Sermon shared online with All Saints Nagoya International Church, Link on Sunday, August 16, 2020 based on the assigned Gospel for the day, Matthew 15: 10-28.
Today Jesus talks toilets.
In today’s lesson from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus makes an astonishing analogy between a toilet and a wicked heart and then gives us a real-life example.
First, Jesus starts with the toilet: “Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?" (v. 17). This is the first part of the metaphor. The word that can be translated as “sewer” is the biblical Greek word aphedron. It refers to a place where human waste is dumped, that is, a privy or a toilet.
But the astonishing part about this is not that Jesus is talking toilets here, that should not surprise us because Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. What is amazing is Jesus is suggesting that the human heart --- the inner consciousness and sentient part of our nature --- can also be like a toilet. It is from this cesspool --- as he describes the parable to the disciples --- from where “evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander” can be defecated, if you will, through the mouth.
The implication is clear, just like our hearts can be a place where love is found, our hearts can pollute everything around us. “These,” he says to his startled audience and the prim Pharisees, “are what defile a person,” not the outward fact that the hands have been washed or not washed (vv. 18-20).
For Jesus, hypocrisy stinks and we need more than air fresheners or incense for our homes and lives to cover it up. Jesus is teaching in this recorded text and elsewhere in the gospels that our words and actions are a product of who we are, of what is inside of us, in our hearts. That's what he means when Jesus says in his “Sermon on the Mount” that a person who thinks like an adulterer is an adulterer even though there's been no actual liaison and that the person who hates another person is a murderer, even though a literal murder has not been committed (Matthew 5:21-30).
So how do we get rid of the stink of hypocrisy? We need more than air freshener. We need more than a cosmetic approach. A toilet with warm seats and lids that goes up and down with the touch of a button and supplies a princess cover sound is still--a toilet.
The good news is that God through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has reconciled us to God and has installed a new system, something so radical and effective that the results are authentic, pure, sweet-smelling, wholesome and of benefit to everyone.
As Paul puts it in today’s letters to the Romans, “are we rejected?” sewage to be swept out of God’s creation. Absolutely not! By grace, through faith, we are loved, forgiven, and baptized into God’s family, called to a life that calls us to a new heart, or a new nature. We are new creations in Christ, as the apostle Paul makes clear: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Because this is true, because we are reconciled to God, we have been given the “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18).
What is this ministry of reconciliation? This does not mean that we become burdened like community workers of old who go from home to home picking up that day’s sewage to spread on the fields. Rather, activated by faith, we speak and act as though we have met the living Christ. We walk in faith, walk in the Spirit, and recognize that we have been given a new life, a new heart, a new nature. Living as though we are in the family of God is an intentional choice of faith. We choose God. We say yes, every moment of our days to God. And the more we do this, the stronger we become.
We can--- based on Colossians 3 for just one example,
+ Live authentic lives.
+ Chose not to lie to one another.
+ Bear each other's burdens
+ Practice love and forgive one another.
+ Live gratefully, in peace, before God and one another.
That being said it does not mean that we do not struggle with all that may pour sewage back into our lives by our actions, those around us or by life circumstances some of which we have no control. The recent image in my mind is the pictures I saw from the flooding in Kumamoto and all the mud in people’s homes. Many were living their lives and then suddenly a flood had overwhelmed them and their neighbors. We can metaphorically feel the same way. As if to underscore what Jesus has just said, the Gospel of Matthew at once supplies an illustration of hypocrisy and this ministry of reconciliation.
Jesus is in modern-day Lebanon and there meets a woman. Matthew names this person as a “Canaanite” woman -- emphasizing her heritage as among the earliest inhabitants of this region. “Canaanite” is cultural code for a long-hardened pagan and a longtime enemy of the Jewish monotheistic faith and commitment.
From the perspective of Jesus and the disciples the encounter with a Canaanite is daring, but with a Canaanite woman, it is doubly defiling. The strict codes of decency in Near Eastern culture sternly frowned on unrelated women and men socializing. The brazen, loud yet faithful approach of this lone woman to Jesus and his disciples makes her character especially questionable.
So, not only is this stranger an unescorted Canaanite woman (is she a single parent?) but she has a daughter who is owned by a demon. In an age in which it was a commonly held conviction that all diseases and afflictions resulted from past life choices, this woman's character rating slips even further. What has she done in her life to have earned such a curse on her and her daughter?
Yet, this faithful woman challenges the old mindset, the tables are turned and Jesus shows his disciples what it means to live as someone in touch with a heart that is higher than the laws, traditions, and conventions of human society --- this ministry of reconciliation. Jesus, at first models the expected behavior and culture of that time, that no self-respecting and self-righteous man would have had anything to do with this woman, but then Jesus lives out this changed heart leading to a ministry of reconciliation. Out of this woman’s faithful response pointing out the hypocrisy, Jesus gives us a living example, that with a new “system” in place, a new nature, a new perspective, old barriers can be overcome and we are now open for daily opportunities to reconcile and live out the good news. In turn to be gracious and generous, to be kind and compassionate.
Interestingly, that kind of a life is one that is like --- to God --- a sweet-smelling sacrifice of praise! “For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing" (2 Corinthians 2:15). As we live like Christ, and “walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us” we are “as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 2:15).
May we be a sweet-smelling family of God. May those who live around us see us not as people with one face, whose actions betray us to be nothing more than sewage, but as people who can live out this ministry of reconciliation as fragrant examples of God’s love. Furthermore, may our faith be like the woman’s, demanding a clean heart, not be satisfied with hypocrisy and open to the faith of others as we grow in faith. Amen.
Prayer: This is a portion from a Prayer called “For Deliverance from False Desires and Fears.”[1]
“And, dear Jesus, grant me the grace to desire that others might be more loved than I, that others might be more esteemed than I, that in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I decrease, that others may be chosen and I may be set aside, that others may be preferred to me in everything, that others may become holier than I, provided that I, too, become as holy as I can. Amen.”
[1] Shane Claiborne & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Common Prayer: Pocket Edition, Zondervan, 2012 p. 73.
