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First Presbyterian Church, Bridgeton, NJ
Richard E. Sindall, Pastor
Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 2, 2008
Lessons: Ezekiel 36:16-28 and Matthew 9:18-26
Hallowed
I think I was about five years old when my parents bought me a record that told the story of “Little Toot,” the tugboat whose carelessness as a juvenile gets his father, Big Toot, in trouble. In the end, Little Toot vindicates himself with his courage during a storm at sea. What I remember most, along with the sound effects that were quite realistic to a five-year-old, is the refrain, “What a shame, what a shame, you’ve disgraced your father’s name. Won’t you ever grow up, Little Toot?”
Today, I wonder how many people live with the feeling they have disappointed a parent or some other role model or authority figure in their lives, and that feeling of being a disappointment can last even when the “parent” is gone. “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.” “What a shame, what a shame, you’ve disgraced your father’s name.” For how many, I wonder also, is God the supreme and supremely disappointed parent-figure whose disapproval hovers over their lives and awaits them at life’s end? The “inner child,” longs to please but also resents the “inner parent” whose disapproval is so hauntingly present in that thing we call the conscience.
The word “hallowed” relates to the holy, the sacred, and in human beings, the saintly. At root, holy indicates that which is set apart from the common, the earthly, the profane. For the Bible, only God is in essence holy, and so only being set apart by and for God can make anything earthly or human holy at all. The question I raise with you this morning is, What makes for holiness in our world, and what hallows the name of God?
The holiness groups in human history are so called because they have set themselves apart from the rest of us to live more hallowed lives, usually understood as more virtuous and purer. They strive to be cleaner morally and spiritually than the common people outside the circle of the set-apart community. It seems to me inevitable that such a sense of relative cleanness and virtue will lead to the judgmental attitude Jesus encountered in his very religious and moral critics. Christian holiness groups would object on the grounds that they require only repentance, a turning away from the moral filth and spiritual grime of the world. A person need not be clean to enter but need only to repent and be cleansed, but must then strive to stay clean. And what is clean? What is godly? What truly sanctifies a person? To look for answers, I take Jesus himself as the model.
“Hallowed be Thy name,” he teaches us to pray, but how can the dirty in this world possibly touch God? Israel realized God could not be directly touched and sullied, but by giving “his” name to the people, God placed that extension of self embodied in a name into their hands. By bearing Yahweh God’s name in the world, Israel had the power either to hallow or to shame God’s name in the sight of earth’s peoples. We bear the name of Christ, and so our actions and inactions reflect upon him. To the world, Jesus is very much as we represent him, though not entirely. I say, “not entirely,” because people do sometimes see in Jesus what they find missing in his church, but overall, we bring honor or shame upon him because we bear his name in the world.
Our lesson from Ezekiel very much fits in with the idea of holiness, of Israel’s being set apart by God as a model to the rest of the world. So, the prophet indicts his people for disgracing the LORD God’s name in the sight of the nations. Just as in my childhood record about the tugboats, the covenant people are told to be ashamed of themselves for the shame they have cast upon God’s holy name. Redemption will come for them, not because they deserve it, but so God’s name will be honored again.
And yet, God means also to change the people themselves. “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you . . . .” In Jesus himself, we see what I believe it means to live with the right spirit, to have a heart of flesh rather than stone. The danger in all holiness movements, all our human attempts to make ourselves clean in a dirty world, is that by setting ourselves apart from other people, we will make for ourselves a heart of stone.
Jesus refused to keep himself clean by the standards of the holiness people who became his chief critics and opponents. For them, social contact with sinners made a person into a sinner by spiritual contamination. Go through the Gospel of Matthew and you will see how many times it says Jesus reaches out and touches someone unclean. Not only the sinful but the sick, the disabled, certainly the leprous, the dead, and women in general were regarded as unclean and contaminating to the holy people. Yet Jesus touches them one after another. A woman with a continual flow of blood dares to touch him, and he accepts her touch. We don’t quite get it, I think, because we live in a more scientific, more clinical, and somewhat less superstitious society, but that woman is the very symbol of uncleanness, exactly as women are used in the prophecy of Ezekiel to represent contamination both physical and spiritual. She is the living embodiment of the unclean and disgusting, the human symbol of the untouchable, the mortal stained by the embarrassments of the body. She reminds us that we are not spiritual beings but earthbound creatures of flesh and blood.
My last two years of high school, I ran cross country, badly. Whether because of my very early childhood pneumonia, at twenty-two months, or simply my physical makeup, I could not sustain the wind I needed to run well. Somehow my oxygen exchange wasn’t good enough. So, I started a race well but finished, never last, but not “in the running.” What I can still picture in my mind is the look of disgust I got one day from the coach as I ran by where he was standing near the end of the course. That look on his face is etched in my memory. I tell you so, not to speak ill of him, but to illustrate the power of disgust upon the person who becomes its object, even for just a moment in so small a matter. Now, imagine being an object of disgust every day you get up out of bed and go about your business. Jesus reached out and touched people who were living objects of others’ disgust. And in that way, he hallowed the name of the holy God.
What a reversal! Think about it. To be holy is to be set apart and kept clean. Jesus neither set himself apart nor kept himself clean from contamination by the unholy and disgusting people of the land. He would not look away in disgust or turn away from an unclean person. He hallowed God’s name with compassion, by associating himself with the disgusting people in their conditions of shame. And he died as the very embodiment of the disgusting. By crucifixion, the Empire made him as shameful and repulsive as possible, for all to see and tremble in fear, despairing of any thoughts of rebellion or freedom. That was the idea behind crucifixion. So, in life and in death, Jesus became the brother of all sorts of shameful and repulsive sisters and brothers. In that way, he hallowed God’s name forever, and we now know that the glory of God is not purity set apart, but rather God’s blood-stained purity of redeeming compassion that embraces even the most filth-stained people of earth. You see, it is love that makes us clean. Scorn and disgust for others make us filthy in God’s eyes and bring disgrace upon the name of Christ we bear. He sends us into the world, not to display ourselves as the better, purer people, but to be more like the world’s nurses and doctors and care-givers who clean up the messes and embrace the shamed.
But let’s not finish without looking in the mirror. God is holy, and we are not. Yet in Jesus Christ, God reaches out to touch us, heal us, and welcome us home. When we look to God, we can be assured that God will not turn away in disgust. The heart of stone is human not divine. It is by compassion, that God gives us hearts of flesh.
Hallowed be God’s name. Amen.