First Reading: Isaiah 29:11-19
11The vision of all this has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed. When men give it to one who can read, saying, “Read this,” he says, “I cannot, for it is sealed.” 12And when they give the book to one who cannot read, saying, “Read this,” he says, “I cannot read.” 13And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men, 14therefore, behold, I will again do wonderful things with this people, with wonder upon wonder; and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.” 15Ah, you who hide deep from the Lord your counsel, whose deeds are in the dark, and who say, “Who sees us? Who knows us?” 16You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, “He did not make me”; or the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding”? 17Is it not yet a very little while until Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field, and the fruitful field shall be regarded as a forest? 18In that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see. 19The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the poor among mankind shall exult in the Holy One of Israel.
Psalm 14
1The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” All are corrupt and commit abominable acts; there is none who does any good. 2The Lord looks down from heaven upon us all, to see if there is any who is wise, if there is one who seeks after God. 3Everyone has proved faithless; all alike have turned bad; there is none who does good; no, not one. 4Have they no knowledge, all those evildoers who eat up my people like bread and do not call upon the Lord? 5See how they tremble with fear, because God is in the company of the righteous. 6Their aim is to confound the plans of the afflicted, but the Lord is their refuge. 7Oh, that Israel’s deliverance would come out of Zion! when the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice and Israel be glad.
Second Reading: Ephesians 5:22-33
22Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30because we are members of his body. 31“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
Gospel: Mark 7:1-13
1When the Pharisees gathered to {Jesus}, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, 2they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3(For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, 4and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.) 5And 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?” 6And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; 7in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ 8You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” 9And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! 10For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ 11But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God) — 12then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, 13thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”
Façades
We’ve all heard the axiom, “you can’t judge a book by its cover”; few things could be truer in our world today. With the maturation of technologies in all areas of manufacturing, in Computer-Generated Graphics, or CGI, and Artificial Intelligence, or AI, things aren’t always what they seem. I read a humorous story, allegedly true, about a zoo in Spain that decided to conduct an emergency drill.
The drill simulated how to handle a gorilla if it escaped from its enclosure. To make the drill more realistic, a zookeeper dressed up as a gorilla and took off loping through the zoo. Unfortunately, not everyone on staff was notified about the drill. Upon seeing a “gorilla” fleeing from its cage, one of the zoo veterinarians grabbed a tranquilizer gun and shot the employee in the leg. “Well,” he said, “it looked like a gorilla was escaping!” Things, including people, aren’t as they might appear.
If you’re a fan of the old western movies and TV shows you’ve seen them. A cowboy rides into a town along the dusty main street and all the buildings seem the same. Two story buildings with large flat fronts. Most of these buildings, if you were to look from the back, were single story small structures. However, the large façade fronts made them look large and grandiose. I know I’m making an obvious statement, but those western town buildings are not so different than the people we see on the streets every day.
On Tuesday morning, I was reading the local news when I came across the following story; it was titled, “It’s everybody”: Swinger lifestyle grows in popularity in North Carolina. According to Danielle, “Oh, it’s everybody. It’s everybody, they could be your friends, co-workers, or even your pastor at church.
Swingers tend to not talk about their lifestyle, Danielle said, but the underground movement is growing. By day, Lincolnton is your quintessential small southern town. Its Main Street is in constant motion, lined by colorful storefronts, with steeples casting shadows over everything in between. By night, there’s a secret shared with a trusted few, hidden between the walls of a local hotel. How many people in your life know that you do this? Queen City News asked Danielle. Well as far as the vanilla side of my life, none. None know this, she said.
Everybody has different reasons. For me and my husband, it was just not that we weren’t happy, it was more of a what excitement can we add. Swinging isn’t a new concept. It exploded in the U.S. during WWII. The term ‘wife-swapping’ was introduced to describe a non-monogamous lifestyle.
If I were to define lifestyle, I would say that you are walking into a group of people that you are probably going to find lifetime friends who have zero expectations and probably think you’re the hottest thing on earth. For the most part, group meetups aren’t random. They’re organized months in advance by a social club. Club organizers, in the Charlotte area, say they have over 1,500 members and the number is growing.
Talk about the people that are in the club, Queen City News asked the club organizer. [They are] people anywhere from 25 years old to 75 years old. You’ve got people that are looking for a place to go where they can totally dress the way they want to in a safe environment. Nobody is going to judge them and meet like friends, he said. To maintain anonymity, the club books up entire hotels. Couples from across the region show up, mingle, and then head their separate ways in the morning. Privacy is very key and that’s why we do the entire hotel, we won’t do an event unless it’s 100 percent private. And we do make guests sign waivers. So, you can’t break confidentiality, so if you do see your child’s fifth-grade teacher, you can’t say anything because you could ruin someone’s life. It’s very private, another organizer said. Despite the unspoken and written agreement to keep meet-ups private, swinging in North Carolina might be more popular than you think. Literally, I started with Google search years ago, Danielle said.
Researchers with Joy Love Dolls looked at Google Analytics to find that for every 100,000 North Carolinians, 498 people inquire about swinging each month. With a population of 10.7 million, that’s over 53,000 people showing at least some interest in the lifestyle. We’ve had preachers. We’ve had people who go to a party on Saturday night and go to church on Sunday. That works for them, Danielle said. As a society, monogamy has been ingrained in our culture. What breaks that mold for some couples? Queen City News asked Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Dr. Charryse Johnson.
According to Dr. Johnson, from what we know is research and what we hear from those that we work with is not feeling satisfied in monogamy, or wanting aspects of monogamy but also feeling like there’s other aspects of their lives that they’re missing out on. In her career, Dr. Johnson has worked with several couples actively swinging or thinking about it. Pleasure and belonging are probably two of the most known ideas behind why people bring out swinging, but there are a lot of dynamics to what makes people decide that is something that they want to do, she said.
From her experience, she says swinging has had a variety of impacts on couples that she has worked with. Some thrive with a deeper understanding of trust and respect, others fall apart. On an individual level, Dr. Johnson says like anything that involves pleasure, too much can become addicting. So, we have absolutely seen that there are individuals who can get into something like this and then really struggle to stop or struggle to find pleasure back into normalized situations because the level of pleasure that they are now experiencing, they don’t know how to get any other way, and that’s a challenge.
Still – she says the number one topic brought up in sessions with swinger clients is shame and the thought process of being exposed. I think your secrecy is people with normal jobs and normal lives, not wanting people to know their lifestyle because sadly that’s who judges, Danielle said. In the 6.5 years that Danielle has been a part of the lifestyle, she says she has gained more friendships than anything else.
The amount of trust and respect you have in your partner to be able to do this is immense and if you have an ounce of jealousy in you, that’s not going to work for you, but if you don’t and you can do this and have fun together, you just flourish, she said. Lincolnton, like many other small towns in the Carolinas, has its secrets. One is not in broad daylight, no longer hidden in the shadows. It’s enlightening, Danielle said.
But this is the opposite of what God through His prophet is saying. In verse 15 we read, “Woe to those who seek deep to hide their counsel far from the Lord, and their works are in the dark; they say, ‘Who sees us?’ and, ‘Who knows us?’ You turn this upside down.” And Jesus in Luke chapter 12 said, “For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, nor hidden that will not be known. Therefore, whatever you have spoken in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have spoken in the ear in inner rooms will be proclaimed on the housetops” (vs. 2-3). We all erect false fronts to hide what’s going on behind the curtain as it were.
We might do this for several reasons, it could be to spare someone’s feelings, it might be to keep the peace, or to hide sinful behavior. We might put up a false front because it’s the polite thing to do, or it could be to play a joke. There are many reasons to hide what’s going on, but, this morning, I’d like to focus on two. The first one is the obvious one, the one that Jesus and our prophet is warning against, putting up a false front to hide our sinful behavior. The key point in all of this is, we must remember that while we think we’re fooling others, God isn’t fooled. Remember the passage I just highlighted? Jesus warns, “For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, nor hidden that will not be known (Luke 12:2).
There’s an intriguing legend known as “The White Witch of Rosehall.” It’s a tale of a beautiful woman named Annie Palmer who used her unparalleled beauty to lure wealthy men to marry her. Each time Annie married someone, she found a way to convince him to add her to his will and then she would poison him. She continued to poison him even as she pretended to be nursing him back to health. The men would die, leaving her their estate. As a consequence, she became quite wealthy. In the end, however, she too was murdered by one of the workers on her plantation. She was known as the “white witch” because of her alluring appearance of virtue on the outside, but her thoroughly evil nature on the inside.
In our gospel lesson for today, the Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law had come from Jerusalem to “investigate” Jesus. On the outside, these Pharisees were the epitome of respectability. On the inside, however, they were full of fear and envy, and they were growing in their hatred for Jesus. They looked for any excuse to discredit Jesus and His followers.
On this particular day, they observed some of Jesus’ disciples eating food without first washing their hands. They used this occasion to take offense. Understand . . . this wasn’t about sanitation. It wasn’t about Health Department regulations that state an employee must wash their hands before returning to work. It wasn’t about preventing germs: they knew nothing about germs in those days. This was simply about maintaining a religious tradition. In fact, Mark even pauses to explain the Jewish practice of ceremonial washing.
“Unclean,” or the Greek word koinais, meant “ceremonially unwashed.” It was a technical term indicating that whatever was contaminated, according to Jewish religious rituals, was unfit to be called holy or devoted to God. This term could apply to things, practices, or people. The most common ritual cleansing was the washing of one’s hands before eating food. Again, to see the façade of the situation, this washing was simply pouring water over one’s hands, no soap, and drying them with a towel. It was what my mom used to call, “a dirty wash and a clean wipe.”
For a devout Jew to disregard this regulation was a sin. You and I simply see this as unsanitary behavior. In the Pharisees’ minds, Jesus’ disciples were indulging in sinful behavior. So, the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?” But Jesus knew what was really going on. Jesus knew the pride, jealousy, envy, and hatred that was in their hearts.
Jesus knew the Pharisees weren’t really concerned about whether His disciples washed their hands or not, as much as they were determined to find fault with His ministry. To this Jesus replies, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.” Jesus, of course, was correct in His assessment of the Pharisees.
The ceremonial laws regarding ritual cleansing were not Biblical. They were part of later traditions the rabbis used to comment on scripture. In truth, they were holding fast to human traditions rather than to God’s commands. But Jesus wasn’t interested in the Pharisees’ theology, but in their hypocrisy. It’s clear in this passage that what Jesus was focused on is inward integrity, not the outward façade. Jesus, quoting Isaiah, said, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” Sometimes we put up a façade to cover sinful or self-centered behavior, thinking that no one sees. What we need to remember is that we cannot hide for God. As God told the prophet Samuel, “man looks on the outward appearance, God looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). The second reason I want to highlight is, we sometimes put up a façade to hide the pain we feel inside.
Rev. Benjamin Shambaugh tells about a widowed woman he once knew who got engaged later in life. Her son, a successful businessman, flew in from the West Coast to have lunch with his mother’s fiancé in order to “check him out” and tell her what he thought. Her son’s feedback, of his soon to be stepfather, amounted to one sentence: “He’s a nice man but he needs new shoes.” Rev. Shambaugh says the observation about needing new shoes was insightful.
The man was going through a grief process following the death of his first wife. He wasn’t taking care of himself, as he should, and was suffering from low self-esteem. The shape of his shoes was the only outward sign that something painful was going on in his life. However, what his critic missed, says Rev. Shambaugh was the incredible heart the man had inside. Despite the shoes, this couple still got married and was very happy together. The man even got a new wardrobe in the process!
People put up facades for several reasons, and we must be very careful about judging people, young or old, by their appearance. Jesus isn’t concerned about what we show people, or our outward appearance, it’s our inner integrity that’s key. “These people honor me with their lips,” Jesus said, “but their hearts are far from me.” God sees the heart and knows what motivates us.
The façades we put up may fool those around us, but we cannot fool God. The Pharisees were concerned about whether the disciples washed their hands before eating. They weren’t concerned with the blind persons who was forced to beg for a scrap of bread each day. They refused to acknowledge that, because of Jesus, the lame could now walk, the lepers He healed were now clean, or Jairus’ daughter who was back from the dead. For them, it was all about appearances. In their pride, the façade was all that mattered. The question is, who do we think we’re fooling? Or do we, as God’s children look past the façade people put up to see the pain that’s going on behind the mask? Can we look beyond people’s outward appearance to their inner needs?
Lots of folks we encounter each day put up false fronts to cover what’s really going on, some for sinful reasons, some to hide the pain they’re experiencing. The warning, or good news, depending on the situation, is that God knows and sees. Jesus said, “For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, nor hidden that will not be known.” If we’re putting up a façade because the words of Jesus apply, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, we need to remember the warning, all that is hidden will be revealed, and what is hidden will be made known, then we need to ask for forgiveness and strive to make the outside look like what is within. However, if those we encounter have placed a façade to hide the pain inside, then we need to look past the façade and reach out to these people and show them God’s love and pray for them. The axiom is indeed correct, we cannot judge a book by its cover. It’s not what we show people, it’s what’s in our heart that matters to God.
Amen