Pentecost 14B/Lectionary 22B
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
August 29, 2021
Ketchup on Your Hot Dog, and Other Sins Against God
I want you to know that I thought I went into it with eyes wide open. Marriage, I mean; Deb and I were married 41 years ago this weekend. I went into it with eyes wide open: everybody told me to expect that adjustment period when we’d decide who would do household tasks (taking out garbage and washing dishes), learn each other’s idiosyncrasies (not that I have any), deal with one another’s failings (again, not mine), and we would grow to enjoy one another’s differing gifts.
But nobody told me to expect serious disagreements over a hot dog.
The first time I watched her pour ketchup all over her hot dog I nearly gagged. “What are you doing? You’re ruining it. What kind of house were you raised in?; who puts ketchup on a hot dog?”
With her mouth full, Deb said, “Do you have a problem, that maybe we need to talk about?”
Well, yeah, I did; my problem was this: ketchup on your hot dog is just plain wrong. It is culinarily wrong. It is culturally wrong. It is morally wrong; a sacrilegious sin against God, if you really want to know.
She looked at me. “It’s a hot dog, Bob. It’s not Holy Communion.”
In the gospel lesson this morning we hear Jesus talk about the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, how they wanted people to obey minute rituals concerning lunch, and it all seems as silly to us as a matter of ketchup or mustard.
Some of the little, picky laws and observances had become burdensome. Worse, people identified those forms with true religion. I don’t blame them too much, because it’s truly hard not to do that. It’s easier to keep to the familiar forms and practices than it is to look deep within ourselves for faith and love and willingness to change. It’s easier to trust the forms we’ve always known, then it is to trust God alone.
I’ll bet nearly all of us closely equate our religious experience with certain forms, certain styles of music, certain types of prayers, certain manners of preaching. There have been times in my life when some forms were more helpful than others, and at those times I believed those forms were intrinsically better than others. Times when I found hymns sung around the campfire to be better, and times when I thought German chorales to be better, and times when I thought How Great Thou Art was a better choice. When I was ordained the opening hymn was the great Catholic hymn Holy God, We Praise Your Name. I picked it, because I knew that my grandmother who was Roman Catholic to her core and not so sure about this Lutheran pastor business, as soon as she heard the opening lines of the hymn she would trust that something good was happening here. It was a form of faith, that she could trust.
The forms of our religion might be the things we grew up with or the things that became meaningful to us somewhere along the way. In either case, they become deeply ingrained in our souls.
That’s a good thing. It’s good to know and appreciate what has meant something to us.
But it’s even better to keep in mind which practices of our faith are important to us, and what things are important to God. Because those two things might not be the same thing.
Jesus refers disparagingly to the traditions of the elders, human traditions, and your traditions. He speaks positively of the commandment of God and the word of God.
He doesn’t seem so much to be condemning the practice of ceremonial hand washing. That’s probably good news for us who have spent a year and a half now counting off twenty seconds with soap, and then sanitizing madly at every opportunity, right? No: instead, Jesus is challenging his listeners on something else — what’s more important: to be ceremonially clean, or to be able to eat? To be ceremonially clean, or to open yourself to be fed?
The point: God wants our hearts, not some mindless obedience to the rules of good behavior, fine though those rules might be. Once our hearts are in the right place – or, to put it in the words of our congregation president Don Beal: Once we’ve included Jesus in the conversation – then it is we can discuss the other rules and practices together.
This is a good thing for any community of faith, and for a community that is named Faith, to keep in mind when we face difficult, perhaps controversial decisions, decisions on which not everybody agrees about what’s best for our life together. Where does God want our hearts to be? Are we in the right place with Jesus? That’s the important thing, in our congregation life and in your own life. Once you’ve got that considered and figured out, then it is that we can discuss the other rules and practices, together.
When we stop for a minute to think about why we do things the way we do them, we need to remember what Jesus showed us: some things are weightier than others. Feeding people – feeding people literally, or for that matter spiritually – is more important than ceremony. Tradition is important – it is! – but relationships are even more to be treasured than tradition. Let’s figure out what the heavier commandments of God are, then, and concentrate on them.
All the other stuff? All the other stuff is not real food but just condiments; no more important than ketchup or mustard.