February 23, 2014
Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; Matthew 5:38-48
7 Epiphany
Raise your hand if you would describe
yourself as “holy”. How about “perfect”?
Me neither. And yet, that’s what God sets out for us as
our tasks in our Old Testament and Gospel readings this morning. From Leviticus, God tells Moses to tell the
people: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” And from Matthew, Jesus refers back to
Leviticus, changing it just a bit as he tells the people: “Be perfect, as your
heavenly Father is perfect.”
The
dictionary defines holy as "divine or worthy of complete devotion as one
perfect in goodness and righteousness; set apart”. And defines perfect as “having no mistakes or
flaws”. They are words we use for God
without much problem, but these aren’t usually words we think of for people,
unless the person is Jesus who had a bit of an advantage on us, or maybe
someone like Mother Teresa or St. Francis. Or someone who lives out in the desert praying
all the time, removed from the world. Holy
and perfect don’t seem like they work as well for people like us in a world
like this. People that are balancing and
multi-tasking and rushing around all the time and confronted with all kinds of
grey areas in the regular world. These
words seem irrelevant and impossible.
So what if
we look at them a little differently.
What if we think of the words holy and perfect more in terms of
wholeness.
If you were
at the Celtic service last week, you heard me mention that last Sunday on the
way to church I heard Krista Tippett interviewing an artist about an exhibit
called “Sacred” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Pieces of what I heard stayed with me, so I
read the transcript of Krista’s interview with Ann Hamilton, an artist who does
huge interactive installations. Ann
calls herself a “maker” rather than an artist because she thinks the word is
more accessible and all-encompassing.
Krista asked Ann how she kept up with her artwork in the midst of the
busy-ness of her life and Ann’s answer has been bouncing in my head ever since
as a helpful way for me to think about wholeness in life. Ann talked about a time when life was way too
busy for her to be even thinking about her usual artistic “making.” She had a small child and the child was sick,
so she was home worried and taking care of her child. In the midst of that, she was in the kitchen
making soup to comfort her child and she realized that in that moment she was
still a “maker.” Even though what she
was doing looked and felt different than what her artistic “making” usually
felt like, this piece was part of the same whole.
Maybe holiness and perfection are
like that too. If every fiber of our
being is intimately connected to our God who made us and loves us and holds us
close, then everything we touch, every word we say, every move we make, every
relationship we are part of, has a potential for holiness. A potential for responding to God, loving
God, loving our neighbor, and pointing the way to God.
This week in
my house we celebrated the anniversaries of Maya’s and Sophia’s baptisms. On Wednesday I realized the next day was Maya’s
day so told her we’d celebrate and light her baptism candle. When she woke up on Thursday morning she told
Holden, “I’m getting baptized today and I’ll light a candle!” She loves the idea of baptism, loves seeing baptisms
in the font here and pretending to baptize her dolls and stuffed animals at
home, so she was excited about the idea of getting baptized again. And so we’ve been talking about how baptism works
this week. About how it only happens
once for each person. About how we
splash water on the person getting baptized just like Jesus had for his
baptism. And about my favorite part, the
holy oil that goes on our foreheads in a cross with the words "You
are... marked as Christ's own
forever." The cross is invisible,
but it’s always there, marking us as set apart – belonging to Jesus forever.
I think that’s what these instructions
for us to be “holy” and “perfect” really mean – learning to live into our identity
as Jesus’ own. In our baptisms, we are
set apart for God and God’s purposes even, and maybe especially, in the midst
of the dailyness of life.
The problem is, of course, that that
all sounds very beautiful and worthy, but what does it mean? One of my friends from seminary wrote in his
blog this week the complaints he sometimes gets from parishioners that his
sermons are too open and theological and they wish sometimes he would just tell
them specifically and practically how to live out what he was talking
about. And he thought the readings this week
would lend themselves to that kind of sermon.
Today’s readings are unusually concrete.
They are about how we live in the here and now. About how we live our lives as those marked as
Christ’s own people.
What does holiness
and perfection look like out in the real world?
What do those words mean when it comes to daily living? Check out the examples in our readings this
morning.
In our Leviticus reading, there are
so many random thoughts about what holiness might look like that my Bible
labels this reading “Miscellaneous Instructions,” and it does have that feel to
it. Holiness is about so much more than
we might have imagined. Holiness is
about how when you reap your fields you leave the edges so that the poor and
the alien can have that part of the crop.
Holiness is about dealing with others honestly. Holiness is about treating the disabled
well. Holiness is about not bearing
grudges. At its heart, holiness seems to
be about that last line of the Old Testament reading “you shall love your
neighbor as yourself.”
And the
Gospel is full of actual examples of how to be perfect – by turning the other
cheek, going the second mile, giving to those who beg and ask to borrow. And Jesus takes the Leviticus instruction to
love our neighbor one step farther; we aren’t just to love our neighbor but
also to love our enemies. How we live with
one another is the practical expression of the holiness and perfection God
instills in us. These readings aren’t
about how we feel, but about what we do.
I think each
one of these examples is something to think about and apply to our own
lives. What grudges are we harboring, for
instance? Or what might it look like for
us to turn our other check in some situation we are confronted with? Since Lent is fast approaching, it occurred to
me while working on this sermon that thinking through the pieces of these
readings and trying to apply them to my life might be a good spiritual
discipline during the weeks of Lent.
But the example that intrigues me the
most is the idea of leaving the edges of our fields unharvested so that people
in need can reap the remainder. I know
at first it may seem like the most unlikely example to pursue, since how many
of us (other than Don Heinrichs, maybe) have fields worthy of leaving the edges
unharvested? But when you get into it,
this is actually a great, concrete example of integrating real life (what you
do for a living, your property and toil) with how you love neighbor (by leaving
a portion of the fruit of your labor for those in need). What might that look like for us in the 21st
century? Think about what you do for a
living, or what you most love to do in your free time, or what you spend a lot of
time doing. Is there some way that you
can offer the skills or results of your job, vocation, or hobby to those in
need?
I can’t imagine how that might look
in my own life yet, much less in any of yours.
We are all living different lives, with different family situations and
different work situations and different struggles and heartaches and
dreams. So I challenge all of us to think
about what that might look like specifically for each of us, practically in our
own lives. To think about how we each might
live out our God-created identities as holy and perfect people. And then try to do it, maybe just one little
step at a time.
And let me
know how it goes, if you don’t mind.
Because we preacher types need to hear about how the Gospel plays out in
practical and specific ways in your lives just as much as you need to hear us
talk about how it works in ours!
Comments
Post a Comment