On Christmas day of 2002, Andrew "Jack" Whittaker, Jr. of Scott Depot, West Virginia, won $113 million in the Powerball lottery. He announced two goals for the money: he would give ten percent to his church, and he would put people to work.
Whittaker has started making good on both his promises, but in ways perhaps he didn't initially imagine.
On Tuesday, 05 August 2003, someone bashed in the window of his SUV and hoisted a brief case containing about a half million dollars. But the real kicker to this story is where the vehicle was sitting when the theft took place: the parking lot of the Pink Pony Strip Club in Cross Plains. It appears the owner of the strip club and one of his stripper girlfriends drugged Jack's drinks to enable the robbery to take place.
The money was quickly recovered, tossed in a nearby garbage bin. The question remains whether Whittaker's reputation can be pulled out of the trash quite as easily.
In today's gospel lesson Jesus offers us one of his hard sayings identifying who is clean and who is unclean. If you think this language of clean and unclean is a little strange, think about how when someone does something bad we say they got their hands dirty; and for the same reason we scrupulously avoid the person in the office who just got in big trouble with the boss because we don't want that person's tainted image rubbing of on us, Jesus' words on uncleanness pack a real punch today.
The punch is doubled because Jesus argues that because it's what's inside that makes us unclean, none of us no, not one can be deemed ritually clean. We all suffer from the fearful blight known as phytophthora infestans.
Between 1845 and 1849, the Great Potato Famine cruelly tortured Ireland and was responsible for the slow starvation and deaths of tens of thousands of Irish men, women and children. The blight that struck the beloved potato, the staple crop of the tenant farmers, was a blight called phytophthora infestans. As the disease decimated the potato crop, it assured bare tables and empty stomachs for millions of working families who depended on the potato for the filling, nourishing part of their daily diet.
What was particularly cruel about this potato blight was that it left the tubers looking unscathed on the outside. The vegetables appeared large, firm, and hearty. But when cut open the potato revealed the blight had consumed it from the inside. The potato would be rotten, hollowed, soft and stinking from the center out to within a half inch of its outer skin. What had looked promising as a meal couldn't even produce a mouthful of unrotted pulpy flesh. The potatoes rotted from the inside out. This is exactly what the Bible means when it talks about original sin. We all have this blight in our being that rots us from the inside out. So even if we look great on the outside, and even if we tithe our lottery earnings and put lots of people to work, our hidden hungers and deep desires within are our true selves. Paul the Apostle said "the good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not I do."
We all stand as lepers, ritually unclean, standing in the need of grace and prayer.
Do you remember your first trip to Disney World? Do you remember your biggest disappointment?
The centerpiece of Disney World, its most familiar icon, is the beautiful Sleeping Beauty's Castle. Its tall towers, fluttering banners, imposing size, and fairy-tale perfection draw every child (and isn't that all of us?) towards it.
But at Disney World, with all its technological wizardry and attention to detail, that centerpiece castle is a disappointment to first-time visitors. At least it was for me. Far from being filled with magical nooks and crannies, secret staircases, vast ballrooms and airy aeries to gaze out at the rest of the "magic kingdom" Sleeping Beauty's Castle is empty. The castle is a hollow shell. The castle's function is simply to serve as a portal into the Magic Kingdom, which loses some of its magic as soon as it becomes apparent that the castle is nothing more than a glorified archway.
The outward appearance is all deception. Sleeping Beauty's Castle has no heart of its own.
Jesus wants to transform you this morning from the inside out, not from the outside in. Whatever the hollowed out areas of your life, Jesus wants to fill them in with his presence and power. Jesus wants to give you a new heart a heart of faith, a heart of hope, a heart of love.
Will you open up your heart to him this morning? Will the sleeping beauty in you awaken and come alive with the power of the Spirit?