And He Called

     This Sunday we start a new series in the book of Leviticus. Most of you have never heard a sermon from this book, and this is the first time that I have ever taught it. Some of you have tried to read it. You made it through Genesis, you were fine through Exodus, and then somewhere around the third set of instructions, you started skim reading.
     Leviticus is a hard book.
     We read the first five books of the Bible as five separate books, mostly because they have five separate names for them in our Bibles. They were written as one scroll. One continuous story. Leviticus does not begin a new subject, and in Hebrew it opens with a verb that signals the story is already in progress, the way you would not normally start a sentence with "and then."
     So to understand where it starts, you have to see where the story has been.
     It opens with a man named Adam in a garden who walks with God and decides he would rather not. It spreads from there, one family to every family, until Genesis 11 has the whole human race scattered and talking past each other, and the problem is no longer one man's rebellion. It is everyone's. Then God calls Abraham. Not because Abraham had earned anything. God answers a problem that belongs to all of humanity by starting with one family, and the promise is that through that family everyone would get back what Adam lost.
     Abraham's descendants end up enslaved in Egypt. They forget who they belong to. And God rescues them anyway, before they ask, before they deserve it, before there is a single commandment on a single tablet. God did not hand Israel a law and say keep this and I will rescue you. He rescued them, and then He told them what life with Him looks like. His grace unto them came first.
     Exodus ends with the tabernacle finished. Seven times the text tells us they built it exactly as the LORD commanded. Nothing has gone wrong. And then the glory of God comes down and fills the tent, which is why He rescued them so that He could be with them, and the very next sentence says Moses could not go in.
     That is how the book of Exodus ends. With a man standing outside a tent he built himself, because God is inside it. What kept Moses out was not sin, and it was not failure. It was the glory itself, in the way that standing next to a bonfire keeps you from putting your hand in it. God got close, and the closeness turned out to be the problem.
     So Israel can see where God is and cannot go where God is. They can follow Him and cannot approach Him. Exodus leaves them standing there on purpose.
     Leviticus begins with saying, The LORD called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting.
     Moses is still outside. He has not found a way in. He has not earned entry or performed a ritual or said the right words in the right order. The silence breaks from the inside, and God is the one who breaks it.
     The Hebrew name of the book is simply its first word, wayyiqra, He called. The book we skip is named after the moment God started the conversation.
     And what He says first is not a warning. It is not an inventory of everything Israel has done wrong. It is an instruction for how to bring an offering, and the Hebrew word for offering comes from a verb meaning to draw near. The first words out of the tent are a way in.
     Leviticus is not a religious system for coping with God's absence. It is a manual for being in His presence. Everything strange in those twenty-seven chapters, the blood and the smoke and the rules about mold in the walls, is God answering a problem He raised on purpose, that He moved in and no one could come to Him, and He would not leave it that way.
     Eden is God walking with His people, and then due to their disobedience, He must exile them. The tabernacle is God among people, behind a curtain. Then John writes that the Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us, using that word deliberately, and adds that we have seen His glory. That is Exodus 40 walking around in a body.
     And when Jesus dies, the curtain in the temple tears from the top down. The barrier comes down from the inside, by the same God who spoke from inside the tent. Then Pentecost, and the voice that once spoke from the tent comes to live inside His people. Which means the question was never really whether you keep the law. It was always whether you will listen when God speaks.
     If the point is listen to the voice rather than follow the rules, somebody is going to hear that as do whatever you feel. Leviticus is the answer to that. The voice from the tent has a documented character, twenty-seven chapters of it, and it turns out to care a great deal about honest scales, wages paid on time, leaving the edges of your field for people who have nothing, and how you treat the immigrant living among you. The Spirit does not contradict the voice from the tent. He lives inside you and speaks these commands to you.