Paradigm Shift - with a new beginning

Every time I prepare to preach my mind keeps bringing up memories of when I was a little girl growing up in the Catholic Church. I remember having a healthy curiosity concerning the things that the nuns and priests were teaching me and much to their consternation I was not afraid to question what they were teaching me.

For instance I was led to believe that the only people who were going to go to heaven were Catholics, and only the good ones at that. Oh sure there were exceptions such as babies who were not baptized that would go to limbo but everyone else was condemned to eternal damnation. Well that didn’t seem fair to me. At that time I was friends with a bunch of Baptist girls down the street and I had a hard time believing that were they not going to heaven because they weren’t Catholic. What about the people in other countries, you know the starving children in China that I heard about every time I tried to not eat my vegetables, these kids didn’t know about the Catholic faith, were they condemned as well.

As I grew up I became more uncomfortable with the differences between what I was taught and what I saw. Through careful study of the bible I was able to find out that Heaven was big enough for all people of faith and that God’s grace and God’s love was given to us freely as preached through his Son Jesus Christ. I experienced a paradigm shift that sustained my faith.
I do know that it seems unusual to use a modern word such as paradigm to preach on this morning’s texts.

A paradigm is set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual sense. Examples of paradigms are Watson and Crick’s way of modeling DNA using a double helix, the belief as expressed in our country’s declaration of independence that “All men are created equal.”, and even our culture’s notions of “what’s hot and what’s not” which seem to change by the minute. Basically paradigms are a set of beliefs, rules and systems that help us make sense of the world around us.

However occasionally we encounter things that make us question our deeply held belief systems. For instance Thomas Jefferson was the author who wrote the famous words, “All men are created equal” and yet he owned over 600 slaves. Many of us grew up with the protestant work ethic, the belief that if you work hard, you will move up in the world and be blessed with great prosperity, however in the midst of this recession, many of us who have worked hard are finding ourselves unemployed and wondering how we are going to make our house payments, feed our families, and pay our medical bills. When our belief systems don’t match with our reality we can become anxious, somewhat embarrassed and may even become stressed out.

This morning’s readings present us with two opposing viewpoints, the reading from the book of Deuteronomy has Moses urging the Hebrew people to observe God’s commandments diligently and closely not adding anything to them or taking away from them. Then we have the reading from the Gospel of Mark where Jesus calls the law into question. This morning we are invited to live in the tension.

In order to understand what these scriptures are saying we have to look at the history behind both of them. Who wrote the texts, what were they trying to say, who were they saying it to. The book of Deuteronomy contains the speeches that Moses gave to the Hebrews as they were about to enter into the Promised Land. We remember that Moses helped free the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. For two generations they wandered the desert because they were disobedient to God. After forty chaotic years of walking, running, packing, unpacking, celebrating, complaining, birthing, dying, obeying and rebelling, they had finally reached the end of the wilderness and they stood on the edge of the Promised Land. As they are about to cross the River Jordon Moses realized that the people needed to know once again what was expected of them according to the covenant that God made with them. The laws of the covenant were not only about making the Lord their God their only God, it was also about living in right relationship with each other and with God. To care for each other, giving special care to the widows, children and vulnerable folk in their community. To care for the land that they are about to enter.
In the covenant are laws on such things as how to worship, how to run their government, how to keep Sabbath, laws on marriage and adultery, even laws on purity which included what the people could eat and how they could eat it. These commandments served two purposes, first to give the Hebrews a way to glorify God, and second to give them a way to live with each other peaceably. Living according to the laws as set out by the covenant made the Hebrew people very different from the cultures that surrounded them not only in religious belief but in how they dressed, how they ate and whom they related to. At times the laws excluded others who were not Hebrew, anyone who ate the wrong foods or anyone who suffered from an illness that made them ritually impure.

Then we come to Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. Here was the son of God who seemed to not follow all of the commandments of the Covenant. Here was this young upstart who touched lepers, ate with sinners, and hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors. During the Sabbath Jesus would heal the sick and let his disciples pick grain from the fields. The Pharisees who were the rule-bearers of that time would confront Jesus every time they saw him break a rule to which Jesus would rebuke them. Now Jesus was not critical of the law. He understood that the law as a whole was good because it was all about loving God and loving one’s neighbor as oneself. What Jesus was criticizing was how some used the law to set up traditions and norms that excluded people not like them according to their interpretation of the law. Now the Pharisees were not bad people, contrary to popular belief. They were doing the best they could with the beliefs they had. They truly believed that they were glorifying God through their faithful following of the covenant. However, Jesus shows them a new way. He gives them a paradigm shift where God’s mercy and grace are not given because you followed the letter of the law but rather because you have faith. It’s not about your actions but rather what is in your heart that causes you to act the way you do.

Jesus and the disciples are being confronted by the Pharisees because they didn’t wash their hands before they ate. The people of that time had no concept of germs causing illness and so the defilement was more about ritual purity than it was about good hygiene. Jesus rebukes them, calling them hypocrites that “honors [God] with their lips, but their hearts are far from [God.]” (7: 6) He tells the crowds, “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” (7:15, 21). In this text he declares that all foods are clean and that the thing that we need to be most concerned about is what is in our hearts. It’s not about what we do, but why we do it.

We are living in an age of constantly shifting paradigms. Where at one time we were a church that didn’t believe in the ordination of women we now include and affirm a woman’s place in the ministry of the church. Where at one time our society believed that the slavery of African Americans was justified according to the law of scripture, we have now moved into believing that all people are created in the image of God and that all are deserving of freedom. In all these things, our forebears the Congregationalists stood on the cutting edge of these paradigmatic shifts. One of the founders of our Congregational tradition John Robinson states, “There is yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s Holy Word.” The Bible reveals the good news of God’s love and grace for all of God’s creation. It is the foundation of our faith. Even though it was written in different times from ours, it still speaks to us in our present world. We do not depend on past interpretations but we hear the scriptures with the expectation of new insights and God’s help for living today. We are of a faith tradition that takes the bible very seriously, and in doing so, we do not take it literally. It is because of our denomination’s willingness to embrace the paradigm shift that we were the first denomination to: experiment in democracy, stand against slavery, ordain an African American pastor, ordain a woman pastor, and ordain an openly gay pastor. We were the founders of the social gospel movement, which led members of our denomination participated in social justice movements such as civil rights and anti-poverty .

I would like to end my sermon with the words of The Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring. “’Yet more light and truth....’ Robinson's assertion continues to be the hallmark of UCC beliefs. That is why in our tradition we read the Bible, we study ancient creeds and catechisms, and we look to the wisdom and guidance of individuals and faith communities throughout history and across cultures—but it is also why we never let ourselves believe that we have read or heard all that God has to say, or all that God may be calling us to be and do.”[1]

May it be so.

Amen

[1] The Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring, “Yet More Light and Truth” sermon preached June 8, 2003 at Eden UCC Hayward, CA.(http://www.ucc.org/god-is-still-speaking/pdfs/Yet-more-light-and-truth.pdf)