(Im)Perfect (Im)Purity

I realize, for some of you, I am an unfamiliar face.  And for many, I am a face of the past, changed, perhaps, but locked in the recesses of time.  What does our relationship mean?  In your accepting me as an In-Care seminarian, in taking my faith journey on as your own responsibility, we have renewed our covenant that began…oh, just about 2 decades ago.  In speaking here today, I realize I have been given a responsibility, and a trust, to verbally give shape to this covenantal relationship.

Of course, when Rev. Lovin asked me if I would be willing to speak today, I didn’t think of any of this.  It was only after I had said yes did I begin to worry about just what, precisely, I was going to say when I got up here. 

So in what could only be described as providence, I opened up the lectionary to see what today’s “assigned” passage might be.  What did I find but the Matthean text dealing precisely with the concept of covenant. 

Of course, there is enormous risk in this passage.  As with any passage criticizing anything about Judaism, it can become problematic very quickly.  This, of course, is particularly true of the author of the Gospel of Matthew, who is known to have painted the Pharisees with broad strokes for various reasons.  But I trust you all to know that any condemnations that Jesus makes in the passage are not towards Judaism – such an idea would be absurd – but rather towards a form of covenant that bypasses the spirit of the law for the word of law, without joining the two. 

That particular form of housecleaning done, let’s move forward to take a look at what the passage has to say.  I’ve already tipped my hand – I interpret the passage through the concept of covenant.  Dietary restrictions and rules of purity were part of the Jewish covenant with the God of David, a way of honoring God and each other.  It is quite easy to deduce that Jesus, here, by speaking about the danger and hurtfulness of our speech and actions, he is placing a premium on goodness and purity of heart.  Purity of heart is more important than purity of hands. 

This is an easy message to accept intellectually, and the expected sermon might be about how we should watch what we say, because words matter.  Words matter a lot.  Words can wound.  I think, like many other UCC churches, this particular congregation knows a lot about the power of words to wound and heal.  A little over a decade ago, many of us sat in these pews discussing the importance of words in our hymnody and language of God. 

It was a painful and difficult decision, and I think we all learned first-hand the power that words can have on our lives.  This is an important message, indeed.  But I think there is something even more important than words in this passage in Matthew, and that is, as I have said, the notion of covenant and our relationships with each other.  What do we do once wounds have happened? 

Behind the simplicity of the message of pure hearts and pure words, there is actually a very challenging demand to shed the barriers of false morality, in order to recognize our own imperfections.  This is harder than it might sound. 

Think of it this way: hardly any of us would own up to thinking that outside successes and righteousness mean goodness of spirit.  We want to profess that God loves us all, that we are invested in helping everyone, that the poor and the downtrodden are no different from us inwardly. 

But is this really our inward belief? 

This summer, I had the immense pleasure of working as a hospital chaplain.  In moments of despair, when people were forced, finally, to stare down the door to their own mortality, the unmentionable questions of the soul are the things that do the knocking.  In expressly theological terms I was asked, “But I was a good Christian, why does this hurt so much?”  “Why do the good people of the world suffer so much?”  “I feel like I’ve tried my whole life to believe every last line and creed, why am I here, please just tell me, why am I here?”  It broke my heart, they were such good questions, and such despair behind them. 

Somewhere there is the niggling thought in our culture that, if I follow the rules and do what I am supposed to, I will be exempt from the messiness of life.  I cannot speak for any of you, but I know that I, personally, am guilty of this lingering thought that my inward cleanliness should manifest itself in outward rewards.

Our entire country was founded on this notion.  The most famous sermon in our history was John Winthrop’s sermon about a city on a hill. 

We were formed to be the shining, squeaky clean example of faith.  If we could keep ourselves clean, follow all the rules, give away a portion of what we have, then we would be the light of God for the rest of the world to see.  Follow the rules and the chaos will be managed, a lid kept on the despair.  It’s not an uncommon belief.  But what this means is that we have taken Jewish dietary restrictions, and simply morphed them into modern moral restrictions.  Follow them, and you will be righteous, you will be somehow exempt.  You will be pure.

The protestant work ethic and even the notion of manifest destiny – all of this stems in large part from this niggling little idea we can begin to see here in Matthew’s story – not only can we be clean, but we can be cleaner than anyone else. 

This is not a bad idea.  It’s good to want to be good and pure.  But how often do we let the struggle to follow the right rules eclipse our desire to be in right relationship with God and each other?  It is, indeed, a good thing to want to be a shining example of goodness. 

But, of course, we’re not.  We are not clean.  And we are certainly not exempt. 

Not only does simple life get in the way of our best efforts to manage the chaos, we can’t even avoid the simple sins of the heart that Jesus mentions here.  When pressed by his disciples to explain what he meant by uncleanliness, he listed many things which may or may not have been committed by some of us here: Murder, theft. (Office pens, anyone?) But then he lists some others that we are all guilty of. 

“For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person.” 

Those are pretty broad categories.  Evil intentions, slander, falsehood.  Many of us wouldn’t want to admit to these, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.  I am definitely guilty of “evil” thoughts – slanderous thoughts, even. 

And unlike the Markan version of this passage, Matthew doesn’t think these things even have to be spoken or acted upon to make us impure.  It is not the act of coming out that defiles us, but rather their simple presence in the heart. 

Their simple presence makes us impure.  I think what he’s getting at here, is that we are all dirty.  And we can’t hide it.  God sees under the lids we put on to manage the chaos.  God can peek into our trashcans.  God knows what lurks there.  This is a hard statement to swallow.  I have never liked theologies of sin and damnation.  But what exactly does he mean by it, here?  What does it mean that our hearts have evil intentions, slanderous thoughts? 

Have you ever been in a place that makes you feel unclean?  Where you need a shower?  There are a whole host of ways this could occur.  Maybe you used a connection to get a job, and feel a bit unethical about it.  Maybe your boss asked you to cut a couple corners which really shouldn’t be cut.  Maybe you are the boss, asking someone to cut corners.  You change the channel when the news comes on.  You vote your gut and you betray your conscience.  You are yelled at and respond in kind.  You look too long at your neighbor’s wife, or husband, or house, or car.  You run a stop sign and almost cause an accident.  You swear at the traffic.  You swear at your spouse.  You swear at yourself.  No matter what it is, you just want to get into the shower – you have to get it off.  You scrub and you soap, and you hug your body, wishing the hurt away. 

That is the sin and uncleanliness in this parable.  That is evil.  It’s the aggravations that eat away at us internally, making it really hard to stay pure.  It doesn’t have to be grandiose, it is the little stuff of life that haunts you, that follows you, that changes you, for better or for worse.  Here body and soul are one – inextricably intertwined in the metaphor of the heart.  Life itself is uncleanliness, the stuff that makes us all into Lady Macbeth, scrubbing at invisible stains.  It is on you and it is in you and it won’t go away. 

To be sinful, then, to be full of evil intentions, in a way means simply to be human, to be open to human hurts and human wounds and human imperfections.  This passage could be read as a great condemnation of what it means to be human.  Yet look to the next section in the chapter.  It gets better.  This is why the Bible is the top selling book. 

So here Jesus is, having just called people sick from the inside out, and a woman approaches him to clean her daughter of her daughter’s sickness.  Let’s look at this in modern terms.  Imagine this: a preacher gives a wonderful, rousing, powerful sermon, invoking the need to renew our faithful covenants with God and, by extension, to each other.  He has railed against the injustices in our soul!  He as called for the recognition that we are all wretched and damaged.  He has called you a sinner who needs healing. 

After the service, many come near him and ask for explanation.  “Well, good reverend, that was really moving, but, um, I certainly am not like that, so could you just clarify the point?”  But one woman in his congregation – the outsider, she gets it.  The sermon speaks to her.  So she approaches this powerful preacher.  “preacher, she says, my daughter is in trouble.  Can you help us?”  She gets it – they are sick on the inside.  This man says he gets it too.  What is his response?  “You are a dog, unworthy of my spiritual food.” 

Lest you think Jesus is pure from the soul-deadening impurities of pride, he lords his power over the woman who comes, begging, for help.  So if you didn’t believe me before, hopefully you do now.  We are all unclean.  Even the son of God.    

So what are we to do?  Even Jesus gets caught up in struggles of ethnicity and race.  Life is so messy.  We can’t escape it.  My preaching professor used to scream at me, “Where is the Good News?!”  Is there any? 

Easily I could offer up as good news the freedom that comes from knowing that uncleanliness is a part of life.  Indeed, there is something overwhelmingly powerful about the knowledge that we all go home and scrub! 

But I think there’s something more here.  We are, after all, talking about covenant, today.  And yes, the first part of covenant is realistic understandings of the finitude of humanity.  But the second part is the knowledge of what to do with this finitude.

There is an ancient Buddhist tale of a man who asks his instructor what he should do if he saw the Buddha walking down the street.  Without hesitation, the master replies “kill the Buddha.”  An odd message, right? 

Of course, as Christians, we are experts at “killing the buddha.”  (point to cross).  But somehow, I don’t think that’s quite what’s meant by the Buddhist saying.  I don’t’ think it has to do with sacrifice or suffering or penance or eternal life. 

I think it might have something to do with our little Canaanite woman.  See, she has met her Buddha, she recognizes and affirms him as the Buddha.  But she refuses to let him tell her – or her daughter - their rightful place.  He calls her an unworthy dog, and she counters that even sick as she is, she, too, is a child of God.  She and her daughter, are children of God.  Kill the Buddha, indeed!  Kill that which would keep you from your God!  Kill that which would put limits on your own enlightenment!  In declaring Jesus wrong – she called Jesus wrong! – this lowly woman not only kills the Buddha which is externally keeping her from God, but she kills the Buddha within herself.  Once her own barriers to God are lowered, there is no denying her place at the table. 

Jesus is clear: Her faith has healed. 

Of course, there is subtly and nuance here that I have completely erased.  In Jesus’ naming of her ethnicity – she is not Jewish, not a “lost sheep of Israel” – he is, indeed, making a power play.  But I’d like to think he has a reason for insulting her and belittling her.  Perhaps he is challenging her to respond in exactly the way she does – to affirm her right for spiritual food.  Perhaps Jesus is challenging her to Kill her Buddha – to claim her place as one of God’s children.  She does not deny she is lowly.  She does not deny that she is unclean.  In fact, she names it clearly.  But instead of wallowing, instead of giving up in the face of this resistance and humiliation, she affirms this weakness as part of the human struggle.  She affirms it, and by extension, she affirms her rightful place at God’s table.  At Christ’s table.  Here, in our covenant of believers.

This, I think, is the meat of being “pure at heart”.  That’s it.  I know it’s shocking and simple and seems a bit maybe like I’m daft in the head.  But if the first part of covenant is recognizing the limits of humanity – we all have spots we need to scrub out – the second part is recognizing our limits, our spots, our imperfections, and making peace with them, by making peace with ourselves, peace with each other, and by extension, peace with God.  Look at our Canaanite woman.  Instead of hiding that which is shameful, she brought it to the community, she offered it up to God. 

It’s not like God’s going to be surprised.  God already knows it’s there.  God can peek into our trash cans, remember?  We’re the ones who want to hide it, to run from it – we want to deny our imperfections and pretend that we can be clean.  We’re the ones who turn a covenant of the heart into simply another set of rules to follow.  But the Canaanite woman, in bringing her wrongs forward, in naming it and in refusing to be refused, she finds herself, she finds faith, she finds healing, she finds God. 

To make a covenant – to make our covenant – based around purity of heart is to understand that the only cities that can ever shine on a hill are the ones that do not ignore that which makes them dirty. 

To be “pure of heart,” then, is to be willing to take up Jesus’ challenge.  Because it is a challenge.  It is to be willing to affirm all of ourselves, to affirm even our brokenness.  To affirm our humanity.  We here in the 21^st century are the kings and queens of denial.  And Jesus here, faces us with the overwhelmingly difficult challenge of admitting that we are not pure, and in so many ways, we can never be pure.  We have wronged – we do wrong.  And we have been wronged.  We cannot deny this and put it in our past, tucked away in a corner, and then expect somehow to stay untarnished.   It will seep into every part of our being.  That’s its nature.  It’s like spilled coffee, it gets everywhere and stays there! 

We can’t ignore it – that which makes us human and fallible.  But we do have a choice.  We can choose either to deny it and let it continue to wound us, or we can recognize it, the hurt and the wrongs, and we can vow to continually do the messy, all too human, work to make ourselves clean, to make ourselves whole.  This is the only kind of purity for which we can strive. 

This, then, is my hope for our covenant here, today, the covenant that we made when you decided to take me into Care, and the covenant we make each time we sit at the communion table, the fellowship table, or the dinner table.  As Christians and citizens of a hungry world, it is my hope that we will not strive for a purity of rules and regulations, a purity of formality, but rather we will strive each moment of each day to be a covenantal community that is made pure by the recognition of our all too human wounded-ness, our indebtedness to each other and, most importantly, our vulnerability in each other’s hands.  Let us receive each other, ourselves, and the world at large, in the love that sees us broken and as we are, not perfect as we would want or pretend to be.  Let us receive each other with the love of God.