A TRIBE OF DOERS
Numbers 8:10-11, 14-16; James 1:22, 2:14-17
[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript seeks to stay close to the exact words spoken.]
Rev. Lyman: Have any of you ever read the Book of Leviticus? Oh, I see a couple hands. More hands than I thought. It's a fascinating book, and it's a book about the Levites--the Levites, and what they did, and how they ordered our life. And I challenge you to look through it some time, or to read a commentary about it, and to see what was going on with the people of Israel, and how they were called to order their lives. It's fascinating.
They were called to be together as a people, to live every single part of their lives according to a certain order. And if any of you know about the Myers-Briggs Indicator--you know that there's the J. Which I'm very proud of, I'm a big J. But they like things ordered. (Rev. Vamos: We could call this J Sunday, then, too!) The church staff, we know…some of us are not J's. Like, all the men on the staff are not J's. (Rev. Vamos: Guilty as charged!)
So there's this blessed orderedness to the book of Leviticus. To what the Levites were calling--what the Levites were charged to do for the people to bring order; to live our lives under rules that God had established. And if you look at what was happening in Leviticus, it touched on everything, from cleanliness to uncleanliness, to money, to how we took care of widows and orphans, to how women were treated, to what we ate--everything. So it's really interesting to look at, to think about that, that it was important for the people of Israel to be organized in all kinds of ways, and to think about how this was worship. How we lived our lives was how we worshipped God. And how we lived our lives was a reflection of how we worshipped God in everything that we did, from sun-up to sundown, seven days a week. And so I challenge you to go and read Leviticus and look about that--look at that how we're supposed to handle our money, how we're supposed to forgive debts, how we're supposed to tend to the land…all those kind of things. It's marvelous, it's fascinating, and as a J, I'm very thankful for this orderedness that we have, and I see it as blessedness. I see it as being blessed by God, and giving a way to live our lives, to fulfill our lives in everything we do: work, worship, service. Everything that we do together as a people is blessed and ordered by God, and it's exciting to me.
Rev. Vamos:Amen! Well, because the Levites were in charge of service in the temple, we're sort of playing with that theme today: how does our work and our worship relate to one another? We also heard a word from the Book of James, which has been somewhat problematic for Protestants through the ages. Martin Luther, as you may have heard before, wanted to throw out the book of James because it emphasizes the aspect of work as part of the spiritual life and the Christian life. If there's one banner phrase that all Protestants could probably get under, it is the phrase, "Saved by grace through faith"--the idea that we don't get into heaven through our good works, but by faith in God's grace. And that's why Martin Luther wanted to throw out the book of James. Because James basically says that faith without works, that spirituality without action, is dead, is meaningless. So both faith and work are important aspects of the Christian life.
James is also famous for the exhortation that you also heard from the passage read this morning, "Be ye doers of the Word, and not simply hearers of it." And so that's what we're doing today. We're trying to emphasize this teaching this morning, that hopefully is simple enough for children and profound enough for adults: that really everything we do as people of faith ought to be seen as an attempt to glorify God--as an act of worship. And so as we go forth from this Meetinghouse--a space that's set-aside specifically for serving God through worship--my exhortation to us is that we see the work of our hands that we're about to do…as the prayers of the people. As we converse with one another, and seek to build the fellowship we have with one another, that we see that as a way of signifying the Kingdom of God and the kind of community we are trying to build here. So that we're not separating so sharply our worship and our work.
One last very quick point before we leave. It seems to me a good thing to keep in mind, that as people of faith, we ought not just to be about fishing bodies out of the river, but going upstream. Today we're focusing our work on the work of charity. Most of what we're doing will have to do with people in emergency circumstances: people who are homeless, who need hygiene kits, people who've suffered from a natural disaster--they may receive one of the kits that we make today. But we also as people of faith, I think, need to think about the work of justice--the going up-river part of the equation. If somebody shows up at our house hungry, we ought to feed them, but we also ought to find out why it is they have become hungry. And so included in our work today, I think ought to also be the cry of the prophets for justice.
So this ends with the exhortation that after you've finished your service project and fellowship, you might take a moment to stop by the Peacemaking table, where you'll have an opportunity to send a letter to a congressperson about debt relief in Haiti, where we've had a mission emphasis for several decades. And include that as part of our work and our worship today.
So we're going to sing a hymn. After the hymn we are all invited to go forth from this place…[into the Fellowship Center to do our service]. So let's continue our worship, as we join our hearts and hands in the work of God. Amen.
January 27, 2008
Levi SundayThe Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos
The Reverend Mary Alice Lyman
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