Sermon: Cleanliness and Godliness Karen Peterson
As I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this Gospel passage sounds different to a post-pandemic audience. So, I want to begin with a pandemic story.
It was just a couple of weeks before Easter when the pandemic hit the U.S. and all the churches were forced to close. There was no Palm Sunday service, no Maundy Thursday or Good Friday services, and no Easter Services in our ELCA church in Dodge Center. For me, that was absolutely unacceptable, and I told my family that, church or no church, we were going to worship and celebrate Easter, somehow, because there is no other day in the church year that matters more or is more important and worthy of wholehearted celebration. Everywhere I looked, there were signs and advertisements about the importance of washing our hands, frequently. So I decided we would give out liquid hand soap to as many people in our community as we could manage. We went to all the dollar stores in the area, and to my surprise, when I explained what we intended to do, most stores let me buy every bottle they had, even taking all they had in the back of the store, besides what was in the aisles. (That only amounted to a few dozen bottles.) Then I did some research about the origin of the phrase, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” and typed up a one-page letter encouraging people to remember who they are (the hands and feet and faces of Christ in the world), and whose they are, (children of God redeemed and cleansed by Christ) and to find ways to worship, celebrate and to be the church in spite of the pandemic, but to do it safely. We delivered these gifts in small brown paper bags that we set on people’s doorsteps, then rang their doorbells and ran across the street to watch and shout, “Happy Easter! He is risen! Alleluia!” as people opened their doors to find our Easter gifts.
It turns out that the phrase, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” was coined by John Wesley, founder of the Methodist branch of Christianity, and first used it in a sermon in 1778. The phrase was taken up by soap companies to promote their products, while church and social reformers used it to promote bodily cleanliness and encourage people to bathe frequently. The phrase is not found in the Bible, however, scriptural passages such as this one certainly suggest such an idea, and may have been cited to support it.
As always, background context is important. IN addition to the 10 Commandments and all the laws regarding sacrifices made for various sins, the Torah, or Jewish law included many laws regarding clean-ness and unclean-ness as well as ritual purity or ritual clean-ness, covering not only what could and could not be eaten and how food had to be prepared, but also the proper ways to rid one’s self of ritual unclean-ness and return to a state of ritual purity, should the need arise. And the need arose rather frequently. Not only did committing sins render a person unclean, but so did disease of any kind, a woman’s monthly cycle and anything involving marital relations or childbirth—even visiting the home of anyone who wasn’t Jewish, or sharing a meal with a non-jew.
So, as I mentioned in a recent sermon, the Pharisees decided that, in order to keep the people in a state of purity and cleanliness, it would be wise and beneficial to “build a fence around the Torah,” which they did my setting up more social and ritualistic rules that would require the Jewish people to focus on and maintain this state of clean-ness or purity. It seems that washing your hands before you eat a meal was one of these fence posts that had been set up to protect the people and the covenant. There was so much focus on clean-ness and purity, that to be unclean or impure was to be, not only ritually unacceptable and unfit to enter the temple, but to be socially outcast, unfit to associate with, unless or until one did whatever was required to become clean and pure once again.
Although some of the purity laws in the Torah, such as those regarding disease or touching the dead to prepare them for burial, were obviously aimed at maintaining bodily cleanliness and health, most were aimed at ritual cleanliness, aimed at maintaining a person’s spiritual purity, taking care of the heart and the soul so as to be fit for worship and temple rituals and to be acceptable in the eyes or presence of God. But many of the laws that composed the fence the Pharisees built around the Torah were not.
That is the argument that Jesus is making here. Jesus is arguing that God desires a clean and righteous spirit and a pure heart, undefiled by selfishness and sin, unstained by injustice, prejudice and malice. What’s more, Jesus is pointing out that the very fact that they are concerned more about the condition of the body than the condition of the soul, more concerned about the dust that might enter the body from unclean hands than they are about the filth that pours out from the body of a person whose heart and soul are sick and polluted with hatred and hedonistic desires, is clear evidence that the Pharisees have lost sight of the spirit of the laws of the Torah. Their very purpose was to maintain the health and well-being of the whole person, to preserve the health and innocence of each Jewish person’s mind, body and soul by preventing one sick person from infecting another, and another. The fence that is supposed to protect the Torah and the people is actually separating the people from each other and from God, leaving them sick in spirit, in need of a savior that can bring them back into relationship with God, who is their source of life and strength and hope and love and meaning and purpose.
When I look at the world today, I see symptoms of the same infectious condition. We worry a lot about what we put into our bodies, and what we put on our bodies. We practically obsess about our bodies—our strength and size and shape, our strength and muscle tone, our complexion, our skin color and hair color… We spend billions (literally 45.58 billion dollars last year) on soap, not to mention the billions more we spend on other hygiene products and beauty products and clothing. Last year Americans spent more than $50 Billion on weight loss drugs. And we are increasingly consumed by the idea that what we eat should be organically grown and contain all natural ingredients, but not fat or sugar, which by the way are totally natural ingredients, even though much of what we actually eat consists largely of chemicals and preservatives. We are captivated by those words, natural and organic, yet even organic farmers use chemicals, and natural, as my wise college chemistry professor liked to remind me, does not necessarily mean safe. He taught me this lesson by drawing the chemical structure of aspartame, an artificial sweetener composed of two amino acids linked together, and beside it the structure of another perfectly natural chemical composed of two amino acids linked together in the same way, and then pointing out that the latter was the deadly toxin in snake venom. My biology professor frequently reminded me that natural and edible don’t necessarily mean delicious or nutritious, only that it won’t kill you if you are desperate and have nothing else to eat. How’s that for food for thought about our obsession with natural ingredients, which is just a gimmick to get us to pay more for essentially the same product. And because we are so worried about nutrition and so in love with McDonald’s and processed instant foods, we spend another $50 billion plus on vitamins and supplements, most of which goes right through us into the sewer, just like Jesus said it does.
We obsess about the health of our bodies and our minds and torture ourselves with fad diets and exercises and do sudoku puzzles and crosswords and play games hoping to ward off Alzheimer’s disease and memory loss, stress about eating healthy and exercising and trying to look good, spend tons of money we don’t have trying to look our best in the newest fashions with the trendiest hairstyles, and we fret and worry about viruses and bacteria and dirt in our homes and on surfaces, so we clean and clean and clean. And at the end of the day, we are exhausted and crawl into bed, only to find we can’t sleep because we are too stressed out.
When it comes to cleanliness and purity, we are no better today than the Jews were in Jesus’s day. If anything, we are probably worse. We keep everything so clean that our immune systems either don’t work, or are so desperate for something to do that they start attacking our own healthy tissues, giving us autoimmune diseases. My sister was so worried about her kids being exposed to germs that she literally washed everything, even her kids toys and pacifiers, on the sanitize setting in the dishwasher, adding bleach, every night. Her kids all have asthma and tons of allergies, and get sick all the time. We need to be exposed to infectious organisms in order for out immune systems to learn how to recognize them and defends our bodies against them. We require symbiotic gut bacteria to be healthy. Humans were not meant to be so clean, inside or out. Our bodies were meant to be habitats for other organisms, just like other animals are. It sounds gross, I know, but it’s true.
We obsess about our bodies, but most Americans ignore their spiritual well-being. What do we do to stay spiritually healthy and connected to God? How do we exercise and train our spirits? How do we give our spirits the nourishment, the exercise and the rest they need? Is one hour of church every week adequate? How often do you feed your spirit? What do you feed it? How do you strengthen it? Where do you find rest for your weary soul? You listen to your body? Do you listen to your conscience?
The truth is, Jesus was right. God doesn’t just care about our bodies. But the Pharisees were right too. Because God doesn’t just care about our spirits. God cares about our whole being, body, mind and spirit or soul, if you prefer. Our spirits live within our bodies—they are connected and interdependent, and the same is true of our minds. That’s how we were created. We can’t neglect any part of our being and still be healthy. Jesus knew that better than anybody. Jesus wasn’t saying that the body didn’t matter, or even that the spirit mattered more than the body nor the mind, which they believed at the time, was located in the heart—hence the heart being responsible for the unclean and unloving words and actions coming from an impure heart. This wasn’t really an argument about who was right and who was wrong—it was a question of balance. To live well—to have that abundant life that Jesus came to offer us, requires maintaining a balance between mind, body and spirit. Jesus didn’t say that people shouldn’t wash their hands before they eat. He was just pointing out the need to strike a balance, to stop neglecting the spiritual needs of people, because a sick or wounded spirit is harder to heal than a broken bone or a skin rash, and a mean spirit can do immeasurable harm that only Jesus can mend.
May we all take time to tend to our spiritual needs as well as physical needs. Be sure you always get your recommended daily doses of vitamins J (Jesus) P (Prayer) and S (Scripture).