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SERMONS:
Pastor Peg posts her two most recent sermons on this page. If you are interested in reading more of her sermons you can go to pastorpeg.wordpress.com. Currently we are doing a sermon series about the scriptures where Jesus has or talks about dinner with people. Enjoy.
What is Clean or Unclean at Dinner?
November 17, 2024 26th Sunday of Pentecost
Philippians 2:1-8 Luke 11:37-44
I’m sure there were a few of you who thought when we read the Luke scripture, “My goodness, Jesus is being rude to his host. He’s not even washing his hands before he sits down to eat. And then he speaks very harshly to the man, implying that his profession, that of a Pharisee, involves being exploitive, judgmental, elitist and unholy.”
This isn’t the kind Jesus who says to people, “Your faith has made you well. Go in peace.” This is Jesus, the firebrand, who’s aggressively confronting someone. I don’t think this means that Jesus is a rude person, rather I think that he was deliberately acting this way to make a point to his host. You see, before this dinner, Jesus had cast out a demon from a person, which caused some people in the crowd to accuse him of being in league with the devil. This led to a discussion about holiness and combating evil, and the Pharisee, who had been in the crowd, asked him to dinner.
I’ve mentioned before that a Pharisee’s job was to live in a community and teach the law to ordinary people; answer people’s questions on how they could live a more holy life; and to keep people from being led astray by Gentile practices and influences. But since Pharisees were supposed to lead by example, showing the ordinary Jews how a holy life should be done, they had to live by very strict rules in their own lives.
There’s a funny Buddhist parable about following rules. A monastery had a cat. The cat was very useful because it caught mice, but it was a very friendly cat and during meditation time it would go into the temple and rub against the monks, or climb into their laps, wanting to be petted and played with. It was very distracting, so the monks decided that the job of the youngest monk would be to catch and leash the cat before the monks meditated. This became a habit, then a custom, then a rule of the monastic order. Then one day the cat died, and all of a sudden the monks went into a state of panic, because how could they meditate if they didn’t have a cat to catch and leash?
We can get so hung up on rules that we forget that the rules were made to help us live our lives well, not to restrict our lives to the point where we become robotic rule followers, unable to meet events in life as they come to us. Jesus, by deliberately being rude, is provoking a discussion to show how to balance living by the rules and being a compassionate person.
One of the strict rules that Pharisees observed was that they could only eat with people who maintained ritual purity. Jesus had performed an exorcism and had been in contact with a crowd of ordinary people, and the Pharisee could easily assume that some of them were sinners or unclean. When Jesus didn’t do the ritual washing to purify himself, his host was scandalized. Jesus starts his rebuke by observing that Pharisees wash the outside of a cup but leave the inside dirty; implying that just because the outside of a person looks clean, doesn’t mean that the inside of a person is clean. Looks can be deceiving; just because a person follows the rules of holiness, doesn’t mean that they have a holy heart.
One of Jesus’ main criticisms of Pharisees is that they give an outward show of demonstrating how holy they are by following rules to the letter, but they don’t try to do justice, love kindness, or walk humbly with God.
Jesus gives us three examples to prove his point – these are often called the three woes. The first woe is that they tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God. I looked this up and found out that one of the tithings that the community had to provide to a Pharisee was food. But apparently a lot of Pharisees insisted that the community provide them with expensive imported foods rather than just the simple foods that they grew in their gardens. This would be like me insisting that you pay me with caviar and champagne. Don’t get me wrong – caviar and champagne are nice on New Year’s Eve, but nobody needs them every day. Jesus is saying that it’s unjust to put burdens like that on a community – they should be happy to live simply with the food that they can receive from their neighbors
The second woe is that they love to have the seat of honor in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces. They are more concerned with their status and pride than they are with giving alms to people and being kind and helping the people around them. Also, in their public displays of status they aren’t being humble before God, rather they are setting themselves higher than others. Jesus is reminding them that God doesn’t care about your status, only how kind and compassionate you’ve been in your life.
The final woe says: For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without realizing it. I found out that graves had to be clearly marked so that people wouldn’t unwillingly defile themselves by coming into contact with them. In some areas you had to whitewash the stone outside a tomb to make sure that people didn’t disturb it. This wasn’t an obscure law that only Pharisees knew about – everyone knew about this one, out of respect for the dead and because of community health and safety. If you did inadvertently come in contact with a grave or dead body you became unclean and had to go through a purification ritual. By saying that the Pharisees are like unmarked graves, Jesus implies that people only see the outside and don’t realize the corruption that is inside them. And with their corruption and influence the Pharisees are making the people around them impure.
Now remember that Jesus traveled with a group of people who probably also came to the house for dinner. So, we can assume that not only were the Pharisee and his friends there but also several of the disciples. Jesus condemns the Pharisees for false piety and attention to minutia, while they neglect alms giving, yet they believe that they should always be praised by others, just because they’re Pharisees. But Jesus isn’t just talking to the Pharisees, he’s also speaking to his own disciples and warning them not to go down this path.
But rules are good for us. Look at the rule about marking graves – that’s very respectful and good for our health. Rules help us to live together in kindness and consideration. I really learned this lesson while I lived in Japan. Japan is a small nation, with a lot of people living very closely crowded to each other, and everyone lives by rules of incredible politeness. And this really helps everyone get along and keeps the stress levels down. I’m not against rules when they help, but what happens when you find yourself in a situation where a rule doesn’t help, but hinders you?
This is when we have to step out of blindly following a rule and apply critical thinking to it and the situation in front of us. And as Christians we can critique the rules by asking ourselves three things: First of all, will our actions promote justice or fairness in a situation? If not, how can we achieve justice and fairness? What will it take to make that happen?
Next, we ask: Does the action we’re going to take, to move us to justice and fairness, contain some kindness and compassion? Sometimes taking a new or unusual action is hard, but if you know that there is an act of compassion in it, often you, and people around you, can see that acting outside of the rule is the right thing to do and they’ll help you do it.
Finally, are you walking with God? And how do we know we’re doing that? When we move away from inflections of negativity and toward generous renewing actions. We’re leaving sin behind and walking into grace.
I read an interesting comment on this scripture which ended with a new set of beatitudes that were in contrast to the woes, and I would like to share them with you.
Blessed are you when you practice justice and the love of God, while you give to those in need, even from your smallest sources of income.
Blessed are you who love to give others the seats of honor, and who greet the lonely and overlooked people in the marketplace.
Blessed are you, for you are like unmarked springs and you bless others without even realizing it.
May we all live well with our rules but realize when we need to change them. And when we change our ways, may we do so to live with the love and grace of our Heavenly Parent, our Brother Jesus, and our Holy Sister Spirit, as we make our way into this world. Amen.
Dinner with Five Thousand
November 10, 2024 25th Sunday of Pentecost
Luke 9:10-17 Colossians 3:12-14
I have a joke book titled You Know You’re a United Methodist if. . . . One of the jokes is: You know you’re a United Methodist, if there is food at your church function. I found out that Methodists love to eat when I started to attend church council meetings as a lay member – someone always brought cookies! I know that doesn’t happen in every church, and I’m sure that other denominations have cookies at meetings, nice coffee hours, and delicious potlucks like we do. But I think there’s a food DNA built into Methodists because so many of our churches started as Home & Dinner churches, before the congregations started to build actual church buildings.
Even when a church built a “real” church building, often the meal tradition continued. The church in Sharon, CT, which was also in a farming community, historically had Sunday lunch instead of coffee hour. After all, if you were going to come all that way by horse and buggy you might as well bring a lunch to share with everyone before you went home. Lunch-or-dinner-church started to fade when the automobile became more common. If you think about it, our dinner-churches, Harpersfield and Conesville, are actually reviving the tradition. Dinner church can be a very cool way to fellowship, support each other, and grow a church. One parishioner told me, “Now that I’ve gotten used to dinner-church, I can’t imagine having church any other way.”
Sharing a meal is not only affirming, it’s Biblical. Jesus did a lot of preaching and connecting with people around meals. And sometimes it wasn’t even around a table but out in the wilderness, like when he fed those five-thousand people. In fact, it was probably more than five-thousand people, because the scripture is just counting men, not any of the women and children that accompanied them. So, let’s say that there were probably eight to ten-thousand people at a conservative estimate.
I want you to imagine that Jesus is outside the city of Bethsaida; the home-town of Peter, Andrew, and Phillip, located right at the top of the Sea of Galilee. It was a large town that Jesus and his disciples visited because of family connections and places they could stay. Bethsaida was a major fishing town, but it was surrounded to the north and east by land that was used for animal grazing. There were a lot of small hamlets in the area, where shepherds lived. And the geography suggests that there was probably a nice area outside of Bethsaida where people could gather and listen to Jesus.
This event takes place in the middle of Jesus’ ministry, after he’s started to get a reputation for preaching and healing, and he’s beginning to collect crowds. People have learned that Jesus is in the area; they’ve come out to hear him speak and have brought people for him to heal; and over the course of the day the crowd has grown to about five-thousand plus from all the people who have made their way to this spot.
But as the day starts to get on, the disciples say that Jesus should tell the people that they need to go home. They’re in a place where sheep and goats graze, and the only food around is what people might have brought. Instead of agreeing with them, Jesus tells his disciples that THEY should feed the people.
This might seem to be a surprising command, but a few months ago Jesus had sent the disciples out on their own missions to preach Jesus’ message. Jesus also gave them the authority to heal people; so, we can see that they had gotten to the point in their training that they were able to connect to and use the Holy Spirit. This also implies that they could tap into the divine power to do other miracles. This event takes place just after the disciples have returned and they’ve all told Jesus about their successes. So, Jesus isn’t throwing a curve ball at them – this is something that he believes they can do.
But the disciples don’t quite believe in their abilities yet. They are daunted by this command and reply, “We have no more than five loaves and two fish—unless we are to go and buy food for all these people.” Of course, the disciples don’t have the money to do that! They’re itinerant preachers who go from town to town and reply on the goodwill of people to feed them. But we shouldn’t judge the disciples too harshly. It’s hard to envision doing something that you’ve never imagined that you could even possibly do. Jesus was the miracle worker that the disciples looked up to. In another Gospel the disciples tell Jesus about all the people they healed, but I doubt any of them figured out how to multiply food.
So, Jesus decides that it’s time for a demonstration, both for the disciples and the people gathered. He has them organize people into groups of 50 and then takes the loaves and the fish, and blesses them, and breaks them. Then an amazing miracle happens. The food multiplies and all those people not only have a snack, they are filled – meaning that they ate enough to be full after a meal. And there were leftovers remaining.
Do you expect miracles from such a simple thing as a meal with someone?
Most of us think that miracles are big things that happen, like the Red Sea dividing, or flames coming down and spontaneously burning a sacrifice, or a blind man suddenly being able to see. We don’t usually associate miracles with regular daily occurrences, like eating a dinner. The disciples didn’t think having a meal was a cause for a miracle, they were all thinking of the normal way to get food; to buy it. But I think that Jesus wanted to show the people around him that miracles can occur in the daily mundane as well as in the occasional magnificent. We just need to look for them.
Also, when Jesus blessed and broke the bread, thanking God for the bread and dedicating it to God for His use and work, God was invited into the process. Yes, God does surprise us with miracles that we don’t expect; but remember that God wants to have a relationship with us. God wants to work and partner with us to build His kingdom here on earth.
That point of scripture really got me thinking. I’m always thanking God for things in my life, even ordinary things. Michael and I always say Grace before dinner; I often thank God for things that help me to do my work, like my computer; I always try to thank God for the people in our congregations who do so much work to keep our churches running. BUT – While I thank God for resources and help in my life, do I dedicate my actions to God?
My sermons and leading you all in worship, of course, I dedicate to God. But what about dedicating everydayactions and interactions that I have with people, to God?
For instance, I always try to smile and be friendly with checkout people. But what if, before I got to the front of the line, I thanked God for this person in my life, and asked God to bless them? What if, before I cleaned my study, I thanked God for the fact that I have a wonderful room to work in, and I dedicated the cleaning time to God? Not only the work I do in the room for the church, but the other stuff I do in the room? What would happen?
When Jesus fed the five-thousand, the food multiplied and everyone was fed. That is a lot of blessings that were handed out that day. So, if we extrapolate from that: If I thank God for my study, and dedicate my cleaning of the study to God, what would be multiplied? What miracle would happen? If I thanked God for the checkout person and asked God to bless them, what would be multiplied? What miracle would happen?
I don’t know the answer to those questions, because I haven’t tried those blessings and dedications, yet.
And I thought: Well, how could it hurt? I didn’t come up with a negative answer to that.
It would probably only help. I mean, I see my attitude and my life becoming much more positive. And that can only be a good thing. I might spread more love and positivity to other people; and that can only be a good thing. I don’t know if any miracles are going to come out of it – but that’s the thing about a miracle – it’s unexpected; you can hope for one, but you can’t plan for one. And you never know what miracle God has in mind for you.
And what would happen if every member, of our congregations, did this at least once, maybe more, a day? What would multiply in our lives? What blessings would happen to us? Maybe even a few miracles would appear around us.
This week I’m going to try what I call the Loaves and Fishes Challenge. I’m going to thank God for at least one mundane task a day, and I’m going to dedicate the task to His use. I’m not going to worry about how He’s going to use it; I’m just going to give it to Him. And I’m going to see what happens. And I challenge you to do the same in your lives.
Maybe noting will happen. Maybe we’ll just all end up feeling better about ourselves. But who knows: Maybe Jesus is waiting for us with blessings, and multiplications, and miracles just around the corner.