Such Potential – sermon on October 29, 2017
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 God said to Moses, “Give the following instructions to the entire community of Israel. You must be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy. Do not twist justice in legal matters by favoring the poor or being partial to the rich and powerful. Always judge people fairly. Do not spread slanderous gossip among your people. Do not stand idly by when your neighbor’s life is threatened. I am the Lord.
Do not nurse hatred in your heart for any of your relatives. Confront people directly so you will not be held guilty for their sin. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against a fellow Israelite, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.
Matthew 22: 34-40 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Sermon: Such Potential by Rev. Doreen Oughton
Leviticus – 27 chapters long, and all but four have God speaking to Moses, asking him to pass along information either to the people of Israel, or to the priests of Israel. Leviticus is a long list of thou shalts and thou shalt nots. Include ritual, legal and moral practices, practices, not beliefs. The passage read today focuses on practices regarding our treatment of other people – judge them fairly, based neither on wealth nor poverty. Don’t gossip or slander, don’t be a bystander when people are in danger. Don’t nurse hatred against your relatives. If you see someone sinning, challenge them. Don’t be vengeful or grudging. Love your neighbor as yourself. These are just 7 of the 613 commands given by God to Moses. Yes, 613.
In the time of Jesus, and I’m sure today as well, a few biblical scholars would be well-versed in these commands. Earlier in this chapter, the Sadducees went after Jesus, challenging his authority, trying to trick him into saying something about paying taxes that would get him in trouble with either the crowd or the Romans, and trying to make him look foolish for his belief in resurrection. Jesus deftly handles these challenges, astounding and silencing the Sadducees. And now the Pharisees take their turn at bat. They send in heavy hitter, a lawyer who really knows the commands. They want to expose Jesus in the same way the Sadducees wanted to – as someone without authority, someone who doesn’t know the commands, who misuses them, who really is not a very good Jew. The lawyer asks which of the commands is the most important. The trap here is that by picking just one, there is a blasphemy against the important of the other 612. But Jesus does his law and bible jujitsu, noting that not only the 611other laws, but also the words of the prophets all hang on just 2 commands – love God with heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. He does not diminish any of the laws, but claims that they are all incorporated into those 2. These are like headings, or you might think of them as the heart of the law. They are woven into all the others.
Now the practices we heard in the Leviticus passage begin with verse 15 of the chapter, but the reading also includes verses 1 & 2: Tell the people, be holy, for I, your God, am holy. And this was the phrase that ran through my head all week. “Be holy, for I, your God, am holy.” That line is used four times in Leviticus, and for me, they are words not of command but of encouragement. You’ve heard me talk before about thinking of these decrees not as commands or demands, but as descriptions and promises. They tell us what is possible, they describe what it looks like to live as God would have us live, to live in God’s Beloved Community. In that place, people don’t gossip or slander, they don’t nurse hatred, they are not vengeful. In that place, people are devoted to God and love their neighbor – doing for them as they would for themselves, holding nothing back in kindness, in sharing, in mercy. These “greatest commandments” can also be called the “greatest relationships,” relationships between God, ourselves, and all other people.
Think about a parent saying to a child studying for an exam: You WILL get an A on this test. Or, You will get AN A on this test. Can you hear how one sounds threatening while the other sounds encouraging and supportive? The parent might follow up – you study hard, you pay attention, you take good notes. All these things support the idea that an A is possible, even likely. Maybe the parent even reminds the kid that she comes from a long line of scholars. Not “why can’t you be like your brother,” but “you’re one of us!” I wonder if when God says, “Be holy, for I am holy” the message is something similar. We are of God, if God is holy, we either are holy or certainly have the potential to be holy. And I believe that for God, I holiness is all about right relationship.
Our book group just finished a really inspiring book called The Case for Grace. As much as I loved the stories of grace it told, I struggled with a consistent theme of the book – that we are lowly sinners, and God’s greatest gift is forgiving us for that through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. The book does some analyses of various religions, and takes some to task for promoting the idea that people can be as holy as God is holy. It says instead that the chasm between divine holiness and our lowliness is huge – like jumping off a pier in No America and trying to swim to Europe. Fortunately for us, or for those who believe anyway, God set a bridge across that chasm, a bridge of a cross on which Jesus died. Through this belief and only through this belief can our lowliness be transformed to holiness.
This is so different from what I suspect Jesus’ own understanding of salvation would be. Judaism focused not on belief, but on practices, practices outlined in the law, all of which hung on right relationship with God and others. For me, there is not an uncrossable chasm between us and holiness. Holiness is closer than that. I think the potential for divine holiness is actually part of our make up as children of God. But I admit that it is hard to see it, it is hard to live into it, and not many people do.
Think again about that student who is very smart, who indeed inherited great academic aptitude from the family. But she doesn’t study. Maybe she is angry and rebelling. Maybe she is distracted by fear or illness. Maybe she has been told that she is stupid and figures, why bother. There is so much that could get in the way of living up to, or into, her potential. I think it is like that with our holiness. If we don’t believe we can be holy, we might think, why bother. If we are living lives full of fear, just barely hanging on, or if we are misinformed about what it means to be holy, if we are focusing all our energy into the ways of the world, we can’t live into our potential for holiness. Left to our own devices, our own best thinking and our own efforts, I don’t think we would achieve much glory.
But God did give us a gift to lead us to holiness. For me, it is not so much the death of Jesus, but the life and teachings of Jesus. Jesus is the embodiment of God’s laws of right relationship, God’s law of love. We don’t have to know the 613 commands if we know Jesus, if we align ourselves with Jesus, if we follow Jesus. His death and resurrection show us more about what it is like to live in the kindom – death has no power there. We truly can go all in in relationship to God and others, holding nothing back because there is nothing to fear. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Living into that truth is the holiness and the glory for which we were born.
We are not given a list of rules to follow, but a dream to reach for, a promise, and a guide for finding our way. We don’t need to fear God’s wrath when we fail, as a child who brings home a C doesn’t need to fear the wrath of a good and loving parent. The parent would help figure out what went wrong, would encourage the child, would support the child, would never love the child any less. The grade ought not be considered a measure of the child’s worth, but an indicator of where she is so that she knows where she could go, an indicator that there is more knowledge to gain, more skills to develop, more potential to reach.
This potential for holiness is different from worldly potential. Too often living up to and into our potential in the world becomes all wrapped up in competing against others. We strive to be THE best, not OUR best. We measure ourselves against others, leading to arrogance or insecurity. This is not the case with our potential for holiness, our potential for right relationship with God and others. The potential is endless – we can always grow, and if we are growing in holiness, we are not judging others or ourselves. We can focus on giving more and more of our lives over to God, or more and more on loving others as we love ourselves, and that may require that we do a better job of loving ourselves. We are not lowly sinners; we are children of God in a process of development.
I’m not saying we don’t sin, we don’t miss the mark. Of course we do, and its a real problem the level of sin in this world. But I reject that as central to our identity. Instead, it blocks our true identity. We can be holy, we ought to be holy, because our God is holy. In order to better live into that potential, we have to look at where we are just getting a C, or maybe even failing, so we can do something about it, or open ourselves up to God, who wants very much to do something about it, but won’t unless we are willing. Our God is a God of freedom. Be holy, for our God is holy. You have such potential, but do you have the will? May it be so.
