Sermon: The Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany

"At the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the parsonage of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct—a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward."
(from In the Beauty of the Lilies, by John Updike)

Clarence Arthur Wilmot is a character in one of the now late John Updike’s novels, so you can hold off on your prayers for this doubting pastor’s soul.

What escaped upward along with Mr. Wilmot’s faith that day in 1910 was the sanctity of the world. Suddenly nothing was holy. Not himself nor his wife nor the farmer and horse clacking their way up State Street at the moment of his faith’s exit. The universe suddenly seemed as oblivious to each of these at is was to a lump of coal.

But the clergyman did not resign his position immediately with the church. And he soon lost something else. Midway through the Sunday service his vocal chords clenched, and Wilmot lost his voice. Worship halted and waited until his wife Stella “stepped forward to the rail and called into the varnished depths of the ill attended church, ‘With gladness, let us present the offering of our life and labor to the Lord.’”

It was, of course, a desecration to have a woman speak these words. And Mrs. Wilmot wasn’t finished. She let the rest of the service. The congregation coughed and rustled, the ushers bumped into each other as they made their way down the aisle with the alms basins. Miriam Showalter, the church organist, was so stunned that she forgot to start the accompaniment to the offertory solo, so the plates pass through the congregation in a fraught and awkward silence.

Now what’s curious about poor Pastor Wilmot’s situation is this: If nothing is holy, nothing can be defiled. Not even having a woman, God forbid, lead worship at the Fourth Presbyterian Church makes a difference. Nothing is supposed to matter any more.

But even Clarence Wilmot’s unbelief in the holy couldn’t insulate him from the collective agony in the church that day. All the familiar emotions from the old sacred, meaningful universe he used to inhabit came rushing upon him. The indignation, the frustration, the embarrassment, the fear. In spite of his crisis of faith, “His cheeks felt hot, but his fingertips felt cold, and a shiver kept passing uncontrollably across his chest.”

So Pastor Wilmot’s discomfort, his own lingering sense that something was being defiled or profaned, raises an old question: Does holiness reside in places and things—like the chancel of a Presbyterian Church in New Jersey—or does holiness happen in the encounters and exchanges of life? Something was still swirling around among Clarence Wilmot’s congregation that day that he couldn’t quite be free of. Even though no one and nothing was sacred any more, something like holiness still moved among them.

Something similar was going on in Corinth it seems. And the pastor of that small first century congregation, a fellow named Paul, decided to help these people sort out the holy from the profane in their lives.

Paul begins his argument by saying, “no idol in the world really exists.” In other words, the things that the meat in question was being sacrificed to weren’t holy or unholy. The idols carried no power in themselves. So a wooden carving couldn’t desecrate an otherwise acceptable lamb chop any more than a Louisville Slugger baseball bat could. They’re both just lumber in the end.

But Paul’s discussion didn’t end there. It was just beginning. Maybe meat can’t be defiled. But a conscience can. “Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.”

Holiness and defilement it seems don’t happen to things. Holiness and defilement happen among people.

What this teaching does, in predictable Pauline fashion, is to simplify and complicate the situation at once. Don’t worry, he says. Nothing has happened if your dinner started out as a pagan sacrifice. But do worry. Or at least do pay attention to what’s going on between you and the other dinner guests. Because even if an idol can’t defile things, we can. And we don’t need wood or precious metals to do so. We can defile things with nothing more than a little knowledge.

Now sometimes this passage is read as instruction never to do anything that offends another person. “If food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall,” said Paul. But you’d better just stay in bed if you plan not to do anything offensive to anyone for a day. And, of course, staying in bed all day is plenty offensive too. So we’re never safe.

No, I don’t think Paul was pretending we can just opt out of offensive situations. Rather, he was reminding us that what’s sacred in our lives is what’s passed between us. Sometimes it’s a plate of food. Sometimes it’s knowledge. But the holiness that happens, happens there. There in the exchange. So if we want to keep from defilement, we have to pay attention to the person in front of us and whatever it is that’s passing between us.

To prove things aren’t sacred or profane in themselves, Paul uses the example of knowledge. He is speaking to people with accurate knowledge about idols. He tells them that they’re right. That the idols are powerless and that we’re not going to get closer to or further from God because of what we eat. But he reminds them that we can defile a relationship even with the truth.

A person can wield their knowledge, even right knowledge, in ways that are destructive. In fact the knowledge itself can be a source of pride. And pride’s a problem because it separates us from the people whom we suddenly find unworthy of us.

A further problem for the community was that the issue of idol meat probably involved class distinctions. Poorer people wouldn’t have eaten much meat at all. But the wealthier ones would have been invited to feasts at the local temples for social gatherings—for weddings, and birthdays, and all kinds of occasions.

Paul insists that the meals were harmless. Smugness about their own enlightenment was a far more likely source of defilement for the upper classes than anything in the pagan rituals themselves. And so, to preserve the holiness in these relationships, each person needs to consider the experiences of the other. What’s perfectly ordinary to one seems strange and forbidden to another. And if we take satisfaction in the fact that we’re in the know and someone else is not, we’ve defiled something. We’ve defiled the relationship. Defiled a relationship with someone God loves. A relationship through which God comes to us. And love doesn’t do that, Paul says.

Like Pastor Wilmot we are caught up in a web of holiness, whether we believe in that web or not. Maybe faith comes easily to you. Maybe some days it doesn’t. But if we play St. Paul’s teaching on out, we may find that there’s a place here for us even in times of doubt. Because it’s not the content of our knowledge that matters most, Paul says. It’s whether we express that knowledge in love. It’s through the love, not the knowledge that holiness makes its way into our lives.

So maybe even our doubts need not defile what happens here. Bread and wine are invested with holiness by God, but through us, in what we do together. Liturgy is always the work of the people. The holiness is present in our loving exchanges, not in the hands of a priest or the possession of right doctrines. And we defile these things not when we get our words or our beliefs or our gestures wrong. But when we use them wrongly. When we let our knowledge puff us up rather than using our love to build one another up.

Unlike his character, the Reverend Clarence Wilmot, John Updike said he could never quite take the leap of unbelief. Many of his literary friends found his religion, especially his church attendance quaint, maybe naïve. But something in John Updike couldn’t quite disbelieve in a God given web of holiness that holds us all together. And he seemed to believe that even people like the doubting pastor Wilmot were part of that web as well.

So remember, when your faith is strong, be thankful. But remember, knowledge doesn’t make our lives holy. And remember, when your faith is wearing thin, unbelief doesn’t defile you nor does doubt defile this place or the great work of our worship. For God has arranged this world so that love, given in the imperfect but faithful exchanges of our lives, love is how holiness happens in our lives. Holiness can be made, even by ordinary people like us, people of imperfect knowledge and inadequate faith. Holiness is built up even among us one loving act at a time. Amen.