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”
|
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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment