What Comes Out
Phish and the Pharisees
Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.
Mark 7:14-15
Today, I’m focusing on both the lectionary’s epistle reading from James 1:17-27 and the reading from Mark 7. In both, we hear what Jesus has to teach us about “what comes out.”
First, though, I feel compelled to defend the Pharisees a bit. They are often made into a punching bag foil of Jesus, and Jewish practices are often poorly and condescendingly understood and regurgitated by Christians. So I want to steelman them and focus on what is good about what they do. Here’s the scene:
Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.
(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash, and there are also many other traditions that they observe: the washing of cups and pots and bronze kettles and beds.)
So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders but eat with defiled hands?”
Jesus 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.”
Mark 7:1-8
Strong words from Jesus. Now, sometimes it’s a challenge to defend the Pharisees, but in this case, it’s maybe not that hard to see that; I mean, washing our hands and washing our produce before we eat is just a good idea. At the least, it’s good hygiene. Most of our Protestant mothers probably taught us this very same ritual.
But that’s not what was at the religious heart of the ritual, which was (to generalize) about preparing oneself for worship. If your hands defiled your food, you defiled your ability to be in the Temple in the presence of the Almighty. As it came to pass in the story above, Jesus says none of that says anything about how “clean” we really are, that the matter cleanliness is about our heart.
This is what James says in our reading, too, with the idea of works, that things that “come out” are signs of the state of our faith, the state of our heart, the state of our relationship with God:
For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.
But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act--they will be blessed in their doing.
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.
James 1:23-27
In some ways, this is what is at the long-standing infamous puzzle of the relationship works vs. faith: to make ourselves worthy of God by virtue of ritual handwashing? That’s trying to justify ourselves through our works. And yet our works do matter, for they are “what comes out,” and they are signs of something to pay attention to to gauge our spiritual health. Rather than ritual, Jesus wants us to pay attention to our speech and actions when we assess the state of our faith, that is, the state of our relationship to God’s grace.
What Goes In
For us in the Church, hand washing is probably not the hottest topic these days. Our elders haven’t brought it up at our session, at least. Nor is our diet probably foremost an issue of holiness for us these days. We typically don’t judge people on those forms of “what goes in.”
But there are plenty of other things we judge people’s holiness by what is going into them. Not just things like drugs and alcohol, but it seems especially the things people mentally consume. That dumb stuff your old friend from college gets sucked into on social media, the political pundits we find out our relative likes, the podcasts our enemies listen to, and far more. Believe it or not, it isn’t watching MSNBC or Fox News that defiles your political enemy.
But also, maybe we should be generous to these judgments in ourselves like we should be generous to the Pharisees. Jesus says what goes in does not defile us, but that doesn’t mean what goes in us doesn’t matter at all—it does matter what we consume (be it physical or informational), for what goes in us often has a relationship to what comes out of our heart. How do we square Jesus’ teaching with the sizable-enough-wisdom in “garbage in, garbage out”?
After all, many of us are in recovery from some addiction or another because we realized the thing we were taking had a huge negative impact on “what comes out” of us. And when Jesus and other epistles guard us against drunkenness and other excess (Luke 21:34), it’s not because wine defiles, but we can know that too much wine eventually does lead to drunkenness, too much sexual pleasure leads to sexual immorality, and too much muchness leads to all kinds of debauchery.
And so yes, the social media, the news, the types of junk we take in online and anywhere else matters because of how it interacts with the sin within us, impacting the sin that comes out.
It just doesn’t have the power over us to make us unworthy before God.
A Festival Story
As some of you know, we went to see my favorite band, Phish, at their big music festival a few weeks ago in Delaware. For four days, somewhere between forty and fifty thousand people were partying all day and all night. As for me, I’ve been sober for a while… or as I like to say, years ago I retired after an illustrious career of substance use. And I am sober for many reasons, including spiritual and religious ones. And for me it is a good thing just in the way that the Pharisees were probably like, yeah, we hear you Jesus, but washing our hands before we eat is a good thing.
But also like the Pharisees, anybody in recovery inevitably has to deal with some occasional spiritual pride. But spiritual pride’s amnesia forgets that it’s not drinking or drugs or anything in and of themselves that are evils. It’s how those things not just lead to bad actions but might prevent better ones from coming out; there are real opportunity costs to being a stoner (I would know). It’s how those things can have the power to amplify the sin that lives inside us and make that sin come out in nastier and nastier ways if we take it too much for granted that Christ abolished all those annoying rules (the common spiritual error that theological nerds call “antinomianism”).
Anyway, back to the festival. We could afford to go because we did a work program where, every morning afterward, we helped pick up trash from the grounds. If you ever need to see a good first-hand illustration of “what comes out” of the raw workings of humanity, well, you can’t do much better than 8 am after a Phish show. And so each morning, we were cleaning up a bunch of trash: food, glowsticks, joints, other weird UFOs from people’s pockets (Unidentifiable Floor Objects), and endless cigarette butts. I will tell you this ancient proverb, if you think you’ve picked up the last cigarette butt, look up; three more will appear. Over and over.
But of all the trash, nothing radicalized me like confetti.
I came to hiss the word. Confetti.
And every night before while I was at the concert, enjoying myself, the music would peak, and then I could only watch in horror from a distance when out of the crowd came huge explosions of streamers and glitter that made up those dreaded technicolor trash bombs. For each morning after, I would have to face it all, that which was shot out for five seconds of fun now matted and enmeshed deep within the grass in the hot Delaware sun. I promise these were way worse than they look:
Facing a dozen of these each morning did not engender the fruits of the spirit within me. This did not make me “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” or “bridle my tongue,” sorry James.
But it did teach me something about sin. Yes, I was being a bit melodramatic, but I’m serious now: one way sin works is that it often doesn’t cause you as many direct problems as it causes other people around you. Sometimes it takes a long time to realize sin’s full cost to you, and only well after you start appreciating the full impact your sin has on other people.
And with the sin of that cursed confetti, for each one person's impulsive fun for a fleeting thrill, it would take 20 people dripping sweat through sunscreen and towel neck-protectors bent over the same pile, painstakingly picking up each one. It added hours to all of our days.
Yet there’s another annoying spiritual problem for us when it’s our shift on life’s cleanup crew.
Maybe you haven’t cleaned up confetti at a festival, but I know everyone here has had to deal with and clean up the sin of someone else before. It’s exhausting. Infuriating. But here’s our spiritual dilemma, the same one James points to, and that’s the old Martha problem (of Mary and Martha fame). That inner Martha within us gets angrier and angrier at the work we feel called to do the holier than thou, “Christ, all this work, and these confetti-bags don’t care how hard it is on everyone else.” And each of those mornings, I would find myself in full-blown curmudgeon mode. I was mad!
Anger is something I still wrestle with. For a long time, I felt like it was never okay for me to be angry. Toxic forms of Christian and New Age culture seem to want to purge it out at all costs. So I couldn’t feel allowed to ever be angry—not on my behalf, not on behalf of others, never for any reason. Yet Jesus got angry many times in Scripture, not just in the Temple, but at his friends. Not just at the Pharisees, but as part of his being, part of his love that is like a mother hen (Matthew 23:37). All of us know that a mother's angry love on behalf of her children is sometimes a vital thing (and sometimes just an excuse for an abusive thing). In trying to find a balance, I’ve had to allow myself to lean into it sometimes as I've tried to learn to be more healthily angry when the situation serves. And indeed, there is absolutely such a thing as a healthy, moral anger wherever there is evil.
Yet when I was cleaning up, I found that anger easily became a fuel for self-righteousness, not true love or "loving anger." Each morning I cleaned up with a pharisaical pride not about my sobriety but about that at least I didn’t foist confetti on the world. I had so much pride I kinda forget that, well, okay… I was getting compensated to do this… nobody made me do this, nor was this some purely altruistic volunteer work. Saints aren’t saints if they’re getting paid to be saints.
Then, on the final day, a funny thing happened.
Phish had to move up the last show of the festival to early in the afternoon to avoid some bad storms. Now I wasn’t working to go to the show, I had to work during the show. Now I wasn’t cleaning up all distant and away from those filty confetti sinners. I was going to have to be in the midst of them. Worse, I had to wear an embarrassing identifiable purple t-shirt uniform, holding a trash bag with my latex gloves, a flashing signal that I couldn’t afford to have a nice luxurious time. The worst was that sometimes I would get an annoying, well-meaning but saccharine passer-by saying, “Thank you so much for your work.” At those comments, my pride that had made me forget I was getting paid turned around to a different face of pride: “I’m not a saint. I’m getting paid!”
But the coolest thing happened when the music started. You might think that this would be the worst part of it all because I couldn’t watch my favorite band and could only listen to them. Instead, I was gifted with a much more interesting experience than I had all festival. This time I had to walk through through the crowd with my trash bag while the music was flowing. And because the music was flowing, instead of being angry at all the junk people left, I found myself naturally wanting to dance and have a good time. I was bopping and jiving and gesturing at the parts of the songs you’re supposed to gesture and kinda forgot how hot it was. I even was having fun bending over to grab those nasty cigarettes in time with the music, offering up my trash bag to passersby to throw something in, a generous dancing trash jester who was just feeling it. And I found that this somehow spread, and people were having fun with me. It shifted any prideful power dynamics into floating along as a fellow sinner who has plenty to clean up, stuff that isn’t in the grass but is in the heart. In the moment I recalled in a flash a vigenette of hard times and how none of that mattered now.
Like all my other highs, this kind of high didn’t last forever either. When we drove home, I actually had a lot of mixed feelings and didn’t know if I would go back to another Phish festival. This bucket list item of my 20-year fandom was finally checked off. Did I need to do it again? The music was awesome, but there was a lot of hassle to the whole thing.
But when I look back at that last day of trash-dancing, I hear Jesus saying something like this: “Now isn’t that a better way?”
“Instead of the burden and weight of spiritual pride…what if in cleaning up the sin of the world, both the sin out there and the sin in here, what if instead of your way of doing, if you listened to the music of grace that I’m playing and danced with me? Yes, I want you to do good work out there, but….can you still have fun?”1
Yeah. I think so. Because whatever comes out of us today, what comes out of Jesus Christ is the music of Grace. And with all the other sinners cleaning up in the crowd with all the unpaid saints above and below, he is calling us to sing and dance along.
Wilson