"Holiness: Love in Tension"

You may or may not realize it, but the story of the good Samaritan in Luke 10, which I just shared with our children, is a story which has a great deal to do with our second scripture reading from the Old Testament book of Leviticus. I’ll speak about that connection in a moment or two -- and both are connected to our first reading in 1 Thessalonians, which speaks about holiness.

We are reading this month selected readings from Leviticus. Today we read from the twenty-first chapter, from a section known as the holiness code, a section which covers chapters 17-26. Our passage is about holiness, an understanding of holiness linked to the life of the priests of ancient Israel.

Holiness, or sanctification or being "hallowed" (the word we use when we say The Lord’s Prayer -- "our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name") mean the same thing. But "holiness" is not always an easy word to define. Sometimes it’s used rather generally to mean nothing more than being exalted -- God is a holy God, an exalted God, a majestic God, divine. And this is not more than a step away from the meaning of being "different" -- God is holy because there are no other gods like God, and we are not like God: God is God, and we are creatures, so God is holy; God is distinct; God is different. And that distinction carries through to God’s moral character, which is a cut above everyone else’s: God is holy and thus God’s actions are distinct from the actions of others, of people like you and me.

Yet, for all this distinction between God and others, the people of ancient Israel were called to be holy as well. They were called to live lives that were somehow different from the lives of the people around about them. At the time of the writing of the scripture, the people around about them were sacrificing their children as part of worship: there was child sacrifice; they were worshiping idols; they were being sexually promiscuous, and unjust in their relationships with one another. And the prophets, and the writer of Leviticus says, "Be holy, be different from those around about you."

And they were not only to be distinct in their moral and religious actions, but they were to carry out in their lives a number of laws which were designed to make them see that all of life, not just their own lives, but all of life was holy, sacred, precious -- different, even the most mundane and down to earth aspects of life, that we might take for granted. And so we find in the book of Leviticus that there are laws relating to eating and to sexuality -- those aspects of life which can descend to an animal level if we’re not careful -- laws which were designed to elevate all aspects of life and to give people a sense of the sacramental, a sense of the holy.

All of this is going on in the background of Leviticus and we read today in the twenty-first chapter of some specific laws of holiness relating to the lives of the priests, those who served in the temple, just like the priest and Levite who came down from the temple on the way to Jericho and passed by the person lying on the ground; something the Samaritan did not do.

Read -- Leviticus 21:1-12

Do you want to be holy? Having just heard what Leviticus says about holiness, do you want to be holy? Do you want to be a saint, a holy person, distinct, different from others around about you? Unique in some way, shape or form? Is this in any sense your goal -- to be holy? In 1 Thessalonians, the Apostle Paul says it’s God’s goal for all of us: our sanctification, our holiness. Is it your goal for yourself? Is there any appeal in holiness to you? Is this a word which does something positive for you, that makes you feel good in some way? Is this a quest that you have in your life? How do you feel about this? Do you want to be holy?

I suppose our answer to that kind of a question really does hinge on how we feel about holiness itself and what we think holiness is. Whether our image of it is positive or negative. There’s a Norman Rockwell painting called "Saying Grace" and some of you may be familiar with it. It’s about a holy moment. It’s about a grandmother in a diner with a grandson and she has bowed her head and the grandson has bowed his, and they’re saying grace together. And the life of the diner is going on as usual. There is somebody reading a newspaper. There is somebody smoking a cigarette. There is somebody carrying a tray to their table and there are a few other people on this picture, all crammed together. They’re sitting in front of the large picture window of the diner. They’re all crammed together, going about their own business, while in the middle of this, there is this couple -- this grandmother and her grandson -- saying a prayer, doing something different, something distinct, something we might call holy.

In some ways this action is clearly "out of place." Yet, in the way Rockwell painted the scene, there’s a strange feeling of warmth and welcome, as if somehow it’s not really out of place at all: just a holy moment in the midst of the mundane. And yet it wouldn’t take much, would it, to make such an action turn into something which doesn’t fit, that is not welcome, that is somehow jarring. Something that in fact is not loving or kind, but self-righteous, harsh and ugly.

For example, what if we knew some background to that picture and we heard the grandmother before the prayer was said, say quietly, but loudly enough for everybody to hear, to her grandson, "Jimmy, we’re going to pray grace here because all of these people here aren’t thankful to God for their food." That would turn things around! And all of the sudden, this holy action would become something that’s ugly or difficult or awkward. How easy it is for those things which are holy, for those parts of our lives that we want to be special, to be twisted in the same way -- making a gulf between us and others around about us. They can so easily become self-centered and self-serving, leaving other people alienated.

It can happen on the "right wing of holy people" and on the "left wing of holy people." It can happen with those who are so concerned to be theologically correct and pure in their theology that nobody wants to speak about God in their presence, for fear of saying something which is not quite right. And it can happen with those who are so involved in the community and in aspects of social justice, who know about this issue and know about that issue, so that you’re afraid to say that you’re stuck in the busyness and complexity of your own life just now, and you’re not quite sure how you can get out into the world like others: and you feel small in their presence. How easy it is for people trying to do something for God, out of the best will, seeking holiness, ending up making other people feel uncomfortable, or even hurting people, around about them.

It was this ugly side of holiness that Jesus often took issue with in the lives of the religious people around him in his day. It wasn’t, in all likelihood, that other people intended for their holiness to be offensive. From their point of view, they were probably, most of them, trying to follow the law of God. To follow Leviticus. It was their scripture. It was their word from God, to follow these laws of holiness which had been written down long before; and in doing so they wanted to create an atmosphere in which they believed that God would be present with them, an aura of holiness which reflected the very glory of the living God.

To experience the presence of God was their goal, yet what actually happened (unwittingly most of the time I would suspect), was that they alienated themselves from God and they alienated themselves from others. And in his stories, like the story of the good Samaritan that I told to the children, Jesus would point this out.

Now the Good Samaritan story is familiar to most of us. But whether you heard it for the first time today or you’ve heard it since childhood, there is an element in that story that you might not have thought about until you heard the reading of Leviticus. The story goes like this, if you remember.

A man goes down from Jerusalem to Jericho. It’s a long, steep road, down a few thousand feet. Down towards the Dead Sea, through an area of wilderness and desert, with hills on either side and robbers can easily hide in those hills and jump out and capture a person traveling by themselves, and steal from them and leave them for dead. And as Jesus said in the story, that’s what happened.

But what happens next? Not long after, two officials come down that road from Jerusalem, a priest and a Levite, who no doubt have been serving in the temple in Jerusalem and they’re feeling good about this. They’ve been where the presence of God is. And they come walking down that road and they pass by on the other side. And then there’s another person who comes who has no truck with Jerusalem, worships God along with the other Samaritans in a place called Mount Gerizim, and who stops and who lends a hand, he touches this person who is lying there in a pool of blood, as if dead.

And that’s the story and there is no question that the simple lesson of this story is that we are to love our neighbor, whoever our neighbor is. And we are to touch all kinds of people who need our help, who ever they may be. Whoever they may be.

But this story, to those who heard it for the first time when Jesus spoke it, contained another message as well. It is, as you may have guessed by now, also a story about holiness. And about the dilemmas inherent in seeking to be holy. How the quest for holiness can sometimes get in the way of love. You see, the most likely reason, and this may not have occurred to us but it certainly would have occurred to those who were raised hearing or reading the book of Leviticus, the most likely reason why the priest and the Levite passed by on the other side

• was not merely that they were callous, though they might have been callous.
• Nor merely that they were too busy and they had to get to Jericho before dark, though they probably had to do that (and I tend to think that the biggest enemy of love these days is our busyness and our weariness. We’re too tired, too busy, to do the things that God wants us to do).
• Nor is it just that they were afraid, though they had every right to be afraid going down that road and seeing this person. They knew there were robbers in the area.

But the most likely reason why they passed by on the other side was that this person lying in the pool of blood was unclean: possibly dead, and certainly with blood showing, which if they touched it, would defile them and would take away from them that sense of holiness or purity that they had just basked in in the temple in Jerusalem. Touching a dead body or blood would have taken their holiness away (so, Leviticus 21).

In this particular case, as the story tells us the quest for holiness as they understood it won out, though what Jesus tries to say in the story is just this -- that it shouldn’t have. That in this case, the Samaritan who could not care less about holiness as they perceived it -- was right. And the priest and the Levite -- those chosen to serve in the temple of the living God, seeking to obey Leviticus -- were wrong. Jesus wants to convey that faithful love, faithful love that leads to the healing of the lives of others, is more important than all the ritual laws of holiness in Leviticus combined.

This, my friends, was not an easy opinion for anybody to express in those days. Indeed, it was an opinion which got Jesus into a great deal of trouble and which was part of why people drove him to his death. It seemed to some that Jesus was against the word of God in holy scripture, that he was undoing the law of Moses and that he was somehow against holiness itself. Against being different, being special, being marked out as a person of God. And yet the truth of the matter was this -- that Jesus was neither against the scripture nor against holiness. It was just that when he understood holiness, he saw it in a particular light.

• In fact, first of all, he saw holiness as something that we do not do or strive for, but as a gift of God. A gift of God.
• And he saw it in the second place as being reflected fundamentally in one law which should color all others and that’s the law of love, which in fact, is a law revealed for the first time in the book of Leviticus itself (19:18), which tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves.

So let me ask the question with which I began a few moments ago -- let me ask it one more time. Do you want to be a holy person? Do you want to be different? Do you want to be God’s person? Do you want to be the person God created you -- no one else but you -- as a distinct human being?

If you do, if there is any sense that this is something to be pursued, and the scriptures tell us it is to be pursued, then the first thing that you and I need to do in our busy lives is to sit still and listen. Listen to what God says to us. Listen to the word of the gospel, to such a simple, fundamental truth as this: that God loves you so much that he sends his only son to live and die for you; for you. As if you were the only person on earth. And that’s what marks you out as special, as unique, as holy, that God would do this for you among all the billions of people on the face of the earth: holy because of what God does, not because of what you do, but because of what you believe God has done for you. Believing that in bearing our sins in his body on the cross, as the scriptures would say, remember this -- that he bears not only your wrongdoing away, but everything in your life that you or others consider would make you impure, that would make you less than perfect, that would make you someone who is somehow not right with God, he carries it away and says to you as best he can, "You are my holy child."

This is a gift. Without such a gift at the foundation of our lives, life is always going to be twisted in some way. But with this sense of gift at the heart and the core of life, what Jesus wants for us is that we be set free to be holy in a way which is wonderful, and does not alienate others; to be holy in a way which is characterized above everything else, by love.

Of course, there are many rules and regulations that we might still pursue in order to make all of life holy. There are traditions we follow which we cherish. We come to the communion table and here at the communion table we follow a procedure in which we take simple elements of bread and wine, and we ask God to make them special or sacred for us. And in different ways, through different rituals, in different seasons, we ask God to make the ordinary parts of life special.

But what Jesus says to us in our scripture today and in the stories we’ve heard is just this -- that everything that we do, every law that we follow, every tradition we adhere to, must be carried out in the light of one Levitical commandment above all other, which is there in the nineteenth chapter and the eighteenth verse, in which even the priests were commanded, though they forgot, "to love your neighbor as yourself" -- whether that neighbor is black or white or straight or gay or Christian or Muslim or Jew or atheist. Whether they’ve treated you well or whether they’ve burned you. Whether you like them or whether you don’t like them. Whether you think they will defile you in some way, or whether you can do them more good than you can possibly imagine, just by sneaking up to them and touching them.

Holiness. The will of God for you. A distinctiveness about your life, a specialness about your life. It’s first of all a gift from God, something you receive before you do it. And only then, a gift of God to be reflected above everything else, in your doing: your persistent healing love for others.

Let’s bow before God in prayer.