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Kindling God’s Anger
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 25, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Leviticus 26, selected verses Matthew 3:1-12
Our subject once again is holiness…our holiness. “You shall be holy,” we read in the 19th chapter of Leviticus, “for I the Lord your God am holy!” What follows, says David Plotz in Slate “is glorious—a catalog of laws that is even more impressive, in [its] own way, than the Ten Commandments.” Plotz is referring to the Holiness Code: commandments concerning sacrifices acceptable to the Lord; gleanings left for the poor; truth-telling and false swearing; commandments requiring honesty with our neighbor and deference toward the “specially-abled”; justice for all and vengeance toward none; respect of the aged and love for the alien. In other words, says God, everything is at stake around the kitchen table and in the situation room and over the back fence! Just as God’s holiness drew a line on the mountain between our mortality and God’s eternity, so the Holiness Code means to draw a line in daily life between God’s people and those who worship idols. To command holiness of Israel is to insist that God’s people be distinguished, separated out from other peoples by their observance of the Sabbath and their worship of the One God, by the way they treat each member of the tribe and the way they treat the stranger, by the way they care for God’s good creation and even the way they tend themselves. The effort is all consuming. Implied in the commandments concerning the Sabbath and idolatry is a love for God requiring heart, mind, soul and strength [the first tablet of Moses]. Then stated in words we ultimately will hear from the mouth of Jesus is the summary of all the rest: You shall love your neighbor as yourself {the second tablet of Moses]. These sentences comprise the first use of the law according to Calvin, “given to exhibit the righteousness of God and the righteousness that alone is acceptable to God,” righteousness being a right relationship between God and God’s people as well as among God’s people and the rest of creation. Holiness! Now lest we think Israel understood these commands to be optional, notice how each injunction in the Holiness Code is punctuated by an ominous reminder: “I am the Lord.” In other words, says God, “No kidding! I am watching!” God’s presumed vigilance of Israel’s daily life brings to mind Calvin’s second use of the law: “It acts,” he writes, “by means of its fearful denunciation and the consequent dread of punishment, to curb those who, unless forced, have no regard for rectitude and justice.” And just incase there is something you do not understand about God’s “No!” read the chapter before us today. Taking the possibility of Israel’s disobedience personally, God rants, verse after verse, vowing to be hostile toward Israel in fury because Israel has been hostile to God. This, we think, is that nasty God of the Old Testament, the God of wrath superseded in the New by Jesus who reveals the God of grace. “Think again!” cries John the Baptist: His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. John says this of sweet Jesus! Strewn with citations from the law and the prophets, Matthew’s gospel insists we see in Jesus the fulfillment of both; that we notice how the “varied threads in the Old Testament witness of God all intertwine [in this man from Nazareth who is the Son of God]: God’s election and God’s wrath, God’s forgiveness of sins and God’s commandments, God’s graciousness and God’s holiness.” [Karl Barth] The point is that if in Jesus Christ we know the love of God, we know that love in One who is gracious as he is angry and angry as he is gracious. To wit, consider the words of our opening hymn: O tell of God’s might, O sing of God’s grace, whose robe is the light, whose canopy space. His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form…. Our enlightened hymnal would have us rather sing, The chariots of heaven the deep thunderclouds form, but I tell you, the God who is God cannot be known short of this holy paradox! That being said, who can stand? Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord, asks the psalmist, or who shall stand in his holy place? “There is no one but us,” whines Annie Dillard. We have heard these words before, perhaps from our own mouth! “There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time…our children busy, troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved.” Surely God’s anger is kindled against us! Yet as diligently as the priests in Leviticus sent the pleasing aroma of burnt offerings up in an effort to keep God from going away, so today’s priests muffle any mention of God’s anger in an effort to keep voluntary Christians sacrificing in the pews. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would still maintain, were he alive today, that our silence betrays the church’s penchant for cheap grace: “…we baptized, confirmed and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition,” he wrote in 1937. “Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving. But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way [the call to holiness] was hardly ever heard.” Or as Flannery O’Connor said of the culturally spiritual a few decades later, “They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing. It’s true that grace is the free gift of God but in order to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self denial.” Practice holiness! The consequence of the church’s massive failure in Bonhoeffer’s time, to put a point on our own peril, was the uncritical melding of National Socialism with Lutheran theology. Because nothing was at stake eternally in the common life, because most anything in the culture was a candidate for worship, lines blurred; allegiances became confused; truth devolved into subjectivity; evil into banality. Being a cultured German fit so seamlessly into being a compliant Christian. So Hannah Arendt could write at the end of his trial that “The trouble with [Hitler’s henchman Adolf] Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment,” she goes on, “this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it…made it well-nigh impossible for [Eichmann] to know or to feel that he [had done] wrong. Would any one of them have suffered from a guilty conscience,” she asks chillingly in the end, “if they had won?” “When God’s commands are disregarded, creation disintegrates and reverts to chaos,” insists Walter Brueggemann. “The commands of Yahweh are not social conveniences or conventional rules. They are…the insistences whereby life in the world is made possible…the viability of creation depends on keeping the commands.” The rub is that we are unwilling to buy the premise. Of God’s wrath we know nothing and of our holiness we care little. Having listened to every voice in the culture other than the voice which requires of us our very souls, we persist in feeling we have done nothing wrong, at least nothing that would warrant God’s wrath, for heaven’s sake. Never mind the wars we wage out of self-interest, the poor we exploit for our own gain, the lies we exchange for the truth, the aged we hide in gated ghettos, the aliens we detain with no recourse…the land we rape with no conscience (though of course to our credit and in accordance with God’s laws, there are the gay people we denounce because it says right here in Leviticus…!) PLEASE!! Look we say, if it makes any difference with our fingers pointed, you could say that we surely are holier than thou and thou and thou. But holier is not what is commanded! You shall be holy as I am holy, says the Lord, no kidding; and God’s impossible command leaves any who can bear to believe it begging God’s mercy even as we brace ourselves for God’s wrath. At long last, my friends, we are on holy ground! It is a fearful thing, we now see, to fall into the hands of the living God. Yet if God does not meet our practiced injustice and half-truths and distain for the poor and distrust of the stranger and casual idolatry by God’s judgment and wrath, then God does not meet us at all. If there are no consequences to our blind indifference toward the neighbor, then there is no real relationship. Then “in spite of all our asseverations about divine love,” say the old theologians, “[we are] in actual fact left to [ourselves].” But we are not! “Despite all the threats,” concludes Plotz in his blog on Leviticus, “God never quite closes the door on His Chosen People. After their horrific reckoning, they (we) will confess our iniquity and atone for it. And [God] won’t forget his promise: ‘I will not reject them or spurn them so as to destroy them, annulling my covenant with them: for I the Lord am their God.’” Likewise, God never quite has closed the door on us either. Rather God has stepped through the door of this mortal life to dwell with us under the law, ‘stepped into the heart of the inevitable conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of [mortals]…and taken part in it from both sides….This is not only the God whose [anger is kindled by our failure to love the neighbor]. This is also the human being whom God’s [judgment and wrath] threatens with death….Where we the enemies of God should stand, God now stands in Jesus Christ.” God has taken our part, has acted on our behalf “so that in [the One who alone is holy] we might become the righteousness of God”, might stand not in opposition to God’s holiness but in correspondence to God’s own being. Here and only here, according to Calvin’s third use of the law, are we “enabled daily to learn with greater truth and certainty what the will of the Lord is which we aspire to follow….” Follow where? The season, my friends, is Lent; the cross our destination. “What if, in important numbers,” asks Marilynne Robinson, “what if we believe there is a God who is mysterious and demanding, with whom one is not easily at peace? What if we believe there will be a reckoning? I find no evidence that such beliefs were…consciously abandoned. They simply dropped out of the cultural conversation.” What if, by God’s grace in the forty days ahead, the conversation were to begin again with us? |