“Sit up straight! Keep your elbows off the table! Place your napkin in your lap! Wait until everyone has been served before you begin to eat! Do not gobble your food; chew slowly!”

The rituals associated with eating begin early in a child’s life and become more complex as we grow older. Eventually, you will find yourself maybe on prom night or at a business dinner where you at a table with a string of forks and spoons. The rule is start on the outside, and work your way in.

Good manners are designed to make for smoother living. However, when one finds oneself entering a dinner with the uncomfortable feeling of being on the outside, it becomes easy to see that sometimes we use manners not as an aid to social interaction, but as a means to exclude.

In Jesus' day, living and eating were smothered with all manner of rules and regulations. The intent was to give honor to God, but the result was a system where some put themselves in place of God. If one did not follow the rules exactly, one was not only an outsider, but was viewed as being unclean, unholy, and excluded.

To our ears, what the Pharisees are demanding in this story does not sound that bad; in fact, the Pharisees sound sensible. Wash your hands before eating; wash the food you buy at the market, and be sure to clean your pots and pans. However, hygiene was not the point.

The Pharisees had come to believe that a person was defiled by what was on the outside. Jesus turns it all around. Jesus says, "It is not what is outside that defiles a person." What makes us unclean is what is on the inside. What is in our hearts is what defiles us.

Then, Jesus gives a list of things that defile. "For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

Jesus challenges the purity laws so fiercely protected by the Pharisees and scribes who have come down from Jerusalem. He does this because the purity laws permit the Pharisees to hide themselves from their sin. Blinded to their own sin, the Pharisees are unable to see their need for forgiveness. They forget that there are things within them that defile them. They forget that they are unable to save themselves.

In today's world, we do something different; even the church is saying that there is no sin. We cannot hold up the standards of the Bible; they come from an ancient culture different from the modern times. You cannot help what you do. Society made you do what you did. You grew up in an unjust system; therefore, you cannot be blamed for what you did.

When we say there is no responsibility for what we do, we blind ourselves to our sin. We rob ourselves of adulthood. We deny what we are. We blame others so that we can keep on doing what we do and have no guilt feelings. When we do that, there is no chance that we will ever look to confess or ask Christ to change who we are.

No person can claim to be without sin. All of us will sin. To think we can minimize the power of our sins by simply saying there is no sin is to ignore what is inside of us. We corrupt ourselves by what is within and not by what is outside.

The Pharisees were concerned with what is on the outside. Consequently, they developed this complex system that was supposed to bring people closer to God, but, in fact stood as a barrier between people, faith, and what God intends for our lives. Jesus is calling us to something far simpler than the complexities of pots, pans, or the way in which everyone is to blame for our faults.

He calls us to see ourselves for what we really are. We are people who sin, but are not lost because we have a Savior who wants us to live in his kingdom. We are people who can be broken by our shortcomings, but also restored in ways we cannot imagine. Therefore, we look at our sins so that we may see where our salvation actually stands. We look at our sins so that we may see that our fault is not from the outside, but from within.

It is what comes from inside, from the center of our hearts, that matters. If we are filled with love of God, what will please us will surely be what also pleases God. If we live in fellowship with Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, what is on the inside will be transformed in a way that also changes what is on the outside. Amen.