Christ Church Cathedral
March 5, 2006

The Rev. Dr. H. Darrell Lance
Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Interpretation
Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School

Thank you for the invitation to worship with you today and to meet with clergy and lay people yesterday for some study and discussion on the issue which is confusing and disorienting so many within the church, namely how the church is to deal with those in its midst who are of a different sexual orientation. This is not something which will be resolved quickly or easily, but the only faithful response is to think and talk and pray together about it and to begin to work toward some kind of common mind.

At first glance, today’s readings from the lectionary might seem to have little relevance to this issue, and certainly as a direct word they do not. However, more often than not, it is in following how the Bible does its reasoning rather than in some specific verse or admonition that we find light for our path, and I think that is the case in today’s lessons.

The reading from the Old Testament was part of the well known story of Noah and the Flood. For the first time in the Bible, we are introduced to the idea of covenant which shall play such a an important part in biblical tradition. “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations. I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth” (Genesis 9:12-13). God makes a covenant with all life, a promise that God will never again bring a universal disaster upon the earth – a message of great pastoral comfort to people for whom the forces of nature were unpredictable and mysterious – flood, drought, disease, earthquake, birth, and death. But the author of the story is saying, no matter how sinful humankind becomes, no matter how chaotic nature appears, there will never again be a final catastrophe. And to remind us of God’s promise, God gives us the sign of the rainbow. Clouds and storms there shall surely be, but never again total destruction.

There are many important covenants mentioned in Scripture. Indeed, the name that Christians give to the two major divisions of the Bible – Old Testament and New Testament – simply means old covenant and new covenant. Covenant may be said to be the glue that holds the Bible together. This first covenant with Noah is between God and all life. Later God grants a covenant to Abraham, promising to make Abraham’s descendants as numerous as the sands on the shore. At the time of the Exodus from Egypt, God forms a covenant with the Israelite people at Mt. Sinai. Yahweh would be their God and they would be his people. And in the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross, followers of Jesus saw another covenant which we observe in the Eucharist: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” All these covenants – though quite different in some respects – share the idea of a solemn agreement, whether between God and human beings or between two humans, like the covenant between Jacob and Laban or between David and Jonathan.

The concept of covenant played a crucial role in maintaining order in Israelite society . In that day there were no courts to enforce contracts and agreements. One might appeal to the tribal elders or even the king, but there were few ways to enforce such rulings. It was the solemnity of the covenant itself – the promise made between the parties and the integrity of the parties that provided the stability for such agreements. To break a covenant, thus, was a serious step, carrying with it a challenge to the very underpinnings of society. And yet in the reading from today’s Psalm, we see foreseen just such an eventuality: Psalm 25:3 can be translated literally, “No one whose hope is in you [in God] is put to shame; but shame comes to all who break covenant without cause.” Apparently, the Psalmist accepts the fact that sometimes there is just cause to break a covenant. What might that just cause be? For guidance in answering this question, let me turn to an episode in the Gospel of Mark.

In Mark 7:1-8, we read the story of one of Jesus’ many confrontations with the scribes and Pharisees. The Pharisees notice that some of Jesus’ disciples were coming to meals without first washing their hands. This was a clear violation of Jewish tradition, the tradition which they felt, not to be simple custom, but to be part of the conditions of the covenant between God and the Israelite people outlined in the book of Leviticus. Thus, this was not a question of simple hygiene but a serious breach of the covenant. So the Pharisees come to Jesus and challenge him: “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And as often the case, Jesus does not answer directly. Rather he says, “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.”

This is only one of the instances in which Jesus comes into conflict with the Pharisees over observance of Jewish law. We now know that the Pharisees’ concern for ritual purity was a particularly burning question for the Judaism of that day. For example, in John’s Gospel there is the story of the wedding at Cana and how Jesus turned water into wine. John 2:6 reads, “Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.” Archaeological excavations in Jerusalem have found many stone jars of the Cana type in the strata that are contemporary with Jesus. In the periods before and after the first century, they are rare. Why did the first century Jews go to the great expense of hollowing out blocks of stone to make storage jars when it would have been much cheaper and simpler to make them out of clay? The answer? It was because of the burning concern during that time about purity and cleanliness. According to Jewish law, touching the earth did not cause something to become unclean. Stone obviously comes from the earth and is not transformed like the clay of a fired pot, so a vessel made of stone would always be clean and would never require ritual cleansing, even if something unclean were put into it. Therefore, it was considered worth the effort to make a vessel out of stone which could never become unclean. So the concern of the Pharisees about these issues of purity reflects the popular theology of the day. Why did Jesus not share this concern?

But before we look at that question, we need to understand the nature of purity codes in general and the role they play in human culture. What purity codes do is to shape our sense of what we consider to be dirty and disgusting and what we consider to be clean. All human societies have purity codes; it’s just that the Jews were more self aware about such matters than we are and wrote about them in detail. If you want to know what a purity code looks like, just read the book of Leviticus. But we have our own purity codes that shape the way we do things as surely as it did for the Jews. In our own culture, this code operates at so deep a level that we are usually oblivious to it unless a sociologist or anthropologist points it out.

Here’s an example of a purity code at work. Suppose I want a drink of milk before going to bed. I pour the milk into a class and drink it. To get rid of the sticky feeling in my mouth, I want some water as a chaser. So what do I do? I go to the tap, put some water in the glass, swirl it around and dump it, then run some clear water in the glass and drink it. Now let’s stop the action and roll the film back a bit and look at this frame by frame. The milk out of the carton was pure and I drank it without hesitation. The water out of the tap was pure and I drank it without hesitation. But there was an intermediate step in there. When I first refilled the glass with pure water, there was a little bit of pure milk remaining in the glass. Pure water plus a little pure milk. But what did I do? I threw that glassful away and refilled it with clear water. Why? Because the mixture looked dirty. Was it really? Of course not. But my cultural purity code whispered in my ear, “Don’t be rational. It’s dirty. Throw it away.” Hoping to be a person of reason, I now drink the water with the little bit of milk in it — it tastes like pure water, even though it has those little bubbles on the top that make it look like dishwater. But now even though I’m being sensible and rational, it feels “wrong” despite what my reason tells me.

Purity codes define boundaries, for example the boundary around my body as in the case of food. They also define boundaries around groups. The boundary determines who belongs and who doesn’t, who is in and who is out. When I got up this morning, I showered, shaved, and put on a dress shirt, a tie, and a suit. I did this because I wanted to appear in a certain role this morning, that of guest preacher. I want you to listen to what I have to say and to give it at least polite consideration. So to achieve this goal, I knew, without thinking about it, that I should conform to that unwritten but clearly understood section of our purity code that governs the attire and behavior of guest preachers. If I had arrived unbathed and smelly, unshaved, wearing a frayed bathrobe and flip-flops, you would have understandably been puzzled, even alarmed. At the very least you would have been greatly distracted and incapable of listening to what I have to say. But by appearing as I am, I am saying, in effect, “I accept the ground rules for such occasions and am within bounds. I am ritually clean, in the anthropological sense. I belong to your group. I’m not a threat.”

Notice that when people want to disparage some group that’s different, they often use purity language. Those dirty Jews or those dirty Muslims or those dirty Mexicans or whatever. When the cultural disgust reaches a certain level, it turns into a kind of implicit death sentence. Those dirty people are too impure to be allowed to contaminate our group. If allowed to live, they will destroy our nation, our religion, our families or whatever. So they must be got rid of at all costs so that the purity of our group – whatever that may be – may be preserved. So in short, purity codes define boundaries. In the case of the apparently dirty glass of water mixed with milk, the boundary was the one around my body. In the case of those who behave or believe differently from those in my group, then the boundary is between groups.

What got Jesus into so much trouble is that he kept violating the religious purity code of his day. In the story from Mark, the Pharisees were shocked because his disciples failed to wash their hands before dinner and Jesus didn’t rebuke them. Matthew’s Gospel tells how once, when Jesus and his disciples were walking through some grainfields on the Sabbath, his disciples were hungry and so they broke off the heads of grain and rolled them together in their palms to get rid of the chaff and then ate the grain, a violation of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1). He didn’t rebuke the woman with the flow of blood who touched his garments, though her touch, according to their purity code, would have made him unclean (Mark. 5:25-34). And then he was always eating with tax collectors and sinners. All of these were flagrant violations of the purity code of his society.

Jesus did not violate the laws of purity flippantly or capriciously. Indeed, in one such encounter in Luke he urges the Pharisees not to neglect the purity provisions, and there is no sense of irony or double meaning in the text. Jesus saw no harm in the purity provisions until and unless they began to take first place and to obscure those principles which are at the core of God’s relationship with his people. “But woe to you Pharisees.” says Jesus. “For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others” (Luke 11:42). In other words, where the purity code comes into conflict with or becomes more important than God’s central commands, then the rules of the purity code must take second place. Human hunger takes precedence over the rules about eating with unwashed hands. Human suffering takes precedence over the rules that govern the Sabbath. All of the Gospels portray Jesus as ranking issues of purity below the more important issues of the purity and motivation of the human heart. Because Jesus puts love first, he breaks the rules of his day and is open to tax collectors, sinners, and Gentiles. The new purity established by Jesus reveals itself in the motivations of the heart for justice and mercy. “Blessed,” he says are the pure in heart,” not those who follow the externals of the purity system.

Human traditions have their place; they give structure and order to our lives. Without purity codes, our lives and social interaction would be chaotic. But they also have their dangers, for although they are the product of human culture and human tradition, they can easily be mistaken for the will of God. They can be used, for example, to cut off and cast out those who are deemed to be sexually impure. Christian lesbians and gays have been told repeatedly that they are disgusting, an abomination, that they make God vomit – a cruel use of human purity ideas that violates the very heart of the gospel, namely that Christ died for all, that we are all baptized, and that we all stand in need of mercy.

What is the point of all this? Well, as a non-Episcopalian, I know I should mind my own business. But like many of your Christian sisters and brothers, I have been following with great sympathy and interest the controversy between the American Episcopal church and some of the rest of the Anglican communion over the consecration of Bishop Robinson. I think I understand some of the dismay of those who fear a rupture in that historic relationship, and like all of you, I hope it will not come to that. But perhaps the Psalmist was right. Sometimes there is just cause to break an agreement or a covenant. What may have appeared to be divine directives may on closer examination turn out to be human precept, elements of a cultural purity code that need to be re-examined, as Jesus did, to distinguish between what is the commandment of God and what is only human tradition. I believe that when the issue of gays and lesbians is considered in this way, we must set aside our society’s purity code and welcome them as sisters and brothers in Christ, judging them not by ancient feelings about purity, but by their spiritual gifts. If Jesus reached out to and touched and had table fellowship with those whom the religious leaders of his time declared to be unclean, can we do any less? Amen.