If you are one of those Christians that need to live by boundaries, borders and walls, this sermon is not for you.\u00a0 Today in Matthew\u2019s gospel, we see that Jesus tackles the question of clean\/unclean and pure\/impure.\u00a0 As much as Jesus fought in his life against the exclusions and maps of purity\/impurity, Christians continue to imprison his ministry of grace and freedom in a quagmire of purity codes, pollution language, and exclusionary behaviors.<\/p>\n
All cultures, especially, religious cultures have their own maps of what is pure and impure.\u00a0 For the Hebrew scriptures, there are ethnic and gender boundaries, often claimed to be divine boundaries between clean\/unclean and pure\/impure and often connected to righteousness\/sinfulness. For example, my heritage of being Scottish, Irish and Greek would make me unclean in the eyes of Pharisee. These purity maps are meant to exclude things, foods, certain actions and behaviors, and peoples.\u00a0 In food, you do not mix certain foods to together such as dairy and meat or with animal products. So bacon cheeseburgers, while tasting great, violate the Jewish kosher laws on two levels: eating bacon and mixing cheese or dairy with meat. You don\u2019t mix various two types of cloth in the same garment.<\/p>\n
Mixtures of categories are forbidden because such mixtures, claimed by practitioners, confuse what it considered God-ordained categories with discrete boundaries.\u00a0 The concept of natural\/unnatural is one variant of this purity code.\u00a0 Sins against nature are hardly sins against the environment but what the majority or the religious authorities consider unnatural.\u00a0 They are unnatural only because the plurality or religiously powerful have the authority to say what is unnatural or natural. According to St. Paul, long hair for a male is unnatural and short cropped hair is unnatural for a female.\u00a0 I wonder where wigs fall into such schema. I suspect they are unnatural because they confuse categories, especially when you cross dress, another unnatural action of confusion.\u00a0 Here is an example of a sin against nature!<\/p>\n
Our garden violates the purity or kosher laws because we mix plants in same fields. Not surprising, we are, of course, an unnatural church because we cause confusion by not separating out the plants of certain types in their own fields.\u00a0 We mix dessert succulents and landscape with tomatoes and other plantsin the same bed.\u00a0 We are church that fails by confusing the boundaries on the level of gardening but also on many other levels of gender categories and sexual orientation codes because we believe in inclusiveness.\u00a0 And radical inclusiveness violates purity codes.<\/p>\n
Inclusiveness is so messy for the religious obsessive folks and compulsive purists or Christian fundamentalists.\u00a0 In fact, it is a nightmare\u2026..What is pure becomes polluted, what has been sacred suddenly become profane\u2026.I read how one fundamentalist Christian, who is a baker, refused to make rainbow cupcakes because it would taint his relationship with Jesus. It might lead to the false impression that he accepted LGBT folks or same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n
The struggle to live as God has outlined begins in the heart:\u00a0 it is justice, mercy, faith, love, and compassion.\u00a0 Sacred tradition cannot be hardened into unchanging traditions of stone tablets while Jesus understand that religious laws and customs are written in sand.<\/p>\n
Many Christian scriptural texts are firm in Jesus\u2019 rejection of rabbinical notions of purity and impurity and their schemas to categorize people. They present Jesus\u2019 ministry as a continual violation of scrupulous ritual codes of exclusive and purity.\u00a0 Jesus sat and ate with sinner, tax collectors, and prostitutes, the unclean and clean, men and women of suspect purity status. He broke all the purity maps of holiness groups, and those groups hated him for breaking what they considered sacred and measured their holiness by adhering strictly to them.<\/p>\n
The early crisis after the death and resurrection of Jesus was whether his \u00a0Jewish followers could even eat or sit at table with non-Jewish followers of Jesus. This sounds so much like the attempt of particular states to exempt homophobic exclusions of business in extending housing and other services to LGBT folks.\u00a0 It is matter of religious codes, outdated. Ifw e asked \u201cwhat would Jesus do?\u201d\u00a0 He would clearly break them\/<\/p>\n
In Acts, there was controversy in which the Holy Spirit gives Peter a vision of animals of mixed purity status and reveals that they are all holy to God before he visits the Roman centurion Cornelius and his household.<\/p>\n
I have heard so often how churches and church leaders have scolded folks for cross-dressing. \u201cYou should dress appropriately to the gender in which \u00a0God created you. God makes no mistakes.\u00a0 It is wrong; it is unnatural to undergo a sex change procedure or take hormones to alter your gender.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet in Acts of the Apostles, Philip, part of the liberal wing of the Jesus movement, baptizes a non-Jew, in fact, an African proto-transgender person, the Ethiopian eunuch as a follower of Jesus. The Eunuch is an African, a non-Jew, and a non-male or non-female, a third gender as the first non-Jewish convert to the Jesus movement. You don\u2019t hear churches speaking about the gender variance of the Ethiopian eunuch.\u00a0 What is called unnatural in the human world, is often natural in the biological world. Joan Roughgarden is a transgendered woman ecologist and wrote a book entitled Evolution\u2019s Rainbow, <\/em>\u00a0where she documents the gender variance, transitions, and diversities within nature. What we call \u201csins against nature,\u201d it appears our Creator God is continuously guilty of creating such gender diversities to enrich biological life.\u00a0 God is the worst offender of the so call, sins against nature.<\/p>\n Remember the baptismal formula in Paul: \u201cThere is neither Greek nor Jew, male or female, free person and slave.\u201d\u00a0 In Christ, there are neither identities nor any other markers such as race, gender, ethnicity, sexual or gender identities, for we are all children of God.\u00a0 There are no exclusions that separate the children of God. We are all siblings.<\/p>\n Let me take you one step further in the inclusive confusion of categories:\u00a0 In Ephesians 5:22-23:\u00a0 \u201cWives be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church the body of which he is savior.\u201d\u00a0 This text has been used my men to dominate their wives. But I also have heard this text at transgender and same-sex weddings.\u00a0 It is an ecclesial transgender confused scripture.<\/p>\n Insofar women are part of the body of Christ through baptism, they are called to be Christ to others, so they must be as grooms and husbands to the brides and wives, whether it be a man or a woman.\u00a0 The church consists of men and women.\u00a0 This text justifies not only all sorts of transgender but also same-sex relations. How many women grooms have married their brides while one of the first weddings I officiated in the 1970s was a gay man in full blown wedding dress with husband I a tuxedos and two lesbians in tuxedoes standing up for them.\u00a0 In this text from Ephesians, this is normal.<\/p>\n But the image is very queer. Christ a male is literally the head over the body\u2014his church, which consists male, female, gender variant, intesex, heterosexual and bisexual, and so on.\u00a0 The body of Christ and traditional baptismal theology are some of the queerest concepts in Christianity. The logic of Christian inclusiveness not only confuses the homophobe and transphobe but those who understand that marriage is between one man\/one woman. This is Christian traditional baptismal theology. Churches came to the conclusion if we baptized LGBT folks, we must recognize their calls to marriage and ministry.\u00a0 It is simply logical.<\/p>\n Christians today have re-animated the purity of codes of the Jewish fundamentalists of Jesus time.\u00a0 Were not these purity codes supposed to be abandoned by Jesus during is ministry?\u00a0 Those who oppose same-sex marriage use the argument that marriage ordained by God is one man\/one woman, and that this is pure while same-sex marriage pollutes marriage.\u00a0\u00a0 Changing your gender is unnatural because it pollutes the gender codes of God.\u00a0 God made you the way you are. Men are naturally superior to women because men reflect the image of God more unless women are subjected to their husbands. Only fundamentalists accept this premise.<\/p>\n Christians use the language of clean\/unclean\/ pure and impure, pollution, sins against nature. Categories of natural\/unnatural, abomination, pollution, dirty, unclean, sinful, disgusting, diseased \u00a0are applied to people living with HIV and AIDS. Even our community uses such as \u201ccleanub2\u201d, referring to being HIV.\u00a0 We speak of drug addiction as unclean, free from drug addiction as clean.\u00a0 Let\u2019s keep America pure and protect our southern border, means let\u2019s keep Caucasians in power and protect ourselves from ethnically different or in this case the invasion from the south of tens of thousands of refugee children.\u00a0 This is xenophobia, a racial attitude of fear of the \u00a0\u00a0We do not worry about the Canadian menace and invasion except on South Park. Mixed marriages were 50 years \u00a0understood as polluting the categories of race, by mixing or Catholic-Protestant as mixed marriages. \u00a0Segregation in the US and apartheid in South Africa were racialized purity codes.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s keep the body of Christ pure.\u00a0 Inclusion is never about purity and walls to exclude. It is about inclusion, tearing down barriers and walls that exclude. Or some would call it Christian confusion of the categories, following in the footsteps of Christians. Fundamentalist Christians appropriate the ultimate purity category: Are you saved? Or are you damned?\u00a0 They proclaim their group saved while they arrogantly look down with condemnation and arrogance, proclaiming \u201cYou are not saved.\u201d<\/p>\n After the debate of clean\/impure dispute with the Pharisees, Jesus enacts a border crossing out of the geographical areas of Israel to the regions of Tyr end Sidon in Phoenicia. He encounters the Syro-Phoenician woman.\u00a0 But here we learn the true nature of radical inclusion. What we consider as radical inclusive is neither radical enough nor inclusive enough.\u00a0 He is approached by the Syro-Phoenician woman who addresses Jesus as he Jewish Messiah and pleas for a healing of her daughter.\u00a0 Jesus, at first, passes by her pleas for healing, and then answers her: \u201cIt is not fair to take children\u2019s food and throw it to dogs.\u201d\u00a0 What appears as a racial slur does not stop the woman.\u00a0 She comes right back: \u201cYes, Lord even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master\u2019s table.\u201d Jesus is invited to stretch his radical inclusiveness even further to include Gentiles. \u00a0At that\u00a0 moment, he realizes he has fallen easily into mental trap of exclusion, and this is not consistent with his message God\u2019s grace. He does and proclaims the woman\u2019s faith is great. This becomes a parable of warning to us as church folks to be weary thinking that we are inclusive enough. We are never inclusive enough, only God is. \u00a0And God calls through the ministry of Jesus to fight against the bigotry and exclusions from such religious prejudice and sinfulness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you are one of those Christians that need to live by boundaries, borders and walls, this sermon is not for you.\u00a0 Today in Matthew\u2019s gospel, we see that Jesus tackles the question of clean\/unclean and pure\/impure.\u00a0 As much as Jesus fought in his life against the exclusions and maps of purity\/impurity, Christians continue to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sunday-sermons"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3Cgaj-4l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions\/270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}