March 25, 2007
Philippians 4:8-9
Prayers of the People
We are grateful, Dear God, for safe travels and new
experiences; for the beauty of the land and its emerging signs of life. We are grateful for all the ways that we
continuously rediscover that we, too, are alive.
Even the concerns that stretch our emotions and haunt
our anticipations remind us of how precious are our relationships – how dear we
hold those who are ill or grieving or standing in vulnerable places or
situations. And so even as we pray for
them and their circumstances, we give thanks for the bond that holds us in each
others’ hearts.
Thank you, dear God, for so vibrantly weaving the
fabric of our lives with people and places and memories and home and
convictions and initiatives and purpose, the strength of your Holy Spirit and
the confidence of grace in Jesus Christ, our Lord, who taught us how to come to
you in prayer by saying, Our father in heaven…
In
Purer Lives Thy Service Find…
“Purity.” I suppose my first acquaintance with the word
was on television – in advertisements for Ivory
bars of soap. You, too, perhaps remember
those ads demonstrating how Ivory
bars would float while the bars of competitors would sink, ominously, like a
stone in the sink. The implication was
that only God might know, apart from the Devil, himself, what might have been
in those inferior varieties. Ivory,
the announcer offered by way of explanation, was – and it always amazed me how
specific was the claim – was “99 and 44/100ths % pure. Practically perfect was the indisputable
implication. 99 and 44/100ths%
pure. Wow!
It wasn’t for many years that I
returned to this concept of purity. In
high school – and we may even have gotten a drift of this in Junior High (which
was the archaic, pre-enlightened way we used to bracket schools, for those of
you too young to remember) – I was never really mindful of how Ivory soap was manufactured because
“purity” had become a concept entirely owned by those concerned with our sexual
behavior. “Purity” was the same thing as
“chastity”, and while there were a few gray areas where that was concerned –
areas not really brought to the forefront until Bill Clinton became President –
we were pretty sure what that meant.
“Purity” meant that you “didn’t smoke and you didn’t chew and you didn’t
go with girls who do.” That, and a few
other things.
So what is purity – in a more
wholistic, or perhaps more generic sense?
The Greek word (hagnos) that our
word “purity” is used to translate originally meant “that which awakens
religious awe.” It was first associated
with things connected to deity, but later encompassed anything considered “ritually
clean” and later “morally blameless.” In
other words, it was less about a shower product than about a moral ideal.
How is it, then, that we serve
God? According to the ancient wisdom set
to music in the hymn, Many are the
Lightbeams, there are “many ways to serve God,” while “the Spirit is
one.” Who, then, is to put a
hierarchical judgment on our service?
Some, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, serve God by caring for the
poorest of the poor in the streets of the city, seeing in those desperate faces
the very likeness of God. Some, like
Brother Lawrence, that medieval monk who wrote the devotional classic, The Practice of the Presence, serve God
in the prayerful and joyful way they wash the dishes.
The Hebrew
prophet Micah tried to answer the question this way:
“With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt
offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be
pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I
give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my
soul?” He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
What, then, will it mean for us to worship God? That, to be sure, is what John Greenleaf
Whittier was interested in knowing. What
would it mean to worship God – serve God – in such “purity.” Or, to flip the question, what so mars our
service – so leadens it with impurities – that it sinks?
I think of the parable of the Good
Samaritan and those who encountered a situation of need – a wounded man lying
by the road – whose religious sensibilities caused them to do nothing. We might say about them that their religious
sensibilities were so twisted out of shape that they ended up doing the
opposite of what God would have had them do.
Another time Jesus taught that if
you should anytime find yourself at the altar and recall that you are estranged
from someone – that someone with whom you have had a relationship has something
against you, your religious exercises are less important than doing what you
can to set that relationship aright.
Indeed, Jesus suggests, you are merely going through farcical religious
motions so long as you don’t tend to such estrangements. And so, Jesus says, drop what you are doing,
get up out of the pew even if the deacon is standing there with the communion
tray, and go work toward reconciliation.
Now, let’s be honest: none of us is there quite yet – 99 and
44/100% pure. All of us are on the
way. We have work to do in the holy
vocation of lining up our beliefs with our behaviors. We are not finished lining up what we want
with what God wants – which is, I think, the grounding of Whittier’s hymn that
is guiding our reflections. The hymn, as
we have noted, is a prayer that starts from a point of humility – that we need
forgiveness for our foolish ways, and that we aren’t quite yet in our right
mind and heart – and proceeds to ask God to grow us in God’s direction. The pure have no need to ask for
purification. Whittier recognizes that
we, by contrast, do.
So what might we take away from this
morning’s humming? What mars our
service? If those two stories of Jesus
are any indication, we might recognize a few things. One is to recognize that our relationship to
God is earthier than it is lofty. Any
so-called “worship” that ignores the people and the human conditions around us
is bankrupt. Loving God requires loving
what God loves, and God so loved the world that he gave his only son. The
purest worship of God is the practice of the love of God.
Second, we can recognize that our
prejudices will ultimately sink us. The
Samaritan was the hero in Jesus’ parable precisely because he didn’t allow
bigotries to interfere with his compassion.
It was a person in the ditch, not a caricature of someone he wasn’t
supposed to like. The purest service of
God is blind to those various differentiators that typically justify our
prejudice and indifference – color of skin, sexual orientation, the appearance
of poverty or wealth, a bumper sticker for a candidate of the “other” political
party.
And lastly we might learn that the
very drive for purity – too narrowly defined – can be its own worst enemy. Just consider the last several years of
public debate in which a preoccupation with a certain kind of morality has led
to such dramatically grotesque displays of immorality – very nearly like the
priest in Jesus’ story who ignores the wounded traveler for fear of becoming
ritually unclean – thereby violating the more basic moral demands of the faith
he was trying to uphold.
And so we pray with the Apostle Paul,
“ whatever is true, whatever is
honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever
is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of
praise, let us think about these things.
And with the poet, Creator of all humankind, forgive our
foolish ways. Reclothe us in our rightful
mind, in purer lives thy service find…
Purer service – absent prejudice, discrimination,
and piety that blinds the grace of compassion.
Pure service – simply and eagerly and unbegrudgingly loving what – and
who – God loves.
And trusting that it is enough.