Christians and the Old Testament, Part 1
Service of Worship
Eastern Parkway United Methodist
Church
July 11, 2021
Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor
Prelude
Greeting and Announcements
Mission Statement:
We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth
disciples of Jesus Christ.
Call to Worship:
Blessed
are those whose ways are blameless,
Who
walk according to the law of the Lord.
Blessed
are those who keep his statutes,
And
seek God with all their heart.
We
will praise you with upright hearts,
As
we learn your righteous laws.
*Hymn 89: Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee
1. Joyful, joyful, we adore thee,
God of glory, Lord of love;
hearts unfold like flowers before thee,
opening to the sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness;
drive the dark of doubt away.
Giver of immortal gladness,
fill us with the light of day!
2. All thy works with joy surround thee,
earth and heaven reflect thy rays,
stars and angels sing around thee,
center of unbroken praise.
Field and forest, vale and mountain,
flowery meadow, flashing sea,
chanting bird and flowing fountain,
call us to rejoice in thee.
3. Thou art giving and forgiving,
ever blessing, ever blest,
well-spring of the joy of living,
ocean depth of happy rest!
Thou our Father, Christ our brother,
all who live in love are thine;
teach us how to love each other,
lift us to the joy divine.
4. Mortals, join the mighty chorus
which the morning stars began;
love divine is reigning o'er us,
binding all within its span.
Ever singing, march we onward,
victors in the midst of strife;
joyful music leads us sunward,
in the triumph song of life.
Prayer of Confession:
Eternal God, in whom we live and move and have our being, whose
face is hidden from us by our sins, and whose mercy we forget in the blindness
of our hearts: cleanse us from all our offenses, and deliver us from proud
thoughts and vain desires, that with reverent and humble hearts we may draw
near to you, confessing our faults, confiding in your grace, and finding in you
our refuge and strength; through Jesus Christ your Son.
Assurance
The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and
abounding in lovingkindness. God has not dealt with us according to our sins,
nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are
above the earth, so great is God’s lovingkindness toward those who fear our
Creator. As far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our
transgressions from us. Amen.
Scripture Reading Leviticus 15: 1-6, 19-27
1The LORD said to Moses and Aaron, 2"Speak
to the Israelites and say to them: 'When any man has an unusual bodily
discharge, such a discharge is unclean. 3Whether it continues
flowing from his body or is blocked, it will make him unclean. This is how his
discharge will bring about uncleanness: 4"'Any bed the man with
a discharge lies on will be unclean, and anything he sits on will be unclean. 5Anyone
who touches his bed must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will
be unclean till evening. 6Whoever sits on anything that the man with
a discharge sat on must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will
be unclean till evening.
19"'When a woman has her regular flow
of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone
who touches her will be unclean till evening. 20"'Anything she
lies on during her period will be unclean, and anything she sits on will be
unclean. 21Anyone who touches her bed will be unclean; they must
wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening.
22Anyone who touches anything she sits on will be unclean; they must
wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening.
23Whether it is the bed or anything she was sitting on, when anyone
touches it, they will be unclean till evening. 24"'If a man has
sexual relations with her and her monthly flow touches him, he will be unclean
for seven days; any bed he lies on will be unclean. 25"'When a
woman has a discharge of blood for many days at a time other than her monthly
period or has a discharge that continues beyond her period, she will be unclean
as long as she has the discharge, just as in the days of her period. 26Any
bed she lies on while her discharge continues will be unclean, as is her bed
during her monthly period, and anything she sits on will be unclean, as during
her period. 27Anyone who touches them will be unclean; they must
wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening.
Sermon Christians and
the Old Testament, Part 1: Sacrifices, Purity, and Patriarchy
Friends, today
as we continue on in our “Stump the Preacher” sermon series, we’re beginning a
multi-part look at the Old Testament inspired from a few different sources. The
first is my friend, the Rabbi Rafi Spitzer, who told me that he’d love to see
what a bunch of mainline Protestants would have to say about this material from
Leviticus. Bodily discharge, bathing, sex, periods…man if this isn’t what all
of us want to hear a sermon about I don’t know what is! The other source is our
friend Diane. Diane asked me a complicated question: “Our evangelical friends are
all about Jesus, but they lean pretty legalistic, and when they start talking
about what you’re not allowed to do they always start quoting the OT and never
the Gospels. What’s up with that?” What’s up with that, indeed? That’s a GREAT
sermon topic, but it’s much more than just one sermon. I’m breaking that very
complicated situation into three different discussions:
1) How should Christian people look at the Old Testament? How should we
read it, interpret it, and apply it to our modern lives when it was written
thousands of years ago by a people who lived so differently than we do? How do
we balance these stories with the words of Jesus?
2) Do we think there’s a shift in the character of God between what we see
in the Old Testament and what we see in the Gospels?
3) What’s this chasm like between progressive and conservative Christians?
How should we be with each other? Can we find middle ground?
This morning we’re tackling the first part: what in the heck should we
take from passages like the one we just heard from in Leviticus 15? First off, the
author tells us right in verse one that God was giving these instructions
directly to Moses and Aaron. They were sitting there taking dictation so they
could pass this on to their people. Can you imagine writing that stuff down? “I’m
sorry, God, can you back up a sec? Can you tell me more about the bath you have
to take after you sit on the same chair as a dude who’s got something leaking going
on?” The very first and most important message I always take from the Pentateuch,
the first five books of the Old Testament and what our Jewish friends call the
Torah, is a message of devotion. The stories in these books are stories about a
small, emerging, frequently struggling group of people who loved God very much and
made a hard core commitment to serve God no matter what. Just flip through
those five books some night that you can’t sleep. You’ll go out like a light,
but first, you’ll see that Moses would do anything—ANYTHING—for God. And at
this point God had already told Moses that he would never see the Promised Land
and therefore he was going to get absolutely zippo out of this deal. Would you
be willing to work any job for no pay? How about a job that required forty
years in the desert, with a frequently disobedient cohort that you had to keep
in line while all of you teetered on the edge of starvation? Moses had a love
for God that most of us can hardly wrap our minds around. If there’s only one thing
you’re going to learn from the Old Testament, learn how to love God.
It astonishes me how truly little time the majority of Christian people
spend talking about the Old Testament. The name “Old Testament” itself, a
moniker that Christians came up with, implies what we think about it. That’s the
old stuff. Those pages are all musty and yellow. They’re not as important, they’re
way on the backburner. The New Testament has the shiny, novel teachings of
Jesus that still have that “New Messiah” smell. It’s a bit embarrassing how
little your run of the mill Christian could tell you about the Old Testament if
asked. These writings take up two thirds of our Christian Bible! These writings
contain our Law, our Poetry, our Songs, our Prose, our Prophesy, and our
History! Yet I didn’t learn most of that until college, and most of the flocks
that I’ve preached to really wouldn’t be offended if I never mentioned the Old
Testament in a sermon.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly stories and characters in the Old
Testament that get more love from Christians. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, Moses
parting the Red Sea, David and Goliath, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Joseph and
the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I venture to say that a lot of our
familiarity with the Old Testament hinges on a few factors—how much kids love
the story, and how grandiose it looks to depict the story in a film or musical.
I dare say that if there are two books in the Old Testament that
Christians don’t hesitate to read at all, they’re the book of Psalms and the
book of Proverbs. And I can’t blame anyone there. Those two books make up the
musical library of King David, and the wisdom of his son King Solomon. It’s
wonderful content that portrays a huge span of human emotion, that expresses
raw, honest feelings to God, that has inspired countless modern songs and works
of art, and that even provides a road map to live by. And there’s no denying
that Psalm 23 sounds WAY better from the pulpit than these verses from
Leviticus 15 about taking a bath after you soil yourself.
Indeed, these particular verses are the last you’re likely to hear a
sermon on. And that’s why Rafi brought them up. The Old Testament makes us a
bit uncomfortable anyway by and large, and these particular verses lack all the
attributes of an Old Testament story that we could handle hearing—no heroic
tales of bravery, no famous words set to choral music, no beloved verses that
you affectionately memorized years ago. Yet, if we don’t read these verses,
these verses that describe in painful detail the world that our ancestors of
the faith lived in, these verses that tell us about how agonizing it was for
the ragamuffin group of runaway slaves to become Israel, these verses that tell us how meticulously God was
watching these guys in the infancy of their relationship with the Divine, these
verses that show us that God kept such a close watch on us that God wanted a thorough
inventory of every drop of fluid that emerges from your body—if we don’t take
the time to read these verses than David’s triumph over Goliath means so much
less because we have no appreciation for what his people have been through.
One piece of wisdom that I have imparted many times from the pulpit
about why our ancestors in the Old Testament had so many more rules to follow
than Jesus’ disciples is that these guys in Moses’ time were just starting out.
And when you were a toddler you had far more rules, and far much less
responsibility, than you have now as an adult. You’re ready for more now. This
week I looked at these words about all the baths these people had to take, and
I thought Gosh, their skin is going to get pruny, they spend so much time in
water. Then I thought, No, maybe it’s like how I’ve had to teach my kids every
single step of how to wash their hands, and every single circumstance that
warrants hand washing. Some day my kids will be grown ups, and no one will have
to tell them that when you make mud in the backyard you have to wash your hands
before dinner. But in the meantime my kids don’t know how germs work. And my
little daughter is too smart for her own good. And she learned at school that
if you wash your hands while singing the alphabet you’ll end up washing them
for long enough to kill bacteria. But she really doesn’t like actually cleansing
dirt from her hands. So last week I finally caught her in an elaborate ruse.
For God knows how long, when I told her to wash her hands she closed the bathroom
door, turned on the water, and stood there and sang “A B C D E F G…” without
touching the soap even once. She knew that if I heard the water and the singing
I’d assume she was washing her hands. But alas, merely singing the alphabet is
not enough all on its own to clean your hands. So now I have to watch her. And
I think this is how God saw us, 5,000 years ago when the book of Leviticus took
place. True, it was a completely different time, place, and culture, but people
have really always been the same.
Though, sometimes you discover that our circumstances have changed enough
in 5,000 years that we can do better than we did then. You see that coming out
in these words. At the time of these verses God was hyper-focused on purity. God
put up every symbolic baby gate available to keep the Hebrew people from
wandering into harm and mischief. But these rules were very difficult for even
the most privileged person to follow, and much harder if your means were
limited. It was much harder for the poor to keep access to what they needed to
stay ritually pure than it was for people who had more money. And in a Divine
desire to keep the Hebrews from mingling in a way they weren’t ready to, God
put such boundaries around sexuality, femininity, and post-menstrual hygiene
that women were nearly always ritually impure and untouchable. In a patriarchal
society the difficult position this put women in went largely unnoticed by men.
God put the Hebrew people in a temporary holding pattern to keep them safe when
they needed it. But there were some major inherent problems with this system
that God’s chosen people would need to face eventually, when they were mature
enough to handle the responsibility.
That time is now. Thousands of years have passed, and we’re not living
in encampments in the wilderness eating manna anymore. We’re out of the desert,
worshipping in a Church we built, living by laws we made ourselves. We have the
unique gift of Jesus, God in human form showing us how God would have us live. When
we read from the Old Testament we read from Jesus’ Bible. We see what was most
sacred to him. We should read his Bible with the highest level of respect. It’s
the Bible Jesus came to bring to fruition.
When we read from the Old Testament as Christians, we read through the
interpretive lens of Jesus. We read with his heart. And what we know of Jesus’
heart is that he wasn’t very focused on nitty gritty rules. He was focused on restoring
all people to the vitality God wants for us, especially those left on the
margins of society by their own Church. That was true in Jesus’ time 2,000 years
ago, and it’s true now. Verses like we read this morning are as good a reminder
as any that the poor, the sick, the disabled, the homeless, the stranger, the
refugee, the queer, and a whole half of our population—women—have always
struggled to find a place in the world of the Church. Our responsibility, one
we’re ready for now, is to use the very Laws God equipped us with all those
generations ago, the Laws Moses passed down to us, Laws about love and
devotion, to create the most Christ-like Church we can imagine. With God’s
help, we’ll get there.
Amen.
*Hymn #389: Freely, Freely
God forgave my sin
in Jesus' name.
I've been born again in Jesus' name
And in Jesus' name I come to you
To share his love as he told me to.
He said 'Freely, freely you have received; freely,
freely give.
Go in my name, and because you believe others will
know that I live.’
All pow'r is giv'n in Jesus' name
in earth and heav'n in Jesus’ name
And in Jesus' name I come to you
To share his pow'r as he told me to.
He said 'Freely, freely you have received; freely,
freely give.
Go in my name, and because you believe others will
know that I live.’
Time of Prayer and
Lord’s Prayer
O God our Creator,
we thank you that today you have called us
to worship you and learn of you.
You alone know our needs.
Satisfy them with your unchanging love.
In your presence may we find comfort in sorrow,
guidance in perplexity,
strength to meet temptation,
grace to overcome the fascination of disobedience,
and courage to face up to the hostility of this
rebellious world.
Above all, may we meet Jesus
and go out from our worship indwelt by his spirit.
This prayer we ask to your glory and in his name.
Amen.
Our Father,
Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against
us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the
kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.
Offering
*Doxology
*Prayer of Dedication
*Hymn #577: God of Grace and God of Glory
1 God of grace and God of glory,
on thy people pour thy pow’r.
Crown thine ancient church’s story,
bring its bud to glorious flow’r.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the facing of this hour,
for the facing of this hour.
2 Lo! the hosts of evil round us
scorn thy Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears that long have bound us,
free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the living of these days,
for the living of these days.
3 Cure thy children’s warring madness;
bend our pride to thy control;
shame our wanton, selfish gladness,
rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal,
lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal.
4 Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore.
Let the search for thy salvation
be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
serving thee whom we adore,
serving thee whom we adore.
Benediction
Our God, Our Creator, Redeemer, and
Sustainer, will guard our going out and coming in, from this time on and
forevermore. And as God’s people we all say together: Amen.
Postlude
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