“Beyond Moral Purity"

Sermon Preached By Rev. Bruce Sanguin
June 17, 2007

Luke 7:36-8:3

            Religion is always at its worst when it focuses on moral purity. Still today, many stay away from church because they think it’s for the morally unstained. For a long time my own brother thought he wasn’t good enough to come to church. The amusing thing is that if these folks were to spend much time with us, they would quickly learn how wrong they were in their assumption that church was only for the morally perfect!

Every couple of years or so, another scandal hits the headlines, having to do with a TV evangelist getting caught in a seedy motel, or stealing the flock’s money, or other kinds of shady behavior. Then come the highly publicized confessions of sin and the promises to try harder to be a better Christian.  And the cycle repeats itself.  The irony of the human condition is that the moment we set ourselves the task of being morally perfect, the shadow – our primal nature that won’t be denied - rises up and runs the show.

Look at every fundamentalist expression of religion, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Hindu – they’re all into moral purity as the highest expression of their faith. Those who are immodest, who drink alcohol, dance, grow their hair too long, don’t wear a hat, or speak up if you happen to be a woman, become the target of the morally pious. One of the driving motivators of Islamic terrorists is their perception that the Western world is morally degraded. Now this may or may not be true, but accompanying this judgment of moral impurity comes with the moral license to punish the impure. 

Mat Fox identified 25 years ago that this focus on moral purity flows from a religious model that is redemption-centered. In this model the problem with human beings is that we are bad, and we are powerless to be anything other than bad. So, we are condemned to be sinners for life. The solution to the problem is to have some other-than-human, transcendent power lift us up out of this sinful condition. For Christians, the power comes in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, whom we are told died for our sins. We had to be punished, because sin has to be punished by a just God. But God loves us so much that God gave his only son to be tortured and executed on our behalf. If we believe this, and ask for forgiveness – a forgiveness that can only come through the blood of Jesus, we will be saved. Saved for what? For living a more moral life on earth.  Saved from what? Sin, the shadow, and ultimately, death, as we receive the gift of eternal life.

It’s quite a package we’re offered by this redemption-centered religion. Through the blood of Jesus we gain the power to be better human beings in this life, with the added bonus that God throws in eternal life for believing it. There are so many problems with this model that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let me just mention a few. First off, lots of people who don’t believe this are fine, upstanding citizens, who are working to change the world. Stephen Lewis comes to mind. Second, it turns God into a divine tyrant demanding death for those who disobey, and to make matters worse, a child abuser who offers His own son for execution.  Finally, it has nothing to do with Jesus own teachings.

Look at what happens in the today’s reading. A woman who deeply loves Jesus for what he’s done for her, crashes a dinner party and starts washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and drying them with her own hair. Then she rubs his feet with oil. It is such a tender and intimate expression of her love.

And all the dinner host can muster is a “tsk..tsk.. this Jesus can’t be the real McCoy or he would know “what kind of person this woman is” , i.e. a sinner – morally impure. “Sinner” was an actually official religious category for someone who did something wrong in the eyes of the religious establishment. In fact, Jesus doesn’t deny that she’s done some bad things. He acknowledges that she’s no mother Theresa. (Luke 7:47). 

            If Jesus really were a prophet, the host concludes, he would have intuited that she was a sinner, and therefore saved himself the trouble of having to go to a priest the next day and purify himself – because he got the “coodies”, as we use to call it on the playground when we touched an unclean kid, the moment he came in contact with her. That’s why she was shunned to the margins of society. She was explicitly forbidden from mingling with society because everyone she touched would have been made impure.

            But Jesus is not operating out of this redemption-centered, moral purity model of religion. He has a very simple, very profound way of dealing with those who fall short of God’s intentions. He forgives their sins. Before a single drop of his own blood was spilled on the cross, he tells this woman that her sins are forgiven. She’s free to rub shoulders with anybody she pleases, without having to risk contaminating them. She’s free to get on with her life. To rejoin her family, hug her children, look into her husband’s face without shame, she’s free to join her sisters as they make dinner, get water from the well, shop in the market. She gets her life back, and that’s why her tears are pouring out upon Jesus’ religion-weary feet, and it’s why she’s kissing them – and what’s more Jesus isn’t in the least concerned that he’s getting contaminated. He’s loving being loved. And after all, isn’t that the point of religion?

            Then he tells his disciples that it’s in their job description to forgive those who sin and liberate them to become the persons God intended them to become. So the disciples were out there forgiving sin, and again please take note – this was going on before Jesus was crucified. The point is, in case I’m not making myself clear enough, we need to get over what Thomas Berry called our “redemption mystique” in the church. Jesus didn’t die for our sin. He died because of them, yes. He died because religious people were deeply confused about the purpose of their religion. They thought it was all about moral purity – and here was Jesus bypassing the whole religious cult of purification – no priests necessary, no blood of innocent animals required, no Temple or church, no televangelists to mediate between God and the sinner –  just a simple, liberating proclamation of forgiveness and an invitation to new life. 

Notice as well that Jesus doesn’t tell the woman that it was her belief that saved her. There are lots of beliefs out there to choose from, some better, some worse. But let’s not confuse belief with faith. Jesus tells the woman that her faith has made her well. Her faith for goodness sake! The priests and the rabbis and everyone else who cast aspersions on her as she hovered at the margins of society had almost convinced her that her faith didn’t count.

But faith, the kind that begins in the gut and ends in a protest against the soul-withering piety of men wearing earnest faces and long robes, waving the Bible in the air like a nuclear missile aimed at the heart of sinners - this kind of faith is different from passive belief. No, she had faith that there was hope for the likes of her, faith that this simple peasant had a heart that more closely reflected the God she knew, faith that abundant life was an inheritance that she had every right to lay claim to, faith that she had it within her to start over if given half a chance. She had the kind of faith that gave her the courage to crash a party she had no business being at in order to pour out the love in her heart for a man that believed in her – and with that tender, loving gesture her sins “which were many” were erased, and she was free to claim a future built upon that love. That was the faith that saved her.

Yesterday, our Street Meals team gave a luncheon to honour Ellen Shonsta, “Mom”, as the kids on the street call her. Well, Mom is moving on. But she’s passed her legacy on to the likes of a young woman, Angie, who for five years was fed sandwiches and a healthy doses of love by Mom – literally kept alive for those years. She was one of those “squeegee kids” we so despise. They are the unclean and unkempt of the 21^st century – the unwelcome guests at the party. We see them coming and we raise our car windows and look the other way. But Angie will tell you that she washed our windows as a way of maintaining a little dignity in a world that wouldn’t serve the likes of her in a coffee shop. She didn’t want a free handout.

 Who knows, it might have been her way of crashing our middle-class party. We, who tsk…tsk… and imagine that the world is fair and just and if only these kids would get a job, and don’t really know the meaning of a broken home or broken bones or a broken mind and heart. There they are, faces pressed up against our windshields, refusing to allow us to take refuge in our moving bubbles. There they are, the faithful ones, holding on by a thread to a promise that there is a future for the likes of them. Angie has taken up Mom’s mantle. She is now running Directions, a program for youth at risk. She credits her life to the likes of Mom, who saw into the heart of the squeegee kid and in the name of Christ, offered her a future. She credits her life to the team of people at CMUC who made the sandwiches that Mom gave her, so she wouldn’t have to resort to crime to feed herself.

 Surely, this is what the religious life is about – the giving and receiving of a love that confers a future when a desperate past threatens to take it way. Forgiveness is not the point of religion – it’s just the key that unlocks the creativity to fashion a new life. Moral purity better not be the point of religion or we’re all doomed. The point is to find a love that breaks open the heart and the tear ducts and makes us want to wash each other’s feet – and maybe our windshields - because it seems that this is the only alternative to being at each other’s throats.

Come to the table this morning, friends. It’s not for the morally pure. It’s a feast for the broken, for the squeegee kids and the Board Room Directors, for those who come from broken homes and those who come from Better Homes and Gardens, for the saints and the sinners, for all who know that what separates us from each other is miniscule compared to what unites us – a longing for love. Eat this bread and drink this cup – fill yourself up with a love that forgives and clears the path to a new future.