Rise Up, My Love
The 15th Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday, September 1, Proper 17B
Song of Solomon 2:8-13; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Three engineers had a spirited debate about which type of engineer God must have hired to design the human body. One said God hired a mechanical engineer. The body’s calibrated system of joints and ligaments surely required mechanical expertise. Another said God used an electrical engineer. All those neurons sending and receiving electrical signals throughout the body prove it.
A third and outlier opinion was that God used a civil engineer to design the human body. Civil engineers typically design buildings and infrastructure like roads, bridges, bike paths, hospitals, systems for irrigation and sewage. What evidence was there that God needed the expertise of a civil engineer? “Well,” said one, “only a civil engineer could route a waste disposal system through a recreational facility.”*
There’s some evidence in our gospel today that Jesus saw the human person like a civil engineer might. The body comprises two very different but confusingly entangled systems—one for waste management, and another for human connection. The hub of one system is the stomach; the hub of the other is the heart.
There’s also evidence in today’s gospel that Jesus had a touch of scatological humor. In a conflict over whether faithful people should purify their hands before eating, Jesus comes up with a snappy one-liner. Basically, “It’s not what goes in that defiles the body, but all the stuff that comes out.”
I imagine the crowd snickering about all the stuff that comes out of the human body. Sweat, mucus, everything from vapors to solids. Jesus activates this instinctive awareness to make a point. Jesus’s point is that if we want to be a priestly people, we don’t need to focus on what goes in, so much as we need to manage what comes out.
Jesus’s public conflict with the Pharisees and scribes was about how to be a priestly people. Handwashing wasn’t a hygiene issue at this point. This form of handwashing, from wrist to elbow, was usually reserved for priests, but the Pharisees wanted to transfer it to all Israelites, made pure and holy, offering themselves to God.
Jesus shares the Pharisees’ desire for a thoroughly cleansed people who offer themselves to God, but he takes a different approach. The disciples ask Jesus to explain his one-liner more completely. In this more private conversation, Jesus is more forthcoming about the meaning—and more explicit about the toilet humor. In part of the story eliminated from the sanitized version of this story that we read in church, Jesus explains: What comes into a person enters the stomach and then makes its way to the sewer. Meanwhile, what comes out of a person originates in the thoughts of the heart. While Jesus tells the crowd not to worry so much about what goes in as what comes out, Jesus is more direct with his disciples. The lesson to his disciples seems to be, “if you want to live as God’s priestly people, worry much more about what dwells in your heart than what passes through your digestive tract.”
The list of defilements that might originate in the heart is long. Almost all of them have the potential to corrode the infrastructure of human community: theft, murder, deceit, envy, slander, and the ominous but ambiguous “fornication.”
Jesus’s teaching about the superior importance of heartfelt intentions over bodily functions has some radical potential. In the verses cut from today’s reading in church, Mark the evangelist inserts a claim that Jesus’s teaching about what goes in and what comes out effectively declared all foods “clean.” Some early Christians also took Jesus’s teachings as a permission slip, but others disagreed. There’s even more radical potential if we transfer Jesus’s words about the digestive system to other systems as well. What if it’s the thoughts and intentions of the heart that make us pure or impure, and the other stuff barely matters?
The author of our second reading certainly wants to redefine “pure and undefiled” religion, but not in so libertine a way. The word translated as religion here is more specifically “worship.” The passage first points to the object of that worship—God as the generator of “lights,” meaning heavenly bodies, like planets and stars. Every gift we receive comes from this generous creator. We’re also on the most intimate terms with this God who gives gifts. The imagery in this passage is subtle, but I swear I’m not the first to see it**: This God implants his essence in us, which grows until it gives birth to us as people who live with the integrity of actions that match intentions.
This God deserves “pure and undefiled” worship. The words “pure and undefiled” more typically described forms of ritual purity, like washing the hands from wrist to elbow. But for the author of this letter, “pure and undefiled” worship strikes a balance between caring for society’s most vulnerable, and protecting oneself from the world’s destructive forces.
Our first reading, from the Song of Solomon, helps us imagine yet another form of pure and undefiled religion. In the Episcopal Church’s schedule of readings, we read from this biblical book less than once per year. Jewish worshippers, though, read from this book of love songs during the springtime feast of Passover. The passion experienced by the lovers in these songs isn’t different in kind from the passion that God shares with humankind.
In today’s passage, one lover is excited by the approach of another. When he arrives, he summons his lover into the fresh, spring weather—with flowers, birdsong, and fragrances. He probably knows of just the secluded spot where the apparently young and unmarried couple can go. Before that, the waiting lover describes the man on his way. He’s quick as a gazelle. Better than that, he’s like a stag: sleek and strong and horn—I mean, “antlered.” In other poems in the Song of Solomon, the lovers describe each other’s bodies in intimate detail.
***
The bodies that we inherit and wrestle with are the outcome of messy evolutionary processes—not the products of carefully drawn blueprints. The sources of our shame and defilement are intertwined with sources of attraction and pleasure. Our emotional and biological systems are confusingly entangled. But these bodies are no less gifts from the creator of planets and stars.
For some of us, or in some seasons of our lives, our bodies are where we experience the sickness, shame, and death that Christ’s resurrection delivers us from. For now, we might experience the body as a gift only in wistful and scandalous memory, or in longing hope for the resurrection.
But the liberating gospel still invites us to regard our bodies not as primary sources of defilement, but as extraordinary gifts from a good creator. Jesus’s teachings aren’t a permission slip, but a request to work more deeply in our souls and bodies. Our bodies are full of wisdom about the intense love and relative priorities of God. And the body is capable of sharing that love, and adopting those priorities. The emancipating God and the incarnate Christ call us to live in these bodies with liberating integrity.
To keep the body pure and undefiled, we can’t let the world tell us it’s anything less than an extraordinary gift from the good creator of the planets and stars. With such thoughts in our hearts, what can defile us?
Notes:
*This joke was told to me many years ago by a civil engineer.
**An early fifteenth-century text called The Lantern of Light reads this imagery explicitly.
The Rev. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas