Trinity 13, 29 August 2021
Lectionary Readings for the Thirteenth Sunday of Trinity
Deuteronomy 4: 1-2, 6-9
So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you. You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!’ For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to him?
And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today? But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children.
Mark 7: 1–8, 14, 15, 21–23
Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe—-the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’ He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’ Then he called the crowd again and said to them, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.’ For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’
Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday of Trinity
What other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?
The people who asked this, the Jewish people, are our ancestors in the faith. Without their faith we would not have our faith. Their lived experience of the God they came to know through His mighty acts on their behalf—-their experience of that God—- was and is a relationship of intimate interaction: the people and their God.
Through knowing Him they came to know how to live.
So the commandments that taught them how to live were a great gift to them. The people of God became not dumb worshippers of a stone statue; they became living participants in a relationship of love and commitment and belonging. This covenant relationship was a living breathing faith, a requirement of which was to live it out. God asked them to live the commandments with all their heart and mind and spirit. And then, to teach it to their children. So that they, as a people, would never forget exactly what this precious gift is made up of:
Take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children.
So this whole sermon is the case for Sunday School!
Remember where that name, Sunday School, comes from: In the eighteenth century, as for centuries before, children worked alongside their parents in the fields six days a week. Sunday was the only day possible for anything besides hard labour, from dawn to dusk.
In eighteenth century England, formal education took place for the male children of the wealthy. Families of wealth educated their children privately, at home, hiring tutors or governesses. Town-based middle class families could send their sons to grammar schools; daughters were left to learn what they could, usually from their mothers, the fortunate ones having recourse to their fathers' libraries. But for the children of farm workers and for the emerging thousands of child factory workers there was no place to go for this kind of education, or for any education at all.
The kind of life poor children led in that time is glimpsed by the fact that the 1819 Cotton Mills and Factories Act was an update: it stated that no children under the age of nine were to be employed and that children aged 9–16 years were limited to a maximum day of 16 hours.
The first Sunday school is recorded as opening in 1751 in St Mary's Church, Nottingham. Hannah Ball founded a school in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, in 1769. Robert Raikes, editor of The Gloucester Journal, vastly furthered this new cause beginning in 1781, recognising the terrible need of children living in the Gloucester slums. For him this was also, interested as he was in prison reform, a means of preventing children from being driven to take up crime. Raikes opened a school in the home of a woman named Mrs Meredith, operating it on a Sunday, the only day that the boys and girls could attend. Using the Bible as their textbook, the children learned to read and write.
By 1831 attendance at Sunday schools had grown to 1.2 million. As it wasn’t until the Education Act of 1870 that universal elementary education was legislated, Robert Raikes's schools are considered the forerunners of the state education system in England.
Good for the churches! It is a good thing to call to mind: that for over 120 years it was in the churches that poor children had the chance for an education. Knowledge of the Bible has fallen out of fashion. Few people read the Bible as part of their education. It is only here, in our church, that we have that chance to hear, each week, the words of the gift of the tradition: the law, the prophets, the writings, the New Testament of Jesus. A rare and wonderful thing——something to be cherished!
When Jesus was asked about the laws of his ancestors, Matthew records him as saying Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
He also said By your fruits you shall know them. He was trying to say to his followers in that day and time that they were to honor the law not by empty observance but by taking to heart each commandment so that it resulted in right behaviour: kindness, compassion, justice, and peacemaking.
There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.
And so for us today, we honour the fullness of the gift we have been given by our acts and by our handing on of the tradition to our own children. God’s good intention for us is that in this gift of the knowledge of his unbroken covenant of faith with us, amid all the pain and suffering that being human entails, we know that He is still close to us—-we have this gift of his word to us to sustain us.
If we love God with all our heart and soul and mind and body, and if we set ourselves to know these words of the tradition, they will sustain us.
Others will look at us and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!
Terry Waite was the son of a village policeman in Styal, Cheshire. You can visit in Styal today the Quarry Bank Mill, now a National Trust property—-its cotton mill buildings chronicle a chapter of the Industrial Revolution in England, where children would walk twenty miles a day on the mill floor to do their work. Waite was educated at Stockton Heath County Secondary School; he was also educated as a chorister in his parish church. Waite was appointed a special envoy in 1980 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, given responsibility for the Archbishop's diplomatic affairs. After securing the release of missionaries detained in Iran after the Islamic revolution, Waite also extracted British hostages from Libya and even succeeded in releasing American hostages from Lebanon in 1986. A total of ten captives were released through Waite’s efforts before Shiite Muslims seized him during a return mission to Beirut on January 20, 1987. He was held in captivity for almost five years before he was finally released. For the first four years he was chained to the wall in solitary confinement. Waite later said that Unconsciously, those words, the words of the Prayer Book and the Psalms and the Bible stuck in my mind.
The words of the tradition we have inherited still sustain us. As for Terry Waite, so for those of us who will, if we have not already, find ourselves in places of darkness and seeming abandonment. If we know these words, if we read them and study them and hold them close, this God who has already made his covenant with us will make his presence known to us. God is present already; it is we who have not perceived Him. May we seize upon these precious words, that they go deep within us, and may we seize every moment to teach them to our children. So will our lives be shaped and formed by the living God who upholds us through all that may come! Amen.
The Revd Dana English
The Church of St. George’s, Campden Hill
London
August 29, 2021