What Defiles (proper 17b)

What Defiles

Proper 17B
2 September 2018; 8:00 a.m. Said & 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily by the Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.  

at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon
Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; Psalm 15; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Why is it that churches, supposedly following a Savior who broke bread with “tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners,” seem so eager to pursue policies and practices of exclusion, and retreat behind a walled community life that keeps the wicked, the unclean, and sinners outside the church doors? 

Richard Beck’s great book Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality, at length tries to understand the dynamics of disgust, uncleanness, and impurity, and how these discourage a willingness to embrace and welcome the strange, alien, and forbidden. 

He begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine spitting into a Dixie cup.  After doing so, how would you feel if you were asked to drink the contents of the cup?”   Swallowing saliva in our mouth seems natural and normal.  But once it has been expelled from the body, even for a second or so, even without any contamination from the outside environment, it suddenly becomes gross, disgusting, transgressive.   That basic near-universal gut reaction—disgust at something strange entering our body—is what lies at heart of cultural notions of clean and unclean.  Almost hard-wired into our reptilian brain by evolution, disgust protects us from poisons and contamination that might make us sick or kill us. 

The idea of “dirt,” is shared by almost all human cultures.  It is not about physical cleanness per se, and most certainly not connected to germ theory, though since Pasteur this idea has come to play a part in modern popular conceptions of dirt.  The simplest way of expressing the core idea of clean and unclean is the difference in our minds between food and garbage.  Though food, properly washed or peeled, is probably fine to eat, most of us feel some revulsion at the idea of eating food that has been fished from a garbage bin or picked up from a restaurant table, even when ostensibly clean.   Is in on the plate or off?  Food that has been in the wrong place is seen as garbage.  The difference is the sociological concept of “dirt” or “uncleanness.” 

A great thread in the Hebrew Scriptures is the ritual distinction between clean and unclean.  For animals to be clean, as food, they had to conform to the category to which they belonged, or at least to which the Law of Moses assigned them.  Fish had to be fish; land animals land animals.  Fish had to have fins and scales; marine creatures lacking these were seen as unclean.  Goodbye, shrimp cocktail.  Large farm animals had to resemble the archetypical one, a cow, by chewing cud and having a cloven hoof.  No eating camels or rabbits.  Birds had to have feathers and be able to fly.  No eating bats or ostriches.

General impurity or uncleanness in this tradition transmitted through specific environmental factors:  food and meals, birth and death, as well as bodily discharges, blemishes, and imperfections. 

You could become unclean through sinful disobedience to God’s commands (like eating an unclean animal), or by unavoidable things (like having a monthly period or a nocturnal emission) or even by doing things you were commanded to do (like having children, or preparing your parent’s dead body for burial).  Impurity and sin were not the same, but the Law made no clear distinction between moral and ritual issues.

Whenever impurity was acquired, it could be purged through a variety of ritual means, including washing or immersing oneself in water.

Impurity was contagious; it transmitted from the unclean to the clean, and so it paid to keep yourself from situations and people where uncleanness was likely:  people who did not observe the ritual distinctions, including non-Jews and non-observant Jews. 

This striving for purity and ritual holiness, for being special and set aside for God’s service is a clear demand of the priests in scripture:  “You shall be holy for I am holy,” we read in Leviticus, and there follows the hundreds of detailed rules setting boundaries for holiness.  On the other hand, the prophets often lay more stress on striving for justice, for treating people, especially the marginalized, decently and fairly. 

Walther Bruggemann says that these two traditions, purity and holiness vs. social justice, are both important and mutually corrective. The boundaries established by the Law define and preserve the People of God.  But holiness becomes empty ritual, a mode of oppression, if not tempered with the call for social justice.  On the other hand, calls for social justice absent an authentic call to holiness rapidly degenerate into the most obvious self-serving interest-group politics.   

Many of the rabbis, sought ways of avoiding inadvertent disobedience to God’s commands, and built a “fence around the Law,” that is, practices that, while not commanded specifically in the Torah, made it less likely that one would break one of its 615 commandments.  Jesus’ contemporaries had elaborate ritual washing of food and eating vessels before meals in order to remove any uncleanness that may inadvertently have been attached to those foods. 

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus disagrees with such washings: “It is not what goes into your mouth that makes impure, but the words and actions your heart produces.”  “Thus,” says Mark, “he declared all foods clean.”  This phrase is most likely a later interpretation of Jesus’ teaching, placed here back on his lips.  In the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters, we read of the great controversy in the early Christian Church about allowing Gentiles to come into the Church as equal members without following Jewish laws.  If Jesus had clearly told his disciples that all foods were clean during his lifetime as Mark reports, it is hard to understand how these later controversies could have occurred. 

The historical Jesus almost certainly criticized rigorous ritual washings before meals by using an inside/outside metaphor. While he seems to have kept a concern for kashrut, his interpretation of the idea was quite broad, and always constrained by welcome and hospitality. 

In every single case where ritual purity is placed in conflict with social justice, Jesus opts for social justice.  For him, justice trumps purity and holiness always.

Jesus answered the question “who is my neighbor whom I should love” with the story of an unclean Samaritan who helps a Jew who appears to have been beaten to death on the side of the road.     This really marks just how radical Jesus was. The religion of the day declared, with the full authority of scripture literally cited and interpreted through authoritative tradition, that impurity was contagious. It spread from the unclean to the clean.  Washing food and one’s hands before eating helped stem the contagion. 

Jesus tried to follow the Law of Moses.  But, following the prophets, he taught that goodness was different from purity, and far more important. In his view, moral goodness was spread to others by compassion and service.  Compassion and service trumped the need to avoid contamination at all times.  And since the hand-washings are not specifically ordered in scripture, he foregoes them.

This is a subtext of almost all of Jesus’ public acts and teaching. He practiced open table fellowship and ate with people that his religion labeled as the worst of the worst, the uncleanest of the unclean.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says what really counts is not what one eats but rather how we treat each other.  He discounts ritual washings because they do not touch what really matters—the heart, where our behaviors arise.

In the film Chocolat, a small French town tries to keep itself pure and clean by observing religious tradition.  In comes a dubious and wandering candy-maker who opens a chocolate shop during Lent!  She begins to meet the very real human needs of the idiosyncratic very human villagers. An epic struggle results between her and the town’s mayor.  In the end, the young village curate preaches the following as his Easter Sermon:  “I want to talk about Christ’s humanity, … how he lived his life on earth: his kindness, his tolerance. We must measure our goodness, not by what we don’t do, what we deny ourselves, what we resist, or who we exclude.  Instead, we should measure ourselves by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.” 

Brothers and sisters, what truly defiles is having a heart of stone, lacking compassion, and justifying our own selfishness at the expense of those about us.  What brings life, joy, a conscience at peace is this:  inclusion of others, especially when we must overcome our disgust at the alien and strange.  What gives us the heart of Jesus is serving and listening , compassion and empathy, and practicing radical hospitality.    

In the name of Christ, Amen.