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ADVENT II
“Setting the World Right:
Purity”
Malachi 3:1-4
Psalm 126
A sermon preached by the
Rev. Douglas M. Donley
Throughout the Advent and Christmas
seasons, we are focusing our attention on “Setting the World Right.” I believe this is what God was doing by
becoming human in the person of Jesus.
God was setting the world right.
God was and is hoping that those who follow in Jesus’ footsteps will
continue the work of setting the world right.
When we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” we are saying, let’s
set the world right.
When we really try
to set the world right, we will really have a sense of the Christmas Spirit.
We have already looked at security last Sunday,
remembering that our security comes from God and not from some worldly power or
principality. Next week, we will look at
strength, followed by clarity on Christmas Eve morning. This week, we have the concept of purity.
When I think of purity and how it functions in the
Christmas story, I think about the great work of George Frederick Handel and
his wonderful work the Messiah.
There it is, the passage from
Malachi that we just heard. The chorus
goes, “And he shall purify…the sons of Levi”.
It starts out great, but then the tempo unintentionally slows and the
choruses I have sung in kind of mumbles on from there. It’s a hard chorus, so we often skip over it
and long for “Glory to God in the Highest”.
I guess that’s appropriate. Purity isn’t the easiest of tasks. We are called to be pure both in body and in
heart. The body is a lot easier than the
heart.
When I think of something that’s pure, I think of
something that’s unblemished—something that you don’t question its
legitimacy. Certainly that was the case in
Jesus. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure
in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8). We want to be pure, too. But we don’t want to go overboard. There is such a thing as being too pure. That’s where we get the term
puritanical. It is obsession with purity
to the extent that only a small group can ever be expected to be pure. So we gain purity by right action, like
voting for the right political party or supporting the right legislation, or
keeping your promises. Then you have the
purity police that are out there watching for us to slip up so we can prove
that they’re better than the rest of us.
Back in Jesus’ time purity was a real big deal. In order to be a full part of the worshipping
community, you needed to be pure. This
meant that you needed to go through rituals to make yourself “clean”. And not only that, you needed to get yourself
declared clean by a priest. This often
cost you, the price of a lamb or a turtledove to be sacrificed as an offering
to God. Once you had done that, you
could be declared clean and therefore a full member of the community. In the Torah, there are 613 laws and the violation
of any of them causes a blemish on your being.
You are unclean and you need to be made clean. So you go to the priest and make an offering,
the priest makes you clean and then you go along your merry way. It functioned kind of like confession
did. It was also susceptible to
corruption, much like the selling of indulgences exposed the corruption of the medieval
church.
But what if you can’t afford to be declared clean by a
priest? Well, then you remain
unclean. As a rule, women were less
clean than men. This is because a woman
is unclean during her menstrual cycle.
Likewise, you became clean quicker if you gave birth to a boy than if
you gave birth to a girl. Give a nod to
the power of patriarchy to reproduce itself.
What happened eventually was that the priestly class got
their goods through the offerings and the rich got richer and the poor got
poorer. One could only afford to be
declared clean so many times. The
prophets railed against this practice, especially Amos and Malachi. Amos talked about how the priests and the
elite had the outward appearance of purity, but their practice showed them to
be quite the opposite.
Malachi talked about how another would come to purify the
priests, the sons of Levi. This
messenger of the covenant will come and restore the ways of God. But who shall abide the day of his
coming? Look out if you have gained by
the purity system—the purity system run amok.
This one will purify the descendants of Levi and show true righteousness,
says Malachi.
This is an illusion to Elijah who is said to prepare the
way for the Messiah by first telling everyone to repent. This is the work that John the Baptist had as
his task, “the voice of the one who crieth in the wilderness, prepare ye the
way of the Lord. Make straight in the
desert a highway for our God.” This one
will prepare the way for Jesus by giving us a new sense of purity. Not one that requires sacrifices and money,
but one that requires a rightness of heart—an ethic of compassion is the purity
that Jesus was interested in.
Think about
it. Jesus came in the most impure and
unclean way. He was a homeless bastard
child, born to poor parents. When he was
dedicated in the temple, Mary and Joseph provided two turtle doves, the price
for the poor who could not afford a sheep.
If Jesus was interested in keeping the purity system of
outward purity, then he would have associated himself with the priests and the
people in positions of authority. He
would not have embraced unclean people—women, lepers, demon-possessed, tax
collectors, non-Jews. He would not have
worked on the Sabbath. He would have
gone through serious ritual cleansings before each meal. But this metaphoric pure spotless lamb was up
to rethinking the purity system.
Marcus Borg puts it this way in his book, Meeting Jesus again for the First Time:
“It is in the context of a purity
system that created a world with sharp social boundaries between pure and
impure, righteous and sinner, whole and not whole, male and female, rich and
poor, Jew and Gentile, that we can see the sociopolitical significance of
compassion. In the message and the
activity of Jesus, we see an alternative social vision: a community shaped not
by the ethos and politics of purity, but by the ethos and politics of
compassion.” (Borg, 1994:53)
The Levitical ethos would have been, “Be ye Holy as God
is Holy” (Leviticus 19:2). In other
words, be ye pure. But Jesus changed
that and said “Be ye compassionate as God is compassionate” (Luke
Compassion
based upon generosity, that’s what Jesus was after. Not a rigid purity system based upon status,
position, wealth and too often confused by corruption.
When we think of people in the Christmas spirit, we think
of people being compassionate. We think
of people putting aside differences in order to recognize that we are part of
the same fabric of creation.
We
think of people willing to go the extra mile for another, or giving a bit more
of themselves because this is what Christianity is all about.
We
long for that purity to return, don’t we when December is done?
I think this is why I love Christmas so much more than
Easter. I like them both, but Christmas
gets people thinking about compassion in a way that makes people stand up and
notice more than Easter.
Don’t
get me wrong, Jesus did a very compassionate thing by dying on the cross, but
it doesn’t make people respond by being compassionate and any more pure like Christmas
does.
I
think that at Christmas time, we release our inner purity and recognize for
once to purity of those around us.
We
give gifts.
We
remember the homeless and the outcast.
We
celebrate being with family, even those we don’t like so much.
We
do it because it honors them.
It
honors God’s creation in them.
It
shows that we can be bigger and better than we once were.
We
get to try on being pure for a few weeks.
We
get to try on seeing another as a pure gift from God, too. And in the process, we set the world
right. We prepare the way of God and we
celebrate the mystery of Christmas in an even more profound manner.
The
new Share the Care team has done great things by spreading compassion to the
membership of this congregation. The
team has provided food, support, comfort and presence to people in need. What a great example of the pure compassion
that is central to the Christmas message and the Christian lifestyle.
Sisters and brothers, we remember that we have security
in God who created all things and watches over all things. We remember also that God made each of us
pure.
And we can become pure once
again by the way we live our lives. When
we do that, then we are well on the way to setting the world right.
So do something in the coming week that recognizes the
purity in your neighbor. Do something
that makes you feel a bit more clean—not by being better than someone else, but
by being compassionate, just like God is compassionate. When you do, you will certainly enjoy a bit
of Christmas Spirit which will go a long way toward making you a more whole,
happy, even pure person.