A Holy Social Network, February 20, 2011

Leviticus 19:1-19
Matthew 5:38-ff
This week someone sent me an email, that as I opened read “Hahaha you won't believe what this fool did. When will they realize, what you put out there lives forever, going directions you cannot control.” I thought little more of it, until about ten minutes later, I began receiving emails from one person after another who claimed to have received an email from me, reading “Hahaha, you won't believe what this fool did...” and that people on their email lists, had then received this email as coming from them.

Every few generations, we develop a new social network. Who are your friends, and who are your enemies. Who, even are your frienemies, those friends who you keep close for fear of what they might do; and how we relate to each. In ancient Israel, long before the time of Kings David or Solomon, immediately after the exodus as slaves from Egypt, Moses addressed the people, defining by LAW, the Social Network. The LORD God is holy. The LORD God loves all God's Creation. The LORD God created humanity, as set apart among God's creation, to care for God's creation. Among all humanity, out of all creation, God chose this people, setting you apart to be a people of faith. Be holy. AND among the Nation, The LORD God chose you to minister, to be a people of faith in the midst of God's faithful people. Be holy.

Being HOLY, does not require wearing a halo, acting pious, accepting to live by poverty or chastity, to live as a happy person unaffected by tragedy, or to wear a dour expression without being moved by joy. Being Holy, is a claim of faith; that life did not just accidentally happen. Your being, is neither an accident, nor fate, nor a curse. There is a God, set apart from this world, and yet who cares, who loves, and has power over this world. God cares so deeply as to make every snowflake falling from the sky unique; creating everything for its own purpose. God set apart humanity, as those who use creation's elements to create, fashioning whole new worlds and possibilities from what God has given us. To be HOLY is to be SET APART by God for a purpose. Generation after generation there have been grave concerns over whether we called ourselves a Nation Under God, a religious people, some have even wanted to say a Christian Nation; even in the book Leviticus, I do not see evidence of this coming from God, but there is the requirement that we would be Holy: loving God, loving life, and loving others as we love our own life.

People have postulated all sorts of origins for the Golden Rule, that You love your neighbor as you love yourself. That Law is named here in Leviticus, and made explicit in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, by instructing that we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute you. The point being that when we hate, when we fear, when in our minds and hearts we make others our enemies, we objectivize them “They,” take on all the negative elements of our hate, even the shadow of ourselves. In our minds and hearts we make “them” a construct of what we do not like about ourselves. This makes the other not us, but what remains as ours is our hate, our fear, our anger, which works upon and worries upon us, until we are worn out. Instead, what Jesus instructs is that we would work at loving our enemies, replace the hate, the anger, the fear, with a desire that they would be forgiven and let the love, the desire for their forgiveness work upon us.

Just like pushing the “Open File” on an email we do not know the content of, we need to understand the culture and context of Jesus' illustrations. The Old Testament Law of “An eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, was not a requirement that if someone hurt you you had responsibility to hurt them, NO. But rather, this was a limitation of force, that should someone cause you harm, even the blindness of an eye or the loss of a tooth, you could not kill them, or harm their children, the limit of vengeance in that Social Order was no greater than an eye for an eye, or a tooth for a tooth.

YET, while not changing the Law, what Jesus described undercuts this, by shifting the SOCIAL ORDER that we not resist the other. In the Social Order of “Class structure” in the Roman World, there was created a distinction between better and worse, between rich and poor, between what is hard and soft, between external and internal. The Left Hand was used for personal hygiene, was covered and not extended publicly. As such, to be struck on the right cheek, was to be struck with the back of the hand; not just wounded, but also insulted, for one used the back of the hand to strike down in anger, or for one who was of lower esteem to acknowledge one who was greater by kissing the back of the hand. Where as the front of the hand was for a caress or the embrace of a trusting agreement. SO as means of challenging the Social Order to be HOLY, to not resist, the instruction that if one struck you with the back of the hand on your right cheek, turn to offer the left as well, required that that they had to demonstrate intimacy to you.

The HOLY SOCIAL NETWORK described in Leviticus, is that none of us are whole unto ourselves. Our identity as HOLY is in relationship to God, but also in how we relate to those in need, those with whom we work, and with our peers. Being HOLY, living our lives as a SOCIAL NETWORK with God, required that those who have received blessings provide for those without. All of this sounds much like the 10 Commandments, preventing lying, cheating, stealing, coveting and murder, yet also explicit here is instruction that we not delay in paying another their due. How easily, if we count our profit before repaying others, we count everything as our own and become jealous of having to pay out of our possession to others.

Jesus' Sermon describes “So if you are in a time of worship, and presenting yourself before God, and there remember that your brother has something against you, go first reconcile yourself, then present your gifts at the altar of the Lord.” There is a subtlety here. We expect Jesus to have said, “If you discover you have something against your brother,” but instead it is “if you discover your brother has something against you.” We have a mandate to make the first step, to reach out to those who might have reason to be angry with us.

This last line of Chapter 5 in Matthew's Gospel gives us all difficulty: “You must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” Ouch. Do any of us fill that? Actually, this is what Matthew wrote, but slightly different from what Jesus could have said, because Aramaic never had the word “perfect”. Perfection was a GREEK ideal, which Matthew in presenting the Gospel to his social network accepted as an appropriate equivalent. What it appears Jesus would have said was “shalem” or “tamin” the sense of which is to be “whole,” “integrated,” “complete,” “committed as finished,” “resolute.” The meaning of which is like the Law of Leviticus, “Be Holy, because God is Holy.”

Years ago, I knew a man who late in life came to realize some pretty horrible things about himself. Struggling, he asked, “With the sins I have done, with all the wrongs I have committed, is it possible God could forgive me?” The answer I know is not that you have to have been perfect to be forgiven, but that God so loved the world that God gave God's only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but be welcomed into everlasting life. That forgiveness is not just for the problems between us as children, but for all the sins of al the world.

How different this life might be, if we owned our anger,
if we saw this life as Holy as God is holy,
if we recognized a bit of ourselves in others,
if we treated others not as those who are not for us must be against us, but rather treating our neighbor as ourselves.
If we lived a HOLY SOCIAL NETWORK.