Sermon 02/01/2020: Pure Lies (Pr. Ben Adams)

Pr. Ben Adams

The Presentation of Our Lord

February 1, 2020

Pure Lies

I started serving here at Holy Trinity back in April of 2015.  That makes it almost five years... wow. It has been an amazing journey. But that also means that this is the first time that the liturgical feast of the Presentation of Our Lord or as it is also known, Candlemas, has fallen on a weekend where we can finally observe this feast day. If you’ve seen Pr. Craig’s Enews opener or read the inside of the back cover of your bulletin, you’ll see that the last time this was possible was in 2014, just before I got here.

So even I had to study up to understand what today’s feast day was all about, and it is beautiful. Jesus is brought to the temple, Anna and Simeon are there and the prophecy is fulfilled that was revealed to Simeon by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Messiah, and in response to this divine moment, Simeon’s song of praise echoes through the temple as he takes Jesus into his arms, “Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, ‘Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.’"

We’ll get to sing that later as we process with candles in a circle around our worship space. But there was something else going on here that caught my attention and I couldn’t let it go. It happens fast in the first sentence of the Gospel today. It says, “When the time came for their purification.”  In my text study this week, my colleague, the Rev. Catherine Healy from St. Paul and the Redeemer Episcopal Church, told us that back in her Roman Catholic days they referred to this feast day as the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin.

So as I dug into this understanding of today’s feast day I discovered this, that according to the Mosaic law in Leviticus 12, a mother who had given birth to a child assigned as a male was considered unclean for seven days; moreover she was to remain three and thirty days "in the blood of her purification.” For a female assigned child, the time which excluded the mother from sanctuary was even doubled. Then when the forty or eighty days was over, the mother was to "bring to the temple a lamb for a burnt offering and a young pigeon or turtle dove as a sin offering;" if she was not able to offer a lamb, which was the case for Mary and Joseph who were extremely poor, then she offered two turtle doves or two pigeons the priest prayed for her and so she was cleansed.

Yet another reminder of all subtext in our scriptures that we would miss if we don’t go beyond the surface level. But I got to admit, all this talk of purification and impurity really had me feeling uneasy. And a big reason for that is because especially in light of the purity culture and the evangelical purity movement, our contemporary understanding of what purity is has been very skewed.

So what is purity? In many ways, purity has been reduced to only apply to our sexual purity, or how well we can refrain from and control the natural sexual urges that occur within our bodies. And this comes from a dualistic form of thinking that would assert that with enough spiritual fortitude, we can then control the thoughts of our minds and the actions of our bodies to such a degree that we can eliminate impure sexual desires.

But I have issues with all of this first off because I do not believe that the body and its natural functions are impure. Also, it is harmful for us to separate ourselves out in these ways, dividing our sense of self and then forming a hierarchy where our soul or spirit controls our mind and our mind then controls the body. With all of these parts of us separated from one another the eventual goal under this framework is to be the most pure by being most separate from our bodies and their natural functions.

In other words, sexual purity disconnects us from our bodies. And if we take scripture seriously then we should know that our bodies were created by God and what God creates is good. There needn’t be any shame in what our bodies naturally do, and we definitely shouldn’t be applying the purity codes when talking about ourselves or any human being because purity is a binary and the only other option is impurity. There are no degrees of purity and impurity; these inherently disregard the complex beauty of our human existence.

So, any time we use purity in reference to human beings we are running into a danger zone. And where this gets even more insidious is when purity takes on a spiritual dimension and is equated with holiness. In her book, Shameless, Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber argues against this idea of separated purity as holiness. She says, “Holiness is union we experience with one another and with God. Holiness is when more than one becomes one, when what is fractured becomes whole. Holiness happens when we are integrated as physical, spiritual, sexual, emotional, and political beings….Holiness happens in those moments when we are blissfully free from our ego and yet totally connected to our self and something else. Holiness is the thing I never saw coming that makes me catch my breath because I know the sacred has interrupted my isolation. And-I insist on this-when two loving individuals, two bearers of God’s image, are unified in an erotic embrace, there is space for something holy. What was separate has come together. Two spirits, two bodies, two stories are drawn so close that they are something together that they cannot be alone. There is unity.”

I’m with Nadia on this one and I think it’s time we did away with this disembodied, disconnected ideal of purity, and instead affirm a unified understanding of holiness that interrupts our separated isolation, and joins us together into a divine embrace. And if purity exists at all in the world it is the pure love of God that connects us all. And if we are being purified it is not by the cleansing of our own souls, minds, or bodies, but rather the work of God in our lives. In our first reading from Malachi it is clear that God is the purifier and not us when it says, “For God is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.”

For too long we have told ourselves and others that it is up to us to make ourselves pure and righteous. This insidious ideology goes beyond sexual purity as well. We see it with avowed white supremacists who believe that they can achieve such a thing as racial purity, or maybe more commonly during this election season as the ideology of political purity, and we cancel anyone or any candidate who does not share our same, pure political persuasion.

I will go so far as to say that any purity test applied to humans is a lie straight from the mouth of the accuser, and ain’t nobody have time for the devil’s lies.  This destructive purity binary has separated us from one another and from our own bodies, and it’s time for us to experience true holiness through the pure, connecting, unifying love of God that holds us all in its divine embrace. We are beautifully complex people and it is wrong and dishonest to label ourselves according to a binary that disregards our complex humanity. We are not pure or impure, we simply are, and God has called us good. Amen.