Getting Down to Basics
The First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
13th Sunday after Pentecost – August 30, 2009
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: James 1:17-27/Mark 7:1-, 14-15, 21-23]

He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

What we hear from Jesus in Mark’s Gospel and from James in his letter is a call to get down to the basics of what it means to be religious. When get at the core of our Judeo-Christian faith we find two essentials: love of God and love of neighbor. Thus, we can say that our faith is at once simple and elegant, but at the same time we can say that it is infinitely complex. Why? Because we don’t always get that it is supposed to be something that comes from the heart and then works outward. The great historian Arnold Toynbee said it well in his work An Historian’s Approach to Religion: “All religions start with a promise of universality but they deteriorate
into a concern for particularity.”

To put it another way, we soon discover that trying to live the basic faith is simply too difficult and so we seek to find ways to make it easier to manage. The result is that we develop check lists, great masses of Dos and Don’ts so that all we have to do is run down the check list and make sure that we’ve done all the Dos and avoided all the Don’ts and everything should be alright. The contemporary author Heidi Husted made this point: “Jesus takes issue with those whose spiritual focus is on the surface, who are concerned solely with outward actions. He is perturbed by those who have reduced religion to doing the ‘right things,’ to looking good, to maintaining outward appearances. He is repulsed by their superficial, skin-deep faith because, as C. F. D. Moule says, ‘Externals are worse than useless, unless the heart is in the right place.’” So, the core issue of getting down to basics is making sure that our hearts are in the right place.

That is the point, I believe, that both Jesus and James make – the core of our faith is not really twofold, it’s onefold: we love. We love God and because we love God we love our neighbor. So we could say, as Augustine did, that this whole religion thing is all about is “love God and do what you please.” So long as we remember what the demands of love are, which is not to be self-centered, which has been modeled for us in Jesus the Christ.

Jesus called the Pharisees and the scribes “hypocrites.” That’s a pretty harsh judgment, isn’t it? One commentator brought out the roots of the word. “Hypocrisy refers to the disconnect between the moral values and the standards that we espouse and those what we actually practice in our behavior; from the Greek roots (hypokrisis “acting out a theatrical role” and hypokristhenai “pretending”) we can see that hypocrisy is a negation of authentic life: it is life acted out to fool others, a role that we take on and pretend to be, that is not really us. It is a denial of our authentic self in favor of the fabricated persona that we wish to be.” [Loye Bradley Ashton]

When we hear the word ‘hypocrite’ we tend to think of someone who is insincere. However, Jesus isn’t accusing them of insincerity, but, in line with the definition above, he’s saying, “wait a minute, you’re pretending that your religion is one thing, when it’s something else.” He is calling them to come back to the center of what their faith was and not what they wanted to make it. The late Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, wrote about it in this way: “The “hypocrisy” for which Jesus renounced the Pharisees so trenchantly did not mean insincerity: the Pharisees were very sincere in their religion and in their moral conscientiousness. Rather was that hypocrisy the wearing of blinkers, the blinkers in which we can think we are serving Jesus without noticing some urgent aspect of our service of him—for instance, our attitudes and actions about race or poverty. … It is not being virtuous that makes a saint: the Pharisees were very virtuous, but they and their virtues needed conversion.” All the aspects of our lives, then, are to be focused on what God would have us do and how God would have us live and not how we want to live. The conversion Ramsey is talking about is that everyday turning of the self more and more toward God and God’s way of acting, which has been shown to us in Jesus Christ – not self-centered, but Other (big O) and other (little o) centered.

Jesus, and James, too, are really calling us to consider the basics. I suppose I could also have titled this, “the heart of the matter,” because the heart is central here. Jesus says that it is not about externals, about the Dos and Don’ts, but it is about where our hearts are focused. We start to add to the core of faith when we get distracted from the central, the core questions of relationship to God and to one another. If we are not focused on loving God and loving neighbor then it becomes quite easy for the heart to be the source of the evils. As Mark records, “For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” These are internals that defile us, not externals, all because of a misdirected heart.
Thus, the hypocrisy Jesus talked about is that which makes us less-than the authentic human beings we have been made and called by God to be and to become. The late twentieth century Swiss theologian Paul Tillich described three basic functions of life: self-integration, self-creativity and self-transformation. If we are to live authentically then we have to find our center and allow life to unfold from it outward in courage and freedom, that liberty that James talks about, and then return to that center nourished and deepened. What Jesus is telling the Pharisees is that their focus is off and that they are really engaging in disintegration by pretending that externals are really the core. We can engage in the same behaviors if we are not careful, not attentive to keeping to the core of our faith, living, as it were, at the heart of things.

All well and good, you say, but how do we go about doing it? Well, both Jews and Christians have been about this for centuries and what I see coming out of those who really lived the basics of faith is that they were not only self-integrated, they were also self-aware. They understood well that rules cannot replace revelation and that rules can’t be the source of relationship (though they can be helpful in how we live in relationship). Let me use a story that the great spiritual writer Martin Buber tells in the Tales of the Hasidim. He tells of how a rich man once came to the Koznitzer Maggid. “What are you in the habit of eating?” he asked. “I am modest in my demands,” the rich man replied. “Bread and salt, and a drink of water are all I need.” “What are you thinking of?” the rabbi reproved him. “You must eat roast meat and drink mead, like all rich people.” And he did not let the man go until he had promised to do as he said. Later, the Hasidim asked him the reason for this odd advice. “Not until he eats meat,” said the Maggid, “will he realize that the poor man needs bread. As long as he himself eats bread, he will think the poor man can live on stones.”

Sometimes we need a different perspective; we need to understand that life is often broader than we make it. This man set himself up as the model and he could not reach to those who most needed his help. If we get focused on rules, they can be like stones because they can destroy as well as build. We can hold people by threatening them with punishment for breaking the rules – and, most often, that will keep people from doing damage to each other. However, that is not the way we build real, meaningful relationships, nor will simply observing all the rules ever make someone Godlike – and that’s the goal here. The goal is to be godlike – godly, as our Puritan ancestors said.

When I look at the great spiritual writers across the Christian tradition – Roman Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox – there is always an emphasis upon taking the time to examine the conscience, making the appropriate adjustments and then getting on with the business of living toward God and toward others. There is, then, a certain genius to what has been called the “particular examen” or “examination of conscience.” It calls for us to simply step back and review how we are doing, to see if we’re living out the basics of loving God and loving neighbor.

As one Puritan layman, Oliver Heywood, wrote that his purpose in examining his conscience – and in his case writing his thoughts in a journal – were: “to compare my past and present state

and observe my proficiency in Christianity, to see whether I be better this year than the last, whether grace be stronger, corruptions weaker, my hart more soft, conscience more tender, wil more bowed, rectifyed, resolved, and my life more reformed.” [in David L. Jeffrey People of the Book, p. 277]. What I read there is the desire to be about the basics of growth in Christian life.

We have a tool that we can use to examine our conscience: our Church covenant. In very brief, very compact form there is the essence of what we’re to be about in loving God and loving our neighbor. It’s right there on the top of the worship order and each church member received a copy upon “owning” the covenant – and we have copies readily available. It’s all about how we go about living our faith. Let’s take just a moment, in conclusion, to go through this as an examination of conscience. Take a moment to center yourself, ask God to open mind and heart so that we might truly live as His child and then simply go through each of the clauses, asking ourselves how we have lived this out:

How have I been a follower of Jesus Christ, how have I committed myself to worship and to serve God, how have I grown in the in the knowledge and expression of my faith (how have I worked on growing and how has it shown in my life), how did I reach out with compassion to those in need, how did I treat each other with love and understanding, have I returned to God a portion of God's gifts. This gives us a marker as to where we are as we’re practicing our faith. It is very simple, very straightforward. Once we’ve asked ourselves these questions, and been honest in our answers, then we can turn to God and ask – help me! Help me to be your good servant.

If we are to live the basics of our faith then we are, as James reminds us to, “be doers of the word and not hearers only.” We honor God with our lives when we stay centered on what really matters – loving God and loving our neighbor. As I’ve said before, it’s about relationship – and that certainly is what Jesus, and James his follower, tell us. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then the proof of the faith is in the living. So, there’s only one thing I can tell you – and I tell myself as well – get on with the business of living. Live toward the Other and toward others. What you will find is that living in that way will draw you deeper and deeper into God’s life and you will discover more and more who you really are and how wonderfully indeed you are made.
Someone who lived well, Hildegard of Bingen, wrote this prayer that I invite you to pray with me:

Holy Spirit, giving life to all life, moving all creatures, root of all things,

washing them clean, wiping out their mistakes, healing their wounds, you are

our true life, luminous, wonderful, awakening the heart from its ancient sleep.

—Hildegard of Bingen, translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Awaken us…..Amen.