Above: Peter’s Vision of the Sheet with Animals
Image in the Public Domain
The Clean and the Unclean
FEBRUARY 28, 2022
MARCH 1, 2022
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The Collect:
Holy God, mighty and immortal, you are beyond our knowing,
yet we see your glory in the face of Jesus Christ.
Transform us into the likeness of your Son,
who renewed our humanity so that we may share in his divinity,
Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,one God, now and forever. Amen.
—Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), page 26
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The Assigned Readings:
Exodus 35:1-29 (Monday)
Ezekiel 1:1-2:1 (Tuesday)
Psalm 35:11-28 (Both Days)
Acts 10:9-23a (Monday)
Acts 10:23b-33 (Tuesday)
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[Jesus] said to [his Apostles], “Even you–don’t you understand? Can’t you see that nothing that goes into someone from the outside can make that person unclean, because it goes not int the heart but into the stomach and passes into the sewer?” (Thus he pronounced all foods clean.) And he went on, “It is what comes out of someone that makes that person unclean. For it is from within, from the heart, that evil intentions emerge: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within and make a person unclean.
–Mark 7:18-23, The New Jerusalem Bible (1985)
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Ritual purity has long been a religious concern. Separating oneself from the world (not always a negative activity) has informed overly strict Sabbath rules and practices. (Executing a person for working on the Sabbath, per Exodus 35:2b, seems excessive to me. I am biased, of course, for I have violated that law, which does not apply to me.) Nevertheless, the Sabbath marked the freedom of the people, for slaves got no day off. Ezekiel, living in exile in an allegedly unclean land, the territory of the Chaldean/Neo-Babylonian Empire, experienced a vision of the grandeur of God before God commissioned him a prophet. Perhaps Ezekiel had, suffering under oppression, prayed in the words of Psalm 35:23,
Awake, arise to my cause!
to my defense, my God and my Lord!
—The Book of Common Prayer (1979)
Those who took Judeans into exile and kept them there were unclean and not because they were Gentiles but because of their spiritual ills, on which they acted. As St. Simon Peter learned centuries later, there is no unclean food and many people he had assumed to be unclean were not really so.
The drawing of figurative lines to separate the allegedly pure from the allegedly impure succeeds in comforting the former, fostering more self-righteousness in them, and doing injustice to the latter. May nobody call unclean one whom God labels clean. May no one mark as an outsider one whom God calls beloved. This is a devotion for the last two days of the Season after the Epiphany. The next season will be Lent. Perhaps repenting of the sins I have listed above constitutes the agenda you, O reader, should follow this Lent. I know that it is one I ought to follow.
KENNETH RANDOLPH TAYLOR
OCTOBER 29, 2015 COMMON ERA
THE FEAST OF PAUL MANZ, DEAN OF LUTHERAN CHURCH MUSIC
THE FEAST OF JOHN BUCKMAN WALTHOUR, EPISCOPAL BISHOP OF ATLANTA
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https://blogatheologica.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/the-clean-and-the-unclean/
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ADVENT, CHRISTMAS, AND EPIPHANY DEVOTIONS 
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