"Dirty Hands, Clean Heart" by Rev. Jillian Hankamer

A sermon for Northminster Church

October 26, 2025

Mark 7: 1-13

                        Part of being related to a pastor is the potential for being sermon fodder at any time. I see this as a benefit, but you’ll have to ask Erich and my mom if they agree. Erich and I have an agreement that I always ask before including him in a sermon. My mom, on the other hand, is fair game for all the times she volunteered for things when I was growing up.

            My mom loves Christmas. Actually, both of my parents love Christmas, and no season of my childhood was more jam-packed with traditions than Christmas. From picking out our tree – always live – to decorating it while watching The Muppet Christmas Carol and drinking eggnog, to going caroling with church friends, the annual church cookie party and bonfire, the Christmas Eve service and gathering at Dr. Carol’s house, and Sister Schubert's rolls on Christmas morning, few things make me more sentimental than Christmas. So, of course, I assumed the traditions I grew up loving would continue into my adulthood. Of course, I assumed I would pass them along to my children. Then I realized I married an absolute Scrooge.

            To be fair, Erich doesn’t try to stop me from enjoying Christmas. He dutifully holds each tree I want to look at while picking the perfect one. He only complains a little when trying to get the tree straight in the stand gets tedious. He’s willing to help me get the lights on parts of the tree I can’t reach, so I don’t have to get out the stepstool. He’ll even sit through The Muppet Christmas Carol if I ask him to, but that’s it. He has no interest in decorating anything. If I suggest listening to Christmas music when we’re in the car together, he assumes the posture of an early Christian martyr. He absolutely refuses to watch White Christmas, go caroling, or make Christmas cookies. And while he’s a generous and thoughtful gift-giver, Erich is downright surly about being given gifts.

            But none of this worried me until we were living temporarily with Erich’s folks while I was on the job hunt. Around Christmas time, while helping my mother-in-law decorate the Christmas tree, we hung up soccer balls, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Tasmanian Devil. Beth told me they were Erich’s childhood favorites, and he could have them if he wanted them. About this time, Erich walked into the room, and she repeated the offer, to which his response was an eye roll so severe he must have been able to see his brain. In that moment, I began to fear for the development of Christmas traditions in the Hankamer household.

            Traditions can be wonderful things. They provide stability in times of upheaval, and they’re a way of defining identity and preserving history. Traditions bring with them stability, a sense of timelessness, and a connection to our ancestors. A tradition can be broad enough to define an entire ethnic group or specific enough for a family of 2.  Yes, traditions are wonderful things…until they control us. Until we pour our efforts into a tradition that no longer fits our needs. Until they become divisive or exclusive. Traditions are wonderful until our attitude becomes, “tradition at all costs” or “tradition before people,” which is what’s happening in the morning’s text from Mark.

            Though the details are different, this passage falls into a common gospel theme: Jesus questioning the religious leaders’ dedication to tradition and the religious leaders questioning Jesus' authority. In today’s story, we again find Pharisees and scribes coming all the way from Jerusalem to nitpick Jesus and his followers. Finding him a big enough threat to leave the holy city, these holy men gather around Jesus and notice that some of his followers are not washing their hands before they eat. Mark tells us parenthetically that not washing – “eating with defiled hands” – goes against the “tradition of the elders,” which also includes washing market purchases and cups, pots, and kettles.

            As modern readers, we can hear this story as simple good hygiene. We take the washing of hands, produce, pots, and pans for granted. We do these things every day. But keep in mind that Jesus and all those around him have no awareness of germs, cross-contamination, or the kinds of nasty bugs humans can carry around on their hands. The ritual cleanliness that’s a daily part of Jewish life includes removing dirt from the body, but it’s for the purposes of being as pure as possible before God, not necessarily for hygienic purposes. And though Jewish law about ritual cleanliness touched many parts of daily life, “there is no biblical law about washing hands before eating.” ^[1]

            What does exist is a requirement that “priests wash hands and feet before ministering at the altar,” and the priests understand this to extend to sacrificial meat eaten from the altar. But in their efforts to take Exodus 19:6 seriously, “You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation,” the priests were to argue that all Israelites “should be as holy as priests, and…consequently all Jews should wash their hands before eating.”^[2]

            So, this scorn the Pharisees and scribes direct at Jesus doesn’t come from his followers breaking a law, but from their disregard for a tradition the Pharisees hold dear. That they, as the religious elite, feel is important enough for all Jews to participate in. Commentator Douglas R.A. Hare points out that, “Mark is exaggerating in verse 3 when he suggests that all Jews obey this tradition of the Pharisees. There must have been many others in addition to Jesus and his disciples who ignored the pharisaic rule.” ^[3]

            In other words, Jesus and the disciples are behaving the way most people of the time behaved, but because they’re already in the Pharisees' crosshairs, this latest flouting of tradition can’t go uncommented upon. But as Dawn Ottoni Wilhelm so insightfully points out, when Jesus confronts the religious leaders, he doesn’t condemn or denounce their traditions. Instead, he responds as a deeply religious Jew, citing the prophet Isaiah and “denouncing the selfish interests of the scribes and Pharisees.” ^[4]

            Traditions are not the problem. The religious leaders' hearts are the problem because they’re far from God. In their sincere desire to be acceptable to God the Pharisees and scribes have lost sight of the fact that people are more than what’s visible from the outside. In working to uphold the Jews’ identity as the people of God, they’ve created traditions that don’t take humanity into account. The Pharisees and scribes excel at being religious practitioners, at the ins and outs of maintaining the religious system and complex. The religious leaders have been the keepers of the people’s identity and have ensured that they don’t get lost in the Roman power vacuum. But in their efforts to preserve, their attitude has become tradition before people.

            Which is what Jesus is trying to get them to see when he turns to the crowd and says, “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.” Or more simply, what makes a person unclean in the sight of God, “is what comes out of him or her. It is not what we eat but what we do that really counts with God.”^[5] And as Jesus makes clear in verse 22, humans don’t need anything added from the outside to be adulterous, wicked, deceitful, licentiousness, or extravagance, envious, prideful, or foolish. We are capable of each of these, perhaps all of these, perhaps all at the same time, and this is what makes us unclean before God.

            With all these uses of the word “tradition” I’m sure several of you have had The Fiddler on the Roof repeating through your head as I’ve been preaching. Not only is the song “Tradition” repeated throughout the musical, but the concept of tradition is also the theme of the entire story. If you’re not familiar, Fiddler is the story of Tevye, a Russian Jew living with his wife and five daughters in the Pale of Settlement – a western region of Imperial Russia – in 1905. The story centers around Tevye’s attempts to maintain the traditions of his faith and culture as his three oldest daughters marry for love instead of having arranged matches and dealing with the Tsar’s edict evicting all the Jews from their village.

            At the beginning of the movie version of Fiddler, Tevye has a monologue that includes this tidbit, “A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy. You may ask, ‘Why do we stay up there if it is so dangerous?’ Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: tradition!” ^[6]

            My friends, Jesus' words in this passage aren’t a condemnation of traditions that give people balance. He isn’t demanding that we throw out the practices that form our identity. Jesus isn’t anti-tradition; he’s anti our lacking compassion. He opposes our quickness to point out other people’s dirty hands while not acknowledging our own dirty hearts. The Good News this morning is that God is far more interested in our hearts than our traditions, but that’s also our challenge.

            What are we as a community willing to change to reach a new generation with the Gospel? What are we unwilling to change?  What might make our worship and congregational life more understandable, accessible, useful, and helpful?^[7] “What tradition…is so 0 include brow beating you and this church into my vision of what’s right. We are a community, a family, and one of the tenets of being good Baptists is believing every member is a minister, so we all have a voice, and we all have a hand in shaping Northminster. My hope moving forward is simple: that we keep having conversations that are honest and realistic, even if they’re uncomfortable. That we do our best not to put traditions ahead of our mission as a community, or ahead of the people we’re called to serve. That we maintain those things that make us who we are and let go of the things that are no longer useful.

            And as we go from this place, my prayer this morning is that we love God, serve others, keep our hands dirty and our hearts clean.

^[1] Douglas R.A. Hare, “Proper 17: Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Theological Perspective,” from Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary Year B, Volume 4. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 2009. Pg 21.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Dawn Ottoni Wilhelm, “Proper 17: Mark 7: 1-8, 14015, 21-23, Homiletical Perspective,” from Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary Year B, Volume 3. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 2009. Pg 22-23.

^[5] Hare, 23-25.

^[6] From www.quotes.com, “Fiddler on the Roof.”

^[7] David Lose, “Pentecost 14 B – Tradition!” from davidlose.net, August 24, 2015. www.davidlose.net

^[8] Ibid.