Purity, uncleanness, and a third baptism
Sermon for Pentecost XII, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 15:10-28 We have yet another baptism this morning, Navy, daughter of Stephanie and Bill, and granddaughter of Linda. I’m getting good practice with my baptism sermons from so many of them recently. We’ll come back to Navy’s baptism in a moment. There’s something we need to explore first. There is a midrash, or part of a Jewish set of rules based on the Hebrew Bible, regarding things we eat and drink from. One of the midrash passages reads as follows: “When the outside of a vessel is contaminated by an unclean liquid, its exterior is unclean;...but its interior and its rim and its hanger or its handle are still considered clean...When one is drinking from a cup with an unclean exterior, one need not worry about the liquid in one's mouth, that it will be contaminated by the outside of the cup and in turn will contaminate the cup.” In other words, if the outside of a cup is u