When we study Leviticus, we’re looking at two significant contributions that make up the text. One is usually called P (Priestly) and the other is H (Holiness Legislation), which was added later just before the Jewish people were exiled to Babylon. (Now, even if you believe these texts are divinely inspired, let’s remember that we may receive inspiration at different times and a later group of folks might join these inspirations to others.) These two sources are sometimes in contradiction to each other, and appear to have somewhat different purposes. Recognizing that to love the Holy, we must love one another, Leviticus concerns itself not only with ritual life but with social life as well. But sometimes as we study the texts, we meet trouble, because we live in a different world than when the texts were written (inspired), and also with that distance may notice pieces of the texts contradicting each other. This week’s reading brings up right up against that trouble: we should condemn these people but love one another? The authors are teaching how to be faithful, but what do we do when a teaching leads us directly into practicing hate, not loving one another?
This week’s reading (Leviticus 19:1-20:27) includes a long speech concerning sexual practices, most of which, just to be clear, have to do with heterosexual practices, and one line of which addresses men having sex with men. The Holiness Legislation component of Leviticus, in particular, features lists of wrongful behaviors that are supposed to contrast the Israelites with the Canaanites as justification for taking possession of the land. There’s no evidence these sexual practices were indeed Canaanite practices, and so we raise an eyebrow and ponder how our spiritual ancestors may have sought to differentiate themselves from their neighbors, to create reasons for less justice towards one’s neighbors. However, before rushing to judge our spiritual ancestors, we might want to consider: how do we do the same thing? How do we justify treating some people better than others? It is a very human thing, to seek moral reasons to override the larger moral commandment of love one another in order to demonstrate our love for the Holy. We might seek justification for seizing land for oil pipelines, or having more civil rights than that other group, or explaining why we can have easier lives and those people don’t deserve that kind of ease. Dr. Seuss covers this very human tendency wonderfully in The Butter Battle Book: those who butter their toast butter side up have distinctly negative feelings about those who butter their toast butter side down and vice versa. I don’t use butter or eat toast, so clearly I’m a blasphemer and anathema to both groups. But while this practice of defining who is worthy and who is less worthy is both an understandable and natural human tendency, it isn’t the kind of compassion, empathy, or justice to which we’re actively called in loving one another.
If we pursue treating the ger, the resident stranger or alien, as though they are citizens, then we are called to a very different way of life than we’re pursuing. People would be protected from being persecuted, rounded up, or incarcerated, arrested outside of houses of worship, and separated as families just because of their immigration status. If we pursue loving the Holy through loving one another than we stop racial profiling in policing and we can truly live in a place where your zip code neither determines your likelihood of imprisonment nor your likelihood of an early death. If we pursue loving the Holy through loving one another in our differences, then that means folks like me aren’t denied services at businesses for having same-gender partners, or access to places because folks in wheelchairs wheeling themselves aren’t welcome, or that restrooms are available to a person depending on the gender they understand themselves to be.
In other words, moral speech and how we treat one another is still a live issue today, long after ancient Israel before the Babylonian Exile. When we reflect on our moral speech, whether in sacred spaces or in public ones, let’s pay special attention to whether we are calling us together for compassion, uniting us to make life better for each and for all, or whether that speech justifies and encourages abuse and hurting other people as somehow less deserving or less than real or righteous people. These sacred texts we love are teaching us still, sometimes, when we come up against the text in contradiction. Perhaps in its original context it would not have felt that way, but today it is so. We have hearts to apply to these situations as well as reason, and with these gifts we may discuss the challenging texts and consider how our behaviors may be mirroring those difficult texts or if we are called differently in order to fulfill this larger call: to love the Holy, love one another, no exceptions. Naming particular groups of people reminds us, really, no exceptions. Strangers? Yup. Widows? Yup. Orphans? Yup. The neighbor who shouts at us? Yup. And that means attending to our own speech, our own tendencies to draw smaller, more comfortable circles.
We’re figuring out how to live faithfully, studying these sacred texts and sometimes wrestling with a worldview that seems to contradict the love commandment. Me? I’d rather risk interpreting too generously and graciously than not enough. My sense of the Holy is that the Beloved is far larger than my single conception of the One, or that any human being can individually hold. We have a world and humanity of marvelous diversity and I read that as both reflecting the Holy and bringing joy to the Holy. May we tend our world with greater compassion, lovingkindness, and generosity than is easy or even comfortable or seems prudent, and be ready to live with awe and wonder as we discover this neighbor, this stranger, now family and friend, dancing, singing, and demonstrating a different aspect of the Holy through their own lives.
