Sermon for Epiphany 7A, 19 February 2017
Preached at Saint Matthew's Episcopal Church, Eugene, OregonLessons
Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18Psalm 119:33-40
1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23
Matthew 5:38-48
Once there was an old farmer who worked a small family holding in northern China. The winters were hard there, and he was barely able to grow enough food for him and his family to eat. But he was content. One day his young son went outside and discovered that an animal had come into his garden and eaten the tops of the turnips. The boy ran inside and said, “Father, the most terrible thing has happened!” But the father just said, “Perhaps.” He went outside and saw that the turnips had indeed been ruined, but then discovered the culprit, a fine horse that was worth more than he could have afforded even by saving for years. He caught the horse and began to be able to plow more ground, and farming became easier. The neighbors noticed the man’s good fortune and told him that he was the luckiest man they knew. “Perhaps,” said the man. One day, when his son got to be a teenager, he was out riding the horse, and fell off and broke his leg. “Oh no!” said the villagers, “What a calamity!” For they knew that the father had come to rely on his son’s help with the chores. But the aging farmer just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Perhaps.” The next day, soldiers came and conscripted all the young boys of the village into the army. Since the farmer’s son had a broken leg, he was excused from duty. The story goes on, as all stories do, and after each episode the father repeated his: Perhaps.
The point of that story, of course, is that you never know where you are in history. The Israelites went down to Egypt thinking that they were being saved from the famine; and so they were, but then they were enslaved and escaped only by means of disaster against the Egyptians. They came and had a marvelous “God moment” at Sinai, with thunder and lightning and God’s booming voice, and received God’s commandments that, by keeping them, they would receive huge blessings. But I want you to notice that not everyone felt like those commandments were a blessing. The divine requirement, “Be holy for I the LORD your God am holy,” meant that some behaviors could not be tolerated, and this clearly placed restrictions on people’s tendency to be selfish. God was giving them land, but they weren’t allowed to use the land however they pleased: they had to harvest the crops in such a way as to deliberately leave some produce for the homeless. They had to be truthful with one another and honest in their dealings, even if it meant putting themselves at a financial disadvantage. In short, they had to be as concerned about the welfare of their neighbor as they were about their own welfare. They had to love their neighbor as they loved themselves.
The thing to get about this is that it’s a corollary of the character of God. Jesus makes the same argument, grounding His moral teaching in his observations about God’s behavior. We’re to do good to people without discriminating between who deserves it and who doesn’t, as he says, “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” This principle of what theologians call imitatio dei, “the imitation of God,” underlies all the moral teaching of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. That’s not to say that it’s all necessarily correct for all times and places. Notice that Jesus’ observation about God’s character leads him to a slightly different teaching than the one in Leviticus. Notice that St. Paul, who is still concerned about the holiness of God, now as manifested in His Temple, applies the principle of the Temple’s holiness to the Church at Corinth, beginning a line of reasoning that he’ll work out into many implications in letters to them. The body is God’s temple, and here he means both their individual bodies and the Church as a whole, the Body of Christ. The temple is holy; therefore it must not be destroyed. The temple is holy; therefore it must not be joined to a prostitute. The temple is holy; therefore we mustn’t think of our fellow Christians as more or less important than one another. The temple is holy; therefore we belong not to ourselves but to God. The temple is holy; therefore its priests deserve financial support. The temple is holy, and our body is God’s temple; therefore God lives in us.
Now we could spend quite a long time unpacking the idea of holiness. Whole books have been written on the subject. But what I really want to get across to you is this central fact that the holiness of God and of God’s people requires different responses in different ages, because although God sees the big picture of history we do not. When the temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth century BC, the prophet Ezekiel had to wrestle mightily with the question of “Does this mean that God’s holiness is gone from us? Or is it that God’s holiness will be with us in a new way?” The answer, as we now know, is that God was still among God’s people, but didn’t require a temple to be among them. But then a Second Temple was built by returning exiles, and that temple was important enough that the only time we hear about Jesus being violent it was in defense of that temple’s holiness. When the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, the question re-emerged: Is God still among His people? Jews gave the answer that God was still powerfully present with His people in Scripture and in prayer, but some Jews who believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah, along with their gentile fellow-believers, reinterpreted the Temple to be composed of partakers in the sacrifice of Jesus.
Today is the only time in the entire three-year lectionary cycle that we read from the book of Leviticus. That’s unfortunate, in my view, because it gives the impression that we get to cherry-pick the passages of Scripture that we like and disregard the others. To me it seems better to read all of Scripture and acknowledge that some of it contains things we can no longer agree with. This is exactly what Jesus does. He reads, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” which appears in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy and contains the important principle that our punishment must fit the crime, but then he sets it in light of the higher principle of doing good to good and evil people alike. Why? Because that’s what God does. If that law is subject to reconsideration in light of God’s grace, then surely the other laws we find troublesome on Leviticus and elsewhere can be reconsidered as well. Instead of simply refusing to read them, let’s read them and then ask where the Spirit of God is moving. Because we don’t know where we fit into history. We don’t know how what we see now will turn out. The only thing we can be sure of is the character of this God whose mercies are new every morning and who calls us to imitate Him. As God has forgiven us, so we must forgive those who’ve trespassed against us. As God blesses all creation with abundance, so we must bless those who are in our power to bless. As God has loved us while we were yet sinners, so we must love others regardless of their worthiness. Quit worrying about whether the Church is flourishing or dying; don’t be immobilized by whether there’s the right or the wrong government in power. Even if there are wars and rumors of wars, the end is not yet. Well, maybe it’s the end. Perhaps. Or maybe there’s another chapter yet to be written. What’s needed from us in any case is for us to be holy, to imitate God, to make God’s mercy present in the world he made. Holy, holy holy, LORD God of Hosts. Heaven and earth are full of God’s Glory. May we be signs and sacraments of God’s holiness. Amen.
