The Rev. Canon Mary Carter Greene

Then he called the crowd again and said to them,

Listen to me, all of you, and understand.

In the name of God, may we be hearers who act. Amen.

Well, I don't know about you, but I have been trying to delay the end of summer.

And the best way I know is to fit in a few more books before the program year picks up.

Most recently, I dug into Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass again.

And though Psalm 45 has never been a favorite of mine,

the White Queen came to mind as I read it earlier in the week.

And then again, our gospel passage.

It brought me a little bit deeper.

Maybe you recognize this language from the book's opening poem, The Jabberwocky.

The poem, ultimately part of Alice's dream,

while offering prosodic and lovely pronunciation and intonation,

is on its own meaningless.

And yet, there is still feeling.

What could it mean that moam raths outgrabe?

And if it's nonsense,

why does it feel?

Why does it feel a little menacing?

It seems very pretty, Alice said when she had finished it.

But it's rather hard to understand.

Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas.

Only I don't exactly know what they are.

The rules of poetry and grammar, while all being followed,

are not enough to make meaning of the verses.

The poems catalyze.

Nobody want this ambiguity, makes its audience wake up,

and leaves its hearers unsteady.

We have to listen a little bit harder.

That is probably one of Carol's goals,

to draw attention to the boundaries of meaning making,

to discourage sleeping through the rule book, as it were.

The relationship between rules and meaning,

and our search for security in them,

extends beyond poetry and language, of course.

Much of life, especially life in community,

is guided by rules and our response to them,

whether conscious or unconscious.

Our reading from the Gospel of Mark today

shows that rules and meaning have been in conversation

since at least Jesus' time.

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes had come from Jerusalem,

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.

Mark's gospel shows how the Israelites were separated from other people by their food laws,

and they were very aware that Jesus' followers were not abiding by them.

Jesus' exchange with them while unsettling and in defiance of their practices was essential

to make sense of the next phases of his ministry. He called the crowd again and said to them,

listen to me, all of you, and understand.

In the verses following,

today's reading, Jesus goes to the Gentile region of Tyre, where these rules and others

that the Pharisees demonstrated were not followed. If the rules had been insisted on,

the Gentiles would have been excluded from the good news Jesus was bringing.

Christianity might not have grown as it did. By his outreach to the Gentiles,

his ministry would prove a universal opening to his teaching.

And understanding that the confining rules of ritual purity did not allow.

So what are the equivalencies today? What rules and practices, assumptions, or biases

might we change to better welcome other people, all people, all people of all genders, sexuality,

race, class, immigration, refugee status, and those among the many, many, many, many, many, many,

who are lonely? Adjustments, challenges to piety and practice, worship, and meaning-making are the

stuff of Christian history, and certainly the history of our own church. The Episcopal liturgy

that we share in worship frames, informs, and reflects our search for identity, meaning,

and closeness to God. And its structure emerged,

over centuries of listening, discernment, debate, battle, and change.

And from this thoughtful and thorough instruction, there is a kind of grammar to our own worship.

It may be hard to see, and sometimes hard to make sense of, especially for visitors.

We enter the service of Eucharist through music and prayers. A collect lands us, little kids know this,

then we take in the word. Until we realize why we are so extraordinary, if we begin to remember the name,

we understand the purpose of every prayer. Other prayers divide and dictate our faith. People may begin,

before entering the table and the blessing.

The offices, like Evensong and Morning Prayer,

wrap up worship in shorter, redundant bursts

that offer a meditative rhythm of connection to God.

The Book of Common Prayer, first written in 1549,

helped the practices that were operational

and then create a way of being church

in every village and town in England.

It was not only a grammar for worship, though.

It was a rule book that changed things.

The BCP's distribution and use

enabled a reordering of church

and eventually a meeting place

for what had seemed very different,

even irreconcilable differences.

Among many,

many others, the addition of monastic practices

satisfied the pieties of Catholics.

The use of the English language

enabled easier access to prayer sought by Protestants.

None of these changes came easily.

Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury,

wrote of the prayer book,

having become the touchstone for the ethos

and even for hundreds of years,

the unity of the whole church,

it is less the expression of fixed doctrinal consensus,

more the creation of a devotional climate.

In other words,

the devotional climate is the aim,

not the enforcement of rules.

Fixed rules alone don't make meaning.

Our prayer and ongoing discernment do.

Of course, we have to work against

the greatest block,

ourselves.

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.

Returning to Carol's Through the Looking Glass,

we find a perfect example.

When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said,

in a rather scornful tone,

it means just what I choose it to mean,

neither more nor less.

The question is, said Alice,

whether you can make words mean so many different things.

The question is, said Humpty Dumpty,

which is to be master?

Humpty Dumpty's envy, pride, and folly

could be any of ours.

The rest of Jesus' list of evil intentions

from the heart of the church,

are equally present today

as they have been throughout history.

This isn't news,

only our response is.

Conflict and a search for meaning

defined in the early prayer books.

So did wrangling for power.

A tour through English history

reminds us that our worship and our church

was formed and reformed in a crucible.

In the great narrative of time,

there's an echo of human division

and separation from God

in the crisis of our days

and in our looking glass dreams as well.

But our scripture and our church history

give cause for unbounded hope.

So while we look to the religious syntax of worship

to organize our celebrations and our petitions,

today's gospel reminds us to invite,

not rule out, others.

In our effort to come closer to God,

we are invited to listen and stay attuned to our hearts.

In these difficult and often confusing times,

we, like the first Christians,

like worshipers throughout the ages,

seek to express, as the Reverend Jude Harmon said,

the grammar of our hearts.

Our time in community and in worship helps us listen,

our time in community and in worship helps us listen,

within God's embrace,

to frame the meaning we encounter in the world.

What listening practices are helpful to you?

What new thinking might we all do?

What sense-making out of nonsense, violence,

and selfishness is possible?

And finally, what break from comfortable behavioral rules

and roles that lock us away from others,

might we reconsider to bridge divides

with our neighbors and strangers,

the people we know deeply,

the people we sidestep on the street,

even the Humpty Dumpties of the world,

to come closer to each other, to God,

and to God's desire for all of creation.

Once reflectively grounded in the real world,

in the rhythms of the church,

not bound by, but moved by the rituals we pray,

as we find ourselves closer to God,

there we will listen,

and there we will find our hearts

writing poetry with the divine.