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."
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