Sermon at St. Philip’s

2009 Pulpit Exchange, May 24, 2009

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Senior Rabbi, Temple Emanu-El

Making Holiness

It is a great pleasure having the honor of sharing your pulpit this morning with Blake Hutson, a colleague and now a friend. He is a fine talent, and I have thoroughly enjoyed learning from him this weekend. It is a special delight to share your pulpit with my good friend of nearly a decade, Gordon McBride, and with another friend from the interfaith community, Alan Breckenridge. I want to especially thank Greg Foraker, who has done so much to foster and build respect and closeness between our congregations, and created something very special in the relationship between Temple Emanu-El and St. Philip’s. I trust that this very cordial and respectful fellowship will continue to grow and flourish over time, as my friendship with Greg and John Kitagawa has blossomed over time.

Our two historic congregations have much to feel proud about, and much in common. We are currently beginning a year of celebrating the 100^th Anniversary of Temple Emanu-El, founded in 1910. I trust that this partnership will become a historic one as well, contributing understanding and service to our community, our state, and our God.

I must admit that in preparing for today I thought more than once about our pulpit exchange two years ago, which occurred on Mother’s Day. On that Sunday the Scriptural readings from your tradition were about the Apocalypse and the end of days, and I had the dubious privilege of connecting Mother’s Day to Judgment Day… Come to think of it, if you don’t handle Mother’s Day correctly, there can be some similarities there. I appreciated your indulgence on that occasion, and I eagerly awaited our reunion this year, last year it having fallen to our fine Associate Rabbi Ben Sharff to trade pulpits with you.

And so it now turns out that we are exchanging pulpits on Memorial Day weekend, which it seems to me would have been the perfect time to have talked about apocalyptic texts, since they feature a great deal of war and death, which are the things that lead directly to commemorations like Memorial Day. So when I eagerly opened the email from Greg Foraker I was actually kind of hoping for something from the Book of Joshua, or Judges, or Ezekiel, or Daniel, or maybe even Revelations. Imagine what a spectacular fire and brimstone speech might have emerged from the confluence of Memorial Day and Judgment Day!

But alas—it was not to be. For I saw that the texts for today were, in fact, from a section of Exodus that dealt primarily with the clothing that the priests were to wear, and their professional accessories. And the other passages in the reading tradition include a rather boilerplate-style Psalm—you know the type of passage, God is good, God is great, God rules everybody, let’s clap and sing and blow the shofar because of it—then an odd passage from Acts about Judas literally blowing up and being replaced among the Apostles, and finally a section from John that comes back to sanctity and the priesthood.

Not a whisper of the apocalypse here, no good war or slaughter to be found—not even a decent pestilence. Why then I could have at least talked about swine flu… What a disappointment.

And I asked myself: just what does this material have to do with Memorial Day and what in heck am I going to preach about?

And finally I began to wonder just who it is that chooses the scriptural readings for Episcopalians anyway, have they ever looked at a calendar, and have they been on the job just a little too long...

Of course since Blake Hutson had to preach about the beginning of the Book of Numbers on Friday night, which is just a long, boring census and was our traditional sedrah in the Torah chanting cycle in synagogues, then in all fairness I had to play ball and work with the material that God, and the wisdom of the Episcopalian authorities, have given us for this morning, and let’s let the chips fall where they may.

After all, duty is a powerful mistress, and the need to obey the requirements of service often overrides even basic common sense. And who am I to question the great wisdom of employing such texts on this particular morning?

On closer examination I began to see some pattern to these passages, a possible method to the madness. Each of the selections, in its own way, dealt with a subject very close to my own heart. That subject is how we create holiness, the ways in which we deliberately solicit sanctity.

The first question that arises is just who it is that gets to make things holy. The obvious answer is that it is God who does so, for God is holy, and we are commanded in Leviticus to “be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy”, in the original Hebrew, “kedoshim tihiyu, ki kadosh Ani Adonai Eloheichem.”

But not so fast. The Hebrew word for holiness, kadosh, comes from the word hekdesh, something set apart. That is, there is nothing intrinsically holy about holy things. We simply set apart ordinary objects and so touch them with sanctity.

Early on in Judaism holiness is clearly delineated as a shared process, a covenant we have with God to make things, and people, holier. I’ll give you a little example from Jewish tradition. Is a sheepskin holy? Well, no, not in and of itself. You can make a coat out of it—particularly if you are an Australian—and use it to keep warm in winter. If you are from California, as I am, then you know that the proper use of sheepskins is as comfortable seat covers for Mustang convertibles.

So a sheepskin is not a particularly holy object. But if you take that same sheepskin and clean the wool off of it, and properly scrape it, pretty soon you have parchment. And if you take that parchment, and using special ink you reverently write upon it the words of the Torah, from Genesis through Deuteronomy, and if you take that sheepskin and roll it on two wooden handles, and cover it over with a special garment, a kind of ephod, pretty soon you have a Torah. And now pretty much every Jew will agree—and it’s very hard to get every Jew to agree to anything—pretty soon every Jew will agree that the sheepskin has somehow become a Torah, and now it is clearly holy.

And of course in this season of graduations you can use sheepskins for diplomas, which are holy in their own right.

Or take an even simpler example. Is an ordinary stick holy? No, of course not. But it you take two of those ordinary sticks, and tie them together just above the middle of one of them, and if you place those two sticks tied together on a grave as a memorial, as a cross, is it then holy?

You see, the creation of holiness is a partnership, a kind of joint project, between human beings and God. While God provides the inspiration, the ideal of holiness and perfection, we are the ones who choose to imbue certain objects, like Torahs and crosses, with holiness. And we are also the ones who help to choose the people who will become holy.

To explore this idea with a little excursion through our passages, I’d like to go backwards, and start with the final reading, from the New Testament, the section from John that deals with the role of his disciples, which one might assume meant those folks who were eventually designated as apostles. That selection features Jesus asking God to protect these disciples, because “for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they may also be sanctified in truth.”

As so often happens in the quotations of Jesus in the New Testament, he is paralleling or even quoting a famous commandment from the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. “You shall be to me a Kingdom of priests, and a holy people, mamlechet kohanim v’goy kadosh.” Here the disciples are sanctified, as the priests were sanctified in earlier times, to carry forward God’s message into the world. In essence, holiness is something that must be cultivated, even created, so that it can be spread among us. Only through the process sanctifying others can we advance the divine mission of holiness. And holiness comes, ultimately, from the truth.

There is an interesting sidebar within this passage. At one point, John quotes Jesus as saying of his disciples that he protected them, and “not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost.” This is an odd formulation, reasonable enough in a text written long after the events within it had become famous and well-established. But it is a bit weird anyway, since it seems to imply that you always end up losing someone off the bow of the ship no matter how carefully you prepare things. Of course after the fact it’s easy to see that Judas had to go; but the implication that we need to lose someone out of any sanctified group is challenging. Perhaps the message is that holiness is not necessarily a permanent condition. We can lose just as we can acquire it.

Continuing to work backwards, we can see that the next to last passage, from the Book of Acts, is perhaps predictably odd and is also the most intriguing of all the passages. The general message is that servants or disciples engaged in this process of holiness-creation must be replaced when they exit the scene. So it is with Judas, whose spot among the disciples is ultimately determined by casting lots, Purim, to choose the new Apostle. The concept being taught is twofold: we need each member of the holiness-creation group, and we are each replaceable in this great work.

But the passage is interesting in unexpected ways. It begins by describing the treachery and death of Judas, which includes him buying a field with the pieces of silver given him for betraying Jesus, and then falling in that field and bursting open and soaking the field with blood, giving it the name of Hakeldama or Chakeldama, which is helpfully translated as “Field of Blood” in the text itself. That construct word is in Aramaic, but the translation is a bit faulty, to be honest; Chaklah is Aramaic for farming—the word for field is different—and so Chakeldama actually means something more like “Bloodfarm”, which sounds like the name of a bad slasher film set in Indiana. But it also might be the case the word is not Chakeldama but Hakeldama, which would mean “Assembly of Blood”, which to be honest is a pretty odd concept… unless you take the notion of communion in a very literal way.

I rather like Acts’ notion that the final choice for the new disciple—who will become the new Apostle, I guess—is made by mere chance, the pull of the lot, the turn of the card, the throw of the dice. It implies that any one of us can become holy, that it may in the end be mere chance that determines which of us will become truly sanctified by others. In other words, stand in readiness, friends: soon it may be your turn to become fully holy.

The passages in our readings from the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, what many Christians call the Old Testament, similarly direct us towards the creation of holiness. The Psalms passage makes it very clear indeed that what truly matters is not worldly power or eminence, but divine power and authority. As your choir here at St. Philip’s sings so nobly, so too we are all directed to sing our praises to God who sits on a throne of holiness.

And finally, of course, our first passage, from Exodus, establishes Aaron and his sons as hereditary priests. There is elaborate ritual involved for the Kohanim, the high priestly class—by the way, my name comes from a hereditary descent from the Kohanim, the high priests; that does not make me intrinsically holy, of course. A very careful process is established for turning these ordinary Israelites into a sacred priesthood. It includes an emphasis on ritual and specific practice that have influenced us to this day, and that underlies much of the ritual that you have observed this very morning. It is an invitation to the human creation of holiness in partnership with God, what we would call the brit of kedushah, the covenant of holiness that is each of our birthrights.

Again, there is an interesting sidelight here. Included in the listing of Aaron’s sons are his eldest two, Nadav and Avihu, who later offer strange fire up to God, an offering out of keeping with the prescribed ritual. They die as the consequence of their error. And their deaths remind us that holiness can be gained, but also lost.

Ultimately each of these passages teaches us something important about holiness. Each contributes a layer of understanding about how an individual achieves holiness, and implies just a little about how we can lose it as well. For each of us can be holy, by choosing to act in sacred ways, by treating those we love with the respect due to a fellow image of God.

But just how does holiness bring us back to Memorial Day?

If you recall the first official American Memorial Day was actually Decoration Day, and it honored the Civil War dead one hundred forty years ago. The greatest of the many great leaders of the American Civil War was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s most famous, and briefest, address was of course delivered at Gettysburg some 145 years ago. He spoke of holiness himself that day, when they sought to dedicate a field as sacred space.

…in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

There are, it seems, times when the actions of one group of human beings intentionally or inadvertently establishes a holiness that is tied to a place, and to those who served there. This Memorial Day is thus a kind of affirmation of the holiness of that service, a fitting weekend to remember not only the losses we, and of course, they experienced. It is also a profound way to recall that holiness is our birthright, but we must claim it through honesty, through effort, and through commitment.

My friends, on this weekend of memory and holiness, may we each commit to separating ourselves from what is purely ordinary, and seeking to affirm true sanctity: not only in our shared houses of worship, but in our work, in our rest, in our homes, in our families, and throughout our lives.

Ken Yehi Ratson: may this be God’s will, and our own.