Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 1, 2024

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Psalm 14
Mark 7:14–23

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Let’s start with this term defile. I don’t much like it. It feels nasty to me and judgmental. But it’s there in this passage from the Gospels we just heard, so let’s deal with it.

“Defile” isn’t the only choice available to English New Testament translators. Other versions of the Bible say something else like “pollute” or “contaminate in God’s sight.” But those aren’t that much better, and anyway most translations say “defile.”

You’ll understand me when I try to explain that the Bible wasn’t written in English but had to be translated into it. The Bible was written in two different languages, what we call the “Old Testament” in Hebrew and the “New Testament” — that is, the Gospels and the letters to the early churches — in Greek.

What was called “common” Greek was the written language during Jesus’ day and in the time of the early church, and so that’s the language in which the stories we just heard were written.

And in “common” Greek, the word translated into English as “defiled” is koine, which literally means “common.” Seriously, in “common” Greek, the word we hear as “defiled” is actually … “common.”

“Common” as in ordinary. Not holy, not set apart as sacred or special. Just common.

The reason I’m explaining all of this is so that we can understand what is actually at stake in our understanding of Jesus’ teaching here about the things that defile people. Because it’s not obvious; it’s not common sense.

Jesus summoned everyone to listen to him carefully and understand what he was saying, precisely because the meaning of it is not easy to understand. In fact, his first disciples told him it sounded to them like a kind of riddle.

Well, if it confused them, I don’t know that we’re in a much better position, 2000 years later, to understand it. But let’s try.  

Jesus is teaching about the things that can defile, that is, things that can render us “common” as opposed to “set apart” or even “holy.”

“Holy” is the preferred term of greeting, after all, in all these letters to the first Christians that make up the rest of the New Testament. We read it today as “saints” — “to the saints in Ephesus/Corinth/Rome,” etc., but the word is actually “holy ones.”

See, to choose to follow Jesus is to choose to be holy. Not by virtue of our own goodness (it doesn’t mean we think we’re better than everybody else), but by the goodness of God.

Washed in the waters of our baptism, we are called and set apart by God for a unique kind of life, a life of loving God and loving our neighbor. In faith, God gives us an identity we don’t create ourselves: child of God, beloved, holy.

And yet there are things that would trade that set-apart, God-given identity for a more common identity given to us by other things, things like our nationality or our race or our wealth or our family or our political affiliation. When we do that, our “holiness” is defiled.

We face a constant temptation to defile our identity by grounding it in something other than God’s grace. So did Jesus and his contemporaries. So did all of their ancestors. That is the overriding concern behind the Jewish law, the Torah, that has guided Jewish worship and practice all these years: the protection of a holy, God-given identity.

All of the references in the law to things that “defile,” all of those Old Testament passages in Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, seek to stake out a difference between the people of God and all the other peoples of the world.

So “Do not turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek them out, to be defiled by them.”

Other things that would defile the ancient Israelites were the practices of their neighbors when it came to worship and sexuality (those two were often intertwined), treatment of diseases like leprosy, funeral rites and contact with dead bodies. It can seem archaic and superstitious to us now, but behind it all is an urgent concern to be faithful to our identify as God’s called and set-apart people.

And, of course, one of the things that got a lot of attention was food, laws, and interpretations of laws related to which foods are considered clean and which ones will defile you if you eat them, not because there is something inherently “unclean” about them, but, again, because eating them will compromise who you are.

Well, Jesus says as clearly as can be said there are no “unclean foods.”

He reminds me of my high school baseball coach trying to get our attention at an unruly practice: “Alright, everybody listen up! I’m only going to say this once; after that it’s laps!”

“Listen to me,” Jesus says, “all of you, and understand.”

Jesus never does this. Nowhere else in the Gospels that I can find does Jesus tell people to listen to him, personally, like this. He summons people to “listen” all the time. But only here, for this message, does he make himself the object of the listening he’s calling for.

Listen. To. Me.

He sounds like the voice of wisdom in the biblical book of Proverbs: “And now, my child, listen to me, and do not depart from the words of my mouth.”

Or the voice of God through the prophet Isaiah: “Listen to me, my people, and give heed to me, my nation; for a teaching will go out from me, and my justice for a light to the peoples.”

“Listen to me … there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile.”

Listen to me … and understand: “whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile.”

This is so important, because food is at the center of community. And so if we regard certain foods as “unclean,” then what relationship will that have not only on the foods we will eat but also on the people we will eat with?

Jesus ate with people whose very presence at his table was offensive to those for whom food defiles, Gentiles and sinners of all kinds. So a table, a common, crowded table, is the center of our worship, since fellowship while eating with people across all these boundaries was so central to Jesus’ ministry.

Jesus could hardly have been more clear about it: foods don’t defile.

So all foods are clean. But that doesn’t mean that all foods are beneficial. Just because you can eat something doesn’t mean you should.

Because what we eat involves a lot more people than just us. And though there is no food that can “defile” — that is, nothing we eat can take away our God-given identity — that identity also comes with a commission, a calling to love our neighbors near and far.

And what we are eating will have a lot to do with how well we are loving our neighbor.

Take chocolate as an example. I love chocolate bars. Like, it’s a problem. And shortly after I moved to Chicago in 2016 I started seeing these new chocolate bars in my local grocery store. The were these big, brightly colored bricks, and they tasted amazing. (I’m not saying the brand name, because I don’t want to advertise, but I’ll tell you after the service if you ask me.)

Well, in August of 2019 my wife and daughter and I were on vacation when we stumbled across the factory that makes these chocolate bars. I was intrigued, so we went into their showroom and were immediately immersed in an interactive exhibit about the global cocoa trade.

This company was created to rid the cocoa industry of all forms of exploitation. I learned things that shocked me. In the two biggest cocoa producing countries, 1.56 million children in cocoa-growing households are involved in child labor; 30,000 people are victims of forced labor (“Tony’s Impact,” us.tonyschocolonely.com).

Eating Snickers or Reese’s won’t contaminate me in a religious sense, but it may contribute to the suffering of my neighbor. I should think about that.

For the earliest Christians who heard clearly Jesus’ declaration of the cleanliness of all foods, loving their neighbors who still felt bound to avoid certain foods meant they, too, should pass them up at the buffet.

In one of the letters to the church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul addressed the dispute about eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols: “Take care that [your] liberty does not somehow become a stumbling block.” If you cause your brother or sister in faith to violate their conscience, you are sinning against them, Paul wrote. “If food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat.”

Food doesn’t defile. But eating some foods can harm our neighbor, and our calling is to love our neighbor.

The truth about us is that, as it relates to the threat of our faith being defiled, the call is coming from inside the house.

The things that violate our religious identity are not things we eat or the people we eat with; they’re not the movies we watch or the music we listen to; they’re not the books we read or the TikTok’s we scroll through.

No, the things that defile us come from inside us, from the intentions of our hearts. That is the heart of the matter when it comes to protecting our identity as people claimed by the grace and the love of God. It’s our own hearts.

You may not relate to all of the “evil intentions” Jesus listed out here (I hope you don’t relate to all of them!), but we all recognize some of them. These are the things we scheme and do that compromise our integrity as children of God. And most of them concern our relationships with other people.

Envying my neighbor defiles me, because I can’t be faithful to my calling to love my neighbor while also resenting her for having things I think I deserve.

Slandering my neighbor defiles me because how can I be grounded in the truth of God’s love for me while also spreading lies about someone else?

Pride defiles me, because it’s impossible to love others and think I’m better than them at the same time.

Jesus calls us to look inward, to guard against our faith and our character being defiled by the desires we cultivate and the actions we orchestrate.

And so in our worship we take action to strengthen our hearts. We extend peace to one another, even if we’ve never met before. We share a common loaf and cup in communion. And we give.

Greed is on Jesus’ “vice list” of evil intentions that come out of our hearts. The opposite of greed is generosity. We fortify our hearts against the defiling potential of greed by giving, and that’s why our worship includes an offering every time we gather.

We give to feed people and to offer people clothing. We give to make space for music and beauty, to welcome everyone into the shelter of a generous community.

So let us give now and give generously.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church