What Not to Wear

A Sermon on Mark 10:46-52

Last week, my colleague told us about one of his guilty pleasures, and this week, I’m going to tell you about one of mine… reality television. It started innocently enough, when an acquaintance of mine was chosen to compete as a geek on Beauty and the Geek, but now I watch it all, from Top Chef to America's Next Top Model. Normally I think of it as a waste of time with no relevance to anything at all, but this week, I was reading the gospel text and I found myself thinking of the show What Not to Wear. 

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a show where people nominate their fashion-blind friends and family for makeovers. They video their friend’s fashion faux pas, and then the hosts, Stacy and Clinton get to go through the subject’s wardrobe, making fun of their clothes and throwing away whatever they want before sending the subject out on a shopping spree to buy clothes that Stacy and Clinton deem more appropriate. In one episode I particularly remember, the woman they were featuring was in her mid-twenties, but she hadn’t changed her style since her early teenage years. She wore lots of little baby-doll t-shirts with slogans on them, and low-riding jeans … but the biggest problem was her “tail.” She had a furry purple tail with a little bell on the end of it, something you might wear if you were dressing as the Cheshire Cat for Halloween, and she safety-pinned it to the back belt loop of her jeans – and she wore it all the time. She thought that without it, she would fade into the background, but once Stacy and Clinton finally persuaded her to part with her tail and teen-aged clothing and start wearing clothing that was more flattering and age-appropriate and less, um, feline, she found that she was taken more seriously. She felt prepared to interview for a real job, a job she certainly wouldn’t have gotten with a tail pinned to her jeans. The thing that had gone wrong in her closet, and the closets of so many other subjects of What Not to Wear, is that her life had changed – she had grown up – but her clothes had stayed the same, and that just wasn’t working for her. 

Now, I don’t mean to glorify What Not to Wear. It’s deeply materialistic, and totally uncritical of our habit of judging people by their appearances; it sends the message that in order to be a valuable person, you need to dress as if you had a lot of money; it buys into and glorifies some of the aspects of our culture that we as Christians are called to reject. But in some ways, that girl and her tail reminds me of blind Bartimaeus. 

Bartimaeus, the text tells us, was a blind beggar in Jericho. Blindness was a lot more common in that time and place than it is in ours – it’s a dry and dusty part of the world, and in the harsh conditions, people’s eyes would become irritated, and then infected, and in a world without antibiotics, their sight would often be permanently lost. So historians suggest that there were many more blind people at Jesus’ time than there are in ours. And in a world without the adaptive technologies that are available to visually impaired people today, there were not many ways for blind people to make a living, so they would often become beggars. 

Bartimaeus was one of these blind beggars, and in our text for today, he is sitting by the road in Jericho when Jesus, his disciples, and a large crowd pass by. He hears that it is Jesus of Nazareth and cries out “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!” The surrounding crowd reprimands him for making a scene, but he shouts out until Jesus notices. Jesus tells the people to send Bartimaeus over, and as soon as he is called, Bartimaeus throws off his cloak. Why in the world does he throw off his cloak? That seems like a very odd thing to do, but it turns out that the cloak had a special significance in this time: the beggars of Jesus’ time wore cloaks because they could spread them out on the ground to catch coins that people tossed their way – it was not just their outer garment and their sleeping surface, but also where they collected their money. And so in a very real way, Bartimaeus’ cloak was a marker of the kind of life that he lived, the life of a blind beggar. But when Jesus calls him, Bartimaeus throws off the cloak, stands up, and goes to Jesus. “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks. “Let me see again,” Bartimaeus answers. “Go,” says Jesus, “Your faith has made you well.” And Bartimaeus’s sight is restored, but he doesn’t do what Jesus says.  He doesn’t go.  Instead, he begins to follow Jesus. 

I think that that is why he leaves the cloak behind him; because this is not only a story of healing, it is also a story of discipleship, a story of transformation. When Bartimaeus throws off his cloak, he is giving up the very thing he needs most for the kind of life that he has been living, a possession which is crucial for his life as a beggar. I think that what we see in this moment is Bartimaeus committing to a new life, a life of discipleship. He is ready to follow Jesus on the way, and in the new life he is called to, he isn’t going to be sitting by the road collecting coins.  There will be no time to sit by the road with his cloak spread out in front of him. In a way, he demonstrates more vision than a lot of the other would-be disciples we’ve heard about in the Gospel lessons of the last few weeks – unlike that wealthy young man who was told that he would have to give his money away and went away dejected, Bartimaeus sees that embracing a new life following Jesus means that some things have to change. He sees that the things that have been so necessary to his daily existence are not going to be important in the life he’s being called to. And so throws his cloak off, and he walks away.  He is about to be healed, but before he even regains his vision, he prepares himself for a life of discipleship – a life on the road – a life of following Jesus. 

It’s this kind of wisdom that is so lacking among those people on What Not to Wear. Unlike Bartimaeus, they insist on carrying their “cloaks” around with them – they don’t realize that the clothes that really worked for them before, the clothes that met their old needs, no longer fit into their new lives. Something has changed – they have grown up, they have changed jobs, they are heavier or lighter than they used to be – and unlike Bartimaeus, they have not noticed that the clothes that used to serve them well are now burdens and obstacles. A furry tail might be a fun accessory for a teenager, once in a while – it might communicate that she is quirky and funny and fun. It might help her to feel, in the difficult and judgmental world of high school, that she has something special about her.  It might help her to know that the judgments of the popular kids don’t need to mean anything to her, that she is not trying to please them. Maybe that tail helped that girl to have a sense of self in a time in her life where that was really difficult. But by the time Stacy and Clinton got to her, she was not a teenager any longer, that tail was no longer a cute accessory, and she had convinced herself that without the tail, she was nobody. And as critical as I am of the show’s obsession with external appearance, the tail that that woman wore every day needed to be thrown off, thrown away, left behind, in order for her to embrace her adult life. Like Bartimaeus’s cloak, it may have served a purpose in her past, but things had changed, and now it was no longer necessary, and because she hadn’t left it behind, it was standing in the way. 

Sometimes we have a Bartimaeus moment in our lives: God calls us to something new, and we have the chance to leap up and go, leaving the garments of our old lives behind us. Something has changed, and the things that were essential before are no longer what we want or need. Maybe taking an exciting new job means that we just can’t stay in the old apartment that we loved. Maybe there’s a change in our family – we start a new relationship, or have a child, and the routines and habits that used to structure our lives become inconvenient or impossible. Maybe changing careers or going back to school means having more happiness, but less money, and that calls us to re-examine our lifestyle and live more simply. Do you have a cloak that you might be called to throw off in order to follow a new call in your own life? Does this church? 

The history of our church tells us that we have done it before. In the 1960s, we saw the expense of maintaining a deteriorating building, and we threw off the cloak of our old building, following a call to become a “church without walls.” In the 1980s, we saw that our organizational structure was a giant bureaucracy with a multitude of committees and boards. This structure had worked well when we were a bigger church but it had become a burden for our small congregation of busy New Yorkers. We threw off our old by-laws to create a more streamlined system that would let us focus more on our mission and less on meetings. What cloak might we be called to throw off next? What part of our life as we know it might start to become a burden or a hindrance as we continue to discern God’s call for us in this time? 

Our commitment as Jesus followers leads us, as individuals and a community, to places we never would have expected, and sometimes calls us to leave behind the things that once seemed essential to us. I wonder, once Bartimaeus regained his vision, whether he looked back at his cloak before leaving it behind – I know that I would have – I would have been tempted to go back for it, to insist that I might need it, like that woman who was sure that she needed to keep her furry tail. But the wisdom of Bartimaeus reminds me that sometimes the things that seemed most important are the very things we’re called away from.  Bartimaeus reminds me that sometimes following Jesus means that we can’t take the trappings of our past with us.  And sometimes for us as for Bartimaeus, the story of our healing and the story of our discipleship are one and the same.

Safety Second

A Sermon on Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

“Safety second!”

That’s what my friends and I would say to each other in seminary. “Hey, I just got this bike… do you think I’m fine to bicycle through Times Square at rush hour?” “Safety second!” “Wait, how does this grill work again? Am I supposed to use lighter fluid?” “Be careful! Safety second!”

It wasn’t a great joke – we were seminary students, not comedians – but the joke was based on the unstated but implied priority, “God first.” Whenever we heard someone who wasn’t in on the joke say “safety first,” we got a kick out of correcting them. “Safety first!” “No, safety second.” Unveiling the “God first” punch line was especially fun if we were talking to a seminary professor or a field education supervisor.

So imagine my joy when my eight-year-old stepson, staying with his dad and me for the month of July, put on his helmet before a scooter ride and remarked, “Safety first.” I taught him the “safety second” joke, and he had a great time sharing it with everyone from my colleague the senior pastor to his vacation bible camp leaders to strangers on the subway. He had some questions about whether God and safety ever actually conflict with each other – whether it is ever actually necessary to choose between “God first” and “safety second.” My stepson enjoys stories of heroes and martyrs who do actually choose God over safety, but we noticed that in our everyday lives, “God first” and “safety second” usually coexist with little tension.

Our Gospel text for today raises questions of what it means to put God first, even as Jesus, in his encounter with the scribes and Pharisees, puts safety second. Our cycle of readings is taking us, step by step, through the life of Jesus as told in the Gospel according to Mark; the last few weeks included a brief detour into the Gospel of John to hear several lessons about Jesus as Living Bread. This week, we return from the Living Bread to the more mundane type of bread, as we find ourselves with Jesus and the disciples eating a meal in the land of Gennesaret, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. And around them are Pharisees and scribes who have come from Jerusalem.

Until I traveled in Israel, I didn’t completely understand the significance of the place names in the Gospels. In particular, traveling in Israel gave me the opportunity to grasp the contrast between the Galilee, where Jesus grew up and began his ministry, and Jerusalem, where he spent his last days and was crucified. The Galilee is a region in the northern part of contemporary Israel, named for its body of water, the Sea of Galilee, which is actually a large-ish lake. To give you a bit of a sense, bicycling around the Sea of Galilee is a popular tourist activity, which takes about a day. To this day, the Galilee is a rural area, with rolling hills and lots of agricultural fields and pastures. Nazareth, the town in the Galilee region where Jesus grew up, is definitely a town, but not a big one, with a couple of bustling streets and a small market.

Jerusalem, by way of contrast, is definitively urban, and was in Jesus’ time as well. The city’s boundaries have expanded since New Testament days, but the center remains similar, a labyrinth of stone streets in a covered market where you could -- and I did -- get lost for hours. As it was in Jesus’ time, it remains a center both of religious observance and of religious and political tension. It is that religious and political tension that will lead to Jesus’ crucifixion, and so when these Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem appear in the bucolic hills of the Galilee, the fact that they have come from Jerusalem is much more than a little geographical tidbit. It is a warning sign that Jesus is starting to get the attention of the religious authorities, and not in a good way.

As soon as these scribes and Pharisees appear on the scene, they have a pointed question, a veiled accusation, for Jesus regarding the disciples, who are eating the meal with unwashed hands. To twenty-first century listeners, people in an age where the existence of germs is widely known, and the sources of germs are widely understood, eating with dirty hands sounds mostly like a safety and hygiene issue. It is a bad idea, but not for the same reasons that the scribes and Pharisees would have considered it unacceptable.

 The Pharisees were members of a religious movement within Judaism, a movement which we honestly don’t know much about. There was a lot of tension between the early Christian tradition and the Pharisees, because both were newish religious movements within Judaism that were open to everyday people, not just the religious elite. The tension between the two movements means that early Christian documents are not considered to be particularly objective, and few other documents mention the Pharisees, so it’s hard to know much about them for sure. The scribes, however, we do know about – they would have been scholarly members of the religious elite. When Jesus attacks them with an accusation of “honoring God with their lips” but not their hearts, he is attacking people who have a lot of power and influence – pretty clearly putting safety second.

For the Pharisees and scribes, failing to wash one’s hands before eating would have been a religious violation: much of Jewish religious practice at the time focused on ritual purity and impurity, and early Christian sources seem to suggest this was a particularly true for the Pharisees. Ritual purity is not about germs and hygiene; it is a different kind of thing entirely – a fact which is illuminated by the verb Mark uses to describe the ritual washing of cups, pots, and kettles: baptizo, to baptize. It is not so much about making things clean of dirt and debris as it is about making things clean in the eyes of God. Observing ritual purity regulations, for the scribes and Pharisees, was a matter of putting God first in one’s daily life and actions; they are scandalized by the disciples’ failure to observe ritual hand-washing practices.

If we don’t pay careful attention, stories like this one can sound like indictments of Judaism and the Jewish tradition, at least as it was practiced at the time. It is easy to hear that tired old theme of Jesus freeing us from the onerous and arbitrary restrictions of the law. But that’s not what this text is saying, or what Jesus is doing. The Gospel accounts make it clear that Jesus knows the law; he quotes the Old Testament with ease, and interprets it with authority. And he knows that there is no religious law or that mandates the washing of hands before meals. That tradition is an old custom by this time, but not part of the Mosaic law. Jesus quotes Isaiah to the scribes and Pharisees, saying that they are, in the words of Isaiah, “teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

The hand-washing tradition is a fine religious observance, I would say also a fine hygienic practice (although ritual washing, like baptism, generally involved a sprinkling of water rather than a good scrub with soap). However, this religious custom that had originated as a way of practicing faith had come to be used as a way of judging, criticizing, and categorizing other people. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus names and rejects many, many religious and social systems that were used to label, demean, and exclude, from ritual washing to temple donations to leprosy. And in many cases, these systems were deeply tied to socioeconomic status: the wealthy and well-born are in, the poor are out.

Our society, too, has a fair number of practices and customs that separate people from one another. We know a few things about labeling and judging. Probably most of us have been on both sides of that coin. From teenage obsession over having the “right” brand of jeans or shoes to the subtle nuances of business attire, our clothing often serves to communicate identity and social status; whether we or not we judge the apparel of others, we are often sized up based on our clothing. The ways we use language, too, whether it’s oral or written, can mark us as younger or older, more or less educated, “from here” or “not from here” in ways that can be used to reinforce racism and xenophobia, sexism, ageism, and class discrimination.

These norms, practices, and customs, from how we speak to what we eat to how we spend our time, sometimes serve to separate “us” from “them,” and to reinforce notions of hierarchy and superiority. This week, more people watched the television show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo than the Republican National Convention. “Honey Boo Boo,” for those not in the know, is a seven-year-old pageant princess from a family that proudly identifies as “red necks.” Their outrageous antics have earned them their own spin-off from the show where they first appeared, Toddlers and Tiaras. The television show has been criticized for the way it portrays this low-income, rural, mostly overweight family; one reviewer notes that the show attempts to make the Thompson family an object of scorn, “something to point and snicker at.” While the audience watches in horror and judgment at the family’s rural Southern culture, others judge the audience for tuning in to such garbage, while some turn up their noses at anyone who even has a television. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of scorn, judgment, and superiority both directed toward and coming from the Republican National Convention.

In the face of all of this, Jesus calls us to a different way, calls us away from judging and labeling, away from hierarchy and arrogance, away from “us” and “them.” Jesus declares that no outward customs – nothing we can see – can “defile,” or make a person less acceptable to God. Instead, he says, “it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” Friends, the only human heart we can really know is our own.  Since the only heart we can truly know is our own, we have no choice but to turn from judging the behavior of others to focusing on our own habits of mind or heart. We have no choice but to turn from the superficial differences which separate us to the love of God which unites us and calls us away from scorn and arrogance, and toward repentance and renewal.

That is precisely what we try to do, what we are invited to do, when we come to the communion table. We experience, for a moment, a table where all are welcome and no one is turned away, a table where there is no “us” and no “them.” We experience, for a moment, a meal where rich folks and poor folks and somewhere-in-the-middle folks receive the same bread and the same cup, gifts of love from the same God. We practice a ritual that has been practiced all over the world for centuries, with many kinds of bread and many different words and many different practices, all of which are good and acceptable to God, because all of them come from good intention, all come from the intention to put God first. And we experience the grace of God, who knows the intentions of our hearts, who invites us to cultivate the good and let go of the bad, and who welcomes us back to the table every time.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.