Roger Ray, pastor
Feb. 20, 2011 Epiphany 7
Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying:
2 Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.
9 When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
11 You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. 12And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.
13 You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. 14You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling-block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.
15 You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. 16You shall not go around as a slanderer* among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood* of your neighbor: I am the Lord.
17 You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. 18You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
Matthew 5:38-48
You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." 39But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; 40and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; 41and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. 42Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
Love for Enemies
43 'You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45so 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. 46For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? 47And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,* what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
I have had occasion, from time to time, to attend a soccer match in which the teams were comprised of three and four year old children. If you have never witnessed a soccer game played by three and four year olds, let me tell you, any resemblance this may bear to the soccer matches you have watched on TV is purely coincidental.
The ball never leaves the ground so there are no great head shots or body blocks and players are as likely to score a goal for the opponent as for their own team. It is, in fact, so confused that no one actually keeps score and there are no fouls called and the total number of players on the field at any one time is never quite equal between the two teams. Most of the time a few players are gathered around the ball in a huddle with no idea what to do while a few other players are walking around, holding hands with a friend, looking for bugs and four leafed clovers.
I'm no great sports fan but this spectacle is difficult for me to watch. Soccer without rules is not soccer....it's rugby. Life, without some rules, is similarly impossible to live.... Especially when there are now nearly 7 billion players on the field.
The book of Leviticus is not one of the favorite books of the Bible in the modern church. In fact, some of the most embarrassing, sexists and otherwise discriminatory passages of the Bible are found in Leviticus so that we are much more likely to ignore it entirely than to try to understand its sometimes laborious social codes.
But to be fair to its historical context, the laws of Leviticus were not written so much to teach the people how they were to try and satisfy their God as they are rules for how the game of life is to be conducted. In any society, you either accept the Darwinian rule of "survival of the fittest" or you have to agree upon some rather more sophisticated rules for living in close proximity to people who otherwise might like to have your food, your house, your spouse or your children.
Twice, in just these 11 verses, the text tells people not to steal from one another and then it says basically that in several other ways.... Not to defraud one another, not to lie to one another, not to murder anyone so that you can take their stuff.
We have police, locked doors and alarm systems to help remind people not to steal or murder but a lot of the rest of this text, which the author took just as seriously as murder and theft, we can only observe if we are all willing to agree to the rules of the game and try to follow them as best we can.
Some of the laws of Leviticus are articulated in order to lay out the necessary ground rules of surviving in close proximity to other people who are also seeking food, shelter and family. But a lot of what remains is really about creating quality of life.... It is about moving beyond merely not killing one another and taking one another's food but it is about living in a way which fosters love, meaning and genuine community.
Look at verse 9 of this reading from Leviticus chapter 19. The text is speaking to land owners and it tells them when they are harvesting to leave the wheat on the edges and in the corners of the field for the people who don't own any land.... For the alien who is walking by, or the poor who are without an inherited farm of their own.
It would be like saying to a merchant now, when you are making up your nightly deposit, don't take of the money you made during the day, leave some of it out on the counter in case someone else needs a little money. You wonder how many people in Israel took Leviticus any more seriously than the church of today does but you have to admit that it is a challenging concept.
You have heard me frequently mention the fact that the word "personal" is not in the Bible. The emphasis on the individual and individual freedoms and rights really is a rather modern concept. More primitive societies were much more aware that no one gets to be a teacher unless some farmers agree to feed the teacher. No one gets to wear shoes and clothes unless you are also good to the cobbler and the miller.
Of course, the text does not say how much of your crop to leave standing in the field, how many of the grapes you are to just leave hanging in the vines or how much of the day's business to leave lying on the counter. But what the text asks land owners to do is to remember that they are not alone.... That though the crop may be the fruit of the farmer's labors, the land isn't..... the text is generously peppered with the reminder: for I am the Lord your God!
Rugged individualism is the hallmark of the modern age but that is nothing more than a polished up version of Darwin's "survival of the fittest." The people of ancient Israel knew how to be self centered. They knew about tending to their own concerns and leaving everyone else to be responsible for themselves, but their holy scriptures asked them to remember the vulnerable that lived among them.
The text asks them simply to be considerate of people who have issues.....verse 14 says not to "revile the deaf or put a stumbling-block before the blind." Don't verbally ridicule people who are too deaf to hear you and don't make faces at blind people who can't see you.
And the text demands that those who are in the position to hire the poor show respect to the people who are in their employ.
Just telling them not to withhold a worker's pay until the next day is really just saying not to taunt the poor about being poor.
When I was just a puppy preacher, I went up to St Louis to attend a church conference and at that time I had a very wealthy aunt who lived in a St Louis suburb and so I was staying as a guest in her home to save myself a hotel bill. She lived on a large estate with several acres that required the care of a pretty much full time gardener.
One morning, as we were sitting down to breakfast, there was a knock at the back door and I could see the old black man whom she employed to keep her living in the trappings of urban luxury. She spoke to him briefly and returned to the table where we ate and talked fairly leisurely. When we finished eating and the dishes were in the sink, she went back to the back door, where her gardener was still standing, and she gave him the pay he had come to ask for.
I couldn't believe that I had accidently been a party to that humiliation of her employee. It was her feeling that her employees had nothing better to do with their lives than to be made to stand at the door with their hand out to be paid what they had clearly earned.
My aunt considered herself to be, not only a good Christian woman but even a philanthropist who donated to various charities but, at the root of it, she indulged herself in the belief that having inherited money made her more important that the man who cut her grass and trimmed her hedges. I couldn't afford it, but I gathered my things and moved into a hotel for the remainder of the meeting because I just couldn't spend another day in the pre-Civil War era my aunt occupied.
Paying a wage is not justice if you have to do it in a way that humiliates the wage earner. The text from Leviticus demands, in verse 15, that their society neither show undue advantage to the poor nor discriminate in favor of the rich but that both should respect each other.
But regardless of class, regardless of the division of employer and employee, the one thing that can destroy a sense of community as fast as stealing your neighbors food, is stealing their reputation. Verse 16 says that you are not to go around as a slanderer and that seems to spill out into several similar injunctions about not hating your kin or taking revenge or bearing a grudge. But slander is the theft of another person's reputation which, for many of us, is more closely cherished than our food or our furniture.
Those of you who really want to be God's special friends who have troubled yourselves to read my book, Christian Wisdom for Today, know that I have a special love for the wisdom sayings of that ancient monastic community from Alexandria in northern Africa.
These monks lived in huts and deprived themselves of all worldly pleasures. They never took their fill of bread so that they would never be hungry for meat. They never drank enough water to stop being thirsty so that they would never crave wine. But the Desert Fathers said that it is far better to eat meat and drink wine than to consume the flesh of your brothers and sisters in gossip.
Frankly, I see gossip as being one of the most corrosive dangers to either a family or a church and yet it is almost impossible to be entirely free of it.
People can be quite strange. Our conduct is sometimes abrasive or irrational. And so we seek confirmation from others that we are not the only ones who find a particular person to be difficult to get along with or that their demeanor is such that they are a constant irritant.
Thomas a' Kempis, the writer of the spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, said that if we will only take the time to fully understand any person we will find ourselves able to be completely forgiving of them.
I had a campus minister when I was in college who encouraged us to work out our petty differences. He suggested that if someone was really getting on your nerves that you should just go tell them, "I don't like you very much, I need to get to know you better." Which I thought was absolutely hilarious advice until someone actually said it to me and meant it! I'm not sure you should announce your intentions in just that way, but it is very likely that if you will invest the time and energy to draw a little closer to the people you like the least, you may, in fact, discover that their most distasteful attributes are not only understandable but that they no longer matter.
All and all, the Levitical code lays out the soccer rules for a fairly decent game on the field of life. Don't steal from each other, don't lie to each other, don't gossip about one another, be generous with the poor and sensitive to the needs of the handicapped, and show justice to everyone. And it is summed up with what Jesus later calls the greatest of the commandments, even though it is not one of Moses' top ten: "you shall love your neighbor as yourself."
Now this is the tradition that Jesus' inherited. Clearly, this is a text he knew and freely quoted. But if you take Matthew's gospel to heart, one of the things that Jesus does in Matthew's gospel most notably, is he takes this traditional Hebrew standard for creating community and he raises the standard so high that no one could possibly do it.
We're not doing everything it says in Leviticus that we should do but Jesus takes that chalk mark on the wall, climbs a ladder and makes a mark up by the ceiling and tells us that we should all be that tall. Leviticus tells the children of Israel to love their kin. Jesus tells his followers to go much farther and to love their enemies. If someone strikes you on the face, stand there and let them do it again. If someone takes you coat from you, give them your shirt as well.
For Jesus, loving the people who love you is too easy. He wants us to love the people who hate us.
I love that scene in the Ben Kingsley movie about Gandhi where Gandhi has moved his family into an ashram and is trying to extinguish the traditional Indian cast system. Everyone, he insists, must take their turn at every task in the community which meant that his upper cast wife would also have to take her turn cleaning the latrines which had always been the task of the lowest cast.
She told her revered husband, "Not everyone wants to be as good as you."
And I feel like saying that to Jesus sometimes. The Jesus of Matthew's gospel often asks me to be a better person than I really aspire to be and yet, I can never quite say "no" to Jesus without feeling like I am cutting off some part of myself.
We're trying to do something here which is a lot more important than forming a successful soccer league. We have a mission to be a prophetic witness to social justice out there, in the bad neighborhoods and at city hall. But in here we have the potentially delightful task of creating community out of some otherwise fairly incompatible parts.
To do that, we can't steal from one another, attempt to diminish one another, lie to or gossip about one another. But more importantly, Jesus tells us that we need to find a way to love the one who bugs us the most and it is just up to you to decide if you even want to be that good, but I know someone who seems to have hoped that you would try.
