BEING HUMAN—WHAT DO WE STAND ON?

KMONDAY AFTER THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT 2015

Today is Mark 7:1-13.

People follow this blog differently. Some “click on it” when they see it on Facebook or get an email. Others check each day. If you are in the latter category, then you know I missed a day…I missed Saturday. Fortunately, the way Bishop Wright has set out his study, he reads Mark sequentially Monday-Friday, so we have not lost the flow. But here is the thing. I said I was going to do something every day for Lent…and I didn’t. Things in life just got a little hectic. Not terribly bad things, but we had ice jams and roof leaks at the Cathedral, I started teaching a new course, some people got very ill, and a number of other demands…and so I did not post a blog for Saturday. It does bug me, the recovering “perfectionist.”

Remarkably it ties into today’s reading from Mark (you would think I planned it—but I am not that clever). In Mark the religious of the day are giving Jesus a hard time because his disciples are not following some prescribed religious rules…like they skipped a day in Lent. Now first off Jesus does not say these rules and customs and traditions are bad. He does however point out that somehow those who are complaining have lost the core, the foundation, of their faith. They, surrounded by the occupying Roman force, are so concerned to guard and protect their way, that they obsess over every little thing, all the while losing the big picture. They have become closed off, isolated, and are not sharing God and God’s love with others.

This need to keep the “big picture” in focus is front and center in my world these next few weeks. I teach a course called Finding your Foundation. I have done it for years. I try to help people explore what they believe, explaining what the church believes, hopefully without forcing those beliefs on them. I do this because I think so many of us have inherited a faith that we may not have had the time to think through, and we all are immersed in a world that promotes some ridiculous ideas about faith and religion…in summary, in this course (or perhaps better said conversation) I try to get us to all think…to think about our foundational beliefs.

I write all that not so much to promote this effort, but to share the intersection of my real life events that mirror Mark 7. On one hand I had a tradition, a good tradition called a Lenten Discipline—and I did not get it done and it bothered me. On the other hand I was leading a discussion about the various ways people understood God, and then we moved to the person of Jesus, and he radically challenges all those ideas—Jesus is the foundation. Which, at the end (or beginning) of the day, is a good thing to keep in focus.