Sermon 2.23.14

The Leviticus passage today begins with holiness and ends with 'You shall love your neighbor as your yourself."  Holiness is about loving your neighbor and in this passage we get a practical description of just what "Love Your Neighbor" means.  And it is not just an individual thing or a relationship between friends and those close to you.  This passage is all about the shaping of community, of an entire society, in which holiness and love are at the foundation.

Right after "You shall be holy," the passage talks about gleaning.  Leaving some of the harvest for the poor and the alien among you.  Now gleaning has been near and dear to my heart for a very long time.  As most of you know, I ran a Food Bank in Stockton, CA in which we gathered surplus food from the whole system and distributed it to the poor.  Much of my career has centered around food. The Hunger Action Coalition in Detroit, where we advocated for Federal Food Programs, and I helped to create the Detroit Agriculture Network of community gardeners.  A big part of the work at the Campbell Farm and Noah's Ark has been about food, growing it, cooking it and eating it, seeking to honor both those who grow our food, advocate for the workers who pick our food, and honor the culturally diverse and indigenous traditional food practices tied to this land.  Throwing lots of good parties, with lots of good food in which everyone is included.  Now we get to have another party Meet Your Farmer on April 6, in which we can build relationships with local small farmers and also raise funds for our mission partners feeding the poor.  From this scripture it is clear that central to Holiness and Love is how we do agriculture, how we eat so that the poor and the alien are on our minds.  Gleaning is a concrete practice that models holiness and love.

It is the obligation of the land owner to not reap to the very edge of the field or strip their vineyards bare.  Built into the practice of farming, into the heart of this land based economic system is a provision for the most vulnerable.  Even today, the church takes a stand on social issues: poverty alleviation, our welfare system, our federal food programs that exist in the larger context of federal farm policy, our broken immigration system.  We take a stand on these issues precisely because we have scriptures like these in Leviticus.  Our prophetic witness has it roots in scriptures like these that call us to remember the poor and the alien among us.

Gleaning is followed by more concrete practices.  Do not steal or lie or use the Lord's name in vain.  We know these things as personal immoral acts which we are to avoid, but here in this passage, once again they are all about an economic system, our business relations.  Lying is about not defrauding people, stealing is about not even keeping the wages of a laborer until the next day, but paying honestly and immediately a days wages for a days work.   We have heard the word kosher, we know that pork is not kosher.  We might now the kosher prohibition about having milk and meat on the table at the same time.  But do we know the rationale for kosher laws?  It is all about the proper care for creation, the ethical treatment of animals and the just treatment of workers.   No milk and meat together comes from the scripture that says, "Don't boil a kid (a goat) in its mother's milk."  This is a metaphor for all forms of abuse and mistreatment of animals.  And kosher is not just about the kinds of foods we eat, or the way they are killed and prepared.  Truly kosher food is also about the way the workers are treated, not hanging on to their money for example which is no longer belongs to the employers, but belongs to the employee.  You all know we are an Advocating Congregation, a part of Faith Action Network.  One of their legislative priorities this year is the continuing and pervasive problem of Wage theft.  The church's concern that workers get an honest day's pay for a day's work again has its roots in these sorts of scriptures.

Loving you neighbor is also about the just and fair treatment of the disabled, exemplified here in this passage by the deaf and the blind.  And so our laws around equal access, the Americans with Disabilities Act, also has its roots here in these passages of Leviticus.

The foundation of a whole legal system is described here and it is one that has holiness and love at its core.  Blind justice, that shows no partiality comes from this passage as well.  This passage envisions an economic, legal and political system in which people are not slandered or exploited.  It is also no longer a system that condones an us/them mentality, that condones vengeance and grudges. We would not be making a profit by the blood of our neighbor if we lived by these words.  This is what love your neighbor means.  What loving your kin, your family means.   And this vision of family is one that includes those on the margins, the poor, the immigrant, the disabled.

All of this is what it means to love your neighbor.  And why do we do this?  Because we are in relationship to God.  "I am The Lord."  And if you want to follow me you will create this kind of community, this kind of society, this kind of economic, legal and political system, this kind of food and agricultural system that cares of the earth and all of its people.

These are the statutes and commandments, the laws that the Psalmist asks God to teach him about.  It is these statutes which he is committed to carrying in his heart to the end.  And none of these particular laws in this passage of Leviticus, with its emphasis on loving your neighbor, is lost as we move into the New Testament.  It is this Law of Love that Jesus says he came to fulfill, to complete, and his call to us is that we should be even more righteous than those to whom God originally gave this law.  In fact he says we should be perfect, even as God is perfect.  The same message that God gave to the Israelites in this Leviticus passage, is given to us. I am The Lord, and if you want to be my followers this is what you will be doing.

Jesus is calling us to, even more radically, live out this Law of God.  He says, "You have heard it said, but I say to you."  This refrain in today's gospel is not a deluding or changing of this law of love, but a deepening and fulfilling of it.  Maybe some have tried to escape the rigors and expectation of this law by externalizing it, doing the letter, but not the spirit of the law, as though what was going on inside of us did not matter.  Or maybe some were circumscribing it, limiting it's application, and the definition of neighbor, imagining that we only had to love those in our own family, clan or tribe.  But at the heart of the Torah, the Jewish Law, is this same call to Love God and Love Your Neighbor that Jesus calls us to.

This one about eye for eye, for example, may sound harsh to us, but it may also be seen as a limitation on punishment or on vengeance that could be exacted.  It may actually be an evolution to a more humane way of treatment in which the punish fits the crime.  Looking at other ancient middle eastern legal texts that predate the Torah, as well as much later texts such at the Quaran, we see this moving away from a vengeance based society, of blood feuds for example, in which one person's kin takes vengeance on another kin for wrongs committed.  Jesus takes it another major step forward, away from vengeance, by radicalizing this call to turn the other cheek, give the cloak, walk the extra mile.  For the sake of this foundation of love, we are to not resist evil.  This doesn't mean being a door mat, it does not mean condoning violence, or silently living with abuse.  On the contrary, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr, the non-violent resistance movement, designed to create major social justice change through a radical application of peace and love, has its roots in this scripture.  This call to turn the other cheek, is about shaping an even bigger, more inclusive vision of community in which those who wrong me, gentiles outside my community, the just and unjust alike, all people are my family and my kin,  And it is no longer right to seek vengeance on anyone.

What good is it that you love your family but hate everyone else, Jesus says.  If you greet only your family - well, most people love those who love them.  There is nothing special about that.  Jesus is calling us to love everyone, to look to a larger more radical vision of unity and reconciliation of all.  Since we are not just children of Israel or of the United State of America, but we are children of God.  All of us exist as one family of God, the just and the unjust alike.  It is this radical vision of the unity of all things that mystics from all major religious traditions speak about.

Hard perhaps to understand, but this is the vision of perfection that Jesus is talking about.  This oneness and wholeness, this vision of the fullness of creation in all of its diversity united as one in the one God.  It is of this vision Jesus wants us to get a taste.

Paul says that Jesus Christ is the foundation for this vision, this community we are building.  The image Paul uses is that we all are builders of a temple, architects, artists really, like musicians practicing.  We practice again and again this art of community, seeking to model this kind of community founded on Love, and modeled for us fully in Jesus Christ.  Always we build upon the foundation laid for us in Jesus Christ.  Paul gives us this image of the temple of God, and often we think of this an individual thing, but this "you" in "you are the temple" is also a plural you, we are the community of God.  We are the Body of Christ and individually members of it.  This image here of a holy temple, a church, is not of a building finally, but of a community of people.  And the Spirit of God dwells within us.  This is holiness.  God's temple is Holy.  We are holy people.  Filled with the Spirit of God.    This of course is not to make us proud.  Paul is quick to counter that.  If you think you are wise you will be a fool Paul says, and goes on about that for awhile in this passage.  So though the call is for us to be perfect, we are clear that we are not.  Most of know how broken and messed up we are.  But what we often forget is how loved we are and the capacity we all have, filled as we are with the Spirit of God, to love as Christ has loved us.

I just went to a conference called Winter Talk with leaders of Indigenous Ministries throughout the Episcopal Church.  We did a training on Asset Based Community Development.  The main theme to about turning inside out the way we often do social change.  We tend to focus on the needs and deficits in the community, painting ourselves actually in the worst light in order to get outside funding, people and experts to help us.  But ABCD's foundation is that communities always have more assets that anyone  knows.  They consist of hundreds and thousands of relationships that can be build upon to improve and build the capacity of their communities and that the people themselves can be the ones to define what health and wholeness looks like for them, developing their own agenda for moving toward wholeness.

One of the ABCD concepts is change the way we think of people, moving away from client to citizen, treating people not as just recipients of services but as actors shaping their own destiny.  Client is a word that actually means to lie down well, and so patients, for example, lie down well in the hospital.  A citizen on the other hand is one who stands up and takes a stand with others.   This kind of ABCD work is not about waiting for leaders or others to come and do something for us.  I think the Good News of Jesus Christ can also be seen in these same terms as moving people from clients to citizens.  For traumatized, disenfranchised communities, the fact that the meek shall inherit the earth is indeed Good News.  That the lowly are lifted up, that you too can be filled with the Holy Spirit, you too are the Body of Christ.  You are a royal priesthood, citizens of a new Kingdom of God, no longer servants but friends.  You can have this power and be connected to the power that can bring healing and wholeness to the world.  This power belongs to you in Christ Jesus who is the foundation of all of this.
I love the way Paul wraps up this passage and it is the way I will wrap up my words today, it turns it all upside down and inside out.  "The whole world," Paul says,  "belongs to you. It all belongs to you, and you belong to Christ and Christ belong to God."

Feast of the Presentation

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple, also called the Purification of Virgin Mary, also called Candlemas, because of a procession and blessing of candles that is associated with this celebration in some places.  It is actually one of the major feasts of the church right up there with Christmas and Easter but you probably don't know much about it or rarely have been exposed it because it is always Feb 2, and unless Feb 2 falls on a Sunday we don't usually celebrate it.

But this year it falls on a Sunday so here we are.  And because it falls on a Sunday it kind of disrupts the chronology of the church calendar.  We were just last Sunday talking about the calling of the disciples and now we are back in time to when Jesus was a young child.  Jim noticed a couple of Sundays ago that we still had 2013 up on the reader board and wondered if the Episcopal Calendar was different from other calendars.  Well, the answer to that is, actually it is.

For instance when everyone else is America celebrating New Years on Jan 1, our church calendar celebrates Holy Name Day, 8 days after Christmas, when Jesus was brought to the temple the first time for his circumcision.

Now 40 days after Christmas when everyone else is celebrating Ground Hog Day, or actually today getting ready for the other Major Religious Holiday in America, the Super Bowl, we celebrate The Presentation.

Under Mosaic Law found in Leviticus 12, a mother who had given birth to a male child was considered ritually unclean for seven days, moreover she was to remain for thirty-three days "in the blood of her purification," as it says. So 7 and 33 is 40,  40 days after the birth, is this presentation in the temple of the baby, and offering of sacrifices to celebrate the end of the time.

Candles became associated with this day, a procession of candles, and blessing of candles, thus the name Candlemas, since we are in the season of Epiphany and because of the light imagery in Simeon's response to seeing the child Jesus.  Simeon words have become a regular part of our Evening Prayer service as we remember in the darkness of night:  "A light to enlighten the nations."
But not just light enabling us to see.  It is also about purification, as in our Malachi passage.  Light or fire is also about purification, cleansing, healing, the refiners fire which separates the dross, the impurities, from the pure silver and gold.

Interestingly enough Groundhog Day actually has its roots in Candlemas.   An old English saying went like this:  "If Candlemas Day is clear and bright, winter will have another bite.  If Candlemas brings cloud and rain, winter is gone and will not come again."   Though in the United States, from the German Pennsylvania Dutch tradition, we have the groundhog, in other traditions Candlemas is the day bears or wolves also emerge from hibernation to inspect the weather.  If the ground hog, bear or wolf, sees his shadow he goes back in for another six weeks nap, six more weeks of winter, but if the day is cloudy he remains out as the weather is going to be moderate.

Now this strange mixture of light and dark images as always seemed to be backwards to me.  A clear and bright day rather than being assurances of good weather means exactly the opposite.  The message seems to be don't get your hopes up, this sunny day will not last.  A warning about jumping to conclusions I guess.  Here light seems to signal dark days to come.

Simeon's foreboding words, his prophecy about Jesus, a warning actually to Mary and Joseph actually echo this.  This light that Simeon sees in Jesus will mean upheaval, the rising and falling of many.  Like the Song of Mary, things are going to be turned upside down by this baby.  The rich will be humbled, as well as the poor being exalted.   Depending on whether you are rising or falling, this might not be such good news at all.  The warning of dark days ahead, of suffering to come, takes a poignant personal turn, as Simeon tells, Mary, "A sword will pierce your heart as well."  What is going to happen to this child will break your heart.

On the other hand as the poem about Candlemas says, if it is a cloudy and rainy day, winter has gone away.  The hope is always that light shines in the darkness, that life comes from death, that joy comes in the morning, that Spring follows Winter, that the days of our pain and sorrow will come to an end, and what seems to be meaningless suffering will at least have a purifying effect, refining us as we are tested by fire, purifying us so that all the dross is burned off, and pure silver and gold at our core will be revealed.  This is the hope of a life of penance, of sanctification that we are all called to live.  Interestingly enough, our modern Ground Hog day even has some this layer of meaning that has surveyed.  Take the movie with Bill Murray.  He is forced to repeat the day, Ground Hog day, again and again and again, until he gets it right, until his transformation is complete.

We are also called to see Christ more clearly, love him more dearly, follow Christ more nearly. Seeing Christ more clearly.  Simeon and Anna saw this baby for who he was.  They devoted themselves to prayer and worship, immersed themselves in the worship of the temple.   Anna, an 84 year old woman, who never left the temple, but worshipped there fasting and praying night and day - She reminds me of Julian of Norwich, a 14th Century Mystic who was also an anchorite.  That means she lived a big chunk of her life in a little cubical attached to the church wall.  Imagine living like that.  Well, I can't imagine it really, seems way beyond what I could manage, and I really am not recommending it, but think of her perspective on life, as she was totally devoted to what happened week after week at this altar, the recitation of the story of salvation, the repetition of Jesus' last meal, again and again and again, the breaking of bread and pouring of wine, the sacrifice of this death and the hope of his resurrection was all she knew, what filled all of her days.  Julian knew nothing else but this experience.

People did come to her for prayers and wisdom.  Actually during a time of serious illness while she was still living at home, she had incredible visions which she recorded in her Showings, Revelations of Divine Love.  God lighted her whole being.  One of my favorite of her visions was her image of the whole world as a hazelnut held in the palm of God's hand.  She also had this incredible feminine image of God.  She talks about all of us, the whole world, even all the tension and discord of our diversity, struggling like Esau and Jacob, all existing in the womb of God, waiting to be born as a new creation.  She has some very graphic images of the suffering of Christ and the suffering of the whole world, but then she also has this wonderful line which TS Eliot quotes in the Four Quartets, "All shall be well and manner of thing shall be well."

This feast day of the Presentation, or Purification, actually was elevated from a minor feast to a major feast back in 6th century when the Candle light procession was credited with delivering Constantinople from a devastating plague.  It also sometimes gets merged with the Feast of St Blaise which is tomorrow, Feb 3 in which candles are used as a part of prayer of healing for throat ailments.  Lots of images of how candles are not just about shining a light, but have healing, purifying power as well.

So the story of St Blaise goes like this. Blaise was a doctor by trade and became a bishop in Armenia.  This was back in the 4th Century, and during a time of persecution he was being taken into custody, and a mother, whose only child was choking on a fishbone, threw herself at his feet and begged him to help. Touched by her grief, he prayed, and the child was cured. Consequently, Saint Blaise is invoked for protection against injuries and illnesses of the throat.  Even today some priests will pray, calling upon St Blaise, with two candles, which are crossed and held against the throats of the people being blessed.  Given the fact that so many of us have been sick lately this might be a good use of our time as well.

Lots of different superstitions, folk lore and practices get attached this day.   Candlemas is traditionally the day you bring in the cows in order to prepare the fields for planting.  It is a day to spread ashes in the fields to ensure a better harvest, or to place ashes on the roof to keep away evil spirits.  Newlyweds used to jump over a fire during Candlemas, both a purification and preparation for their life together.  I guess if they were able to risk being burned by the fire, they were able to take whatever was to come in marriage as well.

Lots and lots of images with various meanings, that lead to a multitude of traditional expressions  Some times it gets rather confusing all of the meaning that can be loaded into just one day.   Just look back into the history to see what has happened on Feb 2.   Just to name a few.  On Feb 2nd 1916 German Zeppelins dropped 400 bombs on Great Britain.  Buster Keaton was fired from MGM in 1933. Babe Ruth was elected into the baseball hall of fame in 1936.  On this day in 1943 the Germans surrendered to Russia.  GI Joe action figure was released in 1964.  1971 Idi Amin declared himself president of Uganda. On Feb 2nd 1990 South Africa lifted the ban on the African National Congress and announced that Nelson Mandela would be released.  Airplanes were highjacked, presidential campaigns launched, storms devastated the county side, epidemics raged and needed medicine arrived in Nome Alaska by sled dogs. Super Bowls are played, babies are born and people die . . .  and also on this day, a long time ago, a woman brought her baby son to the temple for a blessing.

Through all this wild cacophony of events, through all the strange and wonderful happenings here on earth, through all the joys and sorrows, risings and fallings, triumphs and sufferings, though all this messy, crazy life that seems impossible to understand, to make any sense of when taken as a whole even just on one day - through it all we catch the clear vision of Anna who has her eyes only on The Lord.  And we hear the words of Simeon who was told by God that he would not perish until he saw the coming of the Messiah.

Lord, you now have set your servant free *
    to go in peace as you have promised;
For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, *
    whom you have prepared for all the world to see:
A Light to enlighten the nations, *
    and the glory of your people Israel.

 

May we too, see this everlasting and eternal light shining through all the cloudy and rainy days!  May we know the purifying power of this eternal flame that burns in the heart of the creation.  May we see this Christ, this Savior that God has prepared for all the world to see.  May we on this day, and day by day throughout our lives, see him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him, wherever he leads, even to the sword that pierces our own hearts, may we follow him more nearly.  May we be guided by this light, so that either way, clear and bright, cloudy and rainy, whether winter is  going on or coming to an end, we will know that All Shall be Well and All Manner of Thing Shall be Well.