Wash Your Hands

             Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. (Isaiah 1:16-17)

 

          If you’re going to cook dinner, you need to pick recipes, collect and prepare the ingredients and equipment, wash your hands, and do what the recipes tell you to do. If you’re wise, you’ll also make sure that the ingredients are still good. You wouldn’t use buggy flour, spoiled milk, or rotten meat. While you might use old yeast, chances are that your bread won’t rise the way it should.

          Similarly, if you’re going to go to a job interview or on a date, chances are pretty good that you’ll get better results if you don’t dress as if you only have one outfit and you’ve been wearing it for the past two years without washing or mending it.

          There are standards of behavior in much of life, and much of it is based on common sense. Why is it, then, that when we approach God, we think we can come as we are? Of course, there is a sense in which we can and must come as we are. I’m not suggesting that we can cleanse ourselves of sin or that we can make ourselves worthy before we approach Him. It’s ridiculous to think that we need to go buy a new outfit every Saturday to wear to church on Sunday, or pay a beautician for an updo, a manicure, and an eyebrow wax so that we’re ready to meet God.

I’m in favor of practicing the presence of God every moment of every day. At the same time, there are mornings when it takes a half an hour to get myself to the get my “engine” started. I learned when I was jogging that it could take about that same length of time to kick the imaginary and absent people out of my mind so that I could talk to God instead of lecturing them or whining about them and focus on God.

Today’s passage focuses on repentance of sins and doing good, and those are vital steps in approaching God. I’m not downplaying them. Doing evil and not doing good both separate us from God. While those of us who have been Christians for a time know we must repent known or obvious sins (not that we necessarily deal effectively with them as we should) there may be other things that also get in the way and other things we, as individuals, need to do to prepare to come before Him.

          Whatever the thing is that we need to do to prepare to come before God, we need to do it, whether it’s recognizing and repenting of sins, doing good, making things right with a brother, forgiving, putting on a prayer shawl, or just getting the brain to go from g…g…g… to a softly purring engine, if we are going to come to God, we need to “just do it” before we come before God or as part of the process of coming before Him.