Radical Acts of Forgiveness

Leviticus 25: 10 ff

Presenting Engagement: defying gravity
I want to tell you the stories of two Catholic churches this morning.

One is about the broad, octagonal dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in Florence, Italy built in the 1430’s. The contractor on the job was the sculptor, mathmatician, architect, and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi who had the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

The remarkable thing is that Brunelleschi figured out how to use interlocking brickwork to eliminate any requirement for framework underneath the dome to keep it from collapsing into the cathedral during construction. This had never been done before and all the while that Brunelleschi was performing this feat of gravity defying engineering, everyone except his patron thought his math was flat wrong and that he was a complete lunatic and perhaps a heretic whose work would fail in total embarassment. Cosimo was even thrown into prison for bad government and treason over this.

Well, popular opinion and conventional wisdom were wrong. The dome was successful and on the ceiling at the highest point, the Grand Duke commissioned a stunning fresco mural of the last judgment. There’s certainly no doubt about which side of Christ he thought his reprobate enemies and doubters sat.

In the second story, it seems the legal defense costs of the contemporary Catholic church’s child abuse scandals have been so great that some Archdiocese have filed for bankruptcy and sold churches buildings to secular interests.

Pews, stained glass windows, pulpits, and even marble altars have been sold or donated to other churches. In one church recently, the mortar between the polished marble altar and the wall was chipped away and when the altar was removed, workers found that the concrete in the wall behind it was crumbling and fragmented and frail. In other words, the beautiful polished marble that was shown to God covered up a frail framework that was the body of the building.

Why tell these two stories?

Well the point of the first tale is that in order to find truth, we have to look up because that’s where God is. I don’t mean that we have to believe God lives in some mystical realm above the sky that Greek philosophers called “heaven;” it’s that we have to go above and beyond our humanistic, earth-bound world where vision and imagination are enslaved to the bondage of gravity.

But when Brunelleschi and de’ Medici did that they found out that looking up can be a radical act that not only defies gravity but also defies the frightened voices of conventional wisdom and popular opinion.

You know those voices. They’re the ones that say what’s possible and what’s impossible, what’s true and what isn’t true whenever you dare to be different.

The second tale reminds me of Paul’s comment to the Corinthian church that we have the treasure of the glory of God stored in clay jars- which are our bodies.[i]

You see, we can polish up our external surfaces all we wish and offer God our gleaming faces, but behind that marble is a frail, flawed, and crumbling structure-a clay jar. We have got to be honest about the human condition. We’ve got to know ourselves as both polished marble and crumbling concrete even though those same frightened voices urge us to ignore our weaknesses and just polish that marble a little more.

Those voices say: You can find truth in the gleam of the marble’s surface. But if you really don’t like the image that you see reflected in the polished marble then just shop around for different image.

One commentator, cleverer than I am, recently inferred that in our market driven world, where value is whatever appeals to consumer wants and desires, our search for truth could just as easily happen in the aisles of Home Depot as anywhere else.[ii]

Well, today’s scripture readings show that we do need to look above and beyond ourselves to find an indespensible characteristic of God that we need to imitate in our own lives. That characteristic is merciful forgiveness and these verses give us a particular language to talk about mercy and forgiveness and a particular way of thinking about our relationship with God.

Biblical Context: the laws of redemption
That relationship is all about a redeeming God and the command to be a redeeming people.

This 25th chapter of Leviticus decrees a year called Jubilee. That is the 50th year: the year following seven times seven years and during Jubilee, all debts are essentially cancelled.

Every seventh year is also a time of release. For instance, the Hebrews must let the earth lie fallow, which is an act of releasing the land back to God. The earth’s burden of debt to the landowner in terms of yielding produce is cancelled. Every seventh and every fiftieth year financial debts and debts of servitude are also cancelled within the community of Israel.

In the meantime, there is a redemptive social mechanism, a means of redeeming debts and redeming relatives who are in servitude. If any member of a family falls into debt and has to sell off a parcel of land or a house in order to get out of debt, a kinsmen must buy the parcel back and redeem the debt. No land may be sold in perpetuity.

If your kinsman goes into debt and falls on hard times you must take in him and his family to live with you and you may not lend family members money at interest or make a profit off of their hard times. Relatives who bind themselves over to their kin under a term of indentured service may not be treated like slaves and must be released from indenture in the Jubilee year. If a Hebrew falls into servitude to a foreigner, a relative should redeem that person by paying off the debt to the foreigner.

These are all holy practices not decided by some selfless group decision or democratic referendum or inspired by either conventional wisdom or by popular opinion.

No. They are commands of God that originate above and beyond human instinct.

Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, what is the purpose of all this language about redeeming and redemption? It must be important because these instructions also appear in the book of Deuteronomy which was organized by a completely different editor than Leviticus[iii] and they appear even earlier in Exodus, which was composed by still another editor.[iv]

First of all, the God of Moses considers all land to be God’s, and we are tenants on God’s earth. We cannot lay claim to land that is owned by our master.

Second, and more importantly, the social practice of redeeming debts originates in God’s redemption of the Hebrews from servitude to the Egyptian Pharaohs. Redemption is the practice of a community that has been redeemed.

In the history of the Middle East, this redemptive act of the God of Moses is radical for its place and time. The rivals of the God of Moses were Pharaohs and carved idols and not one of them was forgiving or capable of deliverance.

And since the characteristics a community reflect what that community worships, the people who worshipped these other gods were also unforgiving.

Only the community that worshipped the God of Moses had the language and practice of forgiveness. The Hebrew verb for God’s action of redeeming the Hebrews from Egypt describes the act of a protective kinsman, someone who protects the family and keeps it together. God is a protector who redeems people and forgives debts for the good of God’s family.[v]

So when the people of Israel continued this godly practice of redemption, they were doing like Filippo Brunelleschi. They were going against the grain of conventional social practice. They were doing something other societies didn’t do. They were looking above and beyond the polished marble to find inspiration and so 1280 years before Christ the Israelites found that mercy was a characteristic of God.

Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
What does this mean for us nearly 3,300 years later as we attempt to be a Christian community surrounded by the confusing and often misleading voices of conventional wisdom and popular opinion?

Well for one thing, Christianity still confesses that forgiveness originates with God. It comes from above and beyond our human experience and imagination.

This is a radical confession that defies the voices that tell us that everything we need to know can be found in the polished marble of human invention.

Did you know that if you tour the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. or the Field Museum in Chicago or the American Museum of Natural History in New York, you will be challenged to find any exhibit on the development of the human capacity for forgiveness.

Oh yes, you’ll see all manner of displays about human progress. You’ll find things on technological invention, on the development of group coordination in hunting, and even the evolution of organized community structure.

But nothing about the development of a human concept of mercy. Nothing on cancellation of financial debt as a moral virtue. Nothing about the refusal to hold grudges or seek vengence. Nothing about refusal to exploit people in servitude or economic duress.[vi]

Redemption is a religious concept, a gift from God.

But we contemporary Christians claim this 3300 year old solidarity with those Hebrews who were redeemed from Egypt and followed social practices of redemption that set them apart from the conventional wisdom and popular opinion of their times.

We do this whenever we pray the prayer the Lord’s Prayer that we learned in Matthew and in Luke.[vii] When we pray: “forgive us our debt as we also have forgiven our debtors,” we refer directly to the Torah practices of redemption.

When we pray these words, we claim kinship with the historical family of God that asks for God’s intervening, redeeming hand on behalf of ourselves and the community as a whole.

We also claim kinship with early Christians who have used this prayer as liturgy for over 1,907 years.

By the end of the first century, an order of instruction has was used by early Christians, called the Didache (didah-kee), and which organized worship and liturgical practices that affect every aspect of living- inside and outside of church. It was intended to ensure the formation of a particularly Christ-led community which acted quite differently from neighboring communities. Among the instructions of the Didache was the charge to say the Lord’s Prayer three times each day.

The point is that when we practice redemption by asking for our debts to be forgiven and by forgiving our debtors, we are making a radical and unconventional confession that truth is revealed by God rather than by the marketplace of conventional wisdom and popular opinion.

You may not think of yourself as a radical.

In fact that idea might just conjur up all sorts of images that you really don’t want to be associated with! But the word, radical, has to do with going to the origin or the roots. A radical in math is an expression that is the root of another numerical expression.

If you are a radical, you are someone who tries to get to the roots of things and for Christian radicals, the roots are the word of God rather than the frightened voice of social convention.

Conclusion: what’s the point?
So be a radical. Look up above and beyond your earthly experience to find the truth which is that we need mercy. This is a truth will not collapse on top of you.

Be a radical and pray for the redeeming of your own personal debts and for the debts we incur as a society.

Be a radical and forgive the social debts which are owed to you.

Be a radical and don’t hold a grudge or store up ill will in your heart.

Be a radical and wage peace instead of aggravating hatred in your community.

Be a radical and practice Godly acts of mercy rather than exploitation.

Be a radical and get back to the origins of your Christian faith because there, among those radical, counter-cultural origins you will find the kingdom of God.

And when you find the kingdom of God, you will find hope.

AMEN.

[i] 2 Corinthians 4:7.
[ii] Apologies to David Holmberg. “On Language.” The New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2007.
[iii] Deuteronomy 15: 1-11.
[iv] Exodus 21:1-11
[v] Walter Brueggemann. Theology of the Old Testament. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp 174, 175.
[vi] Walter Brueggemann. “Always in the Shadow of Empire.” Michael Budde & Robert Brimlow, eds. The Church as Counterculture. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), p 45.
[vii] Matthew 6:10-14; Luke 11:2-4.