Epiphany
7A 2017
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
February
19, 2017, St. John’s Sharon
This morning’s readings contain a lot of
difficult instructions. We have another
installment of some of the Sermon on the Mount’s most challenging teachings and
our Old Testament lesson from Leviticus lists a number of divine
directives. While we should all read
them carefully and do what they say, I want to look at them through a
particular perspective. That perspective
is holiness – the holiness of God and the holiness we are supposed to have that
will move out into the world.
In
Leviticus, God tells Moses to say to the entire people of Israel: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. In Paul’s letter to
the Corinthians, he says that we are God’s temple and God’s Spirit dwells in
us. For God’s temple is holy, and we are
that temple.
To be holy means literally to be set apart. God is holy because he is set apart from all
the rest of creation. He is in the
God-zone, not in ho-hum everyday life zone.
Unlike his creation, he is the Creator, which is more than a separate
role. God has a whole separate order of being.
During our Eucharistic prayer we sing or say “Holy, Holy, Holy” to God,
just like we see the angels doing in the heavenly throne room in the books of
Isaiah and Revelation. This proclamation
of God’s holiness is our acknowledgment that he is at another order of reality
than we are and that we are grateful to be his creatures.
Now part of the amazing thing about being part of God’s
people is that we also become set apart and are holy. We aren’t ever quite at the level of God, but
the Holy One designates us for his purposes, and in doing so we come to share
in his holiness. We can’t make ourselves
holy, but when he chooses us, God makes us holy. In Scripture, the people of Israel are set
apart as holy because out of all the peoples of the earth they are God’s chosen
people with a special relationship to him.
As such, they are supposed to show forth God’s way of life in the
world. They aren’t supposed to just
exist and act like all the other nations that are out for their own advancement. They are to be about God’s advancement. Israel has a plan and a purpose, and that
purpose is to help the rest of the world to recognize God and God’s holiness,
and to help the world to come in line with God’s will for it. In the New Testament and later, Christians
become holy by sharing in the life of Christ and receiving the Holy
Spirit. We are set apart as the dwelling
places of God, and we become holy as God’s Holy Spirit makes his home in us.
Starting in the Old Testament, and particularly in
Leviticus, we see that one fundamental way that we live into the holiness of
God is by living a moral and ethical way of life. God acts out of love, and we are supposed to
act the same way. In Leviticus this
morning, we find the basis for half of Jesus’ Great Commandment: You shall
love your neighbor as yourself. We
also receive a lot of concrete instructions about how that love works in
practice. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Pay your laborers on time. Don’t take advantage of people. Don’t exact vengeance or hold grudges. Don’t take all of your harvest, that you would
seem to be entitled to because it is yours, but instead leave some food along
the edges for the poor and the immigrants and the refugees to pick and eat.
These activities are what God’s life is about, and when we do them, we bring
his life into this world and share in his holiness.
In Old Testament times, they also had a significant amount
of respect for the danger that God’s holiness brought. They knew that God was the all-powerful
Creator of the universe, so they were afraid to get too close. In their worship, they were afraid of
bringing anything unholy into the places where they worshipped God, or to appear
before God without living fully into his ethical and other instructions. They had extensive rites for atonement and
sacrifice to make sure that they didn’t come before God unprepared, and most people
didn’t want to come close to God at all.
They didn’t do things like touch dead bodies or eat certain foods, lest they
become unclean and no longer holy and end up being smote when they came into
the Temple sanctuary. This deep
reverence and awe is an appropriate recognition that if God has set us apart,
we need to be set apart. Each
commandment in the first reading ends, “I am the LORD” for a reason. God is the Lord, not us. But their fears of their holiness being
contaminated by the profane stuff of the world was misplaced. Certainly, situations existed in more
primitive times that were important for health and safety, like washing thoroughly
with water after handling dead bodies, but that didn’t actually stop you from
doing God’s work in the broadest sense.
Instead, by Jesus time we see that holiness is not in
danger of being lost when encountering the profane stuff of everyday life, but
instead can actually spread out and become contagious. The holiness that God has given us in Jesus
Christ is something that can move to other people and places as we interact
with them. We don’t lose that holiness
by going into an unholy place. We can
only lose that holiness by refusing to do the work that God has set us apart
for – and even in those instances we often find God using us in spite of
ourselves.
This talk of holiness matters, I think, when we look at the
gospel reading with its commands to turn the other cheek and love our enemies
and pray for those who persecute us. The
commandments here, where Jesus is again drawing and expanding on the Old
Testament commandments, are about being perfect as our heavenly Father is
perfect. Another way to say that might
be to say that we are to be holy like God, making God’s kingdom manifest where
we are all the time. Our goal is not to
win, nor to get even, nor to get what is right for us, nor to have things be
fair to us, nor even to survive. Our
goal is to act like God in a way that God’s holiness is exhibited in us and
then passes through to the world around us.
If someone hits us, and we hit back, we have just allowed
the way of the world to continue. Most
people might see that as a justified response.
The Old Testament world of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”
was in fact more fair than “kill someone for an eye” or “burn down his house
and slaughter his family for a tooth”, which might have been how things were
done in a more lawless society. But the
question for people who are set apart as holy for God, who are a temple of the
Holy Spirit, is different. The question
is how will the person who has just hit us experience the presence of God? The answer is by having the strength not to
hit back, or by giving a shirt to someone who is stealing your coat, or by
walking two miles with the Roman soldier who had the right to conscript a local
to help carry their stuff for up to a mile at a time. None of these are the acts of a weak person. They are acts of incredibly strong people –
people who have experienced the power and love and presence of God. Raining down fury and vengeance on our
enemies or those who have harmed us will not allow them to know the power and
presence of God. But prayer can, and love can, and living in a way that
confounds them can. Even if nothing seems
to happen immediately, the holiness of godly, loving actions sticks in the
world and makes a difference. That
presence of God carried on holy love roots into people’s minds and hearts, and
at the right time later might provoke the kind of reflection and introspection
that allows them to recognize that there is a deeper and more powerful reality
to the one they are stuck in.
The holiness of loving enemies and refusing to return
violence for violence and hate for hate is stronger than just an immediate
witness, however. That kind of holiness
also stays in places and transforms peoples.
Two Wednesdays ago, we commemorated the Martyrs of Japan. The first group was 26 people were killed for
their faith in the late 1500’s. Within a
couple decades, hundreds of missionaries and Japanese Christians were killed,
and for over a century Japan was shut down to outsiders. Yet, when westerners and missionaries
returned in the 1800’s, they found an underground church still meeting and
worshipping and passing on the faith.
The holiness of the martyrs’ witness bore fruit. On Friday, the church commemorated Janini
Luwum, the Anglican Archbishop who was killed by Idi Amin. He and many others were martyred in the 20th
Century for their willingness to stand up to a brutal dictator and
murderer. In the decades following,
Uganda has seen an explosion of evangelism and church growth, while also seeing
their government mature into one that could effectively deal with the AIDS
epidemic and other significant social issues.
The
point is that being holy means doing what God would have us do in ways that
create space for God to be at work in the world. That work may include our suffering, or even
death. But ultimately that doesn’t
matter, because we work for God and he is taking care of us. At the end of the reading today, Paul has
this great line: All things are yours, whether…the world or life or death or
the present or the future – all things belong to you, and you belong to Christ
and Christ belongs to God. If we are
God’s, we actually will have whatever we need to do God’s work, whether the
material things in this world, or our own holy lives, or even our own holy deaths
in ways that advance the kingdom. We are
always tempted to think small – that all we have for God is a few hours here
and there for church work, or a few dollars to contribute, or a few minutes to
mutter some prayers. Yet Paul says that
as long as we understand ourselves as Christ’s, which means that we are living
out our lives in holiness to glorify God, then everything belongs to us. We can have whatever we need to accomplish
the work that God wants us to do, and still know that we are in God’s
hands. We may not always understand how
that will happen, and rarely does it happen the way we think it will, but we
can be sure that God’s work done God’s way in God’s time will always have God’s
provision.
Of
course, having this provision means doing what God would have us do, and
confessing our sins when we fall and turning back to God’s life for us. Some of what God commands, like these
instructions from the Old Testament, are pretty straightforward, if sometimes
difficult. Some of what God commands,
like Jesus commandments in the Sermon on the Mount, are pretty high level
callings, and sometimes we’ll succeed in living into them and sometimes we
won’t. But when we do live them out, the
beauty of God’s holiness in us draws people, and that power transforms lives
and locations. The more we practice
living out all these commandments, even when it is tough and even when we
sometimes fail, the more we will find we can be holy, for the Lord our God is
holy, and we are his people and the temples of his Holy Spirit. As we are holy, the life of the Kingdom of
God with all its love, healing and liberation, spreads in the world.
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