Leviticus 9.1-9 – 30 March 2019 by Revd Patrick Moriarty

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 8 April 2019

Shabbat shalom. It’s wonderful to be here at Alyth which – as well as being spiritual home to so many of my favourite people – would also have been my shul when I grew up a 10-minute walk from here…had I been a Reform Jew.  As it was – and as you can see from my attire – I wasn’t and in fact attended St Jude’s, the tall pointy Church that you can see from outside. But Alyth feels close to home for me.

But these clothes – let me share with you my angst about what to wear this morning.  Did Rabbi Josh invite me here as Head of JCoSS – in which case it should be the suit, or did he invite me as Priest, in which case it’s what a student at school once called my ‘vicar outfit’?  But it’s not straightforward: can I even make that distinction? After all, I may have two or three different roles, but there’s only the one me.

Dress says so much, especially religious dress.  I remember early in my employment at JCoSS, my predecessor Jeremy Stowe Lindner gave me a brief and somewhat scurrilous introduction to the messages sent out by one’s choice of kippah.  The large black velvety type (Orthodox establishment); the suedey ones bearing the name of the last bar mitzvah (do you really not have one of your own?); the shabby ones with a fold line in (much loved but, well, mostly kept in a pocket).

Well, guess what, it works for clerical attire too – from the evangelical who if they bother at all probably wear a pastel (or, worse, patterned) shirt with a slip-in collar; to the anglo-Catholic sporting all-round visible collar, fussy black shirt and all manner of odd accessories with Italian names.  And then there are normal people like me – the tonsure collar, the simple black shirt (with double cuff of course), and a tastefully restrained diversity of jackets.

The practised eye can tell with reasonable confidence, just by looking, a priest’s style of worship and theology, views on ethics and sexuality, stance on women’s ordination, and, of course, how much and what they drink.  But also – and this one may surprise you – something of their likely response to our two passages of Torah this morning.

I guess you guys missed the memo – or as Christians call it, the New Testament – that allowed you to skip over the many chapters of ritual instruction that you have been wading through for the last several Shabbats.  (You Jews have staying power: we just relegate these passages to Morning Prayer when no one comes and there’s no sermon…)

A total of 8 animals were harmed in the making of this morning’s portions, if you include the red heifer.  A good number of my fellow Christians (I can talk you through their wardrobes over Kiddush) would regard these passages with squeamishness – and not just at the amount of blood.  You may feel similar.  Isn’t it all a bit backward, we might say?  Even if we want to keep the idea of sin and feel some psychologically retarded need to beg for forgiveness, how will killing and burning animals help?  Isn’t that just another sin to repent of?

Of course this liberal narrative easily slides into the tired old lie about Judaism as the barbaric religion of wrath and bloodshed, with Christianity as the enlightened religion of love and spirit. Well let me surprise you a little, because in my tradition – priests dressed like this – the ritual described in this morning’s portions is very similar to what happens as we celebrate the Eucharist.  To be sure, there’s no animal sacrifice, but the repertoire of ritual is readily recognisable.

In full vestments, in solemn procession, the priest approaches the altar, bows to it, takes an incense burner and goes all around the altar censing it.  The priest is censed him or herself, as are the congregation so that the whole sanctuary swirls with holy smoke; then there’s a ritual handwash; and the  Eucharistic prayer itself includes a whole pattern of ritual actions, each with theological significance.

Progressives (of all faiths and none) may recoil from this as fuss and superstition and frankly all a bit primitive.  But I want to suggest that rituals like this, and like those throughout Torah are not primitive (basic, unsophisticated, crude, archaic) but primal (essential, universal, archetypal, original).  They show us something deeply rooted in the human condition and in our relationship with God that we belittle at our peril.

So what is it in human experience that these sacrifices were trying to express and address? Why do we need all this bloodshed?  To be really unfashionable, I think it’s all about sin, about the need to take seriously the distance between us and God.  Now obviously we won’t be able to take ‘sin’ seriously if we think it means breaking arbitrary rules that were made up to stop our fun – which is the common use of the word in our times.  If sin is ‘naughty but nice’, any kind of sacrifice looks petty and unhealthy.

But I think ‘sin’ is a much more primal experience than that: our sense of misalignment from the way we want to be, from the way we want things to be.  The world – for all its beauty – is full of difficult, dark stuff: people are grindingly poor, often vile to each other, and suffer horribly from disease and disaster.  And we – for all our beauty – are also full of difficult, dark stuff: we are mean-spirited, we are intolerant, we are destructive.

I don’t want to be too depressing – especially at Millie’s bat mitzvah – but sometimes the darkness of world and self can be overwhelming. Something is very wrong.  We are so far away from how God yearns for us to be – from how we yearn to be…there’s a crack in everything, and fixing it is constantly out of reach.  What’s worse (and actually a bnei mitzvah celebration may be a good time to ponder this one) the more spiritually mature, the holier people become, the more they realise how far away they are and how unfixable it all is.

If that is what sin means, then perhaps the rituals of our traditions and scriptures could make more sense.  We need a way to express the solemnity of the situation and the cost of the distance we allow to open up between ourselves and God: to really deal with the messes we get ourselves into, blood has to flow.  To realign with God we have to put our heart and soul into it – we have to make sacrifices for it.

We may not wish to slaughter animals to make the point (though frankly we’re in no position to lecture ancient Israelite culture about the unnecessary destruction of animals) but we do well to feel the horror and the yearning that led our ancestors to do so.

So this morning – as both our traditions look forward to ritual-laden, Paschal festivals and all their talk of freedom – I invite you to embrace the ritual and the primal in your experience and in your religious thinking. It’s easy to dismiss, uncomfortable to face, and for those very reasons wonderful places to listen for the deep voice of the divine.