Sermon: The Politics of Purity - 01/17/10

The Rev. Bill Adams
Second Sunday after Epiphany, January 17, 2010
St. Clement’s Episcopal Church
Rancho Cordova, CA

The Politics of Purity

A policeman, having stopped a car because it was weaving all over the road, noticed that the driver of the car was the local pastor in their little community. The officer also noticed an open flask in the seat next to the driver.

"Reverend," the policeman said, "What's in the flask?" "Oh, this little thing," said the pastor . . . I keep water in there." The policeman reached over and picked up the flask and took a big sniff. "Why Reverend, this flask is full of wine."

To which the pastor shouted, "Praise God . . . He did it again."

There’s a wedding in Cana of Galilee and they have run out of wine. Now most of us can recite the story from memory, but we might not be able to recite all the seemingly small details of this incredible Gospel. We might, for example not remember how many stone jars there were in the story or what is their purpose. St. John tells us that there were six stone jars, and that they were used in the purification rites that all good people of Israel were expected to perform quite regularly.

“Purity” isn’t in the top ten when it comes to our vocabulary these days, but in Jesus’ day, it was a major concern. So much so that many Bible scholars speak of the “Politics of Purity” when describing the social structure of first century Israel.

It all began way back in t he 19th chapter of Leviticus where it is written, “Be holy as your God is holy" And the struggle to imitate this holiness of God forms almost all of the rest of the Levitical law and ritual, and it establishes a system of purity that is pervasive in the world in which Jesus lived.

The politics of purity created a social system of contrasts and polarities. Things and people were either pure or impure... clean or unclean.....I’m afraid that the politics of purity set up a society of winners and losers.

Sometimes your status depended on behavior. People either were observant of the purity code or they were not. And at other times one’s actions had nothing to do with it One might simply be born to the wrong parents or suffer from physical disease through no fault of their own, but they were nonetheless impure even though no change in behavior could possibly make a difference.

Where one was on the economic scale was also seen as an indicator of where one fell on the scale of purity. Wealth was seen as a blessing from God, and poverty a curse, and the vast majority of First Century Palestinians under Roman rule were peasants including Jesus of Nazareth.

Although being male didn’t guarantee that one was pure, and being female didn’t guarantee that one was impure. It is a fact that, generally speaking men in their natural state were thought to be more pure than women.

And of course these polarities were strikingly drawn when it came to those who were Jewish and those who were Gentiles (A word that literally means outsiders).

The politics of purity created a world of sharp boundaries indeed: Pure or impure.... rich or poor.... whole or broken.... male or female..... Jew or Gentile....righteous or sinner.

And along comes Jesus, and it doesn’t take us very long at all to realize that he comes from a radically different political party!

Jesus chooses fishermen to be members of his cabinet. These were men who spent most of their day in boats wading in fish guts and untangling their slimy nets. These were men who couldn’t keep all the ritual purity codes even if they tried with all their hearts. He invited a Tax Collector, the least pure of the impure, to be part of his ministry team. He even held the audacious notion that women could be part of his discipleship, and they were among the boldest and the bravest of his closest followers.

So Jesus has picked his cabinet and as we turn to our Gospel we find that it is inauguration day for Jesus. The Inaugural Ball turns out to be a wedding bash in a town called Cana about 9 miles from Nazareth where Jesus grew up. Jesus is not only invited, but he brings his unlikely cabinet of disciples with him. Jesus didn’t plan on this being inauguration day, but Jesus mother seems to have pushed the date up just a bit. Oh, there's nothing like a Jewish mother.

The bride and groom find themselves in an embarrassing situation. In the First Century, this isn’t just an inconvenience to run out of wine at a wedding. It’s not just a matter of, “Oh well, we’re out of wine, does anyone want sparkling cider?”

Running out of wine at a Wedding Feast would have been a social catastrophe, and we find out quickly that no job is too small for Jesus.

Now I believe that long before this incident in Cana, Jesus made a conscious decision to choose “compassion” as his campaign slogan rather than “holiness....” And therein lays the difference between Jesus and all the prophets who had come before him.

I had a conversation once with a Reformed Jewish Rabbi who told me that when he is asked which person in the Bible he would most like to meet, he would say “Jesus.” When he was asked why, he would say, “Because Jesus was the first Reformed Jew.”

In fact, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus changes the Levitical dictum, “Be Holy as your God is Holy” to “Be Compassionate, as your God is compassionate.”

Oh yes, Jesus definitely intends to help his friends out of their embarrassing situation, but he also knows that he can make an inaugural statement about God and what God is really like; he knows that he can give a sign that will kick off his ministry of compassion. And so he looks around the house, and he spots them: those six stone jars that were used for the prescribed purity washing rituals. Six stone jars that represent the politics of purity; that represent for Jesus all that is out of balance in his socio/religious world.

Jesus has no intention of using those six jars to restore purity to the impure. No! Jesus is going to use them as casks for new wine; the wine that represents the new age of love and compassion that comes with the Advent of the Messiah.

This inaugural is more than a wedding feast of a man and a woman who happen to reside in Cana of Galilee. For Jesus it is a wedding feast between God and Humanity! Jesus could have simply told the servants at the feast to fill the empty wine containers with water. But he specifically chose those six jars.

John tells us that those jars were empty. There is very little in the Gospel of John that doesn’t have some symbolism. Could those empty stone jars symbolize the emptiness of a world that polarizes itself around notions of in and out....clean and unclean.....good and bad.... perfect and imperfect.....?

For the ritual washings, those jars would have been filled with “living water” that is, water that has not been sitting for any length of time. Normally they would have been filled with either rain water, or water gathered from a moving river or spring.

But Jesus has the jars filled with ordinary water, and, as the story goes, Jesus turns the ordinary water into extraordinary wine. Jesus wants us to know that God never labels us clean or unclean.... pure or impure...... good or bad..... perfect or imperfect.
And certainly none of us are seen as ordinary..... We are all extraordinary in the eyes of God!

This act of turning that water into wine represents a great promise. It represents a promise to break down the polarities and religious boundaries that proliferate the world of Jesus, and hopefully all the polarities and religious boundaries that plague our world as well. It is a terrible mistake to make the politics of purity the center of our religion.... and yet I still see it in the church. We still find ways to label people clean and unclean..... pure and impure.... do we not?
There’s simply no room for such designations in the Kingdom of God.

This miracle of Jesus represents a promise to inaugurate a new world that celebrates compassion, which puts forgiveness and justice ahead of the politics of purity and perfection.

And if you ever doubt that Jesus kept that promise.... just read on a bit further in the Gospels. One of the first things that happen after his inauguration in Cana, is Jesus confronts the purity codes in the Temple. It is extremely difficult for the poorest people to offer the right sacrifice because of all the rules against blemishes on the animals, and the necessary exchange of money makes it even harder for them to make the grade, and so Jesus overturns their tables and scatters the sacrificial animal, .and purity takes another back seat to compassion and justice.

Jesus then sits on the ledge of a well with a woman, not just any woman but the least pure of all women in his society: a Samaritan woman! He later tells a parable about Levites and Priests, the purest of the pure, walking right by the man left for dead. This is another story that suggests that compassion is more godly than ritual purity.

He tells a parable about a young son, who ate with the pigs, running into his father’s arms; a father who chose compassion over perfection... Who chooses to love and embrace rather than pigeon hole his son for life?

Most people who are leaving are church aren't doing so because of the election of some bishop in New Hampshire. They are leaving because at convention after convention all we do is argue about who is in and who is out; who the winners are and who the losers are.

The fact is that Jesus rejects religious purity and perfection throughout the Gospels in favor of the Love of God. As it turns out, the closest that any of us can come to perfection is when we embrace compassion and reject the boundaries that the world so often wants to draw.

In Brooklyn, New York, there is a school that caters too many who might be considered by some as less than perfect... to children who would have been seen as “unclean” in the first century... It is a school that caters to learning disabled children. At a fund-raising dinner for the school, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by those who attended.

After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he cried out, "Where is the perfection in my son Shaya? Everything God does is done with perfection. But my child cannot understand things as other children do. My child cannot remember facts and figures as other children do. Where is God's perfection?" The audience was shocked by the question, pained by the father's anguish and stilled by the piercing query.

“Perfection does come,” he went on to say, and then he told them the following story.

One afternoon Shaya and his father walked past a park where some boys were playing baseball. Shaya asked his father, “Do you think they will let me play?"

Shaya's father knew that his son was not at all athletic and that most boys would not want him on their team. But Shaya's father understood that if his son was chosen to play it would give him a much needed sense of belonging.

Shaya's father approached one of the boys in the field and asked if Shaya could play. The boy looked around for guidance from his teammates. Getting none, he took matters into his own hands and said "We are losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning.
I guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him up to bat in the ninth inning."

Dad was ecstatic and Shaya smiled a big smile. Shaya was told to put on a glove and go out to play short center field. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shaya's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three.

In the bottom of the ninth inning, the team scored again and now with two outs and the potential winning run on base, Shaya was scheduled to come to the plate. Would the team actually let him bat at this juncture and give away their chance to win the game?

Surprisingly, Shaya was given the bat. Everyone knew that it was all but over now, because Shaya didn't even know how to hold the bat properly, let alone hit with it. However as Shaya stepped up to the plate, the pitcher moved a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shaya should at least be able to make contact. The first pitch came in and Shaya swung clumsily and missed.

One of Shaya's teammates came up to him, and together they held the bat and faced the pitcher waiting for the next pitch. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly toward Shaya. As the pitch came in, Shaya, with the help of his team-mate, swung at the bat and together they hit a slow ground ball to the pitcher.

The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could easily have thrown the ball to the first baseman for the out, and the end of the game. But instead, the pitcher took the ball and threw it way to high and into right field.

Everyone started yelling, "Shaya, run to first. Run to first." Never in his life had Shaya run to first. He scampered down the baseline wide-eyed and startled.

By the time he reached first base, the right fielder had the ball. He could have thrown the ball to the second baseman who would tag out Shaya, who was still running. But the right fielder understood the pitcher's intentions... and so he threw the ball high and far over the third baseman's head.

Everyone yelled, "Run to second, run to second." Shaya ran toward second base as the runners ahead of him deliriously circled the bases towards home. As Shaya reached second base, the opposing short stop ran to him, turned him in the direction of third base and shouted, "Run to third."

As Shaya rounded third, the boys from both teams ran behind him screaming, "Shaya run home." Shaya ran home, stepped on home plate and all 18 boys lifted him on their shoulders as their hero.
"That day," said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, "those 18 boys showed all of us what God’s perfection is really like.

Jesus now calls us to become Reformed Christians. To realize that there is no ordinary water, nor are there any ordinary stone jars. There is only the new wine of an unconditional love that defies any form of discrimination or injustice.