Dirty Hands

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
August 30, 2009; 13 Pentecost; Proper 17, Year B
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23) – Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.'

You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."
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The chaplain at Temple University tells of watching a mother bringing her small son to the communion rail. As he held out his hand, she slapped him angrily. She was furious with him. Not the left hand! The right hand!

I got a letter from a leader in the Church of Christ. He was pretty furious with a recent column of mine. I get real mixed reviews from my columns, and that's fine. I don't think I know anybody who always agrees with me, including my mother and my wife, and they love me. Bill Clark is fond of saying, "I never agree with what Lowell writes in the paper, but I love him." Anyway, I got a letter correcting my contention that salvation is about a lot more than getting to heaven after you die. IN ALL CAPS the letter writer corrected me, saying that all Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and most Christians are going to hell unless they follow the right formula about Jesus. The Church of Christ teaches that only members of their church are saved.

I wrote back to say that the god he believes in sounds genocidal. His god doesn't look anything like Jesus, and we say Jesus is the incarnation of God. I said that the incarnation of his god would look more like Hitler; he was the last person to try to kill all the Jews. I wrote, "I'll bet you are a kind and loving man. I'll bet that there are people of your acquaintance whom you love and cherish who are not part of your church. If you were given the power of choice, you are kind and compassionate enough that you wouldn't intentionally condemn those good people to eternal damnation. Why would you worship a god who is less loving than you are?"

Well, I got a reply from him. He didn't actually write me back or respond to my questions, but he did enclose three brochures published by his denomination making it crystal clear his church is the only true church, the Bible read literally is the only "absolute, unchanging standard," and adult baptism with lots of water is "an essential condition to salvation." There were a lot of words in those three tracts, but the word "love" never appeared. That's where I'll start my next letter to him. (I wonder which hand they take communion with in that church.)

Ah, Traditions. Powerful stuff. I know I upset quite a few people when I removed some wooden blocks from underneath our altar cross. They were painted white so they might look a little bit like marble, and one had an empty hole in it for a microphone that used to be there in a previous sound system. I thought the blocks were tacky, and Episcopalians hate tacky worse than sin. But only after I removed them did I learn there was a tradition. According to some, the flowers should never be higher than the cross. I had never heard of that tradition. But I am assured that it is a holy tradition passed down from generations in certain Episcopal churches. I am out of compliance.

There are a lot of ways to mess up. There is a Mennonite bishop who had some trouble with some women under his spiritual care. The Mennonite bonnet has strings that are used to tie the bonnet under the chin. Some women decided not to tie their bonnets, but to let the strings dangle. "Honestly," cried the bishop, "I just don't know what this world is coming to!"

Many of you are old enough to remember as I do when women in the Episcopal Church always wore some covering on their head when they came to church. Lots of women had those little lace doilies that they pinned to their hair. That's not the right word, I know. What did you call those? That's a tradition that seems to be waning. There seems to be a lot of non-compliance as I look at the women's uncovered heads in this congregation.

"Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" the Pharisees asked Jesus. Jesus quoted Isaiah back to them: Heart service is more important than lip service. You are teaching human precepts as doctrines.

I ran across an excerpt from the Digest of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. "[Slavery] is a real and effective discipline, and without it we are profoundly persuaded that the African race in the midst of us can never be elevated in the scale of being. As long as that race, in its comparative degradation, coexists side by side with the white, bondage is its normal condition." Many Southern Episcopalians agreed.

I imagine that anthropologists in the year 5000 will not have many good things to say about American football. But in our day and time, football is pretty close to doctrine. For some people, it's a religion. "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the righteous and wear longhorns on your helmets?" Okay, enough entertainment.

How do we know the difference between human precepts and divine truth? We are so immersed in our own culture, traditions, and customs that we rarely have enough distance to see them with much perspective. In some sense, we must hold lightly to what we think we know. James Russell Lowell wrote, "New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth."

The standard and the stillpoint that Jesus gives us is love. "God is love," the First Epistle of John declares. Jesus summarized the whole of the law and the prophets with the commandment to love. Scripture and human history is full of tensions between tradition and love, between purity and love. "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" Sometimes getting your hands dirty is the only way to love.

The Epistle of James offers us a tantalizing hint today saying, "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world." Widows and orphans were the most vulnerable members of ancient societies. Caring for the vulnerable is an authentic religious expression of love. And "keeping oneself unstained by the world" sounds like a reminder to hold lightly the traditions, customs and values that our culture feeds us, constantly holding our inherited truths up to the discerning light of love.

According to the Rev. J. C. Austin of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York:

There are no political, economic, justifications for a lack of care, a lack of compassion, toward those who are suffering regardless of who they are, what they look like, what they’ve done, or whose side they are on. There are no others, only neighbors.

That means we put our hands to work in some pretty dirty places: on the streets, in prisons, hospitals, shelters, and rehab units; in faraway places filled with people who are deemed outside our national interests or against them, like Liberia, Sudan, and yes, Iraq; and in the messiest conflicts on earth, where the most evil intentions and acts of the human heart pour out unchecked and rampage through the streets, as in that region that seems so ironically named these days, the Holy Land.

Our hands are made clean, are made holy, not by washing them, but by getting them dirty. Our hands have been set apart to scrabble in the dirtiness of the world’s injustices and impurities on Christ’s behalf, to touch with compassion those considered untouchable or unclean by our social mores, cultural divisions, or political commitments. As Teresa of Avila famously put it, "Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours; yours are the eyes through which God’s compassion will look upon the world; yours are the feet with which God will go about doing good; yours are the hands with which God will bless others now. (1)

So, open your hands – either hand will do; no slapping – to receive Christ's Body and Blood, according to our traditions. Know yourself to be God's beloved child, fed and nurtured in Divine Love. And then go into the world, holding lightly to everything except love, and be the hands with which God will bless others today and tomorrow, until we return next week, as is our custom and tradition, to this holy place, to open our hands again, to be blessed, and fed, and sent.
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(1) J. C. Austin, sermon: Dirtiness is Next to Godliness; 8/31/03

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The Mission of St. Paul's Episcopal Church is to explore and celebrate
God's infinite grace, acceptance and love.

For information about St. Paul's Episcopal Church and it's life and mission, please contact us at
P.O. Box 1190, Fayetteville, AR 72702, or call 479/442-7373
More sermons are posted on our web site: www.stpaulsfay.org
Also, see the archive of previous sermons in the right margin of this blog
Visit our web partners at www.explorefaith.org

The Hospitality of the Table

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
August 15, 2009; 11 Pentecost; Proper 15, Year B
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(John 6:51-58) – Jesus said, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever."
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Imagine we are typical residents of Galilee during the time of Jesus. What do you think would have most caught our attention about Jesus? Maybe that he was a remarkable healer? But there were lots of healers. Maybe his teaching? There were other remarkable teachers and rabbis.

I think the thing that would have most stood out about him – the most unique, odd, and counter-cultural thing about Jesus – was his table fellowship. He provoked great scandal because he sat openly at meals with good people and bad people, with pious Pharisees and with unobservant tax collectors and sinners.

In that culture, to eat with someone was a public, not a private event. Villages were small. Windows and doors were open. Everyone knew your business. And it was understood, that for a Jewish man to eat with someone, it was a public declaration of friendship and acceptance. That is why people were very careful about with whom they ate. Your standing in the community, your family's honor, was dependent upon the care with which you created friendships and alliances. To eat with someone disreputable would bring disrepute upon your self and upon your whole family.

If we had been living in Galilee at that time, we would have heard the scandalous reports. "Have you heard? He sits at table with sinners and tax collectors. He invited Mary of Bethany to sit with him like any male student. When he was away in Tyre, he allowed a pagan woman, a Canaanite dog, to come and interrupt his dinner, and he healed her child. And him, a rabbi. Shocking!" Today scholars call it the "hospitality of his table." Originally, it was the scandal of his table.

You get the feeling that those meals were remarkable. They were so important to Jesus and to his companions. A meal is a powerful thing. We eat and visit together. We talk and commune. We truly connect with people when we dine with them. And as our conversation flows, the food we are sharing creates a profound union. When we eat together, we are literally being constituted by the same thing. The food we share gives us life. The energy and nutrition of our common food flows into every cell of our bodies. How different can we be if we are being sustained and created by the same substance?

Words and food. Powerful instruments of union and communion. At Jesus' table, words and food brought people together across social and religious boundaries, and you sense that in that holy space they found themselves transformed. They were changed by his presence; by his words and being; by his energy and love; by the power of his table. It made a profound impact on those who were near him.

The only miracle that all four gospels include in their remembered stories of Jesus is the miracle of his feeding multitudes. All four gospels tell how he taught great crowds and then fed them. All four gospels say that everyone was satisfied, and that there was an abundance remaining.

On his last night with them, as pressures increased toward some ominous climax, Jesus again brought his friends together to a table. As his last act with them, his final opportunity to give them something for the unknown future ahead, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to them and said, "This is my body which is given for you. Whenever you do this, do it in remembrance of me." As supper was ending, he took the wine, blessed it, and gave it to them and said, "This is my blood poured out for you. Whenever you do this, do it in remembrance of me." He told them to love one another. Within hours he was arrested, tortured, tried, convicted, and executed.

They were devastated. Afraid. "Will we be next?" They fled and hid. Yet on the following Sunday, something happened. Some of the disciples were sitting around a table, just like they used to do with Jesus. And a stranger took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to them – and their eyes were opened. They knew Jesus was still with them. They knew him in the breaking of the bread.

From that moment forward, Christians have experienced themselves in communion with Jesus and with one another in the hospitality of his table. We have let his life feed us, nurture us, heal us, and make us one. Just as divine life entered into the person of Jesus of Nazareth, we experience his divine life present in the bread and wine as the sacrament of his same life, his body and blood. And we have become what we eat. We have become the body and blood of Christ, given for the world. We are constituted by the life of Jesus, mediated to us through the sacrament of bread and wine. It is the miracle of the feeding of the multitudes, our communion with Jesus and with one another in the hospitality of his table.

Go back with me in time once again. The year is 304. It is a time of persecution for Christians. A Roman proconsul is putting Christians on a torture rack, tearing their bodies apart with barbed hooks. Place yourself there, and ask yourself – What would be worth dying for? For what would I willingly accept torture and death?

There is a young Christian named Felix. He has just seen his father and a friend killed, their bodies torn apart on the rack in front of him. The proconsul now turns to him and asks the fateful questions.

"Were you one of the assembly; and do you possess any copies of the Scriptures?

How would you answer if you were Felix?

Listen to the response that Felix makes as he tells the world what one early Christian was willing to die for:

As if a Christian could exist without the Eucharist, or the Eucharist be celebrated without a Christian! Don't you know that a Christian is constituted by the Eucharist, and the Eucharist by a Christian? Neither avails without the other. We celebrated our assembly right gloriously. We always convene at the Eucharist for the reading of the Lord's Scriptures.

Enraged by that response, the proconsul had Felix beaten to death with clubs. (1)

Our ancestors were willing to die for the privilege of doing what we are doing right now – convening for the Eucharist and for the reading of the Lord's Scriptures. We are participating in the table fellowship of Jesus. It is a place of profound welcome and hospitality, for the pious and righteous, and especially for the sinner and outcast. At this holy meal we hear words of life and stories of God. We listen and we talk. We bring our selves, and offer our lives to this fellowship with Jesus. We hear his words of acceptance and grace. We let ourselves be healed, renewed, enlightened, empowered.

We see and hear the ancient event again. We participate in the night when Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them; when he took wine, blessed and gave it to them, saying "This is my body; this is my blood." We eat. We drink. We are constituted by the Eucharist. We are nourished by divine life. We are made one with Christ and one another. We abide in him, and he abides in us. The gift of eternal life. Here and now. Our ancestors believed this is worth dying for.
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(1) Quoted by Massey H. Shepherd, Jr. in The Worship of the Church, p. 4

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The Mission of St. Paul's Episcopal Church is to explore and celebrate
God's infinite grace, acceptance and love.

For information about St. Paul's Episcopal Church and it's life and mission, please contact us at
P.O. Box 1190, Fayetteville, AR 72702, or call 479/442-7373

More sermons are posted on our web site: www.stpaulsfay.org
and in the archives section of this blog

Visit our web partners at www.explorefaith.org

Our Praxis Gives Theoria of our Theosis

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
August 9, 2009; 10 Pentecost; Proper 14, Year B
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(John 6:35, 41-51) – Jesus said to the people, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, "I am the bread that came down from heaven." They were saying, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, `I have come down from heaven'?" Jesus answered them, "Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, `And they shall all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."

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I am going to do another teaching sermon today. That means I'm asking you to listen with a bit more attention than usual because I don't have some good stories or compelling images to add a little entertainment value. I can remember much of Suzanne's fine sermon last week thanks to her story of the scoundrel named Mutt and the image of radiance around him as he died. If you are going to remember anything about my sermon this morning, you might need to take notes or grab a copy of my text from the Narthex or the Welcome Center. This will be more like a classroom lecture, complete with foreign words and definitions. But at least its not fifty minutes long.

"I am the living bread that came down from heaven...; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."

The fourth century church father Athanansius said, "The Son of God became human so that humanity might become God." The word the Church uses for this teaching is theosis, meaning divinization, deification, or making divine.

Nine hundred years later, Aquinas put it this way: “To restore humanity, who has been laid low by sin, to the heights of divine glory, the Word of the eternal Father, though containing all things within His immensity, willed to become small. This He did, not by putting aside His greatness, but by taking to Himself our littleness.... The humanity of Christ is the way by which we come to the divinity.”

The gift and goal of God is for all of us – all of humanity itself – to be restored to the full potential of our humanity. And our full potential is immense. We have the potential to be one with God. We have the potential to be divinized, filled with divine life and light. We were created to be in union with God, one with God, and therefore one with all creation, because in Christ, God has reconciled to the divine life, not only all of humanity, but also all of creation. That is theosis.

One of the early teachers, Irenaeus has a fetching way to teach theosis, this divinization of humanity. Irenaeus was a student of Polycarp who was a student of John the Apostle. Irenaeus said that God created the world and has been working with it ever since. He sees God as being in an ongoing creative project of raising up humanity from childhood into maturity. It takes a long time to grow up. Adam and Eve were created as children, says Irenaeus. So he says that the Fall wasn't a full-blown grown-up rebellion, it was more like a childish spat, a desire to grow up too fast and have everything now, before we are ready for it.

From the time of Adam and Eve, God has been doing everything God can do to help us overcome this initial mishap and grow up into our full spiritual maturity. But life is difficult. Irenaeus says that God made life difficult on purpose. The world is a difficult place where human beings are forced to make moral decisions as moral agents, because that is the only way we can truly grow.

He says that death is like the big fish that swallowed Jonah. You remember the story. Jonah was trying to flee God's call to go to preach to that terrible city Ninevah. Jonah sailed in the opposite direction and God appointed a fish to swallow Jonah. There, in the belly of the beast, Jonah was able to turn to God and accept his calling. Irenaeus says that death and suffering are like the fish, they appear as evils, but without them we could never come to know God. When we get swallowed up in the difficulty and tragedy of life, God is with us, inviting us to grow into something new, something we couldn't become without such adversity.

For Irenaeus, everything points to the incarnation of Jesus. He calls Jesus the new Adam. Jesus systematically undoes what Adam did. Where Adam was disobedient, Jesus was obedient. Adam disobeyed God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge; Jesus obeyed God even to death on the wood of the tree. Whereas Eve's disobedience brought death to the whole human race, Mary's obedience brings life and salvation, also for the whole human race.

Irenaeus says that Christ recapitulates in his one life the entire history of humanity -- from Adam the child to Jesus the mature human. Jesus lives his life from infancy to maturity, and by simply living it, Jesus sanctifies all human life with his divinity.

If the penalty for sin was death and corruption, Christ's embrace of our flesh awards immortality and incorruptibility. When God unites the divine and human natures in Christ, God spreads the divine qualities to us, like a benign infection. Irenaeus says that Jesus completely renews all things in himself.

A couple of weeks ago I quoted the Presiding Bishop's comment about the great Western heresy, "that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God." St. Irenaeus also reminds us that we are not merely saved as individuals, but that we are part of God's project to create a new human race in Christ. In Christ, our flesh is raised into divinity. Christ takes into the Godhead not just our fleshly body, but the material of the whole cosmos.

Irenaeus said that we know our material body and our material world is filled with divinity because the cup of the Eucharist is the communion of Christ's blood, and because the bread which we break is the communion of his body. Bread, wine, body, blood – all are radiant with divinity, theosis. God became human so that humanity may become divine; God embraced earth so that the whole world might radiate divinity.

Another Greek word: Theoria. Theoria is the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. Theoria is the experience deep down in your guts, in your body and blood, that you are one with God. Knowing. Deep knowing. We know Christ in our life, through praxis, one last Greek word. Praxis is the process by which we gain theoria of our theosis.

Oh my! I've gone one Greek word too far, I fear. But it's easy to translate. Praxis is our practice – the Eucharist, our daily prayer, our struggle to be conscious and loving, our service and surrender to God's will in the present moment. By our practice, we share in the work of growing up, God's work of taking us from infancy to full maturity. And we come to know, deep in our guts, that God is with us, we are "in Christ," we really are God-breathed. We open our hands and receive the living bread which came down from heaven, and we become what we eat. The life that Jesus gives to the world, which is his flesh, becomes our flesh. We enflesh God.

Our praxis gives theoria of our theosis. We look out our window with intentional consciousness and see the lush green leaves blowing in the wind, and we are struck by its beauty. We are seeing with God's eyes; it is God's eyes seeing through us. We look consciously at someone we love and our hearts are so gladdened. We are loving with God's heart; it is God's heart loving through us. We reach out our hand to do some work that needs doing. We are acting with God's hands; it is God's hands working through us.

It's just the business of growing up. Maturing into the potential that God intends for us. "The Son of God became human so that humanity might become God." Our praxis gives theoria of our theosis. So practice. And you'll know. You are one with God.

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The Mission of St. Paul's Episcopal Church is to explore and celebrate
God's infinite grace, acceptance and love.

For information about St. Paul's Episcopal Church and it's life and mission, please contact us at
P.O. Box 1190, Fayetteville, AR 72702, or call 479/442-7373
More sermons are posted on our web site: www.stpaulsfay.org
Visit our web partners at www.explorefaith.org