Bumper Sticker Theology: Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness: August 8, 2026

speaker-1: This morning our first reading comes from the book of Leviticus, chapter eleven, verse forty-four through forty-five. For I am the Lord your God, sanctify yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not defile You shall not defile yourselves with any swarming creatures that move on the earth. For I am the Lord who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall be holy, for I am holy. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

speaker-0: Okay. We are we're week two of our bumper sticker theology series that brings us all your favorite Christian cliches. And this week we've got your grandma's favorite. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Scripture that Kathy read for you today that you all awkwardly said the word of the Lord, thanks be to God to. that is from the book of Leviticus, and it's one of the starting portions of what we call the Holiness Code. And these were instructions for God's people at the time so that they could be set apart from other nations and people, so that they would be God's unique people. On all the face of the earth. And so holiness was sort of coded like cleanliness, right? And so the Levitical Holiness Code was all the ways that you could keep yourself from becoming ritually unclean. And so we get instructions about what kind of foods you're allowed to eat. And this is where this scripture comes from today. And what kinds, for instance, of four-footed insects. that fly that you're allowed to eat. And in case you were wondering, it's the ones with a joint above the foot. and also how many days after giving birth, for instance, a woman is considered unclean. And again, if you're wondering, it's 33, unless it's a girl, in which case it's 66. We're gonna let that lie for today, okay? the Holiness Code always reminds me of this quote that I once heard through Stanley Howerwas. It's not Hower Watts' quote, it's a quote by Chuck Primus. He's an instructor at Notre Dame, and he said, any religion that doesn't tell you what to do with your pots and pans and genitals can't be that interesting. Well, the last part will have to wait for another day. but today we are in fact going to talk about clean cups, pots, baths, beds, hypocrisy, and a religion worth your time. Interesting indeed. Jesus picks up the thread here for us in the Gospel of Mark. Same story, quick break in between. So listen with me if you would for the word of the Lord. Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, that is Jesus, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders. And they don't eat anything from the market unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe: the washing of cups and pots and bronze kettles and beds. All from the Holiness Code. So the Pharisees and the scribes asked Jesus. Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands? And he said to them, just a zinger, Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites. As it is written, This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrine. You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition. And then he called the crowd again and said to them, Listen to me, all of you, and understand, there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile. But the things that come out are what defile. And when he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. And he said to them, So are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a peep person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart, but the stomach and goes out into the sewer? Thus he declared all foods clean. And he said, It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within. From the human heart that evil intentions come. Sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, folly, all these evil things come from within. And they defile a person. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. God, it is my prayer today that our religious expression might be worth it. That our attempts at cleaning the outside of our lives might be little more than an expression of an inward disposition that seeks justice, loves mercy, and desires to be like you. In fact, if we spend so much time on the inside of our cups that the outsides remain blemished, bless us, we pray. Now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Christ, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. My house burnt down when I was six years old. the dog got out. I know you were worried. His name was Brutus. I did lose a hamster though. he was orange and white. I can't remember his name. I think those wounds have healed, even though I might still bear scars on my hands from where he would bite me. He had personality, that hamster. Anyway, we moved in with my grandma for about a year. She had seven children of her own, my dad being the baby, and she never moved from the house that they all grew up in, and so she could fit us, and she apparently didn't mind the company or the presence of a six-year-old or a three-year-old. I have a little sister. I have a constellation of memories from that period of my life, but one of the most pervasive is how committed to cleanliness grandma was. I don't know how often all of you wash your sheets, but it isn't enough. Do you wash them every week, you filthy swine? do you wait every other week to wash your sheets? You might as well be sleeping in a wet Chinese market. Graham changed her sheets every day. Every day Grandma changed her sheets, and every day she would bathe before getting into those fresh linens. Committed to cleanliness, I'm telling you. I guess my mom decided that while we were living there together, that since she had an extra set of hands, she would bathe my sister. She was three at the time. And she'd let my grandma help me out. I was six at the time. And I gotta tell ya, I think that grandma taught our military the enhanced interrogation tactics that they used in Guantanamo because I'm here to tell you that that w woman waterboarded me every single night. With water so hot that it would have made Satan uncomfortable. and she had she had this little brush that had bristles harder than a bristle should be on it, and she would She would scrub my fingernails so hard. Like I've never known somebody to be so obsessed with dirt under fingernails as as this woman. And there were two main c culprits, the dirt under the fingernails, and then I'm gonna let you guess what the other one was that she was really concerned about.

speaker-1: Wait a minute.

speaker-0: Dirt behind my ears. Yeah, why are kids so filthy behind their ears? We don't know. But Lord, like I how dirty could I have become in 24 hours? I don't know. But this obsession with cleanliness was something of a metaphor for my grandma's whole life. And she grew up as I did in in what we call the Pentecostal holiness movement. That's that was my bread and butter. And as we see in in Leviticus, holiness and cleanliness are our bedfellows, and they do also change their sheets every night. So we thought, I thought growing up an awful lot about cleanliness because as we read, the command is God gives us this command to, quote, be holy as I am holy. And everybody knows that that was really just shorthand for being clean. And that's a tall task in a dirty world. And so we worried about it. Like a lot, actually. We worried about what might happen to us i if we got sullied by the world. And so we also had this constant specter of if well if we got sullied and we couldn't be near God, then I guess to hell we go. To hell we go. A happy thought for a child. But the result of this preoccupation with being really clean was That church, my experience of church growing up, was mostly about what I wasn't supposed to do to keep from being sullied. Right? It was everything about what I was supposed to not do. And I can't tell you how many times I heard that scripture from the book of James that pure religion is, quote, to keep oneself unstained by the world. The point of religion really was similar to that of Leviticus, to ensure that we were set apart from the world. And we weren't really sure what that meant for all of the bug eating or eating birds of prey stuff that's in Leviticus. And we thought that we could probably get away with wearing mixed fabrics like your polyesters, a bunch of sinners out here today. We thought that that might be okay, but was what was certain for us is that you should not, under any circumstances, no matter what, smoke, drink, swear, dance, or play cards. You do those things and you will be sullied. and go straight to hell. Don't Pasco, don't worry about throwing doubles, you're not getting out. It's the cards. They send you straight to the pit. But actually on Wednesday night, I learned, Fran told me, that in Baptist circles, you could get around the card playing by playing dominoes. And that would be okay. Jesus never sees that one coming. And also as part of my upbringing, we were told that you were in fact supposed to believe in Jesus. Supposed to believe that that he was the Son of God and and all of that. But as far as I could tell, what that meant was that then you were supposed to not drink, smoke, swear, dance, play cards, or listen here, Baptists, indulge in dominoes.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: This whole prerogative was, I think. Honestly and accidentally, built on the fear of what might happen if you got tainted. It was a religion mostly based in negatives, what not to do, rather than a positive appraisal of what we ought to be striving toward. It's a religious expression where keeping clean wasn't just next to godliness. It in fact was godliness. And it that was safer, an awful lot safer, than striving toward goodness because doing that is, well, it's messy. Striving toward godliness is is difficult and strange sometimes. It's a positive thing. And truly, it puts you in a position to have to take chances and have to create And have to make faithful choices about what God is calling us to in the present. Because the truth is that the Bible isn't and has never been really a plug-and-play manual for living. It wasn't in 50 AD and it's not in 2026. What does the Apostle Paul have to say about the effect of social media on our teenagers? Seriously. We just read the whole book of Romans. And we missed that part. Not a daggum thing in there about that. What does Jesus have to say, for instance, about how we vote in a democracy and how much character is supposed to matter in that? Jesus didn't know what democracy was, you guys. That wasn't a thing, right? Godliness is not just an invitation to stay away. From a bunch of things. It isn't a religion of negatives. Godliness is an invitation by the Lord to trust the Spirit to give you the wisdom to act positively in the world for Jesus' sake and not just to abstain for Jesus' sake. This is the sort of daring action that we see in the New Testament. These are people who are all just trying to figure it out. They don't know what the right thing is. They're living into what is the next thing for the sake of God. And that is so much messier than just keeping oneself unstained by the world. It plunges us instead into the world to try to ignite some goodness there, to try to salt what is flavorless and be a light in the darkness. And in fact, in doing so, we might just get the outside of our cups dirty. It might look to a restrained religion like we've lost the plot. In fact. But I gotta tell ya, it doesn't seem to me like Jesus gives a holy rip about what the outside of our cups look like. Jesus is concerned with your guts. What is inside of you? Your soul, your heart. And if you are orienting your heart to God's good purposes in the world, abstaining from what is truly solely, slander, deceit, pride, folly, and all the rest, who gives a rip about what form your practice looks like? We are all stumbling. Into faithfulness together. Nobody has it all right. We've all got grass stains on our knees from our slipping up and our prayers. We've all got mud clinging to us from our own failings and from those moments when we've gotten down into the ditch with those who have fallen. And I gotta be honest, I would rather get messy with all of you and Jesus than have a sterile, boring religion. Truth is, did our tradition sin trying to keep our cups prudishly clean. PCSA, Presbyterian tradition. Honestly, I think we might could be a little bit more prudish from time to time. No, instead, our tagline is decently and in order. So while some, like the tradition in which I grew up, Some are tempted toward the appearance of cleanliness by keeping themselves not smelling like smoke or booze or cars. We are tempted toward the appearance of decency, inoffensiveness, as a substitute for godliness. But danger is the same, though, my friends, as it is for those whose patron saint is Mr. Clean. Because we hold back from appearing strange in the world. We are concerned that people might look at us a terrible strategy for making Jesus known. My friends, that is why our hesitation is why almost every newer person that comes in the doors of this church says to me something like, I didn't know that this expression of Christian faith existed, especially here in North Texas. But I gotta tell ya, I want all the eyes on us. Because I think a Christianity that puts on the love of God or puts the love of God in the driver's seat is worth looking at. I think it's worth seeing, and I think it's worth witnessing to, even if in our neighborhood, loving our LGBT neighbors, believing that we can do immigration reform without body slamming abuelas. Even if criticizing our country's love of war because we want to love our country, thinking that every person, even the poor, deserve human dignity, even if these conditions, even if these commitments make the outside of our cup look dirty and our community indecent, I think it's worth it. Because Jesus doesn't care what our cup looks like. He's over here eating with dirty hands, with a really pure heart, and wondering what all the fuss is about. I loved my grandma dearly. She never drank. She never smoked. She loved to sing hymns and visit people in nursing homes, which is actually the first part of that scripture from James that tells us that pure religion is to keep oneself unstained from the world. The first part of that is to visit widows and orphans in their distress. She lived into her 90s, if you can believe it. And and then whatever filter she had went wherever the rest of her mind was and then she started swearing. But When I left our tradition and I became a Presbyterian, she prayed for my soul. She thought I was going to hell. She was also the most loving racist I've ever known in my entire life. She was a world class gossip and she could hold a grudge with the best of And at the same time, I do trust that I will see her in the world after this one. And it will not be because she earned it, or because her cup was clean enough. Because it wasn't. It will be because of grace. Truth is that we're all scared of something, right? Scared of hell if you grew up that way. Scared of scrutiny of people looking at you. Scared of change or scared of God? Scared of being in the minority or being the only one standing for something. And so we compensate. We we find ways to compensate. We clean the outsides of our cups really well, so that nobody will think to look inside them very closely. And therefore we cling to purity. or the semblance of it. We cling to decency or some other crutch, hoping that our cleanliness will get us close enough to godliness. But while I will never shame you for having a shower before worship, the goal was never for us to be good enough, or do good enough, or to appear good enough for God. God's love for us is what cleans our hearts. God's love for us is what gives us grace to seek godliness without the worry of appearance. God's love for us is what holds us secure. And not just so that God can scrub behind our ears. Thanks be to God. Amen.