Sunday 10 • 21 • 18

Turned white, the priest shall shut up the diseased person for seven days. And the priest shall examine him on the seventh day. And if in his eyes the disease is checked and the disease is not spread in the skin, then the priest shall shut him up for another seven days. And the priest shall examine him again on the seventh day. And if the diseased area has faded and the disease has not spread in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him clean. It is only interruption. And he shall wash his clothes and be clean. But if the eruption spreads in the skin, after he has shown himself to the priest for his cleansing, he shall appear again before the priest. And the priest shall look, and if the eruption has spread in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him unclean. It is a leprous disease. — Leviticus 13

I'm not going make my son read this part out loud.

Verse 16, If a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water and be unclean until evening. And every garment and every skin on which the semen comes shall be washed with water and be unclean until the evening. If a man lies with woman and has an emission of semen, both of them shall bathe themselves in water and be unclean until the evening. If a woman has a discharge and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days. Whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening, and everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. — Leviticus 15:16-20

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, This shall be the law of the lepers person for the day of his cleansing. He shall be brought to the priest, and the priest shall go out of the camp, and the priest shall look. Then, if the case of lepers disease is healed in the lepers person, the priest shall command them to take for him who is to be cleansed two live clean birds and cedarwood and scarlet yarn and hyssop. The priest shall take some of the blood of the guilt offering and the priest shall put it on the lobe of the right ear of the man who is to be cleansed and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot. — Leviticus 14:1-4,14

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Would you join me in prayer? Father, I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts would be pleasing and acceptable in Your sight. You are our rock and our fortress and our Redeemer. Amen.

Content Warning

So wow. I mean, right? You came on that Sunday. This is, to be honest, PG material. And today we are going to talk about menstrual periods and ejaculations and bodily discharges and skin disorders. And if there is some younger person with you and you're not ready to have that talk yet, this is the fair warning moment. Okay? It's PG material. I'm not going to be a shock jock, but I have to talk about the things that are in this passage. I can't avoid the direct wording. So fair warning to you.

I would say no section probably of this book is as off-putting as chapters 12 through 15. And if you have not been offended so far as we've walked through the book of Leviticus, today's your day to be offended. It's why Nick Offerman, who's a comedian from Parks and Rec fame, calls the book of Leviticus easily the most messed up book in the Old Testament. And he says of it:

I believe it was none other than the Lord Almighty who instructed us to love thy neighbor as thyself. Wise words from the King of Kings. Unfortunately, he spake this phrase smack dab in the middle of the book of Leviticus. And I think we can all agree by now that when it comes to writers of the books of the Bible, the Levitical scribes are about as nutty as a tree full of squirrels.

So, yeah, we have some hard material in front of us this morning.

I'm going to treat this under four headings. If you take notes, all begin with the letter P. Looks like a gold letter star Sunday for you. So the problem of the clean laws, the purpose of the clean laws, the parable of the clean laws, and the pointer.

The Problem of the Clean Laws

Now, I probably don't have to do much to demonstrate there are some problems with the clean laws, but let me just raise all the questions that you probably thought about, or if you hadn't, now you will.

Chapter 12 is about childbirth and menstrual periods, and I know how it sounds. Childbirth makes a person unclean. The bringing of a child in this world is something we regard as beautiful and sacred. And why would we ever say there's something wrong with that? Why would the God of the Bible say this? And I just made sure we read this part out loud so you really got it. A woman gives birth to a girl baby, and she is unclean for twice as long as a boy baby. You feel a little bit of that, right?

Chapter thirteen and fourteen is all about leprosy and skin disorders. Again, really offensive to modern ears, right? That if you have a skin disorder, you have to leave the camp.

And if someone comes near you, you have to shout unclean and they stay away from you. I mean, isn't that emotionally traumatizing? Isn't that abusive? Chapter 15 is about bodily emissions. And this is where it really gets great, right? Sounds to modern ears like the God of the Bible thinks that bodies are dirty and sex is dirty. And some of you have grown up in kind of branches of the church that sort of say those things, and this is why people are like, man, I don't want anything to do with Christians or their god because it's destructive, it's repressive, it's dangerous what you guys talk about.

So yeah, we've got some work to do this morning. And before we jump into the deep end of the pool, I want to just say this to you. Like, before you write me off or tune me out, I want you to notice this: the clean laws were an equal opportunity offender. The clean laws were set up in such a way that every person in the entire camp would have been declared unclean multiple times during the course of a year. There's no way of keeping all these things. So whether it's from a skin condition, bodily emissions, skin problems, mold in your house, contact with a dead body—every person would have had to come into contact and be declared unclean at some point, maybe probably multiple times over the course of a year.

And so there's no kind of sense of like, yeah, we're going to keep all these. The whole point is not these people will always be clean. Something else is going on. So we need to ask some harder questions. It's easy and lazy to write off parts of the Bible and say, oh, that's Old Testament weirdness. That's the easy thing to do. And yet, these are all over—we're talking about this in a moment. These are all over the ministry of Jesus. So we need to do some thoughtful work about this.

The Purpose of the Clean Laws

Let's look at the purpose of the clean laws. Leviticus traffics in terminology that we do not use. From chapters 11 through 15, the book of Leviticus repeats the word unclean over 100 times. That is not a PC word in our culture today. Calling someone unclean, we think of that as shaming. We don't have those categories. And so those are hard for us, but we do have other categories. And I think it's helpful to think about this category and reflect this back on Leviticus.

We have the category of gross or disgusting. There's a guy named Richard Beck, who's a researcher, who's written a great deal on this in his book Meditations on Purity, Hospitality and Morality. And in this book, he gives this example of saliva. This is what he says. Hang in with me, but this is important.

Few of us feel disgust about swallowing the saliva that's within our mouths. We do it all the time. But the second saliva is expelled from the body, it becomes something foreign and alien. It's no longer saliva. We call it spit, right? We call it spit. Consequently, although there seems to be little physical difference between swallowing the saliva in your mouth and putting it in a Dixie cup and then swallowing it, right—you just proved my point, right? Disgust. That is the category called disgust. Disgust regulates the experience, marking the difference. We don't mind swallowing what's on the inside. We're disgusted by swallowing something that's on the outside, even if it was just on the inside seconds ago. That is called boundary psychology. Boundary psychology. Disgust marks an object as exterior and alien. The second saliva leaves the body, crosses the boundary of selfhood, it is foul. It's exterior. It's other.

Now that's really helpful in thinking about these clean laws and these categories. Because remember, I said this last week, if you're with us: clean and unclean are not what you think. This isn't clean equals righteous, unclean equals sinful. This isn't clean are the good people, unclean are the wicked people. Those categories don't match up. Rather, it's about what's fitting and what's appropriate. What's appropriate to life with this God. What reflects what God is like.

And so a person who's unclean doesn't need, in any of these passages, forgiveness. This isn't categories of forgiveness. This is a person who needs cleansing. So a person isn't morally sinful, but ritually unclean. We don't have that category. Ritually unclean. And what it means is that there's something abnormal. There's something out of place. There's something off kilter. There's something out of whack. The normal standards are off in some way. It's other. Like saliva, something about the person who's unclean has crossed a boundary, and that person needs to be restored back in. It's not a question of status. It's a question of condition.

So here's what I want you to see. The whole point of these clean laws is not you do all these things, and you achieve all the cleanliness laws, and you're good with God. This wasn't a way of earning your salvation. This wasn't a way of moral performance.

It wasn't obey these rules, you'll get right with God. So what is this about? The first thing it's about is hygiene. Very obviously, here you have a gigantic nation, hundreds of thousands of people out in the desert in tents, and they have got to live together and have a society where there's not a spread of disease.

Now, I want you to think about the people to whom this book was written. Remember, this is not written to modern people. This was written to a group of people who had been in slavery in Egypt for four hundred years. They have been in an abusive relationship with the pharaoh and the Egyptian nation for four hundred years.

Do you know somebody who's been in an abusive relationship? One of the things that's really tragic about a person coming out of a highly controlling, highly manipulative, abusive relationship is their categories for what's normal or not are off, and they need somebody to come along and just help them with the daily things of life. Like, here's how you're going to do your schedule. Here's how you're going to do your day. Let's just kind of put a step in front of the other. Let me help you learn what's normal again.

And so God is not being mean in establishing clean laws. He's being gracious to them. He's saying, let me help you order your society in such a way that there's thriving and there's health. But if you think about it, that doesn't entirely explain some of the things we read. That explains some of them, but it doesn't explain all of them. So there's something else going on.

This is where I'm going to use the word parable, which is a story. Parable is a story that conveys a deeper point. The deeper point of the clean laws here—it's like these people are called to step into a living parable that teaches them things about who God is, about the way the world is, and the way that we are as people. And so they are called over and over again to step into the parable in these chapters. So let's think about what these clean laws teach us. What do the clean laws teach us about who God is and how God is?

Essentially, this passage shows us what God cares about. That God is team life in all its forms. God is for life in all types and all ways. And so let me show you this.

Chapter 12: The Loss of Life

Chapter 12 is about the loss of life. The loss of life. Here's what Leviticus is not saying. Leviticus is not saying God thinks pregnancy is gross or that babies are terrible, that menstruation is some kind of punishment from God. Rather, this is about none of that. God is pro procreation, which our church seems to have embraced, right?

Rather, the issue here is about blood. If you go over one chapter, a couple of chapters here, Leviticus seventeen fourteen, this is what it says:

For the life of every creature is in its blood, its blood is its life. — Leviticus 17:14

See, the Hebrew people and even today, if you go visit the Middle East, you'll find lots of cultures that view the loss of blood as losing life. You can bleed out, bleed to death, and losing blood is losing life. The life of a person is in his blood or her blood.

So the distinction between unclean and clean—remember, it's not about sinful or righteous, but ritually clean and ritually unclean. God wants His people to associate their life with rhythms that celebrate life and have nothing to do with death. And so when a mother gives birth, it's not childbirth that has anything to do with her being unclean. It's not the baby that makes her unclean. It's the loss of blood. That's what we see in this passage. See, it's the loss of blood. It's life going out of her. Not the baby. The loss of the blood is the issue.

And let me explain about the difference between the female and the male baby. Why is it that when a woman gives birth to a female baby, she has to be unclean for twice as long? It's not that this book is anti woman. It's not that the Bible is anti woman. We see in the beginning of the Bible that men and women are likewise made in the image of God. We see in the New Testament, men and women are likewise given the same Holy Spirit in the same way. We're going to do a whole series on gender starting in January. So hang in with us.

But what we see here is rather this is again about blood. When this woman gives birth to a boy baby, she's unclean for half as long because she's giving birth to a little girl who will herself have a flow of blood in menstruation one day that's likewise a loss. You may not still like that explanation, but that's the truth. That's why this is.

See, God is about life in all its forms. The loss of blood is always about the loss of life for God.

Chapters 13 and 14: The Protection of Life

Chapters thirteen and fourteen are about the protection of life. The protection of life. This is where we're dealing with leprosy and skin disorders. And if you want a fun afternoon activity that's free, you can go home and read all of chapter 13 out loud to people around you. It's really exciting.

And it gets into a lot like the color of hairs, pus, eruptions, boils. It's fascinating stuff. Here's what you need to know. The priests in the society didn't function as doctors. They functioned in a lot of ways as health inspectors. And so they had to be familiar with what is that, and is that spreading, and what color is the hair growing out of that thing? That's the stuff they had to regulate.

And the other thing is that leprosy, as it's described here, is not what we would think today of as Hansen's disease. It's not the same kind of wasting disease. It's a broad category that describes all kinds of skin disorders.

So let's be clear what's going on, though. God is not into shaming. God is not like, "Hey, get those nasty people, these disgusting people out of my sight." God is not into some idea of shaming a person out of a community. That's not what's happening. Again, this is about God saying, "I'm about the protection of life in all its forms."

So there's a person who's got some kind of disease showing up. Quarantine. Contain that thing. You're in a gigantic camp with all these people. God is saying, "We're going to remove this person so that it doesn't spread. We make sure that person gets healing and then they can be brought back in."

In fact, chapter 14. You have to read thirteen and fourteen together because 14 is all about here's how you celebrate when a person's well. It's not just about the protection of life, it's celebration of life.

And then finally, Chapter 15 is about the sacredness of life. Again, this is not "sex is dirty, bodies are dirty." Rather, he's saying this is about how sex is sacred and bodies are sacred. So when something leaves the body in a way that signals the loss of life, God cares about that.

So God cares about ejaculations. In the Bible, semen is called the seed of a man. It's essential for the formation of life. And so the loss of the seed in a way that's not about procreation, the wasting of a seed renders a man unclean because God's saying, "I care about this this much. This is this important."

Incidentally, I have guys who are like, "Hey, masturbation is not a problem." Yeah. Let me show you. This is why this is a problem. God cares about life in all its forms.

Also, same thing with menstruation. Menstruation is a time when the body cannot produce life. It's the casting off of an egg. It's the loss of life, the loss of blood. So God cares about menstruation and regulates it as unclean, not because there's something shameful or gross about a woman. No. It's about he's against the loss of life in all forms. So much so that the person, the man, the woman, they cross a boundary and have to be restored.

Now, I know this sounds so weird to us, and some of you are completely weirded out this morning. But this is because you live in a Western society that doesn't know what to do with our bodies. We're in a place and time where we think we treat our bodies like consumers. "This is for me to enjoy." Or we have contempt for our bodies. We don't know how to relate to our bodies in healthy ways. And God is saying, "Look, I'm not going to let you do that. Your body matters. Life is sacred. I am thoroughly on team life."

Understanding Holiness and Wholeness

Second, what are the Clean Laws? So the Clean Laws are a parable about what God is like, about how God is so much on team life. But it also is a parable about what the world is like, that the world is broken.

Remember as I said last week, the word holiness with an H is closely related to the word wholeness with a W. When we hear the word holiness, modern Americans think of someone who's stuck up or self righteous, thinks they're better than other people. We view that as a negative word. But not so in the Bible.

Rather, if you want to get at the root of what the Bible means by the word holiness, you can go back to the roots of that even in the English language, which ties holiness to wholeness, with an H. That means something being complete, something functioning the way it's supposed to.

So that's what God is talking about in the chapters right before this, Leviticus ten and eleven, where God says, "I want you to be holy as I am holy." God is pure all the way down. He's consistent all the way through. He is holy. And so when he says to people, "You're going to be holy," I want you to think about it this way: "You are. I want you to be whole as I am whole. Complete. There's no blemish on God. God lives in harmony with Himself. He is perfect. He lives in wholeness."

And look, this is what we see in Leviticus. The closer you get to God, the closer you get to wholeness and holiness. The further you get from God, the more you get into decay and corruption and chaos. This is the way the world works. See, this is what God is showing them in this parable. The world is broken.

As people who have been marred by the fall, everything about our world is broken. Things don't work the way they're supposed to work. And here's what's more—I want to push this one step further. You don't work the way you're supposed to work. This is the last thing that the clean laws teach us: that we are not the way that we should be. We're not whole. We're broken, stained, and fallen.

This is why we sing that song in our church regularly about being bruised and broken by the fall, that like every part of us has been polluted, been impacted by sin and the incursion of sin into the world. This meant, again—remember—this meant every person in the camp. These clean laws meant that every person in the camp would be unclean at some point, probably several points over the course of a month or a year. Every person had to step into this parable. Every person had this inescapable touchpoint with: I am now entering into being ritually unclean. There's something off. Every person had to walk out those paces.

How We Avoid the Reality of the Fall

One of the reasons I think that this is so hard for us as modern American people is we do everything we can to disassociate ourselves with the fallenness of the world. We do everything we can to push away from ourselves the effects of the fall and the stain of sin. Let me give you three examples of this.

First is modern medicine. Modern medicine is an amazing thing. I never wish that I was born like two hundred years ago. MRIs and CAT scans and X-rays and antibiotics, arthroscopic surgery—I mean, keep going down the list. There are so many wonderful things about living in this time period. But one of the weird things, one of the side effects of living in a state where all these miracles of modern medicine are available to us, is it desensitizes us to how fallen and broken the world is and our own bodies. We can push death away from us. We can put painkillers on that. We can push the effects of the fall away. And one of the things it does to us is it desensitizes the fact that this doesn't work. This body doesn't work—it falls apart. Generations before us were just more in touch with the fall.

Second way that we see this: We live in Raleigh. We live in Raleigh, North Carolina. And you know what the cultural idol of this place—this entire city is built around? Comfort. We love our great parking spaces and our manicured lawns. We love our really clean, fun downtown. We love things working for us. We love it when Raleigh has awesome schools and awesome places to work, and we live in a city where we have systematically kind of pushed poverty away and pushed anything that's broken away from us. And one of the dangerous things about that is we don't think those things exist as much.

When I was a pastor in Philadelphia, in Downtown Philadelphia, we had no such illusions. It was a lot easier to convince people that the world was broken and you were broken, because you step out your front door every day and it's dirty. The crime level is crazy. The school system is bankrupt. There's all kinds of corruption and violence. And there's the Philadelphia Parking Authority, which is straight from the pit of hell, right? So all those things tell you: this world doesn't work. This world is broken and corrupted.

But here in Rivendell—called Raleigh—living among the happy elves, right, like we've pushed that away from us because the world is not as broken. Our poor are displaced and our problems are out of sight. And it's dangerous. I keep saying this over and over again, and I'm going to keep taking swings at this: this is the most spiritually dangerous place to live and raise kids, because you think, and they think, and grow up without a doctrine of sin or without an idea of like the fall really does impact us. And we're lulled to sleep in it.

The third thing that I think also aggravates this is the modern news. We're just inundated right now with all kinds of problems in the world. And I don't know about you, but it's hard for me. I find myself being more and more apathetic and having a hard time caring because it just comes at me. And as long as it's out there and not right here, I'm like, okay. And as long as the news doesn't touch my life, it's increasingly difficult to care. So I can live in Rivendell again—false reality that everything's okay, not as fallen, not broken.

But do you see what happens here in this book? In Chapter 13, you have these lepers, and God does something with them. A spot shows up on the skin, which signals something not right. You are not whole. And what does God do? He has these rules that disrupt the flow of life for them. They disrupt their work, disrupt their home life. You've got to leave the camp. You've got to go outside. And what is He making them do? They have to walk the paces. There's this living parable of like, the world isn't working right, and they have to step those out.

Here's one thing that I notice with Christians. We are people that, because of Jesus, we don't observe the clean laws like the people of Israel did. These are not things that regulate our society or our church life. But sometimes I'm like, man, wouldn't it be helpful for us in some ways to have some kind of paces and parables that we walk out that remind us, we enter into the fact, we talk about the fact that the world is broken and we're broken? Because we show up at community group, we don't act like it. We show up together in church and everybody thinks like, man, what a put together group of people. Don't you believe it? Don't you believe it?

Life on life shows you, man, we're not whole. We are not right. And there are things that have impacted us. There are ways that the fall and sin has tainted us. Man, don't you just want to be made whole? You know, that word wholeness, I ask you to as you go through Leviticus, would you lean into that word? Because while clean and unclean doesn't land much, whole—I mean, I feel that. Man, I want to be made whole. There are parts of me I know are not whole.

There are parts of me that are like, I need God's healing, cleansing work in my life in deeper levels than I have experienced so far in my life. Don't you feel that? Lean into that. See, this is why the clean laws point us—they're a pointer. They point beyond the pages of Leviticus to the one who makes us clean. This is why I love preaching Leviticus because every Sunday I get to point us to Jesus.

Chapters 12 through 15—these clean laws are all over the pages of Jesus' earthly ministry. They're behind so many of His interactions. Can I just remind you of a few of these things? Because God shows us in Jesus how He disrupts the flow of this world to show He's the clean one who makes clean.

In Luke 17, there are these ten lepers, and they're out sort of at the fringe, and they yell to Jesus, "Jesus, would you make us clean?" And Jesus says, "Go. Go show yourselves to the high priests." And while they're on the way to show themselves to the high priest, they're made clean. One of them comes back and thanks Him.

Or Mark 5. There's a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years. Let's be very specific. She's been bleeding from menstruation for twelve years. She's seen lots of doctors, and no one has been able to help her. Think about what her life was like. She's desperate, bleeding, she's unclean, she probably smells, she's disgusting and can't do anything about it. And she comes and she decides, I'm going to touch Jesus, just the hem of His robe. And when she does so, instead of Jesus being made unclean, she is made clean. In that moment, shouldn't Jesus be contaminated? But He's not. In that moment, power goes into her, and she is made clean. Jesus uses His cleanness to make unclean people clean.

And then Matthew 8—there's a man who has leprosy. Instead of him coming to touch Jesus, he comes and asks Jesus, "Jesus, if you can, make me clean." Again, not healed. He uses this word clean. More than healed. Whole. And Jesus crosses the boundary. Jesus is not supposed to touch this man. Doing so would make him ritually unclean. And yet Jesus crosses the boundary, touches the man, and the man is completely restored. Again, this is the one—Jesus, the clean one, who makes the unclean clean.

And the last night of His life, Jesus is at the last supper with His disciples, and it says He got up from the table, He wrapped a towel around Himself, and he went and washed the feet of all the disciples. And Peter's like, seeing what he's doing, he's like, "I know I'm unclean. Clean all of me." And Jesus is like, "You're clean because of what I've done for you. Because of what I have done for you."

This is Jesus, the boundary crosser, who comes and touches unclean people like us who've been bruised and broken by the fall and restores.

There's a physician named Richard Selzer who's written a memoir on his experience as a surgeon called Mortal Lessons. It's a collection of essays and stories about stepping into the lives of people who've been marred by sin, who the fall has broken their lives. And he, as a surgeon, is trying to put things back together. He tells this story about a young woman on whom he did surgery and had to cut a nerve in her face.

I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh.

I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight isolated from me, private.

Who are they? I ask myself. He and this now wry-mouthed one that I have made, who gaze at each other and touch each other so generously.

The young woman speaks. She says, "Will my mouth always be like this?" Yes, I say, it will. It's because the nerve was cut. She nods and is silent, but the young man smiles. "I like it," he said. "It's kind of cute." He bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and so close, I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.

Such a great picture of the God who bends near us and touches us in all the places and all the ways that our lives are broken and bruised by the stain of sin on this world. And as much as we try to pretend that stuff's not real, we know it is—we swim in it every day.

Jesus comes near us, the one who's clean, and comes and touches us in the places of our own stories, places of our own past, places of our own uncleanness, the places where we experience the bruise and brokenness of this world. And He comes to bring healing in the now and ultimate and complete and final restoration in the not yet.

The Calling of the Church

One more thing, and this is a freebie. Did you read the words there? Hear the words as we read them from Leviticus 14 about how the lepers were to be made clean? We read this from Leviticus 14:14. Very strange words here about how when the priest was supposed to take some blood from the sacrifice, put it on the lobe of the right ear, the thumb of the right hand and the big toe of the right foot of the leper. And that was for his cleansing. I know—bizarre, right?

But where have you heard that before? You've been with us in Leviticus. Where have we heard that before? Ordination of the priests. Very good. Yes, the ordination of the priests. This is what I want you to see. Isn't it odd that God would use exactly the same sacrifices and rituals for the ordination of the priests as He would for the cleansing of the lepers? That's odd. Or maybe not. Maybe it's really fitting.

Because all over Jesus' ministry, he treats high priests like they're lepers, but he treats the lepers like the high priests. He invites those who've been cleansed by Jesus into the ministry of going out as his people and entering into the lives of others who are unclean and saying, you know what? Look, I know the clean one. I know the one who can change your life. I know the one who can, by His touch, make you whole. Will you enter into that?

This is the calling of the church—not to be a happy society of Rivendell, but to go out as His people who walk in and among those who are unclean and bring the message and the person of the clean one to them.

In the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.