By Jim Taylor
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-18, 14-15, 21-23
I need to level with you – I didn’t want to preach this [waving paper document] sermon. Last Sunday, Rhonda talked about writing 14 pages of sermon, most of which she discarded. I can’t quite equal that, but I estimate that my three revisions probably added up to ten pages, single spaced. And then I woke up at 3:00 this morning, suddenly knowing that I couldn’t preach that sermon.
So, I’m going to tell you parts of my story this morning, in the hope that some of those parts will resonate with your own experience – and perhaps give you freedom to think in ways that you hadn’t considered before.
I should also say that this is not a theme I wanted to talk about. In a sense, I was forced into it by the passage from Mark that was just read. You remember, the disciples were eating some food that had not been ritually washed and prepared. And Jesus said, “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” Things like theft, or violence, or deceit, or selfishness.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard that text. Every time, it’s been presented as wisdom that cuts through the legalistic nit-picking of the Pharisees. But the simple fact is that what goes into you CAN harm you. Jesus was wrong. And I don’t think Jesus would say the same today. Because now he would know about germs and bacteria and viruses. If you ingest salmonella, it can hurt you. If you breathe the Covid virus, it can make you sick. Sometimes, very sick.
But the rest of the passage makes clear he was talking about more than food. There too, he would know that what goes into you CAN hurt you. The books you’ve read. The schools you attended. The subjects you studied. The people you associated with. The jobs you’ve worked at. The bosses you’ve endured.
They have all shaped who you are, and what you are. You become what you take into yourself. It stands to reason -- if you watch a steady diet of war movies, or porno flicks, they will affect you. If you hang out with Hell’s Angels, you’ll either take part in some kind of crime, or you’ll abet some kind of crime by keeping quiet… If you get your news from CBC, or Fox…or Bloomberg…
So, what do you do, when your own experience, your own learning, contradicts something that you read in the Bible? When, for example, you read that the earth has corners. Or that the sun stood still in the sky. Or that the value of pi – 3.1416 – is actually three. I’d love to see any engineer work with the biblical value of pi. I certainly wouldn’t trust in any machinery he designed.
Or that the world was created in seven days. When we know that the universe came into existence around 13.8 billion years ago, and our planet somewhere over 4 billion years ago.
My teenaged son took confirmation classes. He almost backed out. Because he said, “How can I say I believe stuff about how the earth was created that I know is not true?”
What do you do, when you encounter these contradictions? One possibility is to reject the Bible altogether – on the argument that if you can’t trust parts of it, you can’t trust any of it. Another possibility is to believe in the Bible and reject the world. That, unfortunately, seems to be the solution half the people in the U.S. have chosen.
I think there’s a third possibility. That the Bible invites us to use our intelligence. So that we can sort out what’s true, and what’s based on the culture and understanding of that time. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not throwing out the Bible.
The Bible is the story of one people’s search to understand the mind and the personality of God. They didn’t always get it right. Sometimes they got it dead wrong. But they kept trying.
Just as we should, too. We don’t have all the answers. But we need to keep trying too. And we need to keep questioning understandings that we have held for years, in case they’re holding us back, applying our intelligence and our knowledge to see the biblical stories in new ways.
For example, I grew up taking for granted that God lived in the sky. He was invisible. And he controlled everything. No one taught me about Golden Thrones or Pearly Gates – certainly not my father, who was both a minister and professor – I just absorbed those notions from the culture all around me.
God was up there, somewhere. Keeping a close watch on whatever went on down here. And handing out rewards and punishments. I don’t know when I started questioning those notions. Maybe around the time of my son’s death. That experience shocked me into discovering that I didn’t really believe a lot of things that I professed I believed.
So I don’t believe, anymore, that God takes sides. For one person, one football team, one nation, or even one species – us. I don’t believe that we can only gain God’s favour by knowing the right words to say, or belonging to the right church, or following the right rituals. I don’t believe, anymore, that God is a harsh judge, keeping a list and checking it twice.
What does that leave me with? Well, maybe a much more universal God. A God of ALL creation, Sometimes I think that God might be the gathered spirit of everything alive, from bacteria to great whales.
De-cluttering my ideas about God has set me free to see God in new and different ways. Which make me more deeply committed to God now than I ever was.
One of our favourite hymns, in this congregation, is the song about “colouring outside the lines.” You can’t colour outside the lines if you’re locked into one way of thinking about God, or Jesus, or the Bible, or the church, or anything else.
I found this children’s colouring book. There are pictures in it. The youngest kids just scribble all over the page. They don’t care what’s on the page. Later, we have to teach them how to colour inside the lines. To use those lines as a guide. But then, if you ever take any art classes, you’re encouraged to colour outside the lines. You didn’t have to depend on lines anymore, to show you what to colour.
It’s the same with our faith. We have to be able to set aside what you’ve taken for granted, to step outside the lines. To free ourselves from ideas and concepts that may be holding us back. That’s the message of one of our favourite hymns, Colouring Outside the Lines, by Gordon Light.
hope, I really hope, that by telling you my story, you too may feel freer to examine, and perhaps to de-clutter, some of your own beliefs and convictions. So that you too can colour outside the lines.
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