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Leviticus 25
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Well, it has already been a busy day, as we have had this opportunity to celebrate with all these families that have dedicated or baptized their children with us across our services. And so once again, it's just such an honor to get to participate in these moments as a community. So thank you to those families. However, we have another big moment to celebrate today, and that is the fact that after two months, we are finally finishing off Leviticus. Now I know some of you are excited about that.
Speaker 1:Some of you have been really digging this series. You've enjoyed a more historical critical approach to the text. You've been intrigued by exploring some of the cultural elements of the ancient Near East. Maybe you've just never had an opportunity to walk through a text like this and you are glad, you're proud that you've survived. I can resonate with that.
Speaker 1:I honestly wasn't sure if commons would survive going into this series couple months in Leviticus. I'm kidding, at least a little bit. And surprisingly, we have actually continued to grow even larger during this series. So who knows what's going on? But I also recognize that some of you have been struggling in this series as well.
Speaker 1:There is or there can be a very real disconnect between the text of Leviticus and the story of Jesus. And that is just obvious when you read the harder parts of this book. Parts that we have not shied away from in this series. And yet, the text of Leviticus was written and collected and preserved and even critiqued by a culture that would eventually give rise to Jesus. And this is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Bible as religious text.
Speaker 1:It is not static. It is an unfolding tale that slowly and progressively reveals God in and through human history until we reach the central conviction of the Christian faith. Now at Commons, one of the ways we say this is that the scriptures are not flat. They are building and bubbling with anticipation for the climax in Christ. But that it's only in Jesus that the entire project of God is made visible.
Speaker 1:And this is why even when we look at Leviticus, every week in this series, we have pointed ourselves and we have oriented ourselves back toward Jesus. For these past seven weeks, we have come back and we have landed on the gospels and Jesus every single time. Because without that, the story is incomplete. We can do lectures on Leviticus. We can study the ancient Near East, but without Jesus, we are just doing cultural anthropology.
Speaker 1:And here, we want to keep Jesus in the center. Now today, we have one final section of Leviticus to work through. But before that, I do want to go back and recapture some of our earlier conversations as we find ourselves about to wrap up this extended series. Because eight weeks ago, we cracked the book of Leviticus, and we spent a couple weeks looking at the opening rituals, primarily the sacrifices in Leviticus. And part of what we have to keep in mind in that section is that in the ancient world, sacrifice was were simply part of how ancient peoples imagined communication with the gods.
Speaker 1:And so what we're seeing in Leviticus is part of the incredible grace of the one true God who says, okay, we can speak your language, and we can start where you are, but I'm not going to leave you there. I desire mercy, not sacrifice, acknowledgment, not burnt offerings, says the Lord. And so we saw how all of these different sacrifices played a unique role in ancient Israel. The ways in which thanksgiving and reverence and even awareness of accidental unrecognized sins were taken seriously and brought before God. We talked about the priests.
Speaker 1:We talked about the purity code. We explored the day of atonement, Yom Kippur in Hebrew, where the people gathered and they confessed their sins before God, but then they placed those confessions over a goat, a literal scapegoat that they sent out away from the community into the wilderness. And it's an interesting ritual, but if you imagine it sociologically, it's incredibly profound. And they gathered together, and they confessed their sins before God, and then they sent them away. So the community was forgiven by God.
Speaker 1:Sins were wiped clean by his grace, but then together as a community, all of the hurt and all of the mistrust, all of the tension and the tendency to hold on and want to blame each other that was all sent away once a year. Now, I have no need for us to go and find a goat and bring it here, have us send it out into traffic after the service. But I do want to be part of a community that regularly and ritually sends our hurts away. In fact, this is part of what we do in the Eucharist. We come and we gather and we collectively stand before God and before each other to know that we are welcome at his table.
Speaker 1:And so when I stand in line for the bread and the wine, and I am in front of someone, and I am after someone else, when I stand and I take my meal from my brother or my sister, I am acknowledging myself before God, but equally, I am acknowledging you as loved before God as well in that moment. Now from there, we talked about the second purity section, some of those infamous passages about sexuality in Leviticus, how to read them in their appropriate context, and then as Jesus again reinterprets and then fulfills the law with his call to grace and neighborliness in our lives. And that brought us to last week where Joel talked about Sabbath and rest, and the idea that Sabbath was created not as a rule to weigh us down, but as a ritual intended to invite us into the rest of God. Today, we have one final section, and this is one of the truly beautiful and lasting progressive images in Leviticus, and is the call to social justice. But first, let's pray.
Speaker 1:God, you are our one true and lasting refuge, our steadfast shelter, our calm in the midst of whatever storm we find ourselves. And so as we speak to you today, as we seek you this day, we need you, and we long for your presence to be made real with us in this place. Even when we confuse our images or our thoughts of you, even when we run from you, even when we wander long and far from your heart and we squander your blessings and our talents. Even then, we trust that you continue to call us home to your table. We want to come home to you, to each other, and to this table that you have set for us.
Speaker 1:And so if we find ourselves close to you today, then we are grateful and we celebrate. But if we are far from you in this moment, then we call out for a sign or a light or a hint of the path that would lead us back to you. Would you show us your way that we might rest in the peace of your arms and then work toward the justice that you imagine for your creation. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Okay. We do have one final section of Leviticus to look at today, and Joel actually hinted at it last week when he talked about Sabbath. He said, there are two major arguments for Sabbath in the scripture. The first comes from the creation story in Genesis. God works for six days and then he rests on the seventh day.
Speaker 1:And so this rhythm of work and rest is a fundamental part of the created order. But then in Deuteronomy and echoed here in Leviticus, there's actually a second rationale for Sabbath, and that is the justice component. See, in Leviticus, Sabbath is tied more closely to the history of the people in Egypt than it is to the creation of the world. Now this is not in conflict. These are complementary ideas that work together, But the focus in Leviticus is on the idea that the Hebrew people need a Sabbath because they had been treated as slaves without a rhythm of rest in their lives.
Speaker 1:Every day, work, work, work, work, work, said Rihanna. At least I'm pretty sure that's what that song is about. Am I right? No? K.
Speaker 1:But therefore, the Israelites now free must learn about the lesson of rest in their lives. Not only for themselves, but also for their slaves and even for their animals. So rest was for everyone in Israel regardless of social status. Now that in itself is a pretty remarkably progressive posture, especially given the social tenor of the ancient Near East. But we are just getting started here.
Speaker 1:Because Leviticus 25 starting in verse one says, the Lord said to Moses out Mount Sinai, speak to the Israelites and say to them, when you enter the land, I am going to give you the land itself must observe a Sabbath to the Lord. For six years, sow your fields, and for six years, prune your vineyards and gather their crops. But in the seventh year, the land is to have a year of Sabbath rest. A Sabbath to the Lord. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards.
Speaker 1:Do not reap what grows itself or harvest the grapes of your untended vines. The land is to have a year of rest. Whatever the land yields during the year of Sabbath will be food for you, for yourself, your male and your female servants, your hired worker, the temporary resident who live among you, as well as your livestock and the wild animals in your land. Whatever the land produces may be eaten. Now if you're wondering here, verse five says, do not reap or harvest the fields during the seventh year.
Speaker 1:Verse six says, you might eat whatever the land yields during the seventh year. That might seem like a contradiction, but distinction here is that to reap katzar in Hebrew and to harvest batzar in Hebrew, obviously, are related words. What they refer to is the gathering of food for storage or sale. So that's what's off the table in year seven. When verse six says, you may eat what the land yields, what it actually says is something more like this, the land will be food to you.
Speaker 1:The point being that you are stepping back out of the equation, and you are trusting that the land will continue to produce without you. Sabbath is about remembering that the world does not depend on you. Now, I love the quote we read last week from Jamie Smith. To go to bed is to let go of the myth that everything depends on me. It is a daily practice of Sabbath keeping.
Speaker 1:The point of which is to rest in the sovereignty of God. So that's the idea here. Except now, you do it for an entire year out of every seven. But we're not done. Because verse eight says, count off seven Sabbath years, seven times seven years, so that the seven Sabbath years amount to a period of forty nine years.
Speaker 1:Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month on the day of atonement, sound the trumpet throughout your land and consecrate the fiftieth year to proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you. Each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. Now, couple things here. First of all, the fiftieth year is problematic here.
Speaker 1:Because if this literally means the fiftieth year, then it would come after the forty ninth year. No surprises there. Hooray for math. But that would also be a Sabbath year. And so you would have people trying to survive for two years without a harvest.
Speaker 1:Now that's tough. The thing is, numbers are used slightly differently in Hebrew. And so for example, the scholar Martin Note argues that this is an example of inclusive reckoning, and that the forty ninth and the fiftieth years actually refer to the same thing. Now that might sound strange, but you get things like this in Hebrew, where they will talk about something eight days later. And what that means is one week later.
Speaker 1:And what's happening is that in Hebrew, you include the day that you're in as part of the counting. That's what we call inclusive reckoning. That may be what's happening here. And that this reference to the fiftieth year is actually the forty ninth year including the year that it was spoken, possibly. Regardless, it's important to note that this jubilee is not just a family reunion, At least not in the sense that we recognize that today.
Speaker 1:Now, I don't know about you, but I have a pretty small extended family. And so I am always amazed when people tell me that they are going to have a family reunion, and they have booked out the TELUS Convention Center to host it because 6,000 people are coming to town. I'm like, really? That's all your family. Like, bunnies are meant to be pets, not inspiration, guys.
Speaker 1:Slow down. But this passage is not just about people returning to the family home to check-in or to catch up and have a good time to enjoy each other's company for the weekend. What it's about is a full socioeconomic reset in Israel every fifty years. So every seventh year, you have a Sabbath year. And in that year, no one reaps or harvests.
Speaker 1:Everyone simply takes what they need. In fact, the text goes out of its way to say that for that year, slave or foreigner or worker or migrant or wealthy landowner, everyone is on equal terms for a year. But in this seventh seventh, this Sabbathly Sabbath as we heard last week, the text says that each of you is to return to your property. But what this really means here is that each of you is to have your property returned to you. Now, in ancient Israel, it was in many ways a capitalist environment.
Speaker 1:Families were given land as they entered the promised land, and they could work, and they could produce, they could grow a lot, they could harvest that, they could sell that, and they could become very wealthy. And they could also be very lazy and let their land sit. They could ignore the hard work of farming and get themselves into trouble. Perhaps, they could hit a run of bad luck, a weak harvest, or a death in the family, a season of trouble that was utterly beyond their control, and they could end up in need. Well, Leviticus actually has rules in place to deal with that as well, to ensure that the destitute are never left without.
Speaker 1:Last week, we actually read from chapter 23. Do not reap to the very edges of your fields or gather the gleanings of your harvests. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner residing among you. Essentially, says, don't grab everything you can. Even if it's yours to grab, leave something for others.
Speaker 1:And this verse came into play last year when we studied the story of Ruth together. She and her mother-in-law are poor. They don't have land, and so they go and they gather the leftovers in the field of a man named Boaz. Spent some time in that a year ago. That passage is directly related to Leviticus here.
Speaker 1:But what if you're an Israelite with land who's fallen on hard times? Well, this is essentially a capitalist society, and so the first thing you do is you sell your land. And maybe you take those proceeds, and you try to make a better way, and maybe you do. Things take a turn for the better, and you move forward. Great.
Speaker 1:But the truth is life in the ancient world without land was hard. And eventually, what would happen is that people would be forced to sell themselves into service. Now, within Israel, this was framed as hired work or sometimes you might see it translated as indentured service, but what it amounted to was slavery. Now we'll see why they don't call it slavery in a moment here. But let's pause for a second because I know that it is hard for most of us to imagine the idea that one person could own another.
Speaker 1:However, the sad reality is that for most of human history and even for many today, the distance that we might feel between ourselves and the idea of slavery is nonexistent. It's hard for you to imagine. If it is, then consider that struggle a blessing because millions before us and millions today do not have that distance that we do. And so in ancient Israel, those who ended up in this indentured service to their fellow Hebrews were for all intents and purposes slaves. But what this year of Jubilee was designed to do, in much the same way the day of atonement was designed to wipe clean the slate when it came to sin, Jubilee was designed to wipe clean the slate economically.
Speaker 1:And so every fifty years, indentured servants were set free, the land was returned back to its original owners. This is why Leviticus makes a distinction between service and slavery. In practice, it was the same, but within Israel, there was always an escape clause even if it took fifty years. In fact, if you read a bit farther, verse 14 says that if you sell land to any of your own people or buy land from them, do not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your own people on the basis of the number of years since the jubilee, and you are to sell to your people on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops.
Speaker 1:When the years are many, you are to increase the price, but when the years are few, you are to decrease the price. Why? Because what is really being sold to you is the number of crops. The land belongs to God. And this is important because the fundamental principle here behind this system is that the land belongs to God.
Speaker 1:The means of production, if you wanna talk in Marxist terms, that belongs to God. I mean, you can work, and you can produce, and you can become very wealthy and blessed, but never forget where generosity truly flows from. God. The scholar Gordon Wenham summarizes the work of another scholar Robert North when he writes that Jubilee was intended to prevent the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a very few. Every Israelite had an inalienable right to his family land and to his freedom.
Speaker 1:And if he lost them through falling into debt, he recovered them in jubilee. This law is opposed equally to the monopolistic tendencies of unbridled capitalism and to thoroughgoing communism where all property is held in the hands of the state. There's a responsibility here that's being vested in the people. Now despite the fact that there is still a long way to go in this text, The simple truth is, the Israelites were still allowed to own slaves from other nations, and those people were unfortunately not eligible for release in the year of Jubilee. So this Jubilee, it was still nationalistic, it was still tribal, and it still did not quite articulate a world in which all peoples were treated equally.
Speaker 1:And yet, even here in this ancient text are the roots of an imagination that would continue to push back against the status quo. Debts forgiven, slaves freed, land returned. A systemic acknowledgment that no one should forever be defined by their worst decisions. Some of us need to hear that today, that none of us should be defined forever by our worst moments. But what's really fascinating to me is that if we take this story and we follow this line all the way to Jesus, we find him once again pointing us back to Leviticus with renewed eyes.
Speaker 1:And so if we go to Luke four, Jesus is just about to start his public ministry. And he's been out in the desert, and so he comes back into town, and he goes into the synagogue in his hometown on the Sabbath, and he picks up the scroll of the prophets. And he takes a second to find a very specific passage that he's looking for. And then he reads out, the spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
Speaker 1:Then he rolls up the scroll, he hands it back to the attendant, and he says, today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. That was a pretty gutsy move, especially in your hometown where everybody knows you as Mary's kid. But Jesus is actually reading from the prophet Isaiah here. And in Isaiah, this phrase, the year of the Lord's favor, that is a direct reference to the year of Jubilee from Leviticus. However, notice that even by the time of Isaiah, by the time of the prophets, what has happened to Jubilee?
Speaker 1:It's become more than just economic. It's become more than just social justice. It has become a metaphor in the human or Hebrew imagination for complete and perfect freedom and release and liberty in God's kingdom. So slaves are freed, but now so are prisoners. Land is returned, but now so is sight.
Speaker 1:The poor are blessed, but now so are the oppressed in whatever way they may find themselves under someone else's boot. And Jesus arrives on the scene, and he says all of that, this expanded imagination of Jubilee we hear in the prophets, it all starts here with me. But what's really compelling for me is that if you go back and you read the passage from Isaiah, there is something that Jesus has actually left out. Isaiah 61 actually reads, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God. Now thing is in Isaiah, this is all about God's blessing on Israel and his vengeance against her enemies.
Speaker 1:You gotta remember that the second half of Isaiah was written while the Jews were in exile in Babylon. That's the original context for this. God is going to bless Israel and free them from Babylon. He's gonna punish Babylon for conquering them. And Jubilee has become bigger and bigger and bigger in their imagination.
Speaker 1:Freedom and liberty have gone beyond just economics, and they have moved into every aspect of what it means to be human. But there is still a bit of this insider mentality here. God's blessings are for us. And Jesus comes along, and he says to his people, yes. Jubilee is more than Leviticus imagined.
Speaker 1:It's more than economics. It's more than technicalities and rules. It was always about an imagination that would be planted, and it would blossom and grow, perhaps even flourish so that it might transform you and us from the inside out. And, yes, it started with us, but here's the thing. It was never just for us.
Speaker 1:In fact, justice only ever really becomes justice when it is for someone else. And so Jesus arrives, and he says, I am here to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Full stop. Leviticus for everyone. And this is what it means for us to learn from Jubilee.
Speaker 1:Jesus takes us past this tribal mentality, and he moves us beyond this insider language. He democratizes religion by eliminating the very idea of an outsider in our language. And what that means is that this deeply held, this internalized sense of community that we see back in Leviticus has now become the vision for every single person we encounter in life. And so when you create a business and you employ someone and you find the right role for the right person and you give them the opportunity to flourish, You proclaim the Lord's favor in their life. And when you sit with someone, and you let them tell their story, and you listen, and you honor them, and you acknowledge their pain or their success or their struggle or their victory, and you affirm them as valued by you.
Speaker 1:You proclaim the Lord's favor in their lives. And when you give, when you forgive, when you invite, when you welcome, when you offer yourself in a thousand different ways to someone who needs you in that moment, when you advocate for what is right, when you vote for what is just, when you recognize that what is purely best for you is not always what is best for God's creation. In all of these ways, you help create the context for Jubilee. You take Leviticus, and you transform it the way that Jesus did into good news for everyone. And so as we prepare to leave Leviticus behind, and we move into the season of Advent next week, as we prepare for the coming of God to us, a coming that only existed in a glimmer of the Levitical imagination.
Speaker 1:May you sense today both the freedom that has come to find you, to set you free, and the liberty that you are now called to extend into God's world through your choices. May your words and your choices, may your purchases and your property, may your interactions with friends and strangers alike be reason for jubilation this week. And with that, we leave Leviticus. Let's pray. God, help us as we continue to wrestle through these texts that you have compiled and preserved and saved for us.
Speaker 1:To reach in and through to find the seeds that you have been planting all along, that would unfold and be unveiled, that would progressively grow and blossom into the story of Jesus where we would finally see you for who you are. God, help us then to take those same seeds and plant them somewhere deep in our own hearts. God, be present to us by your spirit to water and to tend to that so that it might grow in us into something beautiful as well. That we might follow in the footsteps of your son to bring release and liberty and freedom and celebration and jubilee wherever we go in this world. May our steps be something to celebrate in your kingdom.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.