I’ve got out-of town depositions today, so I’m posting in two parts this week. By the way, you can view this week’s Revised Common Lectionary texts at http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=19 (right-click the link to open a separate tab or window).
Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18
The OT book of Leviticus gets a bad rap; and true enough, there’s some harsh and some puzzling stuff in there. But I remember the first time I read it, being struck by how very practical an approach to religion it describes. We can tend to spiritualize and ethereal-ize our faith to the extent that it loses all grounding in practice. Well, the Levitical approach will bring you back to earth quick.
If there’s a theme to Leviticus, I think it’s this: God is holy, and God wants his people to be holy because we belong to God; the way we “be holy” is by doing certain things that show we belong to God. This week’s OT reading communicates that theme clearly. It starts with God’s admonition to the people (v. 2) to “be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” It then follows with examples of practicing holiness. For example, in verses 9-10, we are told that providing for the poor and foreigners is to be part and parcel of how we make a living: instead of squeezing out all the profit we can, we’re to sacrifice some of our profit margin for those in need. Likewise verse 13, says we’re to practice concern for laborers. I take it a boss might want to “keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning” to make sure the worker shows back up for work the next day; i.e., “Good day’s work - I’ll pay you when you get here for work tomorrow.” Instead, Leviticus says laborers are to be treated with dignity and respect. Verses 17-18 talk about loving our neighbors, and it embarrasses me to no end when I think about how “love your neighbor as yourself” gets pop-psychologized - e.g. “you have to first love yourself in order to love others.” It seems to me the point is, “Don’t harbor grudges against each other; instead, resolve your conflicts, because you are a community and you need each other.”
One final observation: each of the admonitions here concludes with the declaration, “I am the Lord your God.” The idea – these practices flow from the nature of God. Again, God is holy and these practices are the way that we as God’s people reflect that holiness.
1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23
Sometimes Paul’s logic gets the better of him and he goes off on these tangents, spinning out some metaphor or theological concept until it’s really not clear what he’s saying. I see some of that going on in this text. Verses 12-15 are left out partly because they’re one of these tangents; and then there’s another sort of tangent at the end of the reading. The one point I will zero in on is in vs. 16-17, where Paul tells the Corinthian Christians that they are God’s temple and God’s Spirit dwells in them. In the NRSV there’s a footnote calling attention to the fact that the “you” there is plural: Paul is not saying that our individual human bodies are God’s temples (i.e., this is not some middle school sex ed fodder), but rather that the congregation is altogether God’s house, where God’s Spirit lives. As we’ve been following these readings the last few weeks and have seen (1) that Paul’s concern is conflict in the church and (2) that Paul has employed these different metaphors – garden, building – to illustrate the life of the congregation, this is pretty clear to us. So, Paul’s point: nasty conflict in the church tears down God’s own building project!
Stay tuned for reflections on the Gospel text!
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