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Leviticus 2+3
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Well, welcome today. Thank you for spending a part of your Thanksgiving weekend with us. We're honored that you would do that. My name is Jeremy, and I'm part of the team here at Commons. But we are in the opening weeks of a series in the book of Leviticus.
Speaker 1:And if you are visiting and thinking, wow, Leviticus really on Thanksgiving? That's what you wanna do to us. Don't worry. We have timed this series to hit some of the passages today that really are about thanks and thankfulness, and I hope that that might actually help us to leave here in the spirit of what this holiday is all about. So hopefully, it's gonna lead us there as well.
Speaker 1:Over last week, we kicked off Leviticus by doing some groundwork. And we looked at the big picture structure of this book, and then we dove into the opening chapter, and we looked at just one little idea that's hinted at in those first two verses. But quickly to recap here, Leviticus is structured in a pattern we call a chiasmus. Now, again, that just means a crossing pattern, but the book looks something like this. We move from ritual to priest to purity.
Speaker 1:And then in chapter 16, we hit the climax of the book where we learn about something called the day of atonement. That's Yom Kippur in Hebrew. And again, whatever atonement is, when we think about that, we think of the at onement. That's a very complex idea, but at the center of it is the idea that we are made at one with God. But then coming out of that climax, this is where we get a chiastic structure from because now we start working backwards to the start.
Speaker 1:And so we read about purity and then priests, and then finally, we end back with more ritual. Now once we got that framework in place last week, we did actually open the first chapter, and we read about the first offering in the book. This was called the burnt offering because Leviticus opens by saying that when you bring your offering to the Lord, bring it from the herd or the flock. And then we read the instructions for how to bring an offering from the herd as a bull or a cow, a very extravagant gift probably from someone who was very wealthy. And we read instructions for how to bring an offering from the flock.
Speaker 1:That was a sheep or a goat, probably a most common offering, the middle class option, if you will. But then, if we kept reading, we got to verse 14, which says, if your offering is a bird. And this was the gift of the poor. Those who couldn't afford a sheep or a goat who certainly couldn't afford a bull or a cow. And here, 14 verses into Leviticus, God is already willing to bend the rules, to move the goalpost to ensure that everyone could come into his presence regardless of what it was they had to offer.
Speaker 1:It's kind of remarkable, really. In a book that is so famous for so many rigid rules that we are already seeing the heart that sits behind these ancient practices. Never was it not understood that God was gracious. And so we actually talked about how Jesus himself grows up in a family that brought birds to God. Never be ashamed of bringing God your best regardless of how anyone else might look on what you have to offer.
Speaker 1:God is pleased with your gift when it comes from your heart. Okay. Let's pray. And then we wanna hit one thing we missed last week, and then we'll look at the three opening offerings in here in Leviticus. Loving creator of all, watch over us this day and keep us in the light of your presence.
Speaker 1:May we sense that we are welcome to come to you today, that we are invited to walk brazenly into your presence, that we no longer need to announce ourselves with offerings or gifts. Instead, we need only offer ourselves, our humility, our trust, our service to this incredible story of grace that is now unfolding in your world, where we have offered less than ourselves to you. May we learn dependence on you. Where we have been told, perhaps taught that we are unwelcome before you, may we learn the limitlessness of your grace. Where we have felt unworthy to come, May we sense your son walking beside us this day, showing us his way, reminding us that in him we are always welcome at your table.
Speaker 1:As we pause for Thanksgiving this year, A scheduled reminder in our calendar to give thanks for all that is good. May our praise now blend with the song of creation. From now until we come to those eternal joys which you promised through your love, all praise and thanks and glory be to God. In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's not a huge deal here, but there is an interesting little thing that I didn't have time to talk about last week. Moment, we would talk about a little aleph. Now, what's a little aleph? Well, first, we need to know what an aleph is.
Speaker 1:And an aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet or aleph bet if you prefer. That's a Hebrew paleography joke for the record. It's alright. Save it for later. It's fine.
Speaker 1:But what we're talking about is this. The very first word of the very first verse of the book of Leviticus, the first word is the word, and it means and he called. As in the Lord called to Moses. And if you were to read Leviticus one one in a very wooden translation, you would get something like this. And he called to Moses and spoke Yahweh to him from the tent of meeting.
Speaker 1:But what's interesting here is that, and he called, ends in an aleph. That's the letter. And traditionally, in all manuscripts of Leviticus in Hebrew, that final aleph is small. So here's an image from my Hebrew Bible. Now, Hebrew goes right to left.
Speaker 1:And so you can see at the top right corner is the start of the paragraph. And if you notice that first word, that's vayakra, and the last letter is slightly smaller. I'll circle it here so you can see it on the screen. But if you notice the letter right next to it, that's another alif. That one's normal size.
Speaker 1:And so this is very much done on purpose in every text of the Hebrew Bible. And this goes back at least to the Masoretic text that come from the tenth century, where all of these centuries old handwritten copies of the Hebrew text have this tiny little aleph right here. Now probably what happened is that the scribes were copying this out, and they would do that. They would go letter by letter. The oldest texts didn't have vowels in them.
Speaker 1:So those are those little dots and dashes that you see above and below the words, but they didn't even have spaces between the words back then. And because you've got these two alifs side by side, you can imagine how easy it would be. You're going along. You're copying this out letter for letter, and you just accidentally miss one of them. But then when you go back and you read through the section and you realize what you've done, well, what do you do?
Speaker 1:I mean, you can't just start over again. You're writing this huge scroll. So what do you do? You try to squeeze in a little Well, however it happened, this little aleph was introduced into the text about a thousand years ago, and scribes just started copying it. And copying it and copying it until eventually it just stuck.
Speaker 1:But this is where it gets really interesting. Because at least for a thousand years, this little aleph has been part of the Hebrew text. And so for a thousand years, rabbis have wondered why. Now, they know the same explanation I just gave you. And most rabbis would agree and say, yeah, sure, that's what happened.
Speaker 1:But they also have such reverence for the text that they would say, well, nothing is by mistake. And so the Midrash says that this small little alif isn't a mistake, it's actually a message. You see without an alif becomes, would be translated something more like and he happened. And so, maybe the rabbi say, Moses is saying through a scribe who missed a letter that God didn't so much call to him. God happened, and Moses just happened to be there.
Speaker 1:See, this is Moses' humility bleeding through in a scribal error, the rabbis say. And so before we even get to these first three offerings today, these gifts of thanks to God we will talk about. Perhaps, we can be reminded here of the incredible privilege it is to live and breathe and move and be in God's world. To be reminded of the moments where the divine just simply happens to us. We go for a walk, or we hike in the mountains, we look at our children, or maybe a friend calls us out of the blue in just the right moment.
Speaker 1:Maybe we pause the TV and we're just quiet for a bit, peaceful. Perhaps friends and family gather and we celebrate with a meal together. And we remember that sometimes God happens because everything is gift. That God is happening to us all the time if only we can slow down long enough to notice him. And since you happen to be here, whether it is an accident or a coincidence, I pray that God might happen to you today.
Speaker 1:Who knew typos could be that exciting? K. Last week, we looked at the burnt offering that opens Leviticus, but we didn't really get to talk about what this offering was for. And so Leviticus one verse four says that you are to lay your hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it will be accepted on your behalf to make atonement for you. Verse five, you are to slaughter the young bull before the Lord, and then Aaron's sons, the priest shall bring the blood and splash it against the sides of the altar at the entrance to the tent of meeting.
Speaker 1:K. Couple things here. First of all, last week, I said that this initial burnt offering was not necessarily about sin. Well, in verse four, it just said that you put your hand on the head of the animal. Actually, it says lean on it, and it will be accepted to make atonement for you.
Speaker 1:What happens is a lot of people read that and they wanna see some kind of transference here. Almost like sin is moving from your hand into the animal. It doesn't work that way. Even in Leviticus, you can't just magically transfer your sins onto a goat. Now atonement means at onement, but there are a lot of different elements to being made at one with God.
Speaker 1:One of which is being cleansed of sin, and we will get there in this book. But before that, there is a need in Leviticus to enter into the presence of God, to be in the space that God occupies. And so notice here that when the animal is killed, the blood is taken and it is splashed against the sides of the altar at the entrance to the tent of meeting. What's going on here in this initial burnt offering is a preparing, a preparation of the space to meet with God. So the person can come and they can be with the divine.
Speaker 1:The room is being made ready and the altar is being cleansed. The space is being prepared for God to come and meet. That's the first step. Now today, the space for God is not this room or this church. The space where God dwells is us.
Speaker 1:Right? So Paul says that our bodies now are the temple of God. And so when we come to worship, that's what we prepare for God. Our bodies, our hearts, our minds, and we would do well to think about that when we come to worship. And to be mindful, to think about our breathing and our heartbeat, the internal space that we will offer for God to dwell.
Speaker 1:But what's really interesting here is that even in Leviticus, where it is a physical space that's being prepared, that happens because of a very personal investment. So not only does the person bring the gift from their herd, they slaughter the gift. Now, I joked last week about all the blood in Leviticus. You know, cutting up animals and splashing blood all over the place, it all sounds very gruesome to me. But if you hunt, this all probably sounds pretty familiar to you.
Speaker 1:You kill the animal, you drain the blood, you skin it, you remove the fat and the organs. There are all these things that need to be done very regularly by hunters today and in any agrarian society. I know this is particularly out of the ordinary. And I realized that most of us here think that meat comes from those Styrofoam containers that we get at Safeway. Sadly, it doesn't.
Speaker 1:See, here's the thing. Almost every hunter I know, there are a number of which in this community who apparently are not offended by my dietary choices. For the record, neither am I by theirs. But almost every hunter I know will tell you that the weight of actually killing your own food makes you think very differently about it. It doesn't seem so sterile and distant and free anymore.
Speaker 1:It seems very costly, almost spiritual. That's language I hear from a lot of people who hunt. Well, in ancient Israel, worship didn't come from a Styrofoam container either. Yes, they had priests and they had a ritual, but you could not pay the priest enough to remove yourself from the experience of worship. You had to come yourself to the tent of meeting, and you had to bring an animal from your flock, and you had to lay your hand on it.
Speaker 1:You had to kill it. You had to participate in that moment. There there was no observer posture in Israel. And maybe you are watching from the edges right now. You're looking at the Jesus story and wondering if this is all for you.
Speaker 1:That's fine. Just know that if you decide to jump in at some point, passivity goes out the door. God is chasing you down, and God is looking for you. God is searching you out because he wants to bring you back to his home. But what he wants to bring you back to is not some weak consumer religion where you come to church if it's fun, or if the music is good, or if the preacher was on point that day.
Speaker 1:Because let's be honest, sometimes we're just not. Well, the Christian story is where you come to participate with God directly. So if you can't carry a melody, then bring some earplugs for the people around you and sing anyway. And if you can't afford to throw much in the donation box, then bring your a game and make sure that someone knows they are loved today. And when you come forward for the Eucharist, and you recognize that your heart, and soul, and mind, and strength are now working in concert with your body as you move.
Speaker 1:And your ears as you listen, your eyes as you look another believer in the face. And your mouth as you taste and you see that the Lord is good. It is God that comes to find you, but there is no such thing as passivity in our response to God. We are required to be part of the ritual. Now there are still two more offerings here in this opening sequence of Leviticus that are taken together as a package.
Speaker 1:And so chapter two begins, when anyone brings a grain offering to the Lord, their offering is to be of finest flour. They are to pour olive oil on it, put incense on it, and take it to Aaron's sons, the priests. The priest shall take a handful of the flour and oil together with all the incense, and they will burn this as a memorial portion. Now, there's some details here about how it's cooked and prepared, but let's notice here that this grain offering is a memorial offering. The word is in Hebrew.
Speaker 1:And so this offering is meant to help the people remember something. Hold on to that. If we skip down to verse 11, the text says this, every grain offering you bring to the Lord must be made without yeast. For you are not to burn yeast or honey in a food offering presented to the Lord. Season all your grain offerings with salt.
Speaker 1:Do not leave the salt of the covenant out of your grain offerings. Add salt to your offerings. So here we go. No yeast, no davash, that's the word here. Probably something like honey or related to honey.
Speaker 1:But we do know categorically this offering must contain salt. So there you go. If you are like me and you would rather eat a bag of chips over a box of candy, then God approves. You can quote me on that. Go home.
Speaker 1:Enjoy a bag. Now again, this is a bit strange for us. Right? It doesn't make much sense to us why God would care about the taste of his bread, but there is another cultural thing here that was common in many ancient rituals. And the issue here is that promises or contracts, covenants is what they use in the biblical language, were often sealed with salt in ancient cultures.
Speaker 1:Now, the thinking here was that if you made a promise to someone, it was made in salt because that was a way of saying, if I don't fulfill my side of the bargain, may my fields be salted. Now, sowing salt in a field or areas that just have a lot of salt in the ground, they don't produce. Nothing grows there. Right? And so in an agrarian society, vowing, if I don't come through on my promise, may God salt my fields, was a very significant thing to say.
Speaker 1:You you were putting everything on the line to say, no, I promise this. And so in second Chronicles chapter 13, the text says, don't you know that the Lord, the God of Israel, has given the kingship of Israel to David and his descendants forever by a covenant of salt. God makes a covenant of salt. In Numbers chapter 19, Moses is speaking to the priests. He says this, whatever is set aside from the holy offerings I give to you and your sons and your daughters as a perpetual share, it is an everlasting covenant of salt before the Lord for both you and your offspring.
Speaker 1:This is a very common phrase, a ritual in ancient cultures. And so knowing that the second offering is a memorial offering and understanding that salt was a symbol of commitment and promise that has been made, this is now starting to make sense for us. But the question is, well, what is the promise we are remembering here? And there are probably two options. We could go to Genesis 12.
Speaker 1:This is where God initially promises to bless the world through the descendants of Abraham. Or probably more likely in the context of Moses leadership, there is the Sinai covenant where God gives the 10 commandments and he says, I will be your God and you will be my people. So it's probably that second one, possibly both of those that are being remembered here in this grain offering. God says, remember what I have promised to you. Now, do you remember when Jesus says in the New Testament that we are the salt of the earth?
Speaker 1:There's a lot of different ways that people interpret that passage, but at least part of it seems to be that Jesus is saying you are meant to help people remember God. Everyone, regardless of their current state, has a divine memory, the image of God inside of them. And when you live and you love and you act like Jesus did in the world, you help to unlock that lost memory for people. Add salt to your offering. Help the world remember God.
Speaker 1:Now, yeast and honey. Just quickly. The issue with yeast seems to be that it changes the state of things. Of course, they didn't understand the science of fermentation back then, but they did see what yeast did. And it seemed, for lack of a better term, magical.
Speaker 1:Now that doesn't mean that they avoided yeast completely. Yeast is not always a bad thing in Judaism, but the idea was when you bring something to God, you bring it in its most natural, untouched state. Right? So for all you organic produce consumers out there, God was granola before you. Okay?
Speaker 1:Now honey or davash in Hebrew is a little more difficult here. Again, this is probably honey or something related to it. The word is actually used to describe a fruit nectar and even sort of a sweet paste that was made out of dates. And so possibly, this just means any sweetener. But if it does refer specifically to honey, some people think the problem here is that honey, again, seems like it's excreted by bees.
Speaker 1:It's not exactly how honey works. You can talk to a beekeeper for the details. They don't know all about that. But in a prescientific culture, that seems to be what's happening. And since any bodily fluids like semen or blood make you ritually unclean in Leviticus, well then perhaps the bodily fluids of a bee should not be included in an offering back to God.
Speaker 1:It's one thinking. Now that makes sense, but probably an even easier explanation is that honey is delicious. And it has always been very popular and has always been very commonly used in human food. And since ancient cultures generally assumed that if people liked something, then the gods would love it, a lot of other cultures, specifically the Canaanite cults that surrounded Israel at the time, used davash in their rituals. We actually have a number of ancient documents from these other cults that call for davash to be given to God in their religious ceremonies.
Speaker 1:And so banning it here in Leviticus is probably just one more way of ensuring that God's memory of covenant and promise wasn't tainted by connections to these other local false deities that people would hear about. Keep those things separate. And so if you like honey, it's fine. Continue eating it. There are no worries there.
Speaker 1:God likes it too. There's actually other places, second Chronicles 31, for example, where people do bring honey to Yahweh and he's fine with it. Just not in your grain offering. So don't make sacrifices to false gods while you enjoy your chamomile tea. That's the point.
Speaker 1:So here we are. We've entered into God's promises or into God's presence, and we have remembered his promises with salt and no sweetener. We have one more offering in this section. Chapter three. If your offering is a fellowship offering, you are to offer an animal from the herd, whether male or female, and you are to present before the Lord an animal without defect.
Speaker 1:Verse five, then Aaron's sons are to burn it on the altar on top of the burnt offering that is already lying on the burning wood. So this is how we know we're talking about one cohesive unit here. Right? The burnt offering is still burning. The grain offering is in the fire.
Speaker 1:All of this is happening at the same time when you come before the Lord. Now the fellowship offering is what the NIV calls it here. I like that. What this is often called in a lot of translations is the peace offering. And that's because the word here is actually shalamim.
Speaker 1:Now, if you know the word peace in Hebrew, shalom, you can hear those same consonants. Well, this is sort of a plural of that, pieces. Eem on the end of a Hebrew word is the functional equivalent to how we would put an s on the end of an English word to pluralize it. But the problem with calling this a peace offering in English is that it kinda sounds like you want to make peace with God. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, you're estranged from him and you wanna make amends. I wanna make peace with you. That's not the idea here. In fact, it's the opposite. The idea here is that things are well with me.
Speaker 1:I can come before God, and I can offer sacrifices, and now I want to say thank you for all of the peace, these pieces that are in my life. Now, it's not just I'm having a good today today, and I'm here anyway. I might as well throw a peace offering on the fire too. Peace in Hebrew is a much deeper concept than that. So we've talked about this before.
Speaker 1:But shalom means to be complete and whole. It doesn't mean I have everything I want or even that everything is going well. It means I am at peace with my place in God's story. He has given me what I need in this moment. And so to bring a peace offering, this isn't a spontaneous moment of thanks as beautiful as those are.
Speaker 1:No. This is a very considered, scheduled reminder, not of the peace that you want, but of all that you have to be thankful for already. This is a moment of thanks that you put on the calendar to remind yourself to be grateful. Anyone? Because I don't know about you, but I need that from time to time.
Speaker 1:A reminder to pause and be thankful to focus on all of the peace in my life. And there are times when things like Thanksgiving weekend or Valentine's Day or let's be honest here, the Christian calendar, Advent, Lent, Holy Week, these can feel a little bit artificial. Am I right? I mean, I can't make myself feel thankful. Can I?
Speaker 1:And yet sometimes, that's not what gratefulness is about. Now, if you feel it and it just bubbles up inside of you, then that's great. Celebrate that, revel in it, take joy in it, but sometimes there is also a sacrifice of thanksgiving. A peace offering where we choose to dwell on what is good even when we hurt. And we choose to thank God even when all that we want is to ask for something else.
Speaker 1:And this is not lesser. Sometimes, this is more. You see, taken together, this opening sequence in Leviticus, what we have here is a personal offering that announces our presence before God and our commitment to engage with him. God, I have prepared the space for you to dwell. We have a grain offering where we remember God's promises and we become part of how that memory is unlocked and remembered in others.
Speaker 1:I choose to remember who you are. And then we have a peace offering, where we pause to be thankful for all that God has gifted to us, lest it slip away from our consciousness. And what I hope you're starting to see even in these opening chapters here is that even though things can seem very one note, very repetitive in Leviticus, offering after offering after offering. There is actually this incredibly wide scope to what these rituals are trying to bring into view as the people worship God here. Leviticus is not a one note song.
Speaker 1:It is a surprising symphony of images and ideas that are being brought together and blended in sometimes unpredictable ways. Ways. And so on this day of thanksgiving in our calendar, our festival day, if you will, may you sense that God is interested in meeting with you personally today. May your salt bring to life divine memories of God that have been forgotten in those around you this day. May you remember the good and be grateful for the difficult and give thanks to God in the midst of it all.
Speaker 1:For this is an aroma pleasing to the Lord. Let's pray. God, help us today on this scheduled reminder in our calendar to be thankful. And if that comes easy for us, then we thank you for that. And we take joy in it, and we celebrate it.
Speaker 1:But if it's hard to be grateful today, then God, we offer you a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and we choose to remember what is good. The breath that you have placed in our lungs, the energy that you have given us to move, the opportunity to love those around us here in your world. God, would that acknowledgment, that glimmer of gratefulness, would your spirit be with us to fan that into something greater so that it begins to radiate out of us. And we pass that gratefulness on, perhaps even unlocking the divine memories in those who have long since forgotten what they have to be grateful for. You're a great God, and so we say, thank you.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.