The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 17B
In the early centuries of Christianity, the Desert Fathers and Mothers were Christians who went into the deserts of Egypt to pray. They felt that once Christianity had attained social and political power that Christianity had lost its way. These ancient Christians went out into the desert, far away from hierarchy and pomp and circumstance. They wanted to do battle with their inner demons, their inner thoughts.
The Desert Fathers and Mothers would pray all 150 psalms every day. They’d sit in their rooms, their cells, and they’d make handicrafts for sale and pray the psalms. The words of the Psalms would be almost the entirety of what they said in a given day. They didn’t live in communities like monasteries; they lived apart from one another, and came together for community prayer occasionally or to travel into town on Sundays to join the local community for Eucharist.
The Desert Fathers and Mothers treasured their Psalms and their silence. Speaking was a quick way to endanger your spirit, and so you sat in silence or you prayed the Psalms so that the words of Scripture were sown deep into your heart. Much later monastic communities like the Benedictines would enshrine silence and psalms into their rules of life. Speaking was a risky act; what you speak not only reveals something inside of you, but it also can speak into existence something less than helpful.
We get how speech can reveal what’s inside our hearts. That’s Jesus’ focus today in the Gospel reading. Jesus does not mince words or make them polite for us. He is very clear – it’s not what goes in the mouth that defiles us, it’s what goes out. It’s what we say. He uses earthy imagery to make his point clear. I love it so much that I made sure we did not use the shortened version of the Gospel reading today. We deserve to hear the whole thing. We’re Christians; what Jesus said and did is kind of the center of our faith.
In our Gospel reading, Jesus gets cranky with the religious authorities. Those authorities look at Jesus and his disciples: they don’t follow the right ritual way of washing that the religious authorities think the disciples should. And so Jesus is cranky. Ah, yes, a fine way of following tradition: fixating on the externals and making sure to scrutinize someone else carefully and judgmentally. Such judgmental attitudes are more than Jesus can stomach, so Jesus redirects attention to the heart of the matter.
Pay attention to what Jesus says: it is what we speak that defiles. The problem isn’t that there’s something impure inside our hearts. Jesus isn’t saying that we’re defiled already because of what’s in our hearts. Evil, or less-than-good intentions pop up inside us all the time. Jesus acknowledges that, and the Desert Fathers and Mothers were also quick to point that out. Stuff pops up. We have thoughts and feelings and desires all the time.
What do we do with thoughts, feelings, and desires that pop up? That’s the crucial step.
What thoughts do we focus our attention on? What feelings do we accept as uncomplicated truth? What desires do we work to fulfill?
Building in room between that thought, feeling, or desire popping up and us doing something with it is a key part of the spiritual journey. I don’t know about you, but I know that the distance between my brain and my mouth is awfully short. That thought? Maybe no one needs to hear it. That feeling? Maybe it’s a little too strong for the moment to do us much good.
Hence the Psalms and the silence. When silence, not speech, is the default, we make room to choose our speech more carefully. When we pray the Psalms and the rest of the Scriptures more, then those words might bubble up for us, to call us back to our spiritual center.
Why might we want more silence and Scripture in our lives? Because we want that space to choose our words. If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you know that it’s very, very easy to throw out there whatever thought or feeling that you have. People do it all the time. People get enflamed by something someone says – or something that they think the person is saying – and rage and righteous indignation pours forth. And once we are sure that our feeling, our thought, our opinion is perfect and right, then we double-down on it. We said it, we must be right!
Those snarky, hilarious words? They make us feel awfully good. It’s a good little rage, and how funny we are to boot! Those feelings of offense we nurture? It feels awfully pleasurable – now we have freedom to be mean and indignant. The internet has multiplied all the ways we can shorten that gap between our brains and our mouths, and so all those little impulses inside get amplified, and get echoed back to us. We become defiled by our own speech. Our minds speed up that brain circuit. We reward that part of our mind and heart that has those angry thoughts and feelings, and the parts of our mind and heart that might help us be reflective get shut down. After a while, someone stops reflecting on their own behavior – the rage feels right, feels justified. Everyone else is the problem, obviously! And thus we have defiled ourselves.
Or, to use an example from St Benedict, his number one sin in the monastery is grumbling. Complaining about something is one thing – if something actually needs to be fixed. But grumbling is that angry little delight that comes with complaining. It wants to complain; it wants to draw others into its complaining for the shared joy of sheer unhappiness. It’s never satisfied. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Grumbling is like the opposite of gratitude; grumbling crowds out gratitude. We can’t be thankful for what is good because we resent what we do not have. With such grumbling, we create a world around us in which nothing is good, nothing is done right, and we resent it, and we resent the people we blame for all those problems. And thus we have defiled ourselves with ungrateful speech.
Or to use the example given in our letter of James that we read today – we might talk about how righteous we are. How we know all the right opinions, speak all the right opinions, how we are the best, most right kind of Christian. We can talk about love in all the right ways, we can quote chapter and verse. We can proclaim how inclusive we are, how righteous we are. But is the perfect, best kind of Christian the one who talks the talk or the one who walks the way of Jesus?
But are we doers of the word? Is what we are doing reflective of what we believe? Is it reflective of the kind of person we want to be?
We cannot think our way into the kind of person we want to be. We cannot feel our way into the kind of person we want to be. As much as we might desire to be a certain kind of person, it’s what we do that slowly builds up that space for us to choose the way of Jesus Christ.
Silence and prayer build up that space for us. That snarky phrase – it may feel fun and right, but is it good? That grumbling – it may give us a reason why everything is terrible, but is it helpful? Is what I am thinking, what I am feeling lining up with what I know about Christ, and what do I want to do with it? Our brains will jump to the path we choose most often. We need more space to choose. The thoughts will pop up, the feelings and desires will pop up. We cannot control them. But we can choose what we will do, and silence and prayer help build up space for us to be able to choose. So notice: what thoughts come up, what feelings come up, what impulses come up from within. And what do you do with them? What will you choose to do with them? Will you choose to focus on what helps you to follow Jesus? Will you choose that way of speaking, or will you choose something else? Each moment is a choice that could draw you closer to Jesus’ way of thinking, feeling, speaking … if you choose to do so. Amen.