A silk purse out of sow’s ear! -- Matthew 8:28-34
A silk purse out of sow’s ear! -- Matthew 8:28-34 By Pastor Lee Hemen August 11, 2019 The idiom “You can’t make a silk purse out of sow’s ear” means that one can’t make something good out of something inherently bad, however, with enough ingenuity it is possible to make a very passable “silk” purse out of a sow’s ear. In 1921 Massachusetts industrialist Arthur D. Little (who discovered acetate) obtained glue made from the skin and gristle of pig’s ears, and had it filtered and forced through a spinneret into a mixture of formaldehyde and acetone. The glue emerged as 16 fine, colorless streams that hardened and then combined to form a single composite fiber. Little soaked the fiber in dyed glycerin. Then he had the resulting thread woven into cloth on a handloom, and the cloth fashioned into an elegant purse. There are certain individuals who are seen as unredeemable by society at large. And here in Matthew’s gospel we find several men who were considered such by their peers. The other ...