Ps. 15, Mk. 7:1–23
Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.
Make these words more than words,
And give us all the Spirit of Jesus. Amen.
Hello again from Virginia. My name is Tripp Hudgins and it is my pleasure to be with you once again. For those of you who may not remember, I’m ordained as an American Baptist, but have been slowly making my way over to the Episcopal Church. I’m a husband and father as well as a PhD candidate in liturgy and ethnomusicology at the Graduate Theological Union and the University of California, Berkeley. I share all this not because I want you to commit it to memory or something, but because I think it’s important that you know where I’m coming from where our two readings this morning are concerned.
I study Christian ritual. Both passages are often understood to be about ritual purity. They are about ritual, both the religious and the everyday. They are also about social purity and its relationship to worship. Right worship isn’t about getting the rite right, but about being right with one another and God giving context to the rite. Right? Right. Okay.
It’s also about how Jesus will turn all of this inside out. “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.”
