Offerings & Responsibility in Sacred Relationship

In any healthy relationship, we give and we receive. We recognize the goodness in the relationship. We renew that goodness in lots of tiny ways: daily greetings, hugs, showing up for an otherwise bad day, staying present through tough times, remembering the names of our loved ones, offering up a tiny gift in the other person’s favorite color, and so on.  This week’s reading (Leviticus 1:1-5:26) offers us a glimpse at how we tend our relationship with the Holy, which so often is about tending our responsibilities toward one another and this earth. The beginning of Leviticus focuses on first-fruits offerings and on peace offerings. These are the regular offerings of recognition, care, and renewal of our faithful promises with the Holy. Just because we’re not talking about a relationship with another human being doesn’t stop us from our human needs and how we cultivate relationships. Human beings are obligatorily gregarious primates: we need to spend a certain amount of time each day and over the course of the years tending to our relationships in tiny, middling, and big ways. That’s true for our relationships with the Holy, with the earth, and with one another.

 

First-fruits are offerings we make to renew our sense of the covenant with the Holy, the faithful promises we’ve made. We might feel very grateful and we might feel rather distressed — we have good and bad years in our lives, no matter how strong our efforts at fulfilling faithful promises.  But however we feel, we’re invited, regardless of how much we can give, to give something in recognition of this important relationship and renewing our faithful promises. The second section of this week’s reading focuses on peace offerings, individual or household gifts in thanksgiving, celebration, or seeking blessing. Please take some time this week to consider how you tend your relationships with the Holy, the earth, and with one another on a regular basis. How are you taking responsibility for these relationships to be blessings?

 

The third and longest section focuses on offerings of taking responsibility and focusing on repairing relationship and our faithful promises. Having processes for acknowledging when we have accidentally, unintentionally, or intentionally done something harmful supports social health and well-being. There are rules, there are laws, there are expectations, and while intention does matter, a break in relationship still calls us to tend it, whether that break was deliberate or not. What are some of the kinds of trouble Leviticus figures we might slip into?

1. Individually we do something inadvertently against the 613 commandments (mitzvot), that is, we make a mistake. Recognizing that mistake, we take responsibility and turn to nurturing our relationship with the Holy more intentionally.
2. The community of Israel makes a collective mistake. This way back to right relationship is laid out, recognizing that people individually and collectively make mistakes.
3. A leader makes a mistake. Leaders often have the power to make colossal mistakes that cause far more damage than a household or individual. We need leaders to be thoughtful about the power they have and how they’re using it. We need leaders to take responsibility for their choices and their mistakes.
4. Someone testifies falsely, which of course does great damage to society’s trust in policies and laws and the processes of bringing about justice. Tell enough falsehoods, especially at the highest levels of leadership, and it is possible to so corrode trust and hope for justice that society struggles to carry on and not dissolve into civil conflict. 
5. Acting wrongly toward holy things. In our pluralist society, acting wrong toward holy things is a way of increasing divisions between people, increasing fearfulness, and causing folks to spend significant resources trying to protect themselves and their holy things. That’s exactly what happens every time someone physically attacks a house of worship or a house of study, attacks and defaces someone else’s religious writings, and seeks to deface and destroy sacred spaces and the people who care for those sacred spaces. As with testifying falsely, acting wrongly toward holy things can fray the fabric of society (whether pluralist or note) and lead to civil conflict.
6. Intentionally doing wrong and violating the mitzvot. Intention does matter. Human beings have choices. We can choose for greater good and we can choose for greater ill. We can refuse to choose, which is a choice, and thereby empower others choosing, frequently for greater ill. Mistakes happen. Choosing is a free act of responsibility and can, therefore, create even more problems. For example, choosing to refuse to care for to protect the stranger makes society extremely unsafe, as who is in the circle enough to protect and who is not must be made very obvious, and that is impossible to do without oppressing more and more people. 
7. Lying, cheating, and stealing are especially bad choices. Again, they undermine how to be together, trust, and social well-being. 

 

To be a free people, we need practices of responsibility for when we mess up. We need them as individuals, as households, and as communities. We need our leaders to understand and practice extra levels of responsibility, honoring the power they have that can cause so much damage. Today, we’re not sacrificing animals or grain or honey to demonstrate our acknowledging we’ve messed up. Instead, we are asked to make a different kind of sacrifice: to put ourselves vulnerably out there, acknowledging that we’ve chosen badly or made mistakes, attending to the damage we’ve done, and then working to try and address that damage. That reparation work may involve offering our gifts in particular ways, or wealth redistribution to nurture a greater social good or our time to nurture different and more caring relationships. 

 

Part of being human is sometimes failing, sometimes making mistakes, and sometimes choosing badly. We are unreasonable and hard-hearted if we expect ourselves or others to never make bad choices or mistakes. We also keep failing one another if we expect that we can or others not to have to face our or their bad choices and mistakes. Our relationships with one another, with this earth and with the Holy call us to responsibility. Responsibility isn’t always fun, and sometimes can be quite challenging to who we believe we are when we hurt one another living out those beliefs. But true freedom doesn’t exist without responsibility. A world without responsibility is a world where we don’t have choices, where we can’t make mistakes, where our creativity and our gifts and our relationships are stifled. That’s not a world I want, and it isn’t the world Leviticus envisions either. In describing the troubles we can create and the first stages of acknowledging and beginning reparations, Leviticus sets up a way of being that explains what it is to be free and so to be responsible. May we take the time this week to consider how we are responsible, how we tend our relationships, where we may need to nurture relationships (who’s a stranger in your world, where do you have sour relationships), and how we go about accepting responsibility and following through on our faithful promises after bad choices or mistakes.