The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

Sermon

1 September 2024

The Reverend Canon Richard Ames-Lewis

Are you the sort of person who likes to abide by the rules, the obedient, compliant type, fearful of the consequences of a misstep or a misdemeanour? Or are you the sort of person who is at heart rebellious, who cannot be doing with rules and likes if possible to get around them? For instance, I have a grandson who is a totally charming boy but tell him that there is a rule he must observe, he will go out of his way to break it. He has a vivid imagination, he sees new ways of doing things and he cannot be bothered with the conventions of his elders.

Probably there is a bit of both in all of us – obedience to rules, balanced by a certain rebelliousness. But if you veer more towards being the rule-keeper than the rule-breaker, then I suspect you would have been quite at home under Moses in Old Testament Israel. We heard Moses say, in our first reading, “Give heed to the statutes and the ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live and occupy the land that the Lord is giving you. You must neither add anything to what I command, nor take anything away from it.” The whole basis of the Children of Israel being God’s chosen people and having possession of the Promised Land was that they were obedient and in a covenant with God. The Ten Commandments identified the chosen race, and the land went with it, the chosen land, the physical area in which the commandments were to be fulfilled. Do this and you shall live and multiply, and the land abundant in milk and honey will provide for all your needs. But it all depended on people being law-abiding, and the Old Testament is rich in stories of how this old covenant was broken, time after time, by those who forsook the way of God and turned aside to worship false gods.

Scroll forward to the time of Jesus and we find the politics of the commandments greatly developed. The Pharisees were by now the party of control and legalism. Over the centuries the original Ten Commandments had been refined, codified and made more prescriptive, and it was the Pharisaic party who headed up this rigour. Nowhere was this more evident than in the dietary laws. We heard in the passage from St Mark’s gospel this morning a detailed description of some of these. St Mark was clearly writing his gospel for gentiles unfamiliar with all these rules. “The Pharisees do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands … and there are many other traditions that they observe, like the washing of cups, pots and bronze kettles.” And we hear how the Pharisees put Jesus to the test, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”  And Jesus turns this round “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

In all the careful codification and observance of the laws of the elders, the pharisees have lost sight of God’s commandment and instead made a human tradition the ultimate authority.

And what is God’s commandment?  In the great summary quoted by Jesus himself: it is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength; and to love your neighbour as yourself. Its about Love, not Laws. And Jesus illustrates this by comparing the goodness of what we eat – nothing by going in can defile us – with the evil which comes forth from the human heart. We are defiled not by what we eat or whether our hands are clean, but by how we behave, how we speak, act, abuse others, deceive others, kill others, indeed break all the Ten Commandments. Jesus’s words remind us that our hearts are full of evil and cry out for the forgiveness which flows only from the love of God.

Jesus’s mission, then, was to bring the love of God to the poor, the sick, the maimed, the downtrodden. To reassure the orphan and the widow, the excluded and the vulnerable, that no one was outside God’s love, and that the laws of religion were a human construct obscuring God in favour of maintaining the institution. No wonder he cried out, “Woe to you, Pharisees, you clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness… you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God.” No one is outside the scope of God’s love. St Paul puts it another way, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

We have seen that it is in the nature of institutions, as they grow and evolve, to develop strategies for self-preservation, especially when there is flagrant injustice. In recent times we have seen this in the Post Office over the Horizon scandal, the NHS over the infected blood scandal, the building industry over the Grenfell tower fire and the BBC over the Huw Edwards scandal. But where it comes to religion, there is a particular problem. Received faith tradition can be used as a cover-up for justice. This is as true for the Church of England in our own day as it was for Temple Judaism in the time of Jesus. So, for example, the imperative for safeguarding, keeping young children and vulnerable adults safe in our care, has for generations been covered up by an assumed virtue and goodness of those in authority – that ordination, or being a church officer, confers irreproachable moral virtue. Our church continues to struggle with the fall-out from this.

Then there is another equally pressing issue today: how to be a truly inclusive institution, as we Christians of varied sexual orientation enjoy sharing our faith and life together - a rainbow church. This issue must be addressed for the Church of England to serve effectively our newly emerging rainbow society. But this does not fit with the received tradition of our Church. Our traditional doctrine is that marriage between a man and a woman is the sole and proper place for sexual expression. So the current discernment process at our General Synod, going under the acronym LLF, Living in Love and Faith, has reached a point where a Service of Blessing for Same-Sex couples has been published. This is a means of welcoming couples of all kinds into Church of England fellowship. It is a compromise of course. It is not a marriage but resembles a marriage. For some it goes too far, and for others not nearly far enough. I am afraid that the division within our church on this issue is one of the reasons why the appointment of a new Bishop of Ely has been delayed.

But what does this say about God’s love? There’s a famous hymn which we often like to sing “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea” written in the middle of the 19th century by Frederick William Faber. It’s a wonderful exploration of God’s love. “The love of God”, he writes, “is broader than the measure of man’s mind.” Verse 4 goes

“But we make his love too narrow

by false limits of our own;

and we magnify his strictness

with a zeal he will not own.”