting joy. For here while our hands are covered in dirt we learn that our Spirit might experience the great goodness of God. Of course, cleanliness and bathing have deep rooted history in Jewish Law and Tradition. Certainly, the aspect of hygienics played a very important role in Biblical times, as it does today and an increased relevance after the fall. But what we are reading, and I hope understanding is how the Pharisees had taken ceremonial tradition to the extreme of creating man-made laws and in so doing miss the joy of the Garden and fell in a way of missing the mark of joy in life. It would appear, that among their thinking was the element of control and dominance but the deeper message is not only about the distortions of culture in driving expected behavior but also in the realization that working the soil is not a point of defilement but part of the challenge of life. So today we put on our thinking caps in the hopes that our gardens of imagination grow productive in ways that not only bring satisfaction but also glorify God.
And So, living in fellowship with our Creator was the goal in the Garden of Eden and it is our hope today as well, but to have this relationship healthy the focus cannot be caught up in the outward signs of the law without an inward reality present of Christ’s good news. Regardless of what some people want you to think there are right and wrong things to do in this life…there is the Way of Christ and everything else.
Pray we humbly understand right from wrong in the context of a relationship with Christ. Pray we realize that the message of the Garden does not answer all the questions that the mind and soul of people can imagine but is a good place to begin. Pray we appreciate the awakening of the Spirit as we contemplate the role of gardens as an image of paradise that reveals to us a better understanding of life. Pray in the reality that it is a sin of civilization to rob people of the beauty and hope of heaven imagined in a walk with God in the Garden.
Pray we have an instinctive wonder about the creation stories and an appreciate of the imagination of people that captured their mystery in a way that is immortal. Pray we realize that growth cannot be forced by human desire and that the silent process of the divine revelation must be trusted. Pray we be humble realizing the God will make known the mysteries of life. Pray we differentiate between the law and tradition…between love and culture. Pray the gardens of our bodies be sanctified for a new creation.
Blessings,
John Lawson
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