Sermon from December 17, 2000
I have a lovely bookmarker that a woman in Oregon made for me. She took a flower from her garden and laminated it. I am not sure what kind of flower it is, but after all these years (more than a dozen now), it still has color: red, several shades of purple, white, and wheat. She then punched a tiny hole in one end and tied a golden thread through that hole to make the marker. I treasure it because it is pretty, personal, useful, and a reminder of the affection that exists between a pastor and his people.

All of which I am sure that kind lady intended. Today, I would like to make that bookmarker serve a purpose that I do not think she intended. For all its color and delicate detail that flower no longer has any life in it. The lamination sealed in something of its beauty by putting an artificial end to its natural life. What happened to that flower happens also to human experience.

If it is not too harsh a metaphor, I would say that human experience undergoes a kind of lamination, when we put that experience into words. The words then allow us to communicate with each other, but when we use the same words and expressions over and over, then the experience they express begins to lose its power as a laminated flower loses its natural life. We call such words and expressions clichés. They can become so trite that no one pays much attention to them any longer. Human communication suffers to the extent that happens.

Now, I deal with words all the time. I am not immune to using clichés, but I am attuned to their existence; not like a great poet, but at least enough to try something creative with them from time to time. Clichés, unlike my laminated flower, can be brought back to life. It is possible to take words that we have almost killed by overuse and inattention and pay attention to them and encourage the reality they express to come back to life. I will try to do that today with one of the more emotional words of our language, the word heart.

To begin with here is a random sampling of how we use that word in ordinary conversation, including some religious uses that you will be familiar with. "We need to have a heart to heart talk." "I left my heart in San Francisco." "He has no heart for it." "Have a heart, man!" "You need to ask Jesus to come into your heart." "Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart." "Give him your heart."

In each statement the word heart still has meaning, but its meaning has been dulled by overuse. It is on the way to becoming nothing more than a way to express approval or disapproval. I would like for us to do some renovation work on that word. Jesus gives us help in the text for today, Mark 7:14-23. 

The question that haunts Mark 5-8 asks of Jesus, "Who is this?" We can now give a provisional answer to that question. Jesus is a prophet, like the great prophets of Israel. He does the work of a prophet: He calms the storm, cleanses a demoniac, heals a woman by His touch, and raises a child from death. He also has the self-consciousness of a prophet. At his hometown of Nazareth He called Himself a prophet. The murder of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas reminds readers that being a prophet can be hazardous to your health.

Then, chapter six records the feeding of the 5,000 and Jesus' walking on the water. The miraculous feeding points to Jesus as an inexhaustible source of satisfaction for humanity's insatiable appetite for purpose and wholenss and God. Jesus may be a prophet, but He is more than any other prophet ever claimed to be. In chapter seven Jesus speaks like a prophet. In fact, He quoted the great Jewish prophet, Isaiah. That quotation sent a signal that Jesus was not doing anything new. He was acting in the tradition of the prophets of Israel. Isaiah had taken the people of his day to task for the same issues as Jesus.

The penetrating truth that Jesus and Isaiah preached and that proved inflammatory comes to us in the words of verse six: "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me." That statement expresses the temptation that cuts closes to every person on the face of the earth that ever thought about being religious. I do not mean hypocrisy. I mean making the religion suit me instead of subordinating my agenda to the will of God. T.S. Eliot put it this way: "Those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them," (Murder in the Cathedral).

That brings us to verses 14-15. Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him 'unclean' by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him 'unclean.'" Did you hear the first line? "Nothing outside a man can make him 'unclean' by going into him."

Remember, the Pharisees were talking about eating food with hands that were ceremonially unclean, that is, unwashed, and the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles and many other traditions of the elders. That was not about personal hygiene but about national devotion to God, about ways by which observant Jews might keep themselves pure in a pagan world. Jesus said in effect, "If taking medicine makes the illness worse, you need another remedy. Your traditions have not kept you from subordinating the will of God to your own purposes." Even worse, Jesus was about to say that their traditions did not even speak to the real problem. Jesus hinted at the real problem when He went on to say, "It is what comes out of a man that makes him 'unclean.'"

He hinted but did not explain. That set up the uncomfortable exchange that took place next in private. Verses 17-19: After he left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. They were not sure what His hints were all about. Jesus responded this way: "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean'? For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body."

Once again, Mark turns the spotlight on the disciples, and we have another, less than flattering evaluation of their performance. "Are you so dull?" A very old tradition says that the Gospel of Mark is based on the preaching of the Apostle Peter. We might say that the Gospel of Mark contains stories that Peter told on himself. If so, we might also say that Peter did not try to put a shine on his public image. The foibles and failures of the first disciples were there for all to see. We also need to remember that these unflattering stories circulated throughout many churches of the Roman Empire while Peter and the other disciples were still alive.

Stories like these can create an environment in which people feel more freedom to come to church, even though they come with a keen sense of personal failure. Have you never come to church and felt like a royal dunce, because the people around you seemed to know so much more than you will ever know? Then, blessed are you among the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. You are in the superb company of the apostles of the church to whom the Lord said, "Are you so dull?" "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Incidentally, did you notice how verse 19 ends? (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods 'clean.') That means that if you want to be a vegetarian, blessings on you – so long as you don't say that the rest of us have to be vegetarians as a duty to God. Before God we all have liberty to eat anything our stomach can endure and our conscience will allow, and we are to grant that liberty to each other. Of course, for Jesus to say that among His Jewish kinsmen seems unnecessarily inflammatory, unless of course He was driving at some deeper point.

We have one clue that He was doing just that. In verse 19 He said, "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean'? For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body." There is the word we have chosen to breathe life back into, if we can: heart. We need a simple working definition of this word. Here is is. Heart means our capacity to love.

Dirty hands and dirty pans may affect your stomach, but they do not touch your capacity to love. Jesus supports this idea by what He said next in verse 20. He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' In one deft statement Jesus turns attention away from external considerations like religious rituals and public opinion and puts it where the great prophets of Israel had always put it – on a person's mysterious and voracious capacity to love.

We misrepresent Judaism, when we say it is a religion of external rituals. We have simply not read the prophets. In Jeremiah 29:13, e.g., the Lord said, You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. Jesus lived and breathed the prophets and, if anything, applied them more radically to the people of God than anyone before or since. Just how radically He applied their emphasis on a person's mysterious capacity to love becomes clear in verses 21-23.

"For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.'" This is Jesus' angiogram of the human heart. It is not a pretty picture. Neither is it a complete picture. Such is the nature of diagnosis. When the cardiologist reads your angiogram, he is happy about the arteries that are flowing free and clear. It is the two that are 90% blocked that concern him and that he has to do something about.

Incidenctly, whatever Calvinists mean by the doctrine of total depravity, they have chosen a hideous way to express it. Holy Scripture never teaches that any person is as bad as bad can be, and I do not believe Calvinist theologians teach that. We must never become so cynical about people that we expect from them nothing but the evil Jesus exposed. Human nature even in its fallen state has a tender, humane side.

Jesus did not mention that side here, because His purpose was not to teach a complete doctrine of human nature. Instead, He was trying to show people then and now why external religious rituals like handwashing and potwashing have no power to deal with the human heart, where hot, passionate evils such as sexual immorality, adultery and murder jostle cold, calculating evils such as greed and envy.

Jesus' prophetic teaching also breathes life back into the overused word heart. For example, I spoke earlier about having a heart to heart talk with someone. Jesus' words ought to provide a reality check for the people having that talk. Both parties bring to the table a potential for deceit, slander and worse. It is not wise to pretend otherwise, either about the other person or about yourself. If anyone doubts it, he should simply ask those who negotiate difficult political dilemmas and police and therapists who mediate marriage disputes. Or remember how your best efforts to settle a dispute failed miserably.

A similar discomfort takes hold of us when we say, "Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart." When we read verses 21-23 we prefer to stick without outward appearances, and we wish God would too. When God takes a peek at the barking, baying, yapping, yelping voices at the center of our being, what does He find?

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil," (Gulag, II, 615).

So, how do we use what Jesus taught us here? First, don't be shocked when people you never expected behave in shocking ways. 1 Corinthians 10:12 warns us about how fragile all human virture is: If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall! Never underestimate the reality of evil in every human heart. More to the point, we need a way of responding to unexpected evil, when it breaks out among us.

It does not help if in shocked horror we distance ourselves from the person whose moral failures just became public. I think we distance ourselves partly because we don't know what to do and also partly because we think that getting close to the person implies approval of his behavior. There is a better way to think about this. The Body of Christ needs to be more like the human body that responds to infection by rushing extra aid to the site of the infection.

I suspect most people think church is for people who got their act cleaned up. Can we communicate to people that this church is not like that? This is a place for people who are hungry for God and whose life is not even what they are happy with, especially when they fail openly and embarrassingly. This is a place for people who are hungry for God and whose inconsistencies torment them even more than they bother people around them. This is a place for people who want forgiveness and patience while they slowly learn a new godly way of thinking and living. Aren't we all that way? Don't we all resonate with the great lines in George Herbert's poem in which God "drew nearer ... sweetly questioning, If I lack'd anything. A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here," (The Works of George Herbert, 188-189). Can we be a church of compassionate realists?

Second it is Christmas. Unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord, (Luke 2:11). And so we say, "You need to ask Jesus to come into your heart." With verses 21-23 before you, you need to say to yourself, "What am I doing, inviting Him into this mess? Why should I do that?" Why would He want to come? The only answer that makes any sense is that we invite Him into the mess that is our heearts so He can clean it up somehow.

When we see the possibilities of evil in our hearts, we ask, "What happened to my capacity to love?" Strictly speaking, nothing happened to our capacity to love. How much we love is not the issue, but what we love and how we love it. Here is the formula. Do I love God more than anything else, or do I love anything else more than God?

If I love anything else more than God, then something in Jesus' "lab report" identifies where that love will lead me. When I get there, I will find it hard to call it evil. How can something I love so much be evil? Or even if I grudgingly admit my evil, it will be hard to give it up, because that would mean I say no to something I love. Every time that happens, the greatest human gift – our capacity to love – has begun to work against our best interests. That is why we need a Savior.

To invite Jesus Christ into our hearts means to invite Him into our hearts to put our capacity to love in order. It begins with directing our deepest loyalty and affection to Jesus Himself, so that through Him we learn to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Then, the other loves will find their proper place. Only in this way does the salvation of the world come to reality.