Making Leviticus Delicious
One of the last articles I wrote before putting the last blog to bed was about broccoli.
Specifically, it was about how I had learned to roast broccoli in order to bring out it’s flavor and make it enjoyable to eat without covering up it’s broccoliness. And that I thought it would be a worthwhile goal to treat scripture the same way.
I always intended to make something od a series out of that and I never got a round tuit, but since we are doing this again let’s talk about everyone’s least favorite book, the Book of Leviticus.
Seriously.
I actually did a series of 12 count ‘em 12 sermons on Leviticus in two parts at my current church and I am still working there, because Leviticus is fascinating, and more than that it’s fun.
you know what else it is? Bloody, disgusting, complicated, rigid, and old fashioned. The authors knew that about it when they wrote it. The earliest readers knew that about it when they first loved it.
So often we try to protect Leviticus from that, and it’s a mistake! Leviticus is meant to be old. It was old even when it was new (the first community to read it enthusiastically and compile it into Torah was reading it long after the events it describes) but as an old book it illustrated what it looks like when a community seeks to follow God with all their heart. The questions that community asks, and the things they try to do. It demonstrates just how much of our daily life it touches when we start asking those questions (all of it)
And what’s so cool about it. so FUN about it, is that it doesn’t do all that with a series of long theological and ethical treatises. No. It deals with the issue of holiness from the perspective of spectacle.
Do you want to know what God is like? Light a fire big enough to consume an entire calf. Don’t leave the area while it burns. Do you want to feel how faithful God is? Live for a week in a booth or a tent. Do you want to know how evil defiles things? Start thinking very carefully about everything you touch, and everything that touches all of those things.
Leviticus, is a ancient book of really really incredible children’s sermons.
And if you want to watch what that all looks like from the pulpit, I have video