What we do matters. How we do it matters. Our intentions, our actions, and our results matter as we seek to cultivate our relationship with the Holy and to fulfill our faithful promises.
Both Leviticus 6:1-8:36 and Jeremiah 7:21-8:3; 9:22-23, which might seem at odds with each other, agree that what we do, how we do it, and what the results are in living faithfully matter. Leviticus clearly and lovingly details types of offerings and how to make them the right way and the consecration of the priesthood. Jeremiah has some choice words to offer that seem to dismiss such offerings. I think that’s why Jeremiah 9:22-23 is tacked onto the end of the reading, so that we don’t fall prey to the temptation of those justifying dismissing most of Leviticus as old hat, rather than closely studying the questions embedded in the text. Each of these texts is asking the recurrent religious and spiritual question: what demonstrates our love for the Holy, for our neighbors, for the stranger and the vulnerable, and for this earth? Following Jeremiah 9:22-23 what is kind, just, and equitable? (I’m using the JPS Study Bible; if you’re using a different Bible translation, you may be looking at Jeremiah 9:24).
Leviticus is mid-exploration of delineating clear practices about how we give thanks, how we make sacrifices, how we consecrate religious leaders. In brief, how do we cultivate our relationship with the Holy? What does it mean to traverse this world with the Beloved? These are important questions related to our important faithful promises. Everyone who spends time in communal religious life recognizes that whether we are explicit or not, communities develop cultures answering these questions. Solitary devotees also develop practices that try to answer those questions and usually settle into a set of practices that becomes quite comfortable. We can be challenged by our ritual life and we are also known, at times, to change that ritual life to be more comfortable and less challenged, or more challenged and less comfortable. Particularly when we move through our spiritual practices without attention, heart, and intention, when we end up just going through the motions, we’re in need of refocusing our attention, heart, and intentions before we come up with dangerous and wrongful ways to practice.
Jeremiah agrees, indeed, how we cultivate our relationship with the Holy matters greatly and we’ve been failing at that in choosing badly. The texts belong together because Jeremiah is a further explication of answering those questions asked in Leviticus, answered, in Jeremiah’s time, by some rather strange and offensive practices that upend the faithful promises that are supposed to help us traverse the world better with the Beloved.
The culture of how can sometimes become more important to us than the culture of what and why. I’ve participated in congregations that invite contributions only outside of worship (in worship feels less worshipful to these folks), that insist on offering plates, that insist on baskets, that use clean paint cans, that use bags, that use envelopes, that insist that cash and checks be visible to all, that only take annual commitments, that invite shared public commitment and sacrifice and that focus on personal private decisions and sacrifices. Some people feel they give too little, some people feel they give too much, some people really do give more than they can and that adversely affects themselves and their families, some people really could give more than they do. Jeremiah in context teaches us that the what and the why both matter greatly, far more than the how. Jeremiah specifically calls out sacrificing their children to the Holy is specifically (7:30-31). Attacking the vulnerable and taking their lives is not what the Beloved asks from us. We might consider what practices draw us away from increasing kindness, equity, and justice in this world? What are our spiritual practices that we do and maybe even enjoy but draw us further from actually fulfilling our faithful promises? What are our spiritual practices that actively add to injustice, inequity, and hard-heartedness?
Jeremiah tells us the third attribute the Beloved is seeking from us is kindness (remember if you’re looking at some translations of the Bible, you may need to read verse 24). For fans of Micah 6:8 (do justice, love goodness, walk modestly or humbly), kindness may be a challenge to our spiritual practices. How does kindness inform how we worship? How we pray? How we give thanks? How we sacrifice? How we offer back to the world? The attributes of kindness, equity, and justice orient us away from being self-serving, super-comfortable, or lauded for how we live. Instead, the measurements of whether we are living with the Beloved faithfully are primarily social and communal. Yes, you can practice self-kindness, but it is difficult to practice self-equity or self-justice. Combine these three attributes and we know they’re standards for how we are to live this life, in religious settings and outside of them, wherever we are and wherever we go.
How we fulfill our faithful promises matters as much as seeking to fulfill them at all. If we are committed to pursuing equity and justice and so address racism and nurture multicultural pluralist life together, then we ask: whose voices, cultures, and experiences are at the center? Whose comfort is consistently sacrificed or denied for others? When, persistently, white middle-and-upper-class voices and cultural practices, music, and leadership are centered, there may not be much sacrificing going on for middle and upper-class white members of the community, but quite a bit for folks with different cultural traditions trying to worship together. The answer is not segregation, although when one belongs to marginalized and historically marginalized groups time apart can be enormously helpful. But centering a diversity of voices, attentive to increasing equity, justice, and kindness, can challenge all of for the better. For members of the dominant culture, getting into the discomfort zone and learning to follow, learning from other cultures than one’s natal one, can be a way of cultivating greater love and bigger hearts. That brings us back to meaningful sacrifice: does this sacrifice, offering, or other spiritual practice nurture a more just, equitable, kind and loving world?
Jeremiah tells us that a meaningful sacrifice or offering will celebrate life, not take another person’s life. Taking a person’s life need not be strictly about murder. Oppressive activity (as detailed more specifically in the section of Jeremiah omitted from this week’s reading) are ways of claiming and taking people’s lives bit by bit. When people turn to those of us living with disabilities and dismiss us as not good enough for leadership or for community life, or make it impossible for us to live genuinely decent lives because of stratospheric medical costs or barriers to participation and access, when cis-gender folk struggle to follow the leadership or live in community alongside transgender and non-binary folk, when youth voices and wisdom are denied, dismissed or undermined, the dominant culture is fulfilling its desire for glory and rendering the Holy in their own image, rather than embracing the diversity of human life as reflecting the Holy. Human beings are wonderfully different. We have differing abilities, differing strengths, differing gifts, differing stories, differing cultures, differing vulnerabilities. Yet we yearn for love, for dignity, for safety to be able to risk for meaningful reasons, for respect, for inclusion, for the regular experience of the message “you are enough, loved, lovable, and with love to give.”
How are our offerings loving strangers, the vulnerable, our neighbors, and this earth with equity, justice, and kindness — and so tending our relationship with the Beloved? Is what we offer primarily for our own glorification? Is it to show off? Or to serve our immediate wants rather than our needs to grow and change and join in more equity, justice, and kindness? How are we considering to meet this world in every way for care, for equity, justice, and kindness? Just as when we speak, we hopefully pass our words through three sieves of discernment (is it true, is it kind, is it just?) when we seek to fulfill our faithful promises we ask ourselves about three spiritual sieves: how does this add to kindness, equity, justice? In other words, how does this protect and nurture and care for the vulnerable? Then we shall be able to answer how we’re living our lives alongside the Beloved, in promises that have meaning every day.
Someday, may we all be able to dance together under vines and fig trees and no longer be afraid. Until then, we have this amazing sacred life to live, tending our relationship with the Holy in very great part by tending our relationships with one another and this earth, for equity, for justice, and with kindness.
