"You shall be holy"

A sermon preached with the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, California, based on the lections from A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year A.

“You shall be holy,” God instructs Her people in our reading from Leviticus this morning.

Have any of you seen the movie The Testament of Ann Lee?

If you haven’t, I will say, it is a unique film — probably not for everyone. I really enjoyed it, but I recognize I am a bit of a niche audience.

The film is based on the true story of Ann Lee, who helped found and shepherd the Shaker movement, from religious persecution in England to a thriving community in the nascent United States.

The Shakers were (I should say are) highly egalitarian. There are three Shakers left, including a recent convert from … the Episcopal Church). The Shakers’ practice of celibacy for all believers has oft been cited as an epic challenge for church growth.

From their founding in the 18th century the Shakers honored Mother Ann Lee as their spiritual leader, and held a theology of a dual-gendered God. In the 18th century. Women preached as a matter of course. Like the Quakers from which they sprang, the Shakers were strict pacifists; refusing military service and resisting violence under any circumstances.

Because of that commitment, during the Revolutionary War, Lee and others were jailed under suspicion of espionage simply for refusing to serve in the Continental Army, despite their clear support of independence from the crown.

During Lee’s preaching tours around New England and Upstate New York, local mobs often met the Shakers with hostility. The film portrays a particularly bloody instance of this hostility that took place in  Shirley, Massachusetts in 1783, when a violent crowd burst into a worship meeting, beat members of the community, and assaulted Ann Lee, believing her to be a man, and stripping her clothing in an attempt to prove it.[i]

In the film, as the violence erupts, the Shakers immediately begin voicing a refrain:

“Do not fight back.” “Do not fight back.” “Do not fight back.”

As they are dragged and beaten: “Do not fight back.” I found myself crying through this scene.

It would be so easy to look at a community like the Shakers and see:

Extremists.
Fanatics.
Rigid religious purists.

That’s certainly what the mobs saw. But what if what we chose to see something else? What if we chose to see a wounded people trying to live according to their understanding of God’s holiness?

Not holiness as superiority. Not holiness as spiritual performance. Not holiness that demands anyone else live as they do. But holiness as a disciplined refusal to mirror the violence they encounter in the world — not only physical violence, but the violence of racism, misogyny, poverty, and all human systems of oppression.

The Shakers were outspoken in their condemnation of enslavement — particularly the institution of chattel slavery in their new country. They welcomed Black members from the earliest days.  In the film, as the Shakers arrive in New York City, they come across a slave auction. “Shame!” they scream. “Shame!” A good reminder that the argument contemporaries of the age “couldn’t have known better” is specious.

“You shall be holy,” God instructs Her people in our reading from Leviticus.

Leviticus … is not exactly a favorite Book of the Bible among Episcopalians and other so-called progressive Christians. You might hear the name and think:

Purity codes. Strange rules. Legalism. Holier-than-thou religion.

You might think of the way Leviticus has been used to legitimize homophobia — verses ripped from context and flattened into hollow slogans in the service of bad, violent theology.[ii] Leviticus has become, for many of us, a caricature. But if we dismiss it entirely, we allow others to distort its meaning, and we may miss what the Holy Spirit was up to in its writing.

Because Leviticus was the work of a wounded people.

These were people returning from exile – a period known as the Babylonian Captivity.[iii] The Jerusalem temple destroyed. A culture fractured. A people who knew what it was to have the winds of war and empire change the course of their lives. They were longing to strengthen and document their identity, their culture, their practices, their beliefs. And so yes, we get codes running the gamut from food to medicine to liturgy.[iv]

And, as they turn toward imagining themselves as a reconstituted community in a new and also old land, God says:

“You shall be holy.” And what does that holiness look like? God says:

Leave the edges of your field unharvested to feed the hungry and migrants.
Pay workers fairly and on time.
Do not mock the deaf or the blind.
Love your neighbor as yourself.[v]

Not abstract philosophy or showy piety, but:

Economic policy.
Labor regulation.
Disability justice.
Mutual aid.

The Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney calls this passage in Leviticus a “social justice manifesto.”[vi] What might look like legalism may actually be a wounded people trying to build a society that does not replicate the same injustice that harmed them.

We could see:

Extremists.
Fanatics.
Rigid religious purists.

Or we could see a wounded people refusing to mirror the violence they have endured.

In the end, I don’t think this admittedly weird, messy book is about haughty, harmful religion. I think it is about breaking cycles of harm. I think it is about a wounded people deciding what they will now become.

In the face of our own crumbling institutions, political fracture, deportation, state violence, and woundedness, it would be easy for our hearts to harden

To dehumanize.
To take up weapons of contempt.
To mirror the cruelty that has marked us.

There are days when I am so tempted to spout dehumanizing vitriol toward those I perceive as my enemy. (Okay, sometimes I give into that temptation … with my inside voice.)

But God calls me to holiness. Not holier-than-thouness, but holiness.

Ann Lee’s community said, “Do not fight back.” Not as submission,[vii] but as a refusal to let violence determine who they would become.

A commitment to holiness that for us might look like:

Breathtakingly courageous love.
Justice without dehumanization.
Community that protects the vulnerable without surrendering our identity; our promise to “respect the dignity of every human being.”

And that commitment may look odd or even shocking to outside observers We may be called

Extremists.
Fanatics.
Rigid religious purists.

This weekend, the tower of the historic Old North Church in Boston was lit with a giant projection of a verse from … Leviticus. It says: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them.”

Who would have thought? Episcopalians lighting one of our most famous church steeples with a quote from Leviticus, in defense of immigrants and refugees. Because … we do know better.

“You shall be holy,” God instructs Her people.


 


[i] Some sources say this happened in Shirley, others in Petersham. I personally would not be surprised if it happened in more than one place.  

[ii] For further reading, see John F. Dwyer’s Those Seven References: A Study of "Homosexuality" in the Bible and Its Impact on the Queer Community of Faith, chapter 2.

[iii] Scholars generally (scholars don’t ever all agree!)  believe Leviticus was written over a period over the late exilic and postexilic period. Leviticus is generally thought of as two sections. The first, the Priestly Code (chapters 1-16) is a pretty dry set of rules aimed specifically at religious leadership, the second, the Holiness Code (chapters 17-26) seems to have been written in mind for all people reading, and is sometimes even claimed to be a bit of a corrective to the Priestly Code. are known as the Holiness. Found in many books, including Fortress Commentary on the Bible, p. 397.

[iv] With thanks to Dr. Robert A. Kugler for contextualizing it this way in Fortress Commentary on the Bible (Leviticus).

[v] As I sat down after preaching this sermon, I realized I’d recreated an assignment from my Hebrew Bible class in seminary in which we were asked to write a sermon focusing only on a reading from the Old Testament (aka Hebrew Bible, without mentioning Jesus. I had no idea I had done so here until that moment! I think that may be because the Gospel is sitting right there, underneath, and indeed, Jesus of Nazareth is so clearly reading these words — so familiar to him — right along with us. I am so thankful for my professor, Dr. Julián González, for giving me such a deep appreciation for these texts.

[vi] A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year A, p 149.

[vii] I hesitated with the “Do not fight back” sermon illustration because of the church’s sorry history weaponizing scripture to encourage people (notably women) to stay in unsafe, abusive relationships. So again, what we are talking about here is not submission; quite the opposite — it’s taking agency back, which can take many forms.

Kathleen Moore