October 4, 2026 - Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Compassion: Whatever is Pure

October 4, 2026  Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Philippians 4:8-9, Malachi 3:1-4
“Compassion: Whatever is Pure”
Douglas T. King

Whenever I hear the word pure my mind hearkens back to the old Ivory soap ad campaign and its proud claim that it was 99.44 percent pure and to prove it, look, the soap floats.  I was never exactly sure how that was supposed to demonstrate purity.  Of course, technically something that is 99.44 percent pure is not exactly pure.  Pure is a one hundred percent proposition.  Which of course makes this call to purity for us a dicey consideration.  I will not speak for you, but even when I am inclined to imagine good attributes to who I am, purity does not make the list.  And frankly, I am not likely to assume purity as a defining characteristic of any of you.  

Today is our fourth sermon in our series on compassion and this week’s call from Philippians is clear, “whatever is pure…”  

So how do we get there?  This is when we turn to our text from Malachi.  This little book has more than its share of harsh condemnation for us.  But it is also clear about who will do the heavy lifting on our journey to becoming who we are called to be, to stepping into purity.  “For God is like a refiner’s fire and like washers’ soap; God will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and God will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.”  We cannot make ourselves pure. And thank goodness for that, otherwise I would not like our chances.  It is the power of God that will get us there.

I have to say the Old Testament prophets knew how to get your attention.  When Malachi thunders, “…who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” I can feel my anxiety rising.  While the cleansing soap metaphor feels reasonable enough, the refining fire is, shall we say, rather intimidating.  But Malachi’s understanding of God is not quite the same as our understanding of God and God’s grace in Jesus Christ.  

Soap and fire are common ways to provide purification.  The focus is on the fact that God will indeed purify.  When something is purified it is not damaged.  It becomes what it truly is, at its essence.  When gold is purified what is removed is what is not gold.  When we are purified we become who we truly are, who we were created to be.  

Our journey to purity is not set in motion by our actions. It is our being welcomed into following Jesus Christ’s journey of life, death, and resurrection that allows us to take any step forward at all.  Jill Duffield reminds us of this and suggests a shift in vocabulary.  Since pure feels like such an either/or word she offers up the word “holy.”  She writes that we rely “on grace, knowing never in ourselves, through ourselves, or by ourselves will we ever be holy.  Everyone and everything belongs to God and is therefore valued and valuable.  We are not pure in and of ourselves, but we are made holy.” (Duffield, p. 63)

She then goes on to suggest how we might grow to appreciate the purity in others.  “I knew and said I believed that each person is made in the image of God, imago Dei, divine-like.  This meant that every time I looked at myself or another and rated, rejected, or devalued them, it equated to apostasy, heresy, blasphemy. (Duffield, p. 72)  

Duffield then came up with a way to put this belief into an embodied practice.  “It started with an experiment.  Just for a day, when I came across anyone—the clerk at the store, the teenager walking the dog, the annoying guy at the gym, my kids, my husband, coworkers—I would think to myself, ‘Holy!’  Just like Oprah said back in the day, ‘You get a car!  You get a car!  You get a car!’  I would see someone and all-but-voice, ‘You are holy! You are holy!  You are holy!’  It began to feel almost like a superpower, as if my naming them as much as made them so.  A performative word enlivened by God’s living one, echoing the ultimate performative word that created by saying, ‘Let there be…and there was…’  The very word that said we were good, and godly.” (Duffield, p. 72)

And Duffield discovered something else.  As she bestowed the title of holy upon the imperfect people around her, she found it easier to think of herself in such terms.  She was not only more gentle and loving to others, but also to herself.

Imagine if we did just that.  If we viewed both friend and perceived foe not for how we are evaluating their worthiness or lack thereof in the moment but for who God is creating them to be.  The author Kathleen Norris writes of another word that is in this family of pure and holy.  She writes of the word “perfect” and how it is used in terms of our call to be perfect.  In Matthew, Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Whew!  No pressure.  “The good news about the word ‘perfect’ as used in the New Testament is that it is not a scary word, so much as a scary translation.  The word that has been translated as ‘perfect’ does not mean to set forth an impossible goal, or the perfectionism that would have me strive for it at any cost.  It is taken from a Latin word meaning complete, entire, full-grown.  To those who originally heard it, the word would convey ‘mature’ rather than what we mean today by ‘perfect.’” (Norris, pp. 56-57)

As Presbyterians we baptize babies because we believe God’s loving grace precedes our ability to be in any way perfect in our behavior.  I always tell parents that their baby can do no wrong during a baptism.  The congregation loves a baptism even more when Melissa or I are attempting to wrangle a particularly feisty, screaming child.  We as a congregation make vows to teach and cherish that beloved one.  There is so much they need to learn. But once that little one becomes an adult and disagrees with us that promise does not seem to apply.  Perhaps we need to be reminded that these vows are for a lifetime, even if the baptized one grows up to see the world differently than we do.  We are ever called to teach each other and embody the meaning of God’s grace.  At nine months, nine years or ninety years, we are still bound to one another by our baptismal vows, and with God’s grace, maturing in the faith together.

Today, around the world, we will all come to this table as invited guests.  We are, one and all, hardly worthy of the invitation by any standard of how Jesus lived and died.  And yet, he is the host, and he can see the potential purity in us, the holiness in us, the mature perfection in us, who we were created to be, and who, with God’s grace, we will be.  

May we learn to extend that grace-filled vision to one another.  None of us are worthy enough to come to the table. Yet, we are, one and all, in God’s eyes, holy and invited.  As we gather around this table across the entire world, let us look at one another as holy, and when God’s love is done with us, pure.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Duffield, Jill J., Appreciate these Things, WJK, Louisville,  2025.
Norris, Kathleen, Acedia & Me, Riverhead Books, New York, 2008.