Unique & Set Apart -- As Sacrament

Pastor Tommy Thompson
7th Sunday after The Theophany of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ
Lev 19:1-2, 9-18; Matthew 5:38-48
20 February 2011

“Unique and Set Apart as Sacrament”

I remember a few years ago, when we lived in Morgantown, WV, we were looking for a family activity on a nice Saturday in the fall. We looked in the phonebook and found there was a small zoo not too far away from us, just across the state line in Pennsylvania--the Woodland Zoo. I’ve been a kid and I have kids...i have been to my fair share of zoos...but this zoo is the one I remember most vividly.

We expected that with it being a small zoo, there wouldn’t be a crowd...that we’d enjoy a leisurely and somewhat quiet stroll along the path to let the children see the animals. But I was wrong. When we arrived, there was hardly a parking space...when i finally found one, we got out of the car, loaded up the stroller and headed up the hill to see what was so special about this zoo out in the middle of nowhere.

When we got to the top of the hill, purchased tickets and started on the path, we noticed that most everyone was huddled around one particular cage (a larger cage...probably a couple of acres)...It wasn’t a fierce lion or a funny monkey...it was something rare and unique--an albino white-tailed deer. It was strange...not something we are used to seeing in the everyday world ... people wanted to see it for themselves...it was unique and we were drawn to its strangeness...so much that even today, it is the one zoo experience that I remember just like it was yesterday.

In the Old Testament lesson for today, God says to Israel: “You will be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Anyone here ever started reading the bible from Genesis to Revelation and all is going well until you get to the book of Leviticus and get bogged down by the all the details? I liken Leviticus to the rubrics in our hymnbook...that red print that instructs the liturgist on how to properly perform the ritual. In Leviticus, we read through the details God gives his people on burnt offerings, grain offerings, offerings of well-being, sin-offerings, and every other kind of offering...it offers instructions on sacrifices, ordination rituals, which foods and animals are clean/unclean, and general community-relations instructions. You might not get very far in Leviticus before you throw your hands up and say, “What’s the point with all this rubric?!”

I definitely understand how you could get bogged down in a book full of ritual instruction and community relations issues...but if we keep reading, i believe the point of the book becomes clear. After 18 long chapters of instruction we arrive at chapter 19 where God makes a statement about His people. God says, “You will be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.”

Ah! There is a rhyme and reason for all the details that have preceded this statement! These rituals and instructions are not to be undergone legalistically as if they are an end in themselves...No, by undergoing these divine things, the people of God are being formed to be something! And that something God says is “holy.”

What does that mean? What does it mean for God’s people to be holy? How does careful and faithful attention to chapters 1-18 engender holiness in and among the people of God?

Some of us don’t like that word “holy.” We hear that word too often on the news in conjunction with the word “war.” We cannot understand how holiness leads to such hatred and violence...good reason to have negative feelings arise when we hear the word.

Some of us have had negative encounters or have heard too many stories of people who called themselves holy yet their entire agenda seemed to be about being different from others for the sake of calling others, well...others. We don’t have to go further than our own history to see the lists...we don’t drink...we don’t watch movies...we don’t play cards...our women don’t let their hair down...our men don’t wear shorts...based on this form of life, it seems that to be holy means to “don’t.”

What comes to your mind when God says, “You will be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy?” legalism? war? exclusivism?

Well that is not at all what God meant when he said that by paying attention to the details of life that he has laid down for them, His people would be holy. I think to put it this way helps us: “You will be unique, for I, the Lord your God, am unique.”

To be holy is to be unique. The people of God have been set apart and given the Torah along with all the rubric and instruction so that they may be formed by God to be God’s unique/special people. The problem is that the people of God liked that word special too much. We enjoyed being set apart but we forgot the reason for our being set apart. We became like that albino deer...we want people to see us as different but that’s about it. Our difference points to the sameness of everyone else and stops there.

But that’s not what God intended when he said, “Be unique/special/holy, because I, the Lord, your God am unique/special/holy.” When we receive only part of the call to holiness but not the whole, we are in very dangerous territory. God calls a people and makes covenant with them, setting them apart from the world as a unique people, not as an end in itself but as the means to the end which is God Himself.

The people of God’s holiness has been like cooking for the sake of cooking but never enjoying the tasty results. Oh for God’s people to hear and accept God’s call to be set apart, not for the sake of being set apart, but to be the living, visible, and tangible means through which God’s life is revealed to the world!

Oh but the people of God only got part of the call! Jesus was born into a world full of signs that said “Danger-Keep out” “Contaminated” “No Trespassing” or “Beware of Dog.” Unfortunately these signs were not put up on doors and walls but on people...and the saddest part of all is that they were hung on people by those who thought of themselves as the set-apart and holy people of God. They thought they were unique, but they had become exactly like that which they were taken out of--the world of pride and competition...the old creation gone haywire due to sin and rebellion.

It is into this world that Jesus is born as the One who will sum up the vocational call of Israel in Himself. God called Israel out of the world, set her apart, in order that His unique, holy love might be made manifest to the nations. She liked being set apart as special, but that’s about it. Jesus shows up and he rips of the signs God’s people have hung around people’s necks! He knows His Father well and demonstrates a holiness that truly is so utterly different than anyone has ever seen. Love that embraces the stranger...the widow...the orphan...the vulnerable...rather than taking advantage of the weak, we see love that lifts up the weak from the ash heaps and hurls the sinful power of the decaying world down from it’s thrones.

Jesus sums up Israel in himself fulfilling that which God said of Israel so long ago: “You will be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” Finally the uniqueness of God is revealed by One who did not see the set-apartness as something to be grasped! Never once did Jesus see the “set-apartness” as the end but always as the means...the means that led to the healing of the whole creation when death itself had to stare God in the face!

Sisters and Brothers, Christ is our holiness! Like that albino deer whose uniqueness summoned us to its cage, so, we have been drawn to the uniqueness that God is...the other-focused love of God incarnate in the one who has been named Jesus.

We cannot be holy...we’ve proven that. But Christ is our holiness....and when we were baptized, we became one with Christ--dying to the obsession of being set apart as end in itself and rising in grace with power to be the means through which others experience the healing love of God!

Like God’s instruction in Leviticus, Jesus has instituted a particular way of life, revealed most clearly at this altar where bread and juice become the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, feeding us with the same so that we might become what we eat for the sake of the world. Paying attention to the details of the unique form of life to which Jesus has invited us forms us to be unique, holy people, becoming the means through which God is revealed to a world full of people wearing signs they were never meant to wear!

Faithful receptivity of the particular form of life opened to us by our Lord Jesus Christ will make us so unique that we might even find ourselves with power to do that which we never even imagined--loving not only our neighbors who are like us...but even our enemies who hate us. Because the one we eat stared those who hate him in the face and said, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do,” and in so doing, gave them life.

O God, grant us enough faith this day that we might accept your grace and become what you said we will be. As we pay attention to the details of the church’s worship and community life, may we become what we eat -- sacrament--a means through which your unique life is conveyed to the world! Amen.