Is Your Church Kosher?

sunday Sermon - 17th August 2008 - Matthew 15. 10-28

As my friends gave their orders to the impatient New York waiter I dithered not seeing anything I fancied. “Do you do shrimps?” The waiter’s face was expressionless. “What about a hot dog?” His face was motionless. “Okay” I persisted “What about a nice bacon carbonara.” My colleagues looked horrified and the waiter rolled his eyes. “You may have noticed Father that half my café is staring at you. Okay, its not every day we see a priest here. But you’ve just qualified as the smuck of the day, because unlike your friends you have not realised this is café is kosher!”

In this Sunday’s reading we have an example of St Matthew puts in a good amount of stories and quotes about Jesus and kosher, rituals, and the Torah. It is accepted that the evangelist has a particular Jewish audience in mind. Not only is he telling the greatest story ever told but without actually writing it down he is asking questions about what kind church is Jesus wanting us to develop? (He is the only evangelist to use the word ‘church’ in his gospel.)

Reading between the lines, I would suggest, that in those days two kinds of churches existed side-by-side. The first we might call the Kosher Church. This is largely Jewish synagogues who have accepted Jesus as the Messiah and stick largely to circumcision, kosher foods and cleansing rituals. The second type of congregation one might call ‘Eleventh Hour’ and has some Jewish Christians but is bursting with Gentile converts. We can infer that there was a lot of friction between the two and this gospel is composed to bring about a reconciliation.

And so the writer very cleverly cuts and pastes stories to highlight this. We have today Jesus saying it is not that which goes into the mouth which makes us unclean but what comes out. The disciples tell their master that the Pharisees are really upset by this. Following this bit of teaching we have the Canaanite woman begging for her daughter to be exorcised. This story is purposely placed to show how she is more driven, more faithful and ultimately more illuminated than the so-called professional teachers of the Law (Torah). Yet she is a Gentile, and a particular type of pagan who was despised, hence the reference to ‘dogs’.

Well that’s an interesting story with a bit of theology and history thrown. It seems hardly relevant to us today does it? Kosher churches did not survive because they closed their doors to outsiders. Beyond the apostles wildest dreams it was the Eleventh Hour churches that grew and grew and grew. The lesson for us is that whatever church, tradition, or denomination we are called, commanded to grow.

The problem is that most of our churches today are Kosher churches in another guise. This is no fault of their own because they had and continue to have some use and are part of God’s plan. Kosher churches in today’s world are communities that have been around for a very long time and have created their own customs, rituals and rules. They are good at giving a sense of history even awesomeness but poor at radically looking outside themselves.

I have another café anecdote to share. A bunch of students stumbled into a tea room. It was five to five and the manager was beginning to wipe the tables. The students asked for food but were basically told off for disturbing her routine and fobbed off with cans of juice. When one of the students said that they were really hungry and would pay extra for something, anything to eat, the manager still refused. Then she began to whip up sandwiches and cakes like no tomorrow and was unctuous to the point of nausea. She had just refused hospitality to Prince William.

In chapter twenty, Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven with the workers of the vineyard. The men at the eleventh hour get the same wage and this rattles the others.

But an eleventh hour spirituality looks not to the inner life of the church but the VAST majority of people who have had no contact with Christianity. Without ditching the orthodoxy of the faith this means putting aside many customs and attitudes of a club. It means being humbled by the fact that we have a long way to go before we evangelise the nineteen thousand people who have decided not to come to worship today. It means that when they do come, we don’t close the doors and call time, or chat to ourselves, but see them as the primary purpose for us being here.

I’ll end with a story of what not to do. A man came to church and got a bit excited at the vicar’s sermon. He shouts “Praise the Lord!’. People shuffle in pews. A official goes up to him and says “Excuse me sir, in this church, we do not praise the Lord.”