Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent

admin | 28 February 2021

“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification”

The Book of Leviticus is the least read and least known book of the Scriptures. And to be sure, it is a daunting task to make one’s way through its myriad of regulations and directions many of which are quite puzzling, though, perhaps, rather intriguing. What does it mean, for instance, “that they shall no more slay their sacrifices for satyrs, after whom they play the harlot”? (Lev. 17.7). In the Canadian Prayer Book lectionary system, readings from Leviticus are very few; never in the Sunday Office readings, and only four times in the appointed readings for the Daily Offices; three times in the week of the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Friday evening, Saturday morning and evening), and once in Holy Week on the Wednesday evening of Holy Week in the story of the proverbial scapegoat understood as an symbol of Christ bearing our sins in his Passion.

Chapters 17-27 of Leviticus is known as the Holiness Code, best expressed in Leviticus 19. 2. “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” The Holiness Code is a collection of injunctions dealing with a wide range of behaviours and actions: social, moral and ritualistic. Set within the context of Israel as God’s chosen people, they express the sense of Israel’s separation and uniqueness over and against other peoples and nations. Yet, while some of the injunctions seem culturally dependent, others are universal and ethically compelling. The injunctions about not trimming beards and not being marked with tattoos may seem trivial and irrelevant but other injunctions seem ethically compelling and binding for all times and in all places, such things as behaving honestly, treating workers fairly, the rights or duties towards those with disabilities, doing justice, loving your neighbour as yourself, working as much for others as for yourself, and fair trade. In the light of those injunctions other things such as reproving and correcting your neighbour and allowing not only the poor and destitute but also the resident stranger to gather the gleanings after the harvest offer an ethical vision of what belongs to the good of all over and against the interests of the few.

As one theologian (Mary Douglas) puts it, the code is the idea of holiness as order not confusion, as rightness or rectitude of behaviour, as honesty and straight-dealing in contrast to the forms of contradiction in double-dealing, theft, lying, false witness, cheating in business, dissembling in speech, degrading and putting down others, hating your brother in your heart; in short the contrast between what we seem to be and what we are, the hypocrisies that belong to all our lives.

The idea of holiness is about sanctification which suggests separation and distinction from the profane and the worldly, the idea that our relation to God should be seen in how we act. This is what Paul is suggesting as well. In a way, it is the struggle to be what we believe and profess. The danger, it seems to me, lies in seeing such injunctions in the Holiness Code of Leviticus and such injunctions in the Christian Scriptures as in Paul’s writings as mere moralizing. The danger lies in not grasping the deeper ethical teaching that underlies and informs our moral outlook. Our technocratic culture is ethically challenged. The challenge, as with Leviticus and Paul, is about what it means to be human. Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger in their book, “Re-engineering Humanity” (2018) explore in some depth the question of the techno-social engineering of our humanity in the tech culture of our day. The Ted-talk by Frischmann and the Sir Graham Day lectures given at the Schulich Law School of Dalhousie this past spring as part of the CBC Ideas programme provide the essential point of their thinking. It has to do with us being engineered or programmed and becoming like machines.

What does it mean to be human? There are really only two ways to lose your humanity: by becoming a machine or by becoming an animal. It is the idea and power of the ethical that is quintessential to our humanity and which has a universal dimension to it by definition. Mere moralizing asserts rules and regulations and often, if not always, in a judgmental and self-righteous way. That tendency gives the idea of holiness or sanctification a bad odour because it remains trapped in a them-versus-us conflict narrative. It is narrow, proscriptive and self-serving in its pretense to piety and righteousness.

“Re-engineering Humanity” reverses the so-called Turing Test. The test devised by the early computation genius Alan Turing was about a machine that could be mistaken for a human. It has belonged to the technocratic dream of AI, making machines that are just like us. Interestingly the test has largely failed but reversing the test is intriguing as a thought experiment. To what extent does the technoculture of our day force us to think more and more like machines? To what extent do we lose agency and a proper sense of ourselves as selves? To what extent do we outsource our own thinking and willing, the highest activities of our being?

We not only make the machines which make or unmake us but we unwittingly become the tools of the tool. Our thinking becomes instrumental and machine-like; not machines becoming like humans but humans becoming like machines. Frischmann and Selinger note the danger of becoming the wards or slaves of the technology which really means becoming the wards or the slaves of the masters of the technology who are using all of us for their interests and not ours.

The larger question is about what it means to be human. Holiness is an essential feature of that question especially in the ethical project of Lent. Holiness is not simply what separates us from others; it is what binds us to a vision of our common humanity. That vision has to do with the ethical teachings which belong to the great religious and philosophical traditions of the world. They contribute to our thinking about what it means to be human. To reclaim something of their wisdom is crucial.

The wonderful Gospel for today complements the Epistle teaching about holiness or sanctification by grounding it in our relation to God in Jesus Christ. The woman of Canaan has a hold of what it means to be human. It is found in our engagement with God. The exchange is particularly intense. She comes to Jesus seeking the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil”. Ours is the culture of addiction whether it is substance abuse or our digital devices. She seeks the healing of her daughter which would mean the recovery of true agency, freedom and dignity as opposed to our destructive dependencies. She undertakes a journey out of her own homeland. That is itself quite remarkable. She is, moreover, not an Israelite but a Canaanite, someone from outside Israel, yet she embodies the essential meaning of what it means to be an Israelite and shows us its universality. She wrestles with God, like Jacob who was renamed Israel as a result. Israel means one who wrestles or strives with God.

She will not be put off in her essential insight about the truth and power of God as the ground of our humanity. In the face of silence, in the face of outright rebuke by the disciples who try to send her away because she is bothering them, and in the face of Jesus’ apparent dismissal of her, and even his deliberate insult of her, she persists. She has a hold of a deep truth. Like the blind man on the wayside, she knows something about the truth of God, a truth that cannot be denied.

The scene is troubling at first glance. Why doesn’t Jesus just give us what we want? Because he wants to draw out of us what it is that is truly to be wanted. “Lord, that I may receive my sight,” the blind man said. Jesus here is rebuking the narrow and moralistic tendencies of Israel and of us all and in a deliberately provocative and imaginative way. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs,” he says, literally putting her down as a dog, but drawing out the problem of our moralizing judgmentalism of one another that denies our common humanity. Her reply shows her deep understanding. “Yet even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” She out-dogs Jesus, as it were, but in truth she signals the profound teaching that our humanity belongs to God’s creation and to God’s care for all creation including the little dogs; animals, yes, but as part of our lives. She has a hold of the deep truth about our humanity as found in its attention to God as the author of our lives. Our good is found in him and it is found in our lives together with every other creature in the world. It is altogether about learning what it means to be human.

What about the satyrs, you may be thinking? They are half-goat and half-man, the head and torso of a man and the legs and feet of a goat, and contribute to the later imagery of the devil or devils. A confusion of animality and rationality, they embody lust and sensual indulgence at the expense of reason and order, the opposite of holiness in our attention to God.

The ground of our sanctification lies in our life with God which is about actively seeking the will of God not just for ourselves but for one another. Here is our true agency, freedom and dignity which is precisely what Jesus seeks for us. Her intense attention and activity of soul breaks into the heart of Jesus who draws out her heart’s desire. “O woman, great is thy faith … and her daughter was made whole.” Holiness lies in our attention to God and requires a similar determination and intensity. It is about seeking the wholeness of our humanity. “Be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”