Sermons by Rev. Kendall Brown: Purity Codes – Then and Now

Sermon: Purity Codes – Then and Now
Date: February 15, 2009
Text: Mark 1: 40-45

The word “kosher” never meant an awful lot to me until I went to my brother-in-law's wedding in a Jewish synagogue in West Hartford, CT. Wayne married Elaine in accordance with her Jewish faith and tradition. Kosher then became a reality for me. In those days, our home was where Cheryl's family gathered on Easter. They were fun holidays. We had a great big parsonage with plenty of room. All of the rooms were filled every Easter. The bustle of family life brought new life to the celebration of the resurrection. After Wayne was married we tried to be a little more conscientious about the Easter Sunday menu. The traditional Easter ham is not kosher! I even learned to look at food packaging labels for vegetable oil instead of oil based in animal fat. Kosher was no longer a distant and foreign word for me. Elaine from the other side did her part to move towards the center, too. At Easter worship, she and Wayne would be sitting with the rest of the family in the front pew right under my nose. The family would go to church early to get that pew because Uncle Lou, Cheryl's uncle and also a redhead from Maine, wanted to be sure to have a seat where he could distract and annoy me. Kosher had come to my house on Easter Sunday no less, and I have learned a lot more about it since.

Sending the man off to the priest to be examined after Jesus had healed him was all about being kosher. And kosher was a big deal. That is why Jesus sent the man to the priests. The man had a skin disease. In those days, any form of skin disease was called leprosy and the patient a leper. The only leprosy that we know today is also called Hansen's Disease. The man in this story may or may not have had Hansen's Disease but the specific diagnosis of his ailment is not our concern here this morning. What is important is that the presence of a skin disease made this man impure. That was a big deal. One could be ostracized for an impurity. That could mean more than being kept out of the synagogue or temple. It could also mean being run out of town. The impure person would be marginalized or driven to the edge. The priest could administer cleansing rites that would allow one to be restored to the community. Obviously this gave the priesthood a great amount of power.

Jesus in sending the man to the priests was honoring the laws set out in the book of Leviticus. These laws are known also as the Purity Code. They defined what is clean and unclean, kosher and not kosher. The Leviticus code worked to polarize society by setting apart different groups. Men/women, clean/unclean, pure/defiled. There was a hierarchy of purity. Priests were on the top. Women and children somewhere in the basement.

The purity code was the work of a group of religious leaders and scholars known as the Deuteronomists. They are named for the book of Scriptures that they are responsible for the form we have today – Deuteronomy. They also authored the codes of purity found in Leviticus. The
Deuteronomists came into their years of glory during the exile.

It is easy to understand why their work was valued during that period. During the exile, the greatest threat to the very existence of the Jewish community was the possibility of it's assimilation into the Babylonian culture and eventual complete disappearance. Babylon was where Israel's educated, ruling, wealthy and powerful people had been taken into exile. Also, the Babylonian culture through Babylon’s military conquests was spreading across the ancient world. You couldn't get away from it any more than you can get away from McDonald's arches anywhere in the world today.

The Deuteronomists devised and refined the culture of purity to define Jewish culture and community, to demark the boundaries between its people and all others, and to preserve Judaism in the ancient world. That mission was as important in Jesus time as it was 600 years earlier during the Exile. In Jesus' day, just substitute Romans for Babylonians as the threat to Jewish life.

When John the Baptist linked baptism with repentance, he was picking up an ancient rite and giving it a new twist. Baptism was a practice established under the purity codes. It was a rite of cleansing used for non-Jewish persons who were becoming Jewish. The non-Jew was impure, dirty if you will, and to enter the Jewish community needed this cleansing ands purifying rite.

In Leviticus, there are many regulations around sexual behavior. All of those regulations were aimed at practices which took place in the fertility rites in the Babylonian religion. The code in may ways says “This is who we are as Jews,' by pointing fingers at practices of the Gentile culture around them and saying “Those are things that Jews don't do.” The code defines all sorts of things like how one eats, what one wears, what one plants in the ground and how it is planted.

Leviticus 7:19 says, “Flesh that touches any unclean thing shall not be eaten.” This law was not written by the Health Department to protect people from the spread of germs and maintain sanitary practices. This law was written by a bunch of religious folk trying to preserve their community. They were survivalists who had been transported to Babylon where they found Babylonians eating lots of strange things. So they said to their community, “We don't eat this stuff. It is unclean. It is so unclean that if any of our kosher food as much as touches it then you throw out the kosher food too.” In other words, do your grocery shopping at your local kosher market and support your own people and stay in all things within the boundaries of your own people. Let us not have any of this assimilation stuff with those who are not like us. The unclean food business was like moving from afar to St. Louis and discovering people eating brain sandwiches! Euch! How dirty can you get? That is an abomination and the word abomination is found a lot in Leviticus. Then brain sandwiches are declared unclean and a rule is set up that you can't eat it if you want to continue being who you are. You can't even allow your egg salad sandwich to as much as touch a brain sandwich.

It is important to remember as we use the Scriptures to guide us today that the priests who wrote the purity codes which are found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy were far more interested in defining community than they were in defining the will of God. Often that distinction is lost today when these particular texts are lifted up as the will of God. The New Testament teaches us that the word of God or the will of God became flesh in Jesus Christ. It does not teach that the word of God or God's will became flesh in a purity code written by men to preserve a community – even if that code is found in the Scriptures themselves.

New Testament writers took issue with the purity codes – especially as those codes defined community. Where the Purity Codes defined a community that was the epitome of exclusiveness, the New Testament defines a new community which is the epitome of inclusiveness. Paul is taking issue with the Purity Codes when he wrote in Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.” This well known and oft quoted verse is a flat out rejection of the purity code and all of its related exclusiveness.

The purity codes had a strong hold on people and it was a struggle to break free of all the attitudes and prejudices that the code had engendered and nurtured in people's hearts and minds. In a way, the entire book of Acts is a history of the early church's struggle to break free of the tenacious and choking hold that the purity codes had on them and on their own spirit trying to breath fresh air of Christ. Over and over a variety of issues were settled on the side of inclusiveness as the early Christians accepted Gentiles into their fold. The issue of circumcision was decided on the side of inclusiveness. The biggest issue of all was the issue of eating unclean (non-kosher) food, which was decided on the side of inclusiveness. We don't fully appreciate what a big thing it was for Paul and the other early Christians to decide to chuck the purity codes and eat non-kosher. That was a matter of turning what they had known as their world totally upside down for their faith. It was a subversive and a counter-culture act.

In today's Scripture lesson, it would seem that Jesus is upholding and affirming the purity codes, when in accordance with the codes, he dispatches the man, whom he had healed of some infirmity of the flesh, to go and see the priests. But Jesus in sending the man to the priest was not simply obeying the law because it is the law. Jesus was concerned with a person's wholeness - the person's total health. The man had leprosy. Because of his leprosy he was ostracized from the community. Jesus could heal the man physically of his disease. But Jesus could not make that man's life whole again by restoring him to his community. Only the priests could do that. Sometimes in our build up of who Jesus was we forget there were things that even he couldn't do. Only the priests could restore the man to community. This story reminds us that there are things in our world that Jesus cannot do and
that only we can do for him. Community building, including people in stead of excluding them, is something that only we can do ourselves.

The strength of the purity code mindset is still very much with us today. One of the places where we see that mindset alive and well is in the debate in our culture to make a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The effort to make that constitutional change happen is a straight forward effort to turn our constitution into a religious purity code, which is something that the Constitution is not and should never be made into. The Constitution especially the Bill of Right is an instrument that protects human rights. In no way does the Constitution work to diminish or take away rights. To change the Constitution into a religious purity code is the first step in turning our country into some kind of Taliban.

Personally, I think the way the Sabbath has been destroyed in our society presents a far greater threat to the moral life and even economic life of this country than a gay married couple or two scattered around the neighborhood. The commercialization of the Sabbath has its philosophical roots in the same base from which operate the captains of Wall Street and the Loan and Banking industry whose greed has contributed greatly to our present woes. I could get real excited about a return of the Blue Laws and a constitutional amendment banning soccer on Sundays.

But as a US citizen who both enjoys and loves the freedom established and guaranteed by our Constitution and laws, I would never propose or support such an anti-soccer amendment. Even though I am more pro-Sabbath than I am pro-soccer, I could not support constitutional changes that impose my religious beliefs on others and that change the Constitution and laws into a religious purity code that any Taliban type would just love.

For all the same reasons, I cannot support a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage. Gay marriage is still an issue. And it is an issue that we need to talk to each other about and listen and learn. The proper place for that religious/moral conversation is in our churches. Our country is in trouble and has been for a long time and will continue to be as long as we take our conversations which we should be having in the religious community among ourselves out into the political arena, and change them into political debates which serve the purposes of divisiveness and polarization very well. Polarizing is the very thing that Paul and Jesus worked so hard against and by their witness and work call us, as their followers, to also work against.

The ethics that Jesus was practicing in today's lesson might be called compassionate pragmatism. He was known to practice it in other places. In Mark 11, we read about Jesus with some disciples passing through a field on the Sabbath when the disciples plucked and ate some ears of grain. The priestly bean counters and purity coders got all bent out of shape. Jesus reminded them that once upon a time priests behaved a little different. He recalled the story of King David being ill and taken to the temple on the Sabbath. There the priests, even though it was the Sabbath, made it their priority to restore him to wholeness. They violated all the Deuteronomists’ purity codes by not only feeding David on the Sabbath, but also, good grief – heaven help us, they fed him from the only bread available - the consecrated bread of presence on the altar, which only God should have been eating. That is compassionate pragmatism. Doing what has to be done to bring wholeness, healing, and health to others. That is our work here on earth. Becoming purity coders and counters turns us into judges. It can't be avoided. As it said on the sign out front for the past couple weeks, we are here to do God's work – not God's job.