Thursday, February 20, 2014

A Reflection on "You Shall Be Holy"



I made a video of this on YouTube in case you want to hear it:
http://youtu.be/8GpJtv0cGic      "You Shall Be Holy"

A Sermon for VII Epiphany                                        
All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC
 February 23, 2014                                                             
Thomas E. Wilson, Rector


“You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy”

Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18              1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23               Matthew 5:38-48

Anyone remember what this Sunday, the next to the last Sunday of Epiphany, used to be called in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer?  Let me give you a hint - last week was called Septuagesima, which means 70th day before Easter, and next week used to be called Quinquagesima (50th).  Go home and look it up.  Every time the word was mentioned in the church I grew up in (heck, I’m not really grown up now…), the Priest would roll his eyes as the immature young boys filled with hormones they did not understand would snicker barely suppressed giggles, and my mother would thump me - and the rest of the mothers would thump their boys - on the back of the head. When we would get home, my mother would sigh deeply and wonder if I would ever learn how to behave in church. My mother died a few years ago, but I think she is still thinking that.


Every year a bunch of people make a New Year’s Resolution to read the Bible all the way through from Genesis to Revelation. And the Hebrew Testament Lesson from the Book of Leviticus is where they really start to bog down. This is one of the most boring books in the Bible, and it is hard slogging for anyone. The problem is that it is a law book, and it is guaranteed to cure any insomnia you might have.


Scholars believe this book was collected in response to the time when the Jewish people were in exile in Babylon, and they were in danger of losing their identity.  As the decades passed in Babylon and as the children were adapting to the local culture, the parents were facing pressure to just go along with living in this strange land, and the grandparents were dying off. The religious center of the community was in danger of falling apart.  The Book collected all the habits of living, rules about health, hygiene, dress, diet, sexual habits, family norms, financial matters, religious observances, and all the minutiae of daily life. The goal was that the exiled community would be different from the larger community in which they lived. The word “different” was important, for “different” was the center of the concept of God. God was the one who was wholly and Holy other. To be Holy was to be different. Chapter 19 from which our lesson for today is taken is called the Holiness Code and underlines that concept by repetition of the phrase “You shall be Holy as the LORD is Holy”.


In these verse the people are reminded not to be greedy; even if the wider cultural norm is to get all you can for yourself the farmers of the exile are reminded to set aside crops for the poor. Even is the rest of the culture plays fast and loose with honesty, honor, compassion and justice the people are reminded that they are different and therefore they to act differently than the rest of the larger community. “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.”


Reading the Book of Leviticus is like spending time with my grandparents and parents who said things like, “I don’t care what the other children do or what their parents allow them to do. You are not them and you need to remember who you are.” That phrase would be honed down to a mantra which would be repeated to me when I would go out:  “Remember who you are.” I passed it on to my daughter, and she would roll her eyes in response because I would say it so often. It became a mantra within my prayers as well for me to remember who I am. It also keeps coming back into my sermons.


In the Gospel lesson, the phrase which ends the pericope is “Therefore you shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Greek work for perfect is “telios” which means finished or complete in and of itself.  My reading is that, as God is complete within God’s self, so are we to be finished, complete within who we were created to be, or as my Grandmother would say, “Remember who you are!”  


There is this concept called synchronicity which is defined as “the simultaneous occurrence of causally unrelated events and the belief that the simultaneity has meaning beyond mere coincidence.” Sometimes we refer to it as “God-incidence”.  It was synchronistic that, at it’s retreat and most recent meeting, the vestry spent hours working on “Remembering who we are.”  This is not nostalgia for the past but a desire to live into who we were created to be. Why did God plant us here?  Who do we belong to? What is our purpose? That so fits in with the Epistle lesson for today from 1st Corinthians:  “So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future-- all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.” This church’s foundation is Christ Jesus, and we belong to him who belongs to God - that is who we are. “Remember who you are!”  


It was synchronistic also that, during last week’s 9:30 Bible Study where we are studying the Book of Romans, we spent a great deal of time reflecting on the start of the 12th Chapter where Paul wrote, “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”


That was the King James Version and was almost always the central verse of any of the Baccalaureate Commencement sermons that I have given over the years. One of the people in the Bible Study class had The Message by Eugene Peterson where verses 1and 2 are expanded:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.


“Remember who you are!” “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.”
 

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