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The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies

St. Martin’s

August 30, 2009

Proper 17 B

              I have a love/hate relationship with the movie “Chocolat.” It was released about ten years ago, a fable about a French village that lives pretty much under the control of one man, who rigidly controls both the sacred and the secular. He is meticulous about every religious observance, writes the young priest’s sermons for him, and is especially scrupulous about the Lenten fast.

              When Vianne, the single mother of a small daughter arrives in the village in Lent, she begins – in this strictest of church seasons – to open a chocolate shop. And not just any chocolate. Vianne’s chocolate recipes come from the ancient Aztecs and is infused with magic – it is delicious beyond anything the villages have ever experienced. Needless to say, Vianne and her way of life, and Comte Reynaud and his rigor and self-discipline are destined to conflict.

              The conflict between them essentially comes down to the question Jesus and the Pharisees debate. Where does  goodness come from? What is the relationship between what we believe and how we live? How do we know when we are living lives that are pleasing to God?

              “You abandon the commandment of God, and hold to human tradition,” says Jesus to the Pharisees. This is a very serious indictment because the Pharisees, pride themselves on their scrupulous observance of the Mosaic law. It is an indictment that has been made by both sides of the human sexuality debate that both the Episcopal and the Lutheran churches have wrestled with this summer. Biblical scholars and theologians from vastly different perspectives will each make the claim that their arguments truly adhere to divine revelation while their opponents are driven by human standards and ideologies.

              The Pharisees are concerned that Jesus and his disciples are not observing what the holiness code dictates about ritual hand washing. According to the religious authorities, Jesus and his followers have abandoned their religious tradition by eating with defiled hands. Jesus responds by quoting Isaiah, and then expressing his contempt for the way the Pharisees manipulate the tradition to serve their own purposes.

              The lectionary omits some verses that I think are essential to our understanding of what Jesus is talking about. Please bear with me while I read them. Jesus goes on to say, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’ …But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have from me is dedicated as an offering to God’, then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on.” In other words, the Pharisees justify withholding money that would have been used to support aging parents by claiming that it is dedicated for a sacred purpose.

              This is serious business. In that culture, parents were dependent on their children for support and would often transfer ownership of property to their children long before their deaths in order to ensure that support. But a son could say, “Sorry – I’ve promised what would have been used to keep you alive to God – there’s nothing left for you.” In reality, the dedicated offering wouldn’t be collected until after the son’s death, and until then, he was perfectly free to use it. This particular tradition cloaks the dishonoring of parents in the guise of honoring God – and Jesus makes clear his contempt for such hypocrisy.

Then having exposed the Pharisees’ poor moral reasoning, Jesus returns to the subject of ritual hand-washing. That ritual wasn’t about hygiene, but about purity – about symbolically cleansing oneself from anything that might have caused defilement. No, Jesus says, nothing from the outside can make you unclean. He tells his disciples that we are clean from the inside out, and not the other way around. The Pharisees spend all their energy on keeping the outside clean, while ignoring how their hearts have been defiled.

              But it’s way too easy to make fun of the Pharisees. It’s way too easy to pat ourselves on the back – and congratulate ourselves for not being small-minded and self-righteous. It’s way too easy to see ourselves as enlightened higher life forms who don’t need to be reminded about the difference between inner and outer purity.

              And that’s why I have a love/hate relationship with Chocolat. It is a wonderful fable, and beautifully filmed, and the chocolate looks so luscious and rich that I think you can gain weight from just one viewing. But where Chocolat makes me nervous is its suggestion that the world is still black and white, the poles are just reversed. The rigid moralist Reynaud has skeletons in his closet, and the stranger Vianne, with her mysterious past and fatherless daughter, is goodness personified.

              Guess who we, the audience is more likely to identify with. We would all, I think, prefer to believe that we are Viannes and not Reynauds. But the movie gives us a false, and a dangerous dichotomy. Whether we are rigid moralists or free-spirit rebels, we are most likely to locate all that is evil and threatening somewhere outside ourselves.

              We may think that, since we’re not obsessed with purity, we are delivered from the Pharisee’s complacency. But by letting ourselves off the hook, we make a mockery of Jesus’ teaching. “Look inside your own hearts,” he says, “That’s where the nasty stuff is.” And there is no person on this planet who doesn’t have something vile inside, who doesn’t now and then need a good scouring. The challenge is that only I can cleanse my heart, or offer it for God’s cleansing. No one else can do it for me – and perversely, the more someone points out how filthy my heart is, the more obstinately I’ll claim that it’s clean. We cannot clean others, however much we might long to give them a good scrubbing. We can only clean ourselves.

              Hypocrites, Jesus calls the Pharisees. The word comes from the ancient Greek theatre – hypocritons were masked actors, whose true facial expressions were always hidden. We are all masked – and the challenge of authentic Christian discipleship is to put off that mask and to try and make our insides and our outsides match. Once the mask is put aside, and we are brave enough to show our true selves, then we can begin to let God make us clean.

              The letter of James is also concerned with matching up the inside and the outside – about making connections between what we say we believe and how we behave with others. Authentic faith has to make a difference in how we live – we must be doers of the word, and not hearers only. And, as in the reading from Mark, that authentic faith flows from the inside out – from allowing God’s Word to be implanted in us, in order to bear good fruit. Goodness comes from God, and not from ourselves. Every generous act of giving – just like every perfect gift – originates and proceeds from God. Genuine faith and genuine discipleship both have their ground and their origin in the grace and goodness of God.

              Authentic faith flows from the inside out. We have nothing to fear from persons or things or situations outside our own selves. But it is wickedly easy to point fingers, mock and isolate those are different from us. I first experienced this as an adult when I got to seminary in Cambridge in 1979. The amount of baggage projected on to me because I was from the south was astonishing. I thought sometimes people expected me to fry up some possum, marry my cousin and organize a Klan meeting all before breakfast.

              I still regularly have conversations with people that believe north of the Mason-Dixon line dwells tolerance, intellect and serious inquiry while in the south one finds only ignorance and prejudice. It’s the same principle that Reynaud lives by in Chocolat. All the evil dwells outside ourselves, and we only have to keep ourselves separate from it.

              Garrison Keillor, in his Prairie Home Companion monologues, often talks about the sect of Plymouth Brethren he grew up in. They were very concerned about purity, about separating themselves from anything that might contaminate them, and sometimes families split apart over theological disputes. In Lake Woebegone Days, he describes a Sunday morning service held in his aunt’s house – with only a handful of those deemed pure enough to be acceptable for worship.

              “Why do your disciples eat with defiled hands?” Jesus, and those who walk with him, are not pure enough to meet the Pharisee’s standards. It is tempting to surround ourselves only with those who meet our standards; it is surely more comfortable. But I think Jesus calls us to be uncomfortable – to risk having our outsides brush up against people we don’t like or approve of in order to purify our insides. Again and again, in his teaching and in his manner of life, Jesus shows us that what’s outside cannot hurt us. The devil does his work inside, and all the hand-washing in the world won’t protect us from our own sin.

              At the end of Chocolat, Pere Henri, the young priest who has put up with Reynaud writing all his homilies, delivers his own Easter Sermon: He says: “I want to talk about Christ’s humanity, I mean how he lived his life on earth: his kindness, his tolerance. We must measure our goodness, not by what we don’t do, what we deny ourselves, what we resist, or who we exclude. Instead, we should measure ourselves by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.”

              As a Christian community, we should measure ourselves by what we embrace, what we create and who we include. This should be a place where we can all safely practice taking off our masks, where we can dare to be most fully and truly ourselves, where we can dare to offer our insides for cleansing, where we can bump up against people and ideas different from ours and know that we have nothing to be afraid of.

              Faith flows from the inside out. I want this to be a place where we are so nourished in faith, so grounded in love, that we will be authentic doers of the word as well as hearers.  I want this to be a community where faith and action bubble up together in our hearts, so that faith informs our action and our actions reflect our faith. I want this to be a community where unity overcomes estrangement, forgiveness heals guilt, and joy conquers despair.