(Meditation for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on September 8, 2019, Proper 18)
Hocus Pocus
As a child, I was fascinated with
magic. My family once recorded a
David Copperfield magic show on television, and I would watch the show over and
over again on sick days home from school.
I learned soon enough, of course,
that magic words were not enough to perform magic. “Hocus pocus” alone wouldn’t get the job done. Magic relied on sleight of hand and
movements that I could not see.
There was a secrecy and a privilege involved in magic. Only a select few knew all that was
happening.
Interestingly enough, the words
“hocus pocus” tell the story of magic’s inner circle, how only a few fortunate
persons know the secret.
Historians explain that the words “hocus pocus” derive from the Latin
words “hoc est corpus meum,” or “This is my body.” In other words, long ago when the church worship service
took place in Latin, a language that most churchgoers did not speak, the words
that the priest spoke at communion “hoc est corpus…” were like magic. They were the secret that only the
clergy knew. They were the magic
words—the words that transformed bread into body, that made an ordinary meal
into communion with God.
Historians tell us that this is
not the only case where a few religious insiders held secret knowledge apart
from the masses. Rewind a couple
thousand years, and the situation was similar among ancient Israel’s
neighbors. If among the Canaanites
a person or a house became possessed by a demon, the priest may come and utter
an incantation. If there were a
drought or a natural disaster needing remedy, the priest may pronounce certain
privileged words that only priests know.
Naturally this contributed to the idea that some people were closer to
God (or the gods) than others. The
more you knew, the nearer you could draw to the divine. And so it was that the priests, who
knew the most, became the inner circle.
But in ancient Israel, we see a
different picture begin to emerge.
God’s First Order of Business
When the Israelites escape Egypt,
they are a mess. They have only
ever known the chaos of slavery.
They don’t know what a well-ordered life looks like. They don’t know what goodness is.
But then amid this chaos comes
the voice of God. There in the
wilderness God speaks to the Israelites.
Specifically God gives seven speeches, instructing the Israelites to
build a special tent. This seven puts us on notice that God is not
just making casual conversation.
What God’s doing here is cosmic.
Just as in seven days God ordered the original chaos of the world (the tohu wa-bohu) into goodness and life, so
now in seven speeches God begins reordering the world of the Israelites. This tent represents a new order, a new
chance at life. We might call it a
microcosm of the larger order of goodness and life that God intends. If you’re going to begin reordering
chaos, you have to start somewhere.
That somewhere is this tent.
That brings us to the start of
Leviticus, where the first thing that happens is God speaks from the tent. We are on the edge of our seats,
wondering just how God will begin reordering the Israelites’ world. What comes out of God’s mouth first
will represent literally the first order of business in this new creation.
God with Us
Here’s what God says: “When any
of you bring an offering…to the Lord” (1:2). That sounds pretty mundane to our ears, or even primitive if
we’re inclined to write off sacrificial offerings as a barbaric exchange where
God’s help is bought by sacrifice.
In the Hebrew, however, it sounds revolutionary.
The first word in the Hebrew here
is adam, which is the most basic word
for human. It’s a word from the
creation story, when God creates adam
in God’s image, male and female God creates them. Adam is as
democratic a word as you can find.
Adam means male and female,
young and old, this people or that people. Any human that walks this planet is adam.
So God’s first order of business
concerns adam, or anyone. “When adam of you”—that is, when any of you, male or female, rich or
poor, Israelite or not—“brings an offering.” And it’s here that we come across another crucial Hebrew
word. The word “offering,” qorban, derives from the Hebrew root qarav, which means “to draw near.” In other words, an offering is
fundamentally linked to drawing near to someone. An offering means you are entering into another person’s
presence.
So the very first thing God does
to reorder the world of the Israelites is to say that adam, anyone, everyone,
can draw near to God. Everyone can
enter into God’s presence. The
first order of this new world is that God wants to be with us. Every year at Christmas, we celebrate
Jesus with that special word Immanuel,
which means “God with us.” We see
the same idea here at the beginning of Leviticus. Before we get into all the rules and thou shalts and thou
shalt nots, we hear the basic building block of this new world order: God wants
to be with us. It doesn’t matter
who you are, what you’ve done, what you look like. God wants to be with you. You can draw near.
And it’s an open invitation.
Everyone can draw near.
Common Worship
Now what follows next is a little
gruesome to our ears. The offering
that you bring is offered as a sacrifice.
It is slaughtered, its blood dashed against the altar, its flesh cut up
and arranged on the fire and burnt until nothing is left but smoke. We won’t get into the logic of
sacrifice today, but there is one critical detail in the process of sacrifice
that I’d like to point out. Who
makes the sacrifice? I always
thought it was the priests. I
thought the worshiper brought the animal and then the priest did all the dirty
work. So I was surprised to learn
that in fact the worshiper does almost everything. The worshiper selects the animal, brings it to the tent, slaughters
it, and cuts it up into parts for the fire. (All I could think when I first realized this, was thank God
I don’t live in ancient Israel!)
But all of this is huge, and
especially in a book like Leviticus.
Leviticus gets it name from the word “Levite.” The Levites were the tribe of Israel from which the priests
came. So Leviticus is a book that
focuses on the priests and their duties in this special tent of God. Now remember what’s happening among
Israel’s neighbors. In many other
cultures, only the priests could draw near to God. Only the priests knew the words to say and the deeds to
do. Only they had access to the “hocus
pocus” of sacred moments. But here
in Leviticus, which itself focuses on priests, we see nonetheless from the very
beginning that everyone draws near to
God. This truly is “common
worship.” God wants to be with everyone. That is the first word of this new creation, the first order
of business.
By the way, that reminds me of a
little detail later in chapter 1, where provision is made for the persons who
cannot afford an animal from the flock.
They may instead offer a turtledove or a pigeon. The guidelines go out of their way to
make sure that everyone can draw near.
(Fascinating footnote: we know Mary and Joseph must have been poor, for
when they offer a sacrifice after Jesus’ birth, they choose which animals for
sacrifice? The turtledove and
pigeon. It’s as if Luke in the New
Testament is making the same point.
Immanuel. God with us. All
of us, even the poor.)
Everyone a Minister
Today our practice of faith looks
rather different than it did two thousand years ago. But underneath the obvious differences, there remains the
same fundamental fabric: everyone draws near to God. This is essentially what Jesus taught and embodied when he
transformed the table into a place of communion, where the lowly were welcomed
and lifted up, and sinners were welcomed and forgiven, and the broken were
welcomed and blessed with healing and wholeness. Everyone—adam—is
welcome at the Jesus table.
One of the blessings and gifts of
a small church, I believe, is that everyone plays a part. I still remember the words of wisdom I
received from Richard, a former Methodist minister who lived in the memory care
unit at Symphony Manor. When I
asked him for advice, he said, “I always tried to find something for everyone
to do.” Which is a way of saying
what Gayton Road already says: everyone here is a minister. We all draw near to God.
And we all have gifts that
draw others near to God too.
You’ll see in your bulletin today
an insert about Gayton Road’s Ministry Teams. I hope you’ll spend some time pondering and praying about
your involvement in one or more of these teams. Some of us draw nearest to Christ at tables, others in the
close support of small groups, and still others in reaching out to the
community. Wherever it is that you
draw near to God, I hope that it will sustain you and give you life and inspire
you to share the good news of God-with-us. I hope that it will be the first order of business in your
world. Because according to Leviticus,
it is the first order of business in God’s.
Prayer
God with us,
In Christ
Who invites everyone to draw
near,
We have come to know
Your unconditional welcome and
love.
This communion is the first order
of business
In your world.
May we so order our lives,
Sharing with others
The welcome and love we receive
from you.
In Jesus, friend of sinners. Amen.
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