Rev. Jon Smoot
“What Proceeds From the Heart”
Rev Jon Smoot
Preached at Bethesda Jewish Congregation 4/27/07 and at
Bradley Hills Presbyterian 4/29/07 8:30 Service
One can’t read far into Leviticus without tripping over this oft-repeated injunction in the book: “Be holy, for I am holy.” Kodesh (“holy”) occurs as verb, noun, or adjective 150 times in Leviticus: Seems that this book calls upon both priests and people constantly to “distinguish between the holy and the profane or common, between the unclean and the clean.” Frankly, we liberal Protestant Christians don’t talk too much about holiness – we leave that to the Fundamentalists to try to figure out what’s holy or not, and they appear to have fun doing so – usually defining themselves as holy and others as not. And Christians in general don’t talk about anything as clean or unclean. So, I guess this is an opportunity to explore a bit of the Holiness Code. And when I think “clean and unclean” from the Christian Scriptures I immediately think of this strange little story from Matthew’s gospel.
First a story: I read some time ago about some graffiti scrawled upon a bathroom stall in a New York public bathroom: “If you’re tired of sinning, call the Prayer Hotline at 1-800-blah blah blah.” Underneath it, someone had written, “If you’re not tired of sinning, call me for a good time” with a name and number…
What is holiness? Is it the absence of sin? If so, I guess we’re all toast. Is holiness defined by what we do, or don’t do? Isn’t it rather daunting for us for God to command: “Be Holy, for I am holy?” My first question as a Christian is “How?” Maybe the Jewish answer would be, “you are holy when you follow the instruction in the Torah. Maybe holiness means separation from the ordinary or the common – but I don’t know how to do that, maybe you do. Maybe God has already made us holy by virtue of God’s faithful and forever election of Israel and has made us Christians “honorary Jews” as Krister Stendhal put it, as God’s covenant faithfulness extended out to Gentiles through the sacrifice of Jesus.
Or, maybe it’s really not about us at all. Maybe holiness is all about God – God’s total and complete otherness, God’s majesty, sovereignty, mercy – so unlike our petty little selves. And maybe holiness means that if we’re lucky, some of that “otherness” of God gets to rub off on us a little when we brush up against the shattering majesty and beauty and compassion of God.
In Leviticus 16 I discovered what was, for me, a striking thing: Although traditional, pietistic theology has insisted that the only sins that could have been forgiven under the old law of Moses were sins of ignorance and sins of inadvertence, this text boldly decries such a meager view by announcing in verse 21: “Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness.”
All iniquities, all sin, all transgression can be forgiven. That covers all the bases! It is clear that the mercy and forgiveness of God encompasses every sin except blasphemy or sinning against the Holy Spirit – this we find in both Numbers 15 and in the Book of Hebrews chapter 10 – What does that mean? It means high-handed sinning against God’s grace – the despising of God’s mercy for ourselves and for others. We who have been shown every grace and compassion of God cannot then turn around and high-handedly treat others with cold contempt or active hate. Here’s the common ground for Jew and Christian founded on God’s unimaginable mercy: All are sinners. All sin forgiven and forgotten – except for the sin against grace: The despising of mercy.
Which brings me to the strange little story from Matthew. Here is a Jesus that makes even Christians uncomfortable. Gentle Jesus, kind Jesus, inclusive Jesus - responding in a harsh and offensive way to a woman in pain, even calling her a “dog,” by virtue of the fact that she is a Canaanite – not a child of the covenant.
Jesus has just been teaching the disciples about ritual purity – that you can’t be made unclean by what you touch or ingest – contrary to the teaching of the Scribes and Pharisees. These leaders had ripped into Jesus and his disciples because they dug into their lunches without washing their hands first – that is not just bad manners, it is bad faith. So he rips right back into them, and then tells the disciples that the danger is not what is outside of you, waiting to creep into you through your mouth. The danger is already inside of you, inside of your heart. If you want to be pure – holy, start there with yourself, instead of blaming the dirt on everybody else.
Then, smack on the heels of this teaching, as if to rub his nose in it, Jesus is presented with a distinctly unclean situation: a Canaanite woman, with a daughter tormented by demons. What’s a Messiah to the Jews to do – one who just announced in Chapter 10 that his mission was to the lost and leader-less children of Israel? You can almost hear the wheels turning or the tumblers falling into place in Jesus’ heart and head when he finally acknowledges the woman and says to her, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
She will not let it go – she respectfully, but doggedly wrestles with Jesus: “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” With echoes of Jacob wrestling with the divine opponent all night, the woman says, “I will not let you go until you bless me.”
And Jesus faces a teachable moment for himself – a moment of change. He hears her, and gives her one of the strongest appreciations for someone’s faith in the gospels. Just as Leviticus 16 and the Day of Atonement provisions form the climactic and pivotal point of the book, so is this story the hinge point of Matthew’s gospel. He is accomplishing two major feats: he is reassuring his Jewish audience that they continue to be irrevocably covered by the promise of God – they still have the priority in the divine plan of salvation – but he is also foreshadowing the Gentile Mission – that the covenant grace and mercy of God is to be poured out on all flesh. There is no more “other” or outsider not worthy of God’s mercy.
The Canaanite woman, the outsider, the unclean, forces Jesus to deal with her, forcing him to expand the boundaries of his understanding of his mission of God’s shalom. The faith and chutzpah of this nameless Canaanite woman become the model voice from beyond the boundaries as she stakes her claim on the mercy and generosity of God. This story is here to amplify what Jesus is talking about with reference to what is clean or unclean. What Jesus teaches here is that danger to us or to our holiness is not “Out There” – with things and people who frighten and disturb us. The danger is in here, in that part of us that wants to cut us off from the “other” – whoever that might be.
So what’s my point? Back to the Holiness of mercy – God will forgive everything and anything except profaning the mercy of God by refusing it for ourselves or refusing it for others. All sin forgiven and forgotten – except for the sin against grace: The despising of mercy. And if the world ever needed some good news about mercy, it is now. There is so much hatred and contempt and violence throughout the world. But then again, it’s been around since the first plotting of murder in the garden. In biblical times, Jews and Samaritans hated one another, and both groups hated the Gentiles and the Canaanites. Throughout most of the past 2,000 years, many Christians have hated Jews, blaming them for murdering Jesus. It is the perversity of the human heart that leads us to envy those above us and hate those who are unlike us. In our own American history we have vilified the English, Blacks, Native Americans, Russians and Muslims. Not to mention that gays and lesbian continue to be prime targets of convenience for hostility and injustice and sometimes murder. Now I fear backlash and hatred of Koreans for the rampaging, murderous, Mr. Cho - a broken human being if there ever was one. Who knows what defilement he ingested over his life: scorn, contempt, neglect, abuse – and out of his heart, his mouth and his hands spoke unimaginable defilement and destruction. We can hate the evil he did, but must not hate the person, Mr. Cho.
There is actual evil in the world, no doubt about that, but until we face up to the evil and hatred and contempt inside of us, we cannot do battle. We cannot fight the shadow that we will not own. That is true for us as individuals – it is true for us as a national community in regard to the way we treat other peoples or nations.
“Be holy, for I am holy” – God commands. God is holy – God is the wholly other – the unimaginable, the beautiful, the majestic, the sovereign, and the merciful. There is holiness expressed to humanity in unfathomable mercy. The sins have been forgiven and forgotten – removed as far from us as the east is from the west. All of us are standing in the need of grace, of mercy, of compassion, of forgiveness. We are all outsiders, outliers, until God draws us in close to the altar of mercy.
If that doesn’t impel us to the holiness of mercy – to go out of here and act like the reconciled and received shalom of God – then I don’t now what would. And as we are drawn near to the altar-flame of God’s heart, maybe, just maybe, we might learn to express God’s holiness and justice and shalom in our daily lives. After all, there are things that God hates – but never people. There are things to hate, but never people. We are to hate and combat the insanity of gun violence – 8 children or teenagers are shot to death every day in this country; we are to hate and combat the rape of Darfur, and injustice in every form. We must never be afraid to express the holiness of God – for what proceeds from our heart and hands is holy when the holiness of God’s mercy has first grabbed us and then compels us to go out of here and be the shalom of God. Amen.
