Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from September 3, 2006

“Rethinking Holiness”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

James 1:17-27

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Just the sound of the word Pharisee brings to mind things like hypocrite and phony.  We image the Pharisees as pompous, empty, heartless rulers and enforcers who led the crusade to end Jesus’ earthly ministry.  When texts like these come up in the Gospel of Mark and in other places, it’s also an excuse for us to pat ourselves on the back at the expense of our Jewish roots in a “My God is better than your God” type of gloating.

It’s not only wrong.  It’s also very, very misleading.  Biblical scholar Sarah Dylan Breuer reminds us that the Pharisees are not the bad guys that we make them out to be.  Pharisees in Jesus’ day did not hold to a religion that said that God was more distant or less loving or merciful than the God we proclaim.  Anyone who looks up words like love and loving and mercy in a decent concordance that includes Hebrew Scripture will find plenty of evidence that the Pharisees taught that God is, to quote the Book of Exodus, “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, forgiving inequity and sin.”

Neither do the Pharisees teach that God is distant, or that human beings can’t have an intimate relationship with God.  If you spend any amount of time reading the Psalms, you know that that is true.  Indeed, the Pharisees, unlike the Sadducees, taught that God can be as present in anyone’s kitchen, workplace or bedroom, as God is in the temple.  Nor do the Pharisees confine God’s love to Jews, or suggest that one had to be born Jewish in order to know or follow God.

So Jesus’ beef with the Pharisees is far more subtle than what we’ve been taught to believe.  In truth, Jesus and the Pharisees are far more alike than they are different.  Both Jesus and the Pharisees were concerned with purity laws and with holiness.  Both believed that the richness of Jewish law and tradition was available to anyone and that anyone could have a vital and intimate relationship with God.  Anyone could be a Jew or a Pharisee, and any place could be holy to God if only people would treat it as such.  On that point, Jesus and the Pharisees agree.

Where they disagreed was about what made a place, a time or a relationship holy, what made it pure.  It wasn’t that purity and holiness didn’t matter.  It did—both to Jesus and to the Pharisees.   What they disagreed about was what constituted purity and holiness.  For Jesus’ contemporaries, holiness was connected to behavior and ritual.  One was able to have a relationship with God through the tasks, behaviors, and disciplines related to Jewish law.

But Jesus takes a wonderfully subversive turn from his contemporaries.  He defines holiness as something that comes from inside, something that resides in the heart and is manifest in how one lives.  Jesus  wasn’t making up new religion as he spoke of that truth.  Rather, he was tapping into an ancient strand of our shared Judeo tradition that is often unraveled from the fabric of our faith.  That is the wisdom tradition.

I mentioned it last week.  Here it is again, this subtle, wonderful thread that adds a radical teaching about what it means to be a person of faith.  In the wisdom tradition and for Jesus, holiness is not something one does.  It cannot be created or created or conjured.  One cannot become holy by doing anything, including going to church.  As Keith Green commented, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car.” 

Holiness exists.  It already is and it is God’s doing, not ours.  If we take seriously the notion that God is indeed the creator of everything that is, the world and all that’s in it including you and me, then holiness is inherent in all those things.  It is God’s fingerprint on creation that makes it holy.  It is God’s fingerprint on us that makes us holy and all God’s critters have a place in the choir.  Holiness is not about what we do.  It is about what we recognize.  It is all around us and it is within us.

This radical teaching of Jesus reclaimed the forgotten truth about God, about people, and about how we were supposed to be in relationship with each other.  Jesus reminded his followers of every age that things in relationships and life itself are holy because they always point beyond themselves to a truth about who God is and how God is present in the stuff of life.

This table and this meal that we will share in just a few moments is holy and it points beyond itself to a life-giving, lay-down-your-life kind of love.  It is the true meaning of sacrament, a symbol that points beyond itself to greater truth.  But this table is holy because it also reminds us that, when we join hands and break bread around our own table, God’s presence blesses, enlivens, and makes meaning beyond the nourishment we find on our plate.  God is as present in the sacrament of our daily meals as in the sacrament we share around this table.

Jesus knew in his bones what is easy for us to forget, that holiness cannot be created—it can only be revealed.  The joy of revealing is one that belongs to us all because holiness lives in us all.  Does it get occluded by a lot of other stuff?  Absolutely but that’s a sermon for another day.  But Jesus reminds us that all of life, all of creation, including us, is holy.  The significant part of our faith journey is about living into that truth.

When we recognize and remember that, then our lives will point beyond our days to reveal something of God.  Then we will recognize that we all have the opportunity to let God’s words stammer out through ours and that silence can speak as loudly the truth of God as anything else, and that blessing can come through our hands as we feed one another with food for our bodies and food for our souls.  Then we will remember that we always have within us the power to bless.

There are a few other things that I put into my God bag that I didn’t share with the kids.  But they are important to me as a reminder about who God is and how God can be known.  This is Nunzilla.  She is a little plastic wind-up nun.  She is a little worn-out but when you put her down, she kind of waddles along.  When she was younger, she used to spew sparks out of her mouth.  She is one of my favorite things.  One of the reasons is not just because I think it’s hysterically funny but she was a gift from a client of mine.  It’s significant because it marked a crucial turning point in her recovery from clergy sexual abuse.  It meant that she was reclaiming her humor and that she was beginning to differentiate between her faith and her religion.  Nunzilla reminds me of the integrity of her journey.  She also reminds me, from time to time, to laugh at religion.  She reminds me to take the essence of ministry seriously but not to take myself too seriously in the process.

The other stuff that are in the bag speak of places holy because they are places of God’s revealing—the summer home of my youth, our boat, the home that Reneé and I share, the sacrament that happens around our dinner table every night.  Other things speak of relationships—Pearl’s leash, Cromwell’s bit, also my wedding ring, Aunt Goggie’s watch, and this stole that you see from time to time.  It’s made from pieces of fabric given to my by people who reflected holiness to me during some of the darker days of my life.  It’s a reminder that holiness does indeed live in everyone.  There is one final thing—it’s a rubber scraper.  I use it not only because I love to cook but because I think it’s a good reminder, at least for me, that much of the life of faith is about gathering up what we are tempted to leave at the edges and that we’re constantly called to scrape all that stuff that’s a little crusty and easily forgotten back down to become a part of the whole, and that it all gets richer for the moment it takes to do that.  Each of these symbols remind of relationships that reveal God’s richness and grace, symbols of holiness.

I encourage you to make your own God bag.  Put together those things that speak to you of holiness, those things that reveal to you something of the truth of God, things that remind you that holiness lives not only around you but also within you.

Jesus’ concerns about purity moved to the conversation from what one did to who one was.  It shifted the emphasis on holiness from what one created by certain behavior to what one embodies as they paid attention to life.  It was so troubling and so challenging because it grounded religious practice and something far deeper, more profound and central to the very essence of our lives.  It meant, in part, that we’re called, as Sarah Breuer commented, to be as sure that we don’t infect one another with salmonella at the potluck supper as we are that we don’t infect one another with racism and hatred and homophobia and ageism and a thousand other hatreds and isms that deny the holy in us in creation and in those around us.

Jesus’ teaching embodies what Meister Eckhart hundreds of years later.  He said, “People should know worry as much about what they do as what they are.  If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant.  If you are righteous, then what you do will be righteous.   We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on who we are for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.”

Amen.