Inside Out
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
A sermon given at
The Church of Christ at Dartmouth College
A congregation of the United Church of Christ
August 30, 2015
Carla J. Bailey, Senior Pastor
A few months ago, Pixar Animation released a wonderful film, “Inside Out”. The film is
set in the mind of a young girl, Riley Andersen, where five personified emotions try to
lead her through life as she moves away from Minnesota with her parents to a new and
strange city. The embodied emotions are joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust.
Washington Post ' s film critic Ann Hornaday wrote that “Inside Out” is "that rare movie
that transcends its role as pure entertainment to become something genuinely cathartic,
even therapeutic, giving children a symbolic language with which to manage their
unruliest emotions." (June 18, 2015). The script was written by Pete Docter and Ronnie del
Carmen, and they brought humor and compassion to a child’s wild emotions, but they
also tapped in to an emotional need of many adults who never quite managed to
understand the deep emotions of childhood.
The film skirts around the debate as to which holds the greater influence over the
development of mature, moral emotion – nature, those things with which we were born,
or nurture, those things that are cultivated and shaped by external influences. It will
always be an unwinnable debate. It’s true that some people are just plain mean adults, in
spite of a loving childhood home environment, generous and supportive care and good
nurture. And some people are just plain wonderful by nature, in spite of the truly
despairing and dismal circumstances of their rearing. Most of us are some place in
between, of course, selectively blaming some things on our parents’ bad parenting, and
claiming other qualities as gifts that came to us biologically. Being the parent of adopted
children, I tend to fall on the side of nurture as the greater influence, but our children
didn't come off the plane from India blank slates. There was already quite a lot written on
their hearts and deep in their personalities. Those of you who met your children at the
moment of their first breath can attest to the fact that they come from the womb with
already-determined personality traits and quirks.
So, what is already inside us morally and emotionally, and what do we take in and how
do those different methods of moral shaping influence who we are now as adults?
When I read the story from Mark about Jesus’ response to the critical Pharisees, I realize
how incredibly sophisticated Jesus was about human emotion in an age that one might
describe as fairly primitive. Let’s look at the story. At first glance, it appears to be about
Jewish purification laws, dwelling on cleanliness, both ritual and physical. But it doesn't
take long to follow Jesus to its deeper meaning. When Jesus was questioned about his
apparent ease with the less-than-perfect observances of his disciples, he quickly turned
the question into an example of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Using their common
Scriptures to frame the teaching moment, Jesus berated the critics and then turned to the
crowd to make his more significant point. “There is nothing outside a person going in
that can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” Jesus turned a criticism
about the observances of dietary law into a lesson about the quality of the human heart,
saying, quite clearly, that evil intentions - fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice,
wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly - come from within. They
are not caused by external influences or behaviors.
I've been asking myself what I think of this clearly articulated conviction. Do I believe
that what Jesus said in that 1st century context is still true, generations before the
extensive study of psychology, before the debate over the influences of entertainment and
social media, before we were taught about the cultural and historical impacts of racism,
sexism, and economic inequality? Is it still true that all those harmful intentions come
from within, or have the insidious and profound influences of the waters in which we
swim shifted the balance a bit, so that evil intentions, some at least, might also come from
without?
What makes a person good? What influences cause people to do harmful things? That
Jesus elevated the debate to something more significant than keeping dietary laws adds to
my certainty that it is a more complex matter than one might imagine. And by locating
the genesis of evil within the human heart, Jesus has raised the stakes considerably about
whether the human heart can be changed, whether one's evil intentions can be
transformed into something quite different, whether there is anything that comes in from
the outside that alters one's motivations, ones behaviors, or the quality of one's heart.
Was Jesus right in the first century when he proclaimed that evil intentions come from
within? Is he still right today?
Most of us here today care about how we transfer our faith convictions to young people.
We may be parents or grandparents, or our concern might simply rise from our belief that
the values found in a religious faith structure should be imparted to the young. We may
believe that the life religious is a life better lived, more richly savored, more generously
offered. We may hope for the transformation of oppressive structures in our world and
we may base our hope in the promises of our faith. We may quite simply believe that
kids will be nicer if they embrace the religious values we cherish. Whatever our reasons
for caring about the transfer of faith from one generation to the next, I imagine we are
agreed on this point, that the internalization of the values of the Christian faith can make
a difference in the motivations of the human heart and that the motivations of the human
heart can make a difference in the quality of the entire human endeavor.
Lots of parents, both in this congregation and around the country, are engaged in sending
their not-quite adult children off to colleges and universities for the first time. Yesterday
at our garage sale, Warren and I met a woman who has been recently hired by Dartmouth
to work with students to actively prevent sexual assault and to respond to the needs of
students after a sexual assault has occurred. We were so impressed with her and so
grateful that she has arrived, just 3 days ago now, to work on this issue at a college for
which we have deep affection. Colleges everywhere, but especially those under the
Department of Education’s microscope, as Dartmouth is, are addressing the scourge of
sexual assault. Many important questions are being widely discussed – alcohol, privilege,
Greek organizations’ culture, bystanders, and so on. Since we are a faith community, our
part of these cultural conversations should include how to develop moral maturity
informed by loyalty to our loving, forgiving, anticipating God. But we are scarcely
having these conversations about any of the scourges that plague our culture these days,
are we? Progressive Christians are not good at the transmission of Christian faith. We
need to get better.
I don't know the ratio of outside influence to inside conviction when it comes to human
behavior. But I do know this, the human heart, however complicated or hardened,
however young and unformed, however embittered or however open, always responds to
love. That seems like the best place to start the conversation. Amen.