Swine Flu
0 Amens
SWINE FLU
The big news this year is all about the swine flu – how to avoid it, how to keep from passing it on, how long the virus can live on a hard surface, whether or not pork can be safely eaten and whether or not you should wear a facemask when you’re in a crowd. For all of the drama associated with this strain of flu by the news media, the response from the medical community has been pretty ordinary: You can still eat pork. Use Kleenex and hand sanitizers, wash your hands, wash your produce and eating utensils and keep your hands out of your eyes, mouth and nose.[1] Just common sense and basic hygiene.
Influenza aside, pigs have always been a big deal for the people of God. Pigs were one of the animals that Yahweh deemed to be “unclean” and therefore forbidden to be eaten by the people of God.[2] The purpose of the designation of some items as “clean” and some as “unclean” was twofold: first, it was to identify the people of God as being holy – set apart, different – from the rest of the people in the world. God’s instruction was “Be holy, because I, the LORD your God am holy.”[3] So, every time a Jew avoided contamination by something deemed “unclean” by God, he or she was witnessing to the world that they worshipped the God of Israel. Second, it reminded the people of God that there was an expectation of obedience to their covenant with God: three times a day, as they selected and prepared the food for every meal in an ordinary day – not just on Sundays, as we do - they were reminded that God expected their obedience.
God had an additional instruction for the priests who ministered at the sacrificial altars: they should wash their hands before serving at the altar and before eating the meat from the animals sacrificed there.[4] The rabbis knew that Israel was to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation”[5] – what we call today the “priesthood of all believers.” They put the two instructions together and it came to be their religious tradition that all Jews should therefore wash their hands and scrub their pots before eating, just as the Levitical priests did before sacrificing.
So in our gospel text, when Jesus’ disciples did not wash their hands, they were violating a basic religious belief. This is what the Pharisees were criticizing them for: Jesus was teaching as a rabbi – a righteous Jew – yet his disciples did not wash their hands – they were not “observing the tradition of the elders.” They were violating a fundamental tenet of Jewish religious ritual. In “Presby-speak” terms, they were dissing their elders by putting their sneakers on the communion table, singing “mindless praise and worship choruses” instead of “theologically-sound” 19th century hymns, and wearing shorts to church!
But how seriously did the Jews of Jesus’ time, as well as the Jews of today, really take that instruction about “clean and unclean”? We know that the prophet Isaiah compared pigs to “rats and other abominable things,”[6] and in one spectacular exorcism, Jesus sent a legion of demons into a herd of panicked pigs that charged over a cliff.
And that exorcism story tells us that during the time of Jesus, the fact that there were pigs in Israel at all that were available to receive the demons, means that there were plenty of people who owned pigs, people who made their living as swineherds and people who ate pork regularly, all in a land where pork was unclean and forbidden.
When I visited Israel in 2006, and we’d been traveling in the Middle East for three weeks, we were tired of eating either hummus and rice and lamb, or lamb and rice and hummus, and we were hungry for some comfort food. Our guide pulled the bus over at a barbecue restaurant at least as big as a Texas Luby’s that was having a blue plate special on pulled pork sandwiches!
We were good Old Testament students, so we asked how a pork restaurant could do such good business in Israel – after all, who would want to be seen just going inside, let alone eating? The guide explained that because pigs were considered abominable, unclean creatures -- and because all the land of Israel belongs to God – the rabbis had decreed that the foot of a pig could not touch the land of Israel.
So, we asked, do they import the pork? Nope. The pork farmers built their pens on top of wooden platforms – like a deck – so that the pigs live about a foot above the ground, never touching it! And, of course, since no good Jew would admit to actually eating pork, the rationale was that the restaurant existed for the tourist trade – but I sure heard a lot of Hebrew conversation at the tables nearby.
And we can’t write this off to “just another one of those Old Testament religious rules stories that don’t apply to Christians, because the command to “Be Holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy,” didn’t “end” with the new covenant in Christ. So often we hide behind a belief that when adherence to ritual law for salvation was abolished, and righteousness became something we obtain not by religious ritual, but instead through the saving blood of Jesus, we think Christians are “off the hook” for everything God expected of the Hebrew nation. But holiness is not just an “Old Testament thing” and grace is not just a “New Testament thing”: Both holiness and grace are present throughout the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, and the command for God’s people to “be holy” still stands.
So here we can ask, like Dr. Phil, “So how’s that workin’ for ya?”
The pollsters at the Barna Group[7] report that “Overall, three out of every four adults (73%) believe that it is possible for someone to become holy, regardless of their past. Only half of the adult population (50%), however, says that they actually know someone they consider to be holy. And that’s more than twice as many who consider themselves to be holy (21%).” Who says that Pharisees only dominated until the 2nd century?
Barna continues: “When pressed to describe what it means to be holy, adults gave a wide range of answers. The most common reply was ‘I don’t know.’ …”
“Realize that these results portray a body of Christians who attend church and read the Bible, but do not understand the concept or significance of holiness, do not personally desire to be holy, and therefore do little, if anything to pursue it.”
Another Barna researcher writes that the single, main issue that turns non-Christians off about Christianity is the behavior of professing Christians. 84% of non-Christians say they are friends with Christians, but also say that the behavior of their Christian friends is no different from non-Christians. Between 70 and 91% of non-Christians said their Christian friends were judgmental, hypocritical, out of touch with reality and too insensitive to others.
“But wait, there’s more!” As if that weren’t enough, there is virtually no statistical difference between Christians and non-Christians when it comes to divorce,[8] and one website claims that 70% of all abortions performed are performed for women who profess to be Christian.[9] Both of these social crises are sourced in fear: fear that that God will not provide for us, fear of discovery, fear that God will not initiate or complete the work he began in us or others with whom we have relationships; and those fears are embedded in the unshakable depravity that convinces us to set our selfish desires above God’s desires - but that’s a different sermon.
I guess our response to Dr. Phil has to be, “It’s seems that it’s not workin’ at all.”
We might be tempted to think of ourselves as “twenty-five percenters” – part of the group of Christians that according to Barna’s percentages really does pursue holiness that is evident in their behavior. After all, Jesus’ list of “vomit from the heart” is pretty harsh stuff, isn’t it? Surely I am not spewing out “obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness.” Surely I’m not such a hypocrite.
That could be true, except that to avoid being lumped in with those hypocrites, we have to deal with those “pesky beatitudes” and the expansion of the Law of Love that Jesus gives us in Matthew 5 and 6: You know, where Jesus teaches that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder; anyone who looks at a woman with lust is guilty of adultery; anyone who marries a divorced person is guilty of adultery; anyone who prays in public is a hypocrite; and anyone who fails to give, or who gives expecting to be thanked or recognized or memorialized will not receive a reward in heaven; and everyone who judges the behavior of anyone else will be judged by the same standard.
Eww. Do you spend a lot of time in these chapters in Matthew, or do you skip right over them like I do?
Well, since Jesus sets the bar so high in Matthew 5 and 6, let’s get back to Jesus’ list of vomit - maybe we’ll fare better with examples of concrete behavior. Here goes:
“Obscenity, lust and adultery.” Anyone here struggling with pornography, or lack of sexual restraint? You don’t need to raise your hand.
How about “theft, deceptive dealings or greed”? I think that probably covers everybody right down to women who wear makeup and enhance their figures with special underwear – ask any man if that’s “deceptive dealing” – and anyone who wants more than God has given them, especially if it’s not as much, or as shiny, or as big, as what God has given to their neighbors.
We’re not doing too well so far, are we? Well, at least 30% of us can at least skate by “murder.”
That just leaves us with “carousing, mean looks, slander, gossip, arrogant pride [and] foolishness.” Surely I don’t have to pick those apart to make you feel convicted, do I? It seems that our sitting in church every week – if that’s the extend of what we’re doing to pursue holiness - amounts to just washing our hands and scrubbing our pots for all the world to see.
I feel pretty rotten now. In the words of a college friend of mine, “I guess I ought to just drink a bottle of Jack Daniels and walk into Lake Michigan until I can’t tread water anymore.” We can probably find the Jack Daniels in No Man’s Land, but all we have is Lake Optima, so what are we to do? Does God really expect us to pursue holiness or is it just an unreachable ideal? Do we just continue to live like hell and rely on Jesus to grab our smoldering shirt collars and drag us into heaven stinking of smoke?
Well, good if you feel rotten, because most Christians don’t understand their sin nature well enough to be grateful to God for his indescribable gift of God’s word in Scripture and God’s Word in Christ, because there is hope for reprobates like us!
In Romans 7, Paul complains that “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.
I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”[10]
I’m here to tell you that your life and mine can be radically different. With God there are no “if’s, anything is possible.[11] First we accept God’s grace and then we pursue God’s holiness. In Ephesians, Paul writes that we are to put off our old way of life and to set our minds on a new attitude, that of being new creatures in Christ, like God in true righteousness and holiness.[12] And so you shouldn’t be among those Christians who say that they don’t know how to be holy, here is Paul’s practical advice:
Speak truthfully. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. Stop stealing and go to work doing something useful and then share what you earn with those in need. Don’t say anything that’s judgmental or slander or gossip, but only build others up with your words. Get rid of your bitterness, rage, anger and hatred and replace it with kindness and compassion, forgiving one another as in Christ God forgave you.
We can move through the crowd and handle everything in sight , and take our chances by not washing our hands and catch the swine flu. We can move through a corrupt culture, carelessly living like pigs without giving it a thought, and catch diseases of the heart, mind and soul, and make others side besides.
Or we can wash our lives in the blood of Christ, wash our hearts in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, wash our consciences in confession before God the Father, wash our behavior by imitating Jesus and watch the vomit of our lives, that contaminates ourselves and others, be flushed down the sewer where it belongs. Thanks be to God for this indescribable gift!
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/H1N1flu/qa.htm
[2] Leviticus 11:7
[3] Leviticus 19:2
[4] Exodus 30:17-21
[5] Exodus 19:6
[6] Isaiah 66:3
[9] http://newheights.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/abortion-statistics/
[10] Romans 7:15-25
[11] Mark 9:23
[12] Ephesians 5:22ff
Comments:
Login to post comments