Weeding and Whiting

(no audio this week... sorry.)

Proper 17b 2015 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The Pharisees and scribes asked Jesus, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders?”

A few weeks ago I spent a few days in Baltimore at my future retirement home. The abundant rain and warm weather — and when they say “warm” in Baltimore they mean it! — had produced a huge amount of growth in the modest back yard. The worst of this was that most of the growth was of weeds! In particular, a plague of morning glory vines had covered almost everything else in the garden, strangling two rose bushes and knocking them to the ground, and wrapping around a peony and a fig tree. By the time I pulled up all of the morning glory vines, and a few other weeds, I had a four-foot high pile of garden refuse to dispose of. Fortunately, the local hardware store supplies five-foot high brown-paper refuse bags for just this purpose — a purpose they are fit for, as I noted last week!

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Would that it were as easy to get our lives in order as it is our gardens! We heard a reading from the Letter of James — not our Saint James (the brother of John and son of Zebedee) but the James referred to as the brother of the Lord, and who served as an early leader of the church in Jerusalem. In it we hear some good advice about the sort of spiritual gardening that is necessary if we are to bear fruit. James tells us we need to strip away the “rank growth of wickedness” so that the welcome and implanted word — the word of God that Jesus himself had likened to seed scattered on different kinds of soil — might germinate within us, so that we ourselves might become, as he says, “a kind of first fruits” to the glory of God. Just as in a garden, this can be hard work, as we strip away the parts of our lives that are keeping us from proper and productive growth.

The problem with this kind of personal reform, as with some garden weeding, is that it isn’t just an external sprucing up that is needed. Weeds have roots, and if you don’t pull up the root with the stem and stalk and leaves you may just have made the problem worse, or at best deferred the problem until the stem and stalk and leaves pop up once more from the stubborn root underground. Many weeds, as you likely know, are even gifted with the ability to break off their stem just at ground level and make you think you’ve solved the problem, only to pop back to life in a few days twice as strong as before. I spent a good bit of my time a few weeks back, as I wrestled with some crab-grass, twining my hand around and around on the stalk, down to the ground so I could dig my fingers in to grasp the root and pull it up.

It is the same way with our bad habits — it is so easy to make a list of New Year’s resolutions that are forgotten within a week. Saint James gives us the example of one who is a hearer but not a doer — “all show and no go” as they say in the Islands. Such people look in the mirror, but the moment they step away, forget what they look like.

The point Saint James is making is that righteousness isn’t about appearances, about the outside — but what is going on inside. If that inner word of God is smothered by vice it will perish; but if allowed to breath and grow and bear fruit, it will eventually show on the outside. Good roots from good seed bear good fruits, if they are planted in good soil with depth to grow and freedom from weeds.

And our Gospel today addresses this distinction between inside and outside directly. It might appear at first glance that Jesus is being a bit hard on the Pharisees and the scribes. After all, their criticism, “Why do your disciples eat with defiled” — could come from the mouth of many a mother or grandmother or aunt talking to a son or granddaughter or nephew or niece. At least I was brought up that way — and so it was a tradition in my family home, as much as it appears to have been for the Pharisees, as Mark observes. It is not that unusual to be expected to wash your hands thoroughly before you eat — particularly when you are eating without knife and fork, by dipping your hand in the bowl and breaking the loaf with your bare — and, one hopes, clean — hands.

But as Jesus notes, there is more going on here than hygiene and table manners. The thing that seems to pull Jesus’ last nerve is the tendency of the Pharisees and the scribes, at least the ones who confronted him, to miss the point of God’s law, and to substitute their own rules and regulations, and focus on those hand-made laws, rather than on the deeper matters of justice, truth, and love, embodied in God’s sublime law: the Law summarized so well in the commandment to love God and neighbor.

As important as washing your hands may be, there is something superficial about it. It cleans only the outside; it does nothing for the inside. In another Gospel passage Jesus will accuse the Pharisees of being like whitewashed tombs: lovely and clean on the outside, but full of corruption within. A lick of paint to cover the evils of the heart, like weeding that fails to get the root as well as the stalk, is a half-way measure that may be worse than doing nothing at all! Jesus contrasts the talkative lips that honor God with literal lip-service, and the all-too-fallible and sinful human hearts that conceal God-only-knows what evil mischief deep within, where sin crouches for employment, ready to leap out at the first opportunity.

In the present case Jesus addresses the question of food — for the Pharisees would hold that even kosher food would be contaminated by eating it with unclean hands. But Jesus goes beyond the food question to expound on one of his favorite themes: what does God really want from us? Does God want merely the appearance of righteousness, a superficial ship-shape on deck while down in the engine room is all is filth and confusion? Does God only want clean hands and a clean slate, or rather a clean heart, an inside cleaned of all the impurity that lurks within, and defiles as it comes out?

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Surely that is the message for us today, and it is echoed in the teaching of Saint James. He calls for the inside of the believer to be purified — weeded of the rank growth of wickedness, and transformed inwardly by the implanted word of God, like a seed planted in a cultivated garden plot, ready to grow inside the heart of a faithful person, so that the righteous person can actually do what God requires — not only hearing the word with the ear or speaking it with the lips, but actually doing what it requires; not being like those who look at their superficial reflection — their outside — in a mirror, but who take the word in, in to the heart, where it empowers the righteous to act rightly, and the good to do good.

Ultimately goodness does not come from within us, as James testifies: “every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” But if we allow this graceful gift to enter us, to cleanse us inwardly of all our faults, allowing the hand of God to weed our garden even as God plants the seed, then we can bring forth things other than those awful and defiling things that are all we could do on our own, without God’s grace. As Jesus is quoted as saying in the parallel passage in Matthew’s Gospel, “Clean the inside of the cup and then the outside will be clean.” The vessel that needs cleaning — inside — is us, and only God’s grace and God’s gift can do that cleaning, deep down where it matters, in our heart of hearts.

God’s hand is working on us now — twisting around the stalk and reaching down into the ground where sin and unrighteousness take root. May we be ready to allow this gardener to do his work in us, to cleanse us from all sin, that we may be prepared to bring in a plentiful harvest on the great last day!+

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The Humility of God

There is no place God will not go to seek out the lost

SJF • 1 Epiphany A • Tobias S Haller BSG
John would have prevented Jesus, saying, I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me? But Jesus answered, Let it be so for now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.

Some years ago I remember a bishop who was the guest preacher in a parish — not this one — say something that really bothered me. He said, “There are some people with whom God will not associate, and some places God will not go.” Perhaps you can see why I was bothered! I didn’t say anything, until a friend of mine who had been at the same service came up to me at coffee hour and said, “I am so tired of bishops coming to my church to preach their favorite heresy!” I wouldn’t go perhaps that far, but surely I believe the bishop who preached those words was wrong. For if the Gospel teaches us anything it is that there is no one and nowhere that is beyond the reach of God; that God will seek out the lost and find them no matter how far they have strayed. This is “the humility of God” and it is nowhere so clearly laid out as in the incident recorded in our Gospel this morning, Matthew’s account of the Baptism of Jesus.

In this Gospel Jesus does something so startling it even surprises his cousin John the Baptist. John has been baptizing for some time, proclaiming baptism as repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Now, this was something new, not the same as the ordinary Jewish baptism, or ritual bath that people undertook whenever they became ceremonially unclean; that is, whenever they violated any of the purity laws of the Torah. The ordinary ritual baptism of Jewish law had nothing to do with sin in our sense of the word; it wasn’t a question of morality, but of impurity. Sin could only be wiped away by a sacrifice; sin could only be wiped away by blood. But impurity could be wiped away with water. And these were matters of ritual impurity: did you accidentally touch a dead body? are you finished having your period? have you been healed of a skin condition? did you just give birth, and have you waited the required number of days? These are all ritual matters going back to the years of desert wandering, and they had more to do with public health than the moral state of one’s soul.

So John the Baptist introduces something new, a new twist on this. He comes to see sin itself as something that needs to be washed away. He calls on people to be baptized not to wash away the outward impurities caused by touching something ritually unclean, or by coming into contact with bodily fluids; John calls on the people to be baptized in token of their inner transformation and cleansing release from sin.

So when the one person who can have no use for such a baptism approaches John one day, John understandably says, “What are you doing here? You should be baptizing me!” Like that Bishop with the odd opinions about where God would go and not go and who God would associate with or not, John the Baptist doesn’t see why Jesus, whom he recognizes as the sinless one, is lined up ready to be baptized as a token of the remission of sins. He doesn’t have any sins; he doesn’t need to be there. But Jesus will not hear John’s protest, and says, “Let it be for now; this will fulfill all righteousness.”

The question, of course, is, What does Jesus mean by that? What does righteousness mean in this regard. To answer the question I’d like to tell you a story I first heard told by a priest friend of ming, Fr. Gray Temple, Jr., whose father was a bishop who I believe always stayed on the right side of doctrine. And Gray told this story, a nice summer story for a cold, damp winter day. This story will take us back in our imaginations, to a warm summer day, about eighty years ago in Arkansas.

Imagine we’re in a small country town on a warm mid-afternoon. The name of the town isn’t important; thousands of little towns like this one dotted the Midwest in the 30s; maybe they had a few paved streets in the center of town, but the rest packed dirt. Picture that town square with its courthouse, the church, and the schoolhouse surrounding the little patch of green that could stand up to the summer’s heat; maybe there’s a bandstand in the center, like one of those little towns from an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” This is a town where people have worked hard, but they have suffered a lot. The effects of the Great Depression are visible, and many of the poorer folk from what the better-off call “the wrong side of the tracks” are just scraping by by the skin of their teeth. Well, to make matters worse, and to burden these poor folk even more, an outbreak of lice has struck their part of town, out on the wrong side of the tracks. The county health officials sweep in and go from house to house with a fumigator.

To add insult to injury, all of the people from the affected area have to come to the town square, to line up outside a big white tent they put up just for this purpose, right outside the courthouse, right across from the church and the school. There all the poor folk have to go through an inspection and delousing one by one, there for all to see. You can imagine the humiliation, especially for the children. To be seen in the louse-line means you are one of “them.” These are proud people, poor but proud, and to have to stand in line in the hot sun waiting for the medical examiner to pronounce you “clean” or worse, “infested,” is a terrible embarrassment and humiliation. Well, the local minister, opposite the tent in his white-shingled church on the side of the square, notes all this, as he sits fanning himself with a palm fan, trying to concentrate on next Sunday’s sermon. He sees the people lining up, feeling literally and figuratively lousy, and his heart goes out to them. He looks at the children hanging their heads in shame, as their parents try desperately to hold their heads high with a kind of “It doesn’t matter” sort of attitude — the closest thing this small town will ever see to a New York, “What are you looking at?”

The minister looks out and sees that miserable little line of people, and then he sets down his palm fan, gets up from his desk, puts on his coat and hat, walks out into the square, and joins the end of the line. A little boy, the last in the line up till then, looks sheepishly up at him, and his eyes grow large as he sees this dignified man in his neat suit, standing in a line in which everyone else is dressed in overalls or gingham. A couple of the local matrons out in front of the post office eyes grow as big as saucers, the ribbons of their hats quivering in astonishment, and through their good efforts, within twenty minutes the whole town has heard the news that the minister is in the louse line. Within another twenty minutes the line has grown by a few more people, among them the judge and the schoolmaster and the town doctor; and within the next hour the line extends all the way around the square, and even includes the matrons in their ribboned hats, looking a little uncomfortable, trying to make smiles in faces that look like they are going to shatter, but smiling and there, nonetheless.

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Jesus did not come to John to be baptized because he needed baptism, any more than the minister joined the louse-line because he had lice. Jesus joined the line of sinners waiting to be baptized by John in order to fulfill all righteousness — for only righteousness that has submitted itself to judgment can be called truly righteous. Righteousness that stands apart, alone and by itself, is only self-righteousness; and Jesus, the man who above all lived for others, would not establish his righteousness apart from making all others righteous, too, by being with them.

Believe me, that Bishop was wrong. There is no place that God will not go, there are no people so fallen that God will refuse to be among them; such is the humility of God. Jesus, himself sinless, joins the line of sinners waiting to be baptized by John because joining himself to sinful humanity is exactly what he came to do. Jesus did not come — the first time — to judge the world; that he will do when he comes again in glory! But at the first, Jesus came not to judge the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved. And he saved it by becoming part of it, by joining himself to the suffering, the sinning, the weak, the helpless, the outcast; getting into the louse-line of our fallen human nature.

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Epiphany means “showing forth.” Over these next few weeks, as we travel through the season after Epiphany up towards Lent, our Scriptures will “show forth” different aspects of Christ and his relation to us. It is fitting that this first Sunday after Epiphany begin with Christ’s baptism, where, faced by an astonished John the Baptist, Jesus shows forth perhaps the most important thing about himself that he can show: his humility. He is one of us; he is Emmanuel, God-with-us; and he cares enough for us to leave his heavenly throne and join our assembly, thereby raising our hearts and our spirits to that place where he sits at the right hand of the Father Almighty, now and forever.+

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