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Christ Church Covington Most of you probably don’t know this, but at one point in my life I studied microbiology – the science that investigates microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, etc. that have such an enormous impact on human life. It was great fun, learning to isolate and grow the various species, learning what medium they grew best on, where on the human body or in the environment they could be found. We even created mutants using ultraviolet light, chemicals, and whatnot. I discovered that altering the environment in which they lived determined the degree to which different species flourished or the rate at which they died. We found that changing the proportions of the different nutrients supplied to the organisms would change their life cycle. Changing the temperature or the amount of oxygen could have similar effects. This is why so many canned goods are vacuum-sealed, why our refrigerators are set at a certain temperature, and why you can get one disease from bad mayonnaise and another from bad hog’s-head cheese. For microorganisms, their environment determines their life-cycle, so we humans endeavor to make sure that our environment won’t sustain the lives of those microorganisms that cause disease. Now there are social scientists that would apply observations about microorganisms to human society. Some might say that our behavior is determined solely by our environment. To a certain degree this is true. Because of our environment, I don’t shovel nearly as much snow as I did when I lived in Wisconsin. Environment has affected my behavior in this way. Because of the abundant food supply, folks grow taller in the U.S. these days than they did in previous eras. I’ve read that the amount that a child is read to is directly related to his or her IQ. What goes on around us and what we take in certainly affects the shape of our lives. However, in our gospel today Jesus says tells us that there’s more to the story than that. In Jesus time, there was a group of Jews who believed that the kinds of food they ate and the cleanliness of their hands didn’t merely affect their health, it affected their relationship with God. Their understanding was that unwashed hands or the wrong kind of meat would damage their relationship with God, would probably make Him angry, and that conversely clean hands and the right meat would make them special in God’s eyes. To be sure, for this group, such things were not simply an expression of their spirituality, they were matters of right and wrong – evidence of a person’s Godly character. But in our reading, Jesus says that character is not demonstrated by controlling our environment, what we take in. Godly character is shown forth by our response to what is going on around us, by what we choose to do with what we’ve taken in. Furthermore, he says that no amount of religious fussiness can substitute for integrity of character and moral behavior when it comes to our relationship with God. Our relationship with God is manifested in our behavior toward other much more than by religious rituals that affect no one but one’s self. So our moral behavior, our Godly character and our relationship with God are intimately connected. A healthy lively relationship with God results in a Godly character, and solid moral behavior results in a solid relationship with God. The real shape of our lives, the part that is of ultimate importance, has very little to do with our environment. It has mostly to do with what we believe and what we want. If we believe that God is God and we want relationship with Him, then our moral lives will take on a certain shape marked by compassion, sacrifice, integrity, generosity, justice, joy, and mercy regardless of our circumstances. If relationship with God is not what we want, then we don’t really believe that God is God, our current circumstances are all we have and it ultimately doesn’t really matter how we behave because life on earth is a meaningless survival story. No. We are not God’s science
experiment, like bacteria growing on a Pitre dish. Circumstances may
change, life may be easier or harder, but God has provided us with the
essentials that not only yield survival in this world, but the fullness of
eternal life, that is relationship with himself, and the power to choose
that relationship.
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