Holy God, Holy People
Seventh Sunday after Epiphany
February 20, 2011

Well, it certainly has been an interesting week here in Madison, and events continue to unfold. Emotions are high—there’s the exhilaration of participating in protests and sitting-in at the capitol as some of our members could attest; there’s concern among many who are state workers about what the future holds; and there is the anger that can flare up when the exchange of ideas turn into shouted arguments, when ill-considered protest signs offend, and when people who want to go about their daily routine are thwarted.

We don’t know what to make of it when history seems to be occurring right in front of our eyes and some of us are active participants in it. It’s hard to step back and interpret events and since we don’t know how this will all end, it’s too early to do so. But still, even as the protests continue around us on the streets of Capitol Square, we have chosen, not to participate in them, nor to stay away entirely, but to come here, to gather as God’s people, and as we do every Sunday, to hear God’s word and to share in the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood.

We’ve opened our doors this week to provide a place of sanctuary, prayer, and respite in the midst of all that is taking place around us; and it may be that many of you have come today for that very reason, to hear words of comfort and solace and to take your minds off of what is occurring.

If that was your hope, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Well, I’m not disappointing you—the lectionary is. We are still in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and as I said a couple of weeks ago, these are among Jesus’ most difficult and most challenging words. Of all that Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, the verses we read today may be the most profound and most challenging. We are told to turn the other cheek, go the second mile, and to love our enemy.

As hard as these words are to hear, they are even more difficult to understand, let alone to live out. We may be inclined to interpret these sayings of Jesus as a command to be submissive or passive in the face of violence or brutality. To love one’s enemy even as they may be striking us down seems impossible.

The lectionary, though, gives us help in making sense of them. The reading from Leviticus includes the statement that Jesus reinterprets. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” reads the Torah, and it comes at the end of a passage that begins, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” Our reading this morning jumped from verses 1and 2 to verse 9. In between those two verses come a series of other commandments. Several like some of the verses in today’s reading are restatements of some of the Ten Commandments. In addition, there are certain instructions concerning sacrifice. The verses we heard today are notable in that they all focus on relationships within the community.

It’s important to keep in mind that the laws we read about in Leviticus are given long before the people of Israel enter the promised land. They lay out a vision of an ideal community. It’s important also to note that while the instructions about what to do are clear; no penalties are mentioned. That means this is all about how society is to be structured, how people are to relate to each other and not about individual morality, sin and punishment.

Some of what we hear is commonplace and unremarkable—don’t lie, don’t slander, don’t be partial to the poor or defer to the great. But others are more revealing. The Israelites are instructed not to harvest all of their crops, but to leave some for the poor and the alien. For subsistence farmers, who sometimes have to go without food to protect seed grain for the next year, those are hard words.

But these aren’t just rules about how to get along with one’s neighbors. They are framed by statements about God: “You shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy.” In other words, keeping those commandments is more than an ethical obligation; it also says something about God’s people and about God. Or to put it another way, to keep God’s commandments makes the people holy as God is holy, sharing something of God’s nature. To create and live in a community in which the widow and orphan are cared for, the alien welcome is to share in the nature of God, to participate in God’s holiness.

We see something of the same in the gospel at the very end of the text when Jesus says, be perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect. We might be inclined to see perfection and holiness as synonymous, but that’s not the case. Holiness in the sense used in the Hebrew Bible, means being set apart, being other than. God is other than us, that is one of our most profound experiences—when we encounter God with all of our defenses stripped away, we become aware of how totally other than us God is. But at the same time, Leviticus reminds us that we are called to be holy people, to share in God’s nature, God’s set-apartness from the rest of creation. And for Leviticus, as hard as it is for us to imagine, being set apart, sharing in God’s holiness means caring for the widow, the poor, and the alien, and loving one’s neighbor as oneself.

Jesus takes that notion even further. He does it by expanding the notion of neighbor. No longer is the one we should love, our neighbor, the person like us, our relative, a member of our ethnic or religious group, someone in our socio-economic status. Now, we are called to love the human being who we perceive to be wholly other than us, our enemy, who we are inclined to hate.

But we are to do it, not out of some sense of duty or responsibility, but again, because of God’s nature, and more importantly because of who God has created us to be. For Jesus’ call to be perfect does not mean some sort of moral or ethical perfection. Rather, the word translated as perfect has in it the sense of an end goal or purpose. As the army ads used to put it “be all you are meant to be.” Ironic, isn’t it.

Who are we? Who has God created us to be? We want to answer that question on an individual and personal level and so we should. For what purpose or end has God created us? How are we to put our god-given talents, our skills, to use for the shaping of our own personhood, and to ensure our flourishing as human beings? How do the ethical decisions we make—to love our enemy as well as our friend or relative—contribute to making us all that God intends us to be?

While the question of our individual purpose and meaning is important, more important, from the biblical perspective, is the purpose and meaning of the community in which we leave. In the reading from Leviticus, indeed throughout the Torah, we see a vision of the people of God that cares for the oppressed and embraces the foreigner. In the New Testament, the vision of God’s new people is the same. The body of Christ is a community in which the old barriers of gender, class, slave and free, Jew and Gentile, no longer exist.

In John’s gospel, Jesus at the last supper tells his disciples, “By this will everyone know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” That, my sisters and brothers, is our task as the church. That is our calling. That is who God intends us to be. To have love for one another, to share that love with the world on our doorsteps, to share that love, not just with our friend or neighbor but even with our enemy. When we do that, we are God’s holy people. Amen.