(Meditation for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on October 20, 2019, Proper 24)
Home Makeovers
If television is any indication,
our world is fascinated with home makeovers.
My brother used to live in Waco, Texas, and he worked at a church just
one block away from where Chip and Joanna Gaines worked their magic. It was surreal, he says, to see the tourists. There were people who actually wanted to come
and visit Waco.
Closer to home, I have to marvel
every time our church has a yard sale.
Our yard sale crew have become experts with pricing antique furniture and
all sorts of decorative paraphernalia. I’m
pretty sure they could put on a home makeover show of their own now.
Why is our world so fascinated
with home makeovers? Perhaps part of our
fascination is simply fantasy, a sort of vicarious wish fulfillment, where we
get to see on other houses the renovations and furnishings that we would like
for ourselves. But I wonder if there’s
not a deeper reason for our fascination.
I wonder if on some fundamental level we hope and believe in and
celebrate the possibility that what has fallen into disrepair can be made good
and beautiful again. I wonder if we
aren’t looking for confirmation that everything has potential, even the most
run-down house. I wonder if deep down
this has to do with us, with our suspicion that there is more to life, that we
can be truer to ourselves, that the world can be made over in a very good way.
“A
Priestly Kingdom”
When God delivers the Israelites
from slavery in Egypt, God does not simply liberate them. As the book of Exodus makes clear, something
much larger is happening. The big clue
to what’s going on is that the number seven keeps showing up. God gives seven commandments about the
tabernacle where the Israelites will worship; Moses and the Israelites respond
with seven acts of compliance. This
pattern of seven harkens back to the beginning of the biblical story, and it
suggests that through Israel God is embarking on a new creation.
In other words, God does not
simply set the Israelites free to roam the wilderness and find their own
way. God has liberated the Israelites in
order that they might help to usher in a new creation, that as liberated people
they might model for all the world what liberation looks like. God commissions the Israelites with the same
message with which Christ commissions his followers: not simply “Go,” but more
importantly, “Show!”
Here’s how God puts it at one point
in Exodus: “You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation”
(19:6). “A priestly kingdom” is another
way of saying a people who act like priests.
And priests, according to our scripture from last week, are people who
distinguish what is holy from what is not holy, what is pure from what is not. In other words, a priest is like a home
makeover host. A priest distinguishes
between what is not good and needs to go, and what is good and needs to be
developed. A priest acknowledges and
accepts the present reality even as he calls for a future possibility. A priest stands on the threshold. A priest sees the potential for something
good and beautiful, and helps make the distinctions that will bring that
potential to fulfillment.
A priest is like a parent or a
teacher or a coach, someone who welcomes a child just as they are but also sees
and calls forth what they could become.
God delivers Israel that they
might be like priests to the world, a threshold people who acknowledge and accept
the way things are even as they show and call forth the way things could be.
Different
Than the World
And as we all know, the truest
and most enduring form of teaching and showing is by example. Which is what we hear in today’s scripture, a
passage that many scholars consider to be the center of Leviticus, its
heartbeat: “You shall be holy, for the I Lord your God am holy” (19:2). How will the Israelites show the world what
liberation and the good life looks like?
They will live good, holy lives themselves.
Last week we talked about
holiness as making space for God.
Another key meaning of holiness is being different. To follow our compulsions, our biases, our
unexamined plans, is to be all-too-human.
But to make space for God is ultimately to be different. What follows the command, “You shall be
holy,” is an assortment of ethical and ritual instructions that have to do with
being different than the world: not living by the principles of impulse and
greed and convenience. These are the
unholy things that need to go, so that the makeover might be made complete, so
that the potential of this world might be fulfilled.
These various instructions
culminate in verses 17 and 18, where we see a stark contrast between the way of
the world and the way of God: “You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your
kin; you shall reprove your neighbor….You shall not take vengeance or bear a
grudge, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” What I hear in these two celebrated verses,
from which will spring the golden rule, is the same good news Jesus proclaimed:
“Don’t judge. And don’t keep score so
that you might take vengeance or hold the higher ground. Instead love.” God’s new creation is founded on a simple
invitation: love. That is the crucial difference
between this world of judgment and keeping score and the eternal circle of
vengeance and violence, and the new world that God is creating.
I am reminded of Jesus on the
cross. What his followers likely hoped
for—that he would come down from the cross with might and muscle and vengeance
and show everyone they were wrong and he was right—is in fact the way of this
world. Such a sequence of events would have
been all-too-human. What his followers
saw instead was something different, something holy and divine: a man
who with his last breath forgave his enemies.
Not
the What, But the How
The writer of Hebrews in the New
Testament says that Jesus is our high priest.
He is the threshold person par excellence. He lived with us in this world, but he showed
us a different world—a world makeover, one that he called the kingdom of
God. In other words, he distinguished
between the world and the kingdom. He
distinguished between the things that are passing and not worth our time and
the things that are full of life and will ever be so. And he called us to join his makeover project
by making the same distinction, by discarding things like pride and coercive
power, greed and impatience, all the things that preserve the circle of
vengeance and violence, and in their place cultivating things like love and
trust, giving and forgiving, all the things that liberate and bring new life.
You and I both stand at
thresholds. We probably both wonder
where we will be in a year’s time. But
as Jesus reminds us in our gospel scripture today, these concerns are not holy. What we will wear, what we will eat, what
we’ll be doing, who we’ll be with, what the world around us will be like. These things are what the world worries about,
he says, but not you. You strive for the
kingdom, for things like loving your neighbor and not judging them, welcoming
the stranger and not counting the cost, embracing interruptions like children
and the sick and the lonely.
It’s almost as if Jesus is
saying, it’s not the what that’s holy.
It’s the how. To live as a
threshold person means to welcome the uncertainty of our lives—we don’t know
what the final makeover will look like.
What we know is the how.
Just as Chip and Joanna know how to fix a living room or how
to renovate a basement, just as a coach knows how to encourage his players
and cultivate their skills, we know how to live.
The good news of Leviticus, which
is also the gospel of Jesus Christ, is that even though we don’t know the
future, we know that it can be made good and beautiful. And according to both Leviticus and Jesus, it
all starts in the simplest way: by loving our neighbor.
Prayer
Holy
God,
Whose
love
Orders
all of life
In
goodness and beauty:
We
are a work in progress.
Bless
us at this threshold
With
levitical hearts
That
beat not according to worldly impulse
But
according to the kingdom of God,
Where
love reigns.
In
Christ, our high priest: Amen.
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