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For any recovering evangelical that grew up in the 90s, just hearing the word purity can set one’s teeth on edge. Purity culture seemed to deform everything it touched. Girls were told to repress their bodies’ sexual desires and take responsibility for the the leers, the advances, and all the other lusts of their male counterparts who apparently couldn’t help themselves; boys were taught to fear their desires because our urges were so uncontrollable and could overtake us at any time; anyone who didn’t fit into these gendered categories—queer kids of all orientations—no doubt had it the most difficult because their basic desires themselves were categorized as sinful, and there was no way they could ever express their sexuality with another person in a way that wouldn’t be condemned. Often the common denominator among all these populations seemed to be the transmission of an all-pervasive shame for the urges, functions, and even the bare fact of the body.
For many years after I deconstructed the theology behind purity culture, I assumed it no longer held me in thrall. Of course there was the lingering sexual shame, but I surely wasn’t operating out of that theological construct of the God who so neatly divided creation and humanity into good and evil, pure and impure, loved and hated. But I’ve grown suspicious of my own assurances. I’ve noticed that the basic image of God and the categories of purity have largely remained intact in my theology, even as the have taken on new forms: not personal purity but social purity; not sexual purity but ideological purity; not conservative purity but liberal purity. So often I still serve a judgmental God quick to anger and abounding in rage, but now this God is progressive and so is equally mad for opposite reasons (a theological take on Newton’s Third Law of Motion?). It has made me wonder: have I kept the same God but just switched fundamentalisms? Alas, binaries die hard.
So, this fall the Revised Common Lectionary and the preaching schedule aligned to give me the chance to preach on the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds/Tares (Matt. 24-30).1 I knew I wanted to explore the concept of purity, but I also wanted to avoid a false moral equivalency that suggests we can’t make any ethical judgments or a quietism that gives up on acting for justice and peace in the world. So, here’s a little of what I wrote in that sermon (with a few edits):
“It is…the impossibility of purity that I want to focus on because it can be a loaded idea that many of us have tried to give up—especially those of us raised in the purity culture of evangelicalism. But I’m becoming more and more convinced that often these almost primal parts of our childhood faith aren’t deconstructed or exorcised as much as they often shape-shift and transform to arise in different contexts. Many of us wouldn’t claim to want purity, but we often act out of the same impulses that want to draw stark lines between what is right and wrong, good and evil, acceptable and unacceptable—in ourselves and in our world.
But to imagine that we, our churches, our communities, our world can ever achieve this purity can be incredibly unproductive. Individually, I think the desire for personal purity can become an unbearable burden. The attempt to live above reproach often ends up causing us to live above humanity, above relationship, above the real world— because the only world we have is a messy and imperfect one with messy and imperfect people. We are not angels who can float above the surface of the earth, never tarnished by its imperfections. Frederick Buechner’s crusty monastic character Godric gets to this inherent truth when he reminds his fellow monks, “Nothing human’s not a broth of false and true.”
Not only that, but the quest for purity may actually do damage to ourselves and the community. As the poet William Stafford writes, “if we purify the pond, the lilies die.” Sometimes it is the clearest looking water that is the most unhealthy because it’s purity doesn’t represent the presence of health, but the absence of life. It is pure because nothing lives there. It is the teeming wetlands,not the chlorinated pool, where life actually thrives. Like our mistaking the wheat from the weeds, sometimes the things we think are only impurities could actually be compost, the death and decay that creates the healthy soil that is absolutely necessary for life to persist and beauty to grow.
Again, this is not an argument for quietism or relativism. There are absolutely things we can do to make the world better, and we should strive for justice and mercy in a world that is so often unjust and unmerciful with tangible acts of kindness, with advocacy for political and social change. But the parable’s image of weeding is perhaps again instructive. If you are successfully weeding, you don’t even attempt to change the weed or believe transformation of the weed is possible; you simply rip it out by its very roots—it is a final judgment from which there can be no return. And, again, the servants are told to leave that type of final judgment to God because we are too fallible to make these judgments correctly and might pull out wheat, or something that still might transform into wheat.”
So, I concluded a few paragraphs later,
“So, yes, love mercy and do justice—God knows we desperately need more people who will. But be humble in your judgments, knowing you are fallible; be enamored more by your love for the wheat than your hatred for the weeds, so you do not lose your soul; and be wary of the quest for absolute purity this side of eternity, so you can stay fully human in the messiness of life. And never lose hope in the possibility of transformation, for that is the reason Christ was sent into the world, not to condemn it, but to save it—and it is that saving, loving God alone whose judgments are true and righteous altogether.”
As is often the origin story for new hymn texts, I wrote this text because I couldn’t find a fitting song to sing after the sermon. I chose to write it in C.M.D. (Common Meter Double) so it could be quickly adapted to a well-known tune (the meter also tends to fit narrative texts like this—which is why it was often called the “ballad meter”). You’ll see how the stanzas follow the overall structure of the sermon:
Among a field of new-sown wheat
prepared with costly seeds,
an enemy snuck in at night
and planted noxious weeds.
”We’ll pull them out!” the workers cried,
their voices loud and sure.
”You’ll kill it all,” their boss replied,
”in trying to be pure.”
For if our goal is purity,
the gifts we should enjoy
are turned to dangers, fears, and threats
we struggle to destroy.
And so we treat a fertile field
where plants can grow and thrive
with purifying chemicals
till nothing can survive.
For nothing could be easier
than finding others’ sin,
projecting all the mess and murk
we worry lurks within.
But we are all a complex mix,
a wounded work of art;
the line of saint and sinner runs
through ev’ry human heart.
So work for justice, peace, and truth
with ev’ry seed you sow,
not ripping out the things you hate
but planting what must grow.
For grace expands beyond the bounds
of all we understand,
and ev’rything is harvested
by God’s redeeming hand.
© 2024 GIA, Inc.
And here’s the demo (look at that haircut!):
You can purchase the music here through GIA Unbound.
You’ll also note at the end of the third stanza my take on a quote by Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, not between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”
That seems like a good place to end.
Wonder-ings
One of my favorite new-to-me authors of the last two years is the Iranian-American writer Kaveh Akbar. His writing traverses subject and genre with poems, essays, and a novel exploring ancient spirituality and modern mysticism, addiction and recovery, sexuality and migration. I first stumbled upon him in essay “What Can Ancient Spiritual Poetry Teach Us About Living” in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. The whole article bears close reading, but he argues that the mystery the poems convey, alongside the surprising contemporaneity of its themes (e.g., grief and loss) and the care and precision with which they employ language, can help us navigate the modern world—and he absolutely sticks the landing.
Today the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn—on our phones, on our TVs, in our periphery on billboards and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute: immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you sexually irresistible. Poetry opposes these things, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of it entering us. Sacred poetry teaches us to be comfortable with complexity, to be skeptical of unqualified certitude. In reminding us that language has history, density, integrity, such poetry is a potent antidote against a late-capitalist empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction…
What are we to do, then? We who are tethered to language like a plant to the soil. We who write into a country run by religious zealots to their one true God, the late capitalist Money God, to whom they would sacrifice our lives, the lives of the people we love and people who love the way we love. What are we to do, amidst such zealotry?
Our ancestors have given us models. Reject certainty, which exists only in the rhetoric of zealots and tyrants. Reject false equivalencies, the vapid argle-bargle of empire. Adjust our metabolization of language to remind us of its materiality, its power. Our task as wardens of our species’ most dangerous technology? To treat our materials seriously. Embrace the mystery of earnest, mellifluous language. Embrace its infinite potential to thin the partition between us and the world we seek.
Earlier this year, he also released his dazzling debut novel Martyr!, which tells the story of Iranian-born Cyrus Shams. Shams grows up in the shadow of his mother’s tragic death, his father’s quixotic struggle to keep the family afloat, and the daily xenophobia of Middle America. Now a rudderless poet struggling with addiction, he becomes fascinated with stories of martyrs, which will eventually lead him to the Brooklyn Museum for an unexpected encounter and revelation. And accompanying him on this quest, we are the recipients of his hard-earned spiritual wisdom. “What distinguishes grace from everything else?” Cyrus asks,
“Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.”
Or, in line that dovetails nicely with the discussion of purity, “The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief.”
While I’ve only read one of his books of poetry (Pilgrim Bell), there is also beauty and insight prodigally sown through those pages, like this section of his prose poem “The Miracle”:
“It wasn’t until Gabriel squeezed away what was empty in him that the Prophet could be filled with miracle. Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill—with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise—and imagine them gone. What’s left? Whatever you aren’t, which is what makes you—a house useful not because its floorboards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space between them.”
Oh, and he’s also occasionally funny, like in his description of the former president as “a cartoon ghoul of a man for whom Dantean ideas of hell seemed specifically conceived.”
I finished the marvelous Ali Smith Seasons Quartet a few days ago with Summer, the final book in the series. Each is successful as a stand-alone novel, but their subtle interlocking story lines and themes resonate with one another and create a small-scale ecosystem of beauty and anxiety, grief and hope. Here’s one of the narrators toward the end of Summer with a reflection that probably hits a little closer to home for academic types.
“When I was a callow schoolgirl…I really believed I could hold all the knowledge in me, all the narratives, all the poems, all the art, all the learning—and this gathering and holding of all of these things meant I now owned these things and that to do this was the reason for living.
These days what do I know?
Close to nothing.
But one thing I do know now is that i don’t hold any of those things I thought I owned.
Instead, all those things hold me. They hold us all under the sky.”
May you find yourself held this day, and may you learn to accept the marvelous mess of your humanity.
Peace,
Dave
He put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” He answered, “An enemy has done this.” The slaves said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he replied, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’
Lovely song! Thanks for sharing. I recently learned (from Fleming Rutledge) that righteousness and justice are the same word in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the N.T. This helps us understand God's heart.