There are those who tell us that God only accepts those who they believe comply with their own understanding of the scriptures. They use their understanding to exclude, reject, and condemn anyone who is different from them, accusing others of being so sinful and so out of God’s will as to have absolutely no hope of ever having a relationship with God.
When I was growing up my family and church leaders kept warning me about other people who they perceived as evil: the Catholic and Orthodox majority of the population where we lived were constantly being referred to as non-Christian and therefore sinful. There were others: anyone who drank alcohol, anyone who danced, anyone who went to the movie theatre, unless it was to see a Disney cartoon movie. Even that was attacked if the movie had ‘magic’ in it as magic was seen as evil evidence of Satan’s presence even in a children’s cartoon.
As I grew up and entered adulthood I began to realize that some of those “evil folks” were actually pretty good people. Yes, they might have a drink or two when they were out with friends, or a beer when they were watching a movie or game on TV, but they weren’t all that different from me or my family in their thinking, feeling, how they lived and worked, or even in their worship and spiritual practices.
The fact of the matter was that I was living under the cloud of a modern day “Purity and Holiness” code that said if anyone acted in a certain way then they had to be evil, had to be out of God’s will, not just in this one thing they were doing, but in everything in their lives. The warning was that evil would sneak into my life anyway it could if I didn’t keep a spiritual fence around myself by refusing to do certain things, and making sure I did other things that were considered spiritual and by doing those things I would assure that I would stay in the good graces of God.
I grew up in a predominantly Catholic and Orthodox neighborhood. My fundamentalist church condemned every single one of them as sinful and non-Christian. Another group that was condemned by my spiritual leaders were gay and lesbian people. Now this was a big concern for me because I had known from at least age ten that I was gay, that I loved and wanted to be loved by other guys. I soon learned to keep that a secret because, according to my spiritual leaders, that meant I was extremely evil, so evil as to have no hope of ever going to heaven. One pastor, to my horror, as a young teen, said “Every single gay person is going to hell. No exceptions!” Was I that evil?
Thankfully I began to examine how I could have a relationship with God and still be gay. Was I truly so evil that God hated me and excluded me from God’s promises and presence? It didn’t make much sense to me because I knew God was present with me, living in and through me, helping me, encouraging me, and telling me that God loved me. Eventually I came to realize that God knew I was gay before I had known I was gay. Why? Because God created me that way and God pronounced me to be a part of God’s good creation. I was blessed! I was accepted! The Purity and Holiness codes created by men and women had nothing to do with me.
The last couple of weeks I’ve been preaching on the Gospel of Mark and how Jesus is confronting the Pharisees and religious lawyers of his time about their “Holiness and Purity Codes” and how they were using those codes against people that God loves. Jesus very clearly set aside the codes and deliberately cared for, healed, and welcomed into fellowship with him exactly those people that the Pharisees and religious lawyers thought were outside of God’s Love and acceptance.
In this week’s Lectionary (the scripture passages we read on Sundays) passage from Mark 7, Jesus heals the daughter of a Gentile woman and restores the ability to hear and speak to a Gentile man. These were pagan people that didn’t even know or understand the Jewish faith, may not have even known about God, but Jesus clearly demonstrates that they are loved by God and by him, he even allows the woman to touch him (unthinkable behavior) and touches the Gentile man in order to heal him (thus making himself unclean in both situations).
Who in your own life do you want to exclude, condemn, and reject as being outside of God’s love and acceptance. Come on, now, you know that you’ve got at least one person that drives you absolutely crazy and that you wouldn’t mind sending to hell for at least a few minutes.
Who in your life makes you feel unclean when you are around them? You know, those people that you can’t even stand to hear speaking, especially speaking to you. Who do you avoid? Who do you go out of your way to avoid? Have you made a list? You might be surprised by who you would put on that list.
The fact of the matter is that we will always have trouble living up to the example of Jesus by accepting other people as beloved by God. It’s not something we can achieve over night. It’s something we will always be working on until the day we die.
Interestingly enough, Jesus had the same problem, too. When the Gentile woman bowed down before him and grabbed at his feet to beg for healing for her epileptic daughter Jesus spoke in a riddle and told her that “the bread” was only for the ‘children’, that is, his own people, the Jews, and not for the ‘dogs’, a clear racial putdown of the Gentiles. The woman argued that ‘the dogs under the table eat the crumbs that the children drop.’ This is the only time in the Gospels that any person bested Jesus in an argument. Jesus agrees that she is right and he heals her daughter.
If even Jesus, who was raised in an isolationist culture that condemned and excluded all other peoples but Jews from God’s blessings, can learn to broaden his own understanding of who God loves and accepts, then I guess there is hope for you and me to learn the same lesson.
At least it is something to think about!
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