proud of her new shirt and where she came from. But when 6 year old Phyllis arrived at the residential school, the staff immediately stripped her and all the little children she arrived with, not just of their clothes but of any sense of safety and self worth they had brought with them.

“The color orange has always reminded me of that and how my feelings didn’t matter, how no one cared and how I felt like I was worth nothing. All of us little children were crying and no one cared,” says Phyllis.

It wasn’t until she was 27 years old and entered a treatment center, that Phyllis was finally able to begin to heal from the trauma of that day and her years at the school.

In 2013, she founded a movement in British Columbia called “Orange Shirt Day- Every Child Matters” to create awareness of the abuses suffered by the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children in Canada and the United States who were forcibly removed from their families and placed in church- and state-run boarding schools to assimilate them.

I only know this story or anything about Orange Shirt Day because of Judy Sherman. She and Lise just returned from a trip to Banff and brought me a bulletin from the church they attended there.

Much like what we are trying to do here during the the Season of Origins, churches in Canada are remembering and owning up to the harm they have done in the name of their faith. They are draping their buildings with orange shirts, posting signs with facts and figures that attest to the crimes committed against their indigenous neighbors, and lighting orange candles in memory of the thousands of children who never returned home. They are engaging in the work of repentance and repair for past sins.

But what strikes me, even as I stand here, is how close that past really is. If Phyllis was 6 years old in 1973, then she’s only 58 years old now. Does anyone know when the last residential school closed? 1997!

Some of you know I attended a preaching conference this past week and one of the panels featured Dr. Kelly Sherman-Conroy, an indigenous theologian and pastor, who made it clear to us all that we are not just talking about ancient history or the atrocities committed by early settlers when we talk about the evils of conquest and colonialism.

“We are carrying the history of what Christianity has done to indigenous people in our own bodies right now,” she said. “We tend to think of reconciliation as something that happens once we acknowledge that something horrible happened (a long time ago), but our community is still living with the consequences of this trauma…My own mother was raised in a residential school.” I admit I was shocked when she said that.

One of the most heartbreaking details that Phyllis Webstad shares on the Orange Shirt Day website is that she had no idea how to raise her own son because both her grandmother and mother had been taken as children and then had their own children and grand children taken from them.

These are hard stories to hear but they are also stories that need to be told. Telling the truth matters. Owning up to our past is important and yet, simply admitting to it is not enough. Repentance and repair requires more than litanies of atrocities or land acknowledgments. True reconciliation demands more than our thoughts and prayers.

Right here, in our hearts and minds, is where the work starts. But if we do this right it will become clear that this (touch head) and this (touch heart) is not where the work ends. There are people living among us to whom we can make actual amends, people who deserve reparations, people we can do better by right here, right now.

Which is why I’m glad we get to read from the book of Leviticus this morning. Not a phrase I ever thought I’d utter, and not the book I ever thought I’d turn to if I was looking for guidelines on how to love my neighbor, but here we are.

How many of you feel a little shiver of dismay at the very name of this book? Of course you do. Leviticus is home to one of those classic clobber passages that have been weaponized against the gay community, though a close reading should relieve most of you. Leviticus 18:22, “You shall not lie with a man as with a woman.” As one cheeky lesbian said in Bible study this week: “No problem!”

In all seriousness, though, Leviticus is a book Christians have always had kind of a weird relationship with. I think most people are quick to dismiss it as full of outmoded rules about everything from shrimp to sacrifice; rules meant for the ancient Israelites that we don’t have to follow anymore because we’re not under the law but under grace. (Except for the gays. For whatever reason, 18:22 man, is still the one cherry conservatives are gonna pick. So watch out.)

But Leviticus is actually a really important book for us to know a little something about because as retrograde as it sounds to us now, it was a huge leap forward for people back then. So I’m going to offer you a little back story about Leviticus in the hopes that it will help us write a better story going forward, not just for people like Phyllis, but for for us all. OK?

Alright. Well, according to Rob Bell, If you want to understand Leviticus the first thing you need to know is just how revolutionary it was. Turns out that people in the ancient world thought of the gods as all powerful, capricious deities who could smite you at any moment for any reason.

But the God we meet in Leviticus is different. This God actually loves people. Loves them so much that God chose a particular people, set them apart - which is what holy means - , made a covenant with them, and is now leading them toward a promised land where they will be able to settle down, prosper, and be a blessing to all.

The God we meet in Leviticus is not distant or capricious - well, maybe still a little - but a God who wants to be in actual relationship with the Israelites. To that end, God gives them instructions about lots of things, including how to make various kinds of sacrificial offerings. The Hebrew word for these offerings is Corban: meaning, “to draw near.” And these offerings were typically in the form of food, food you would offer at the temple and then partake of in such that you could have an actual meal with God.

You need to know that in the ancient world sharing a meal was a sign that you were welcome and at peace in the presence of another. Which means that the Israelites were not only welcome in the presence of God, they had a way to make peace with God.

Now once you get past the instructions for sacrifices, you realize that there are also a lot of rules laid down in Leviticus. And as you read them, even though many of them seem completely irrelevant to us now, it’s pretty easy to see that even the really strange ones were in place to help people live well together, to keep people safe and healthy, to prevent the spread of disease and food poisoning, to allow people to rest, and to curb our tendency to dominate and exploit one another.

If you kept the rules you knew where you stood with God, and if you broke the rules you had a way - through sacrifice - to get back in God’s good graces (What is the Bible? P 229-230). This was new and this was amazing.

“[A]t the heart of Leviticus,” says Bell, “ is this insistence that human action matters. That it is holy. That there is weight and significance to what people do in the world. In a time and place when human life was fragile and fleeting, and people were often victims of great violence, to insist on the dignity and holiness of human action was a revolutionary idea” (P 231).

And that is precisely what we see here in our passage today. Through Moses, God says to the people: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” And then lays out what holiness looks like. And sure there is a little bit of ritualistic language in here, but please note that most of it is grounded in how we treat one another and if you ask me, actually comes across as remarkably progressive and enlightened.

Remember that holiness means “set apart.” The Israelites are being given instructions that set them apart. They are not to act like everyone else. They are not to take whatever they can get through violence and domination, but are called by God to treat everyone justly, lovingly, and respectfully.

They are to respect and care for their elders. They are to make provision for the poor rather than make as much money off their land as they can. They are to care for the strangers in their midst. They are to make accommodations for the disabled. They are to live peaceably and above all, they are to love their neighbors as they love themselves.

But this is what I really want you to notice. There is nothing sentimental about this love. It is not just a matter of the heart or the head. Love is an action. It is acting justly and generously toward all people not just your own people.

Keeping these laws was an act of love. Here in Leviticus we see that a loving people is a holy people. A holy people is a loving people. In Leviticus, you do not achieve holiness by being perfect, but by being loving. In fact, I think you could go so far as to say that humans are holy already.

When we act with love toward one another, we honor the holiness in ourselves and we honor the holiness in others.

When we fail to act with love we obscure the holiness in ourselves and we obscure the holiness in others.

Thankfully, we can always get back to that holy state through repentance and repair, by making peace with others and making peace with God.

Friends, here in Leviticus we actually have the story of God teaching a particular people how to live well with God, with one another, and with those who are other. Last week we talked about the first declaration of human rights. Here we might have the first policy for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

I think the hope was that the Israelites would learn how to do this as they wandered in the wilderness so they they could enter the promised land and bring this new way of living with them, a new way that could have, should have, would have, been good news for all…if they had followed it, but they didn’t.

Which brings me, very quickly, to our passage in Deuteronomy and where things went wrong and are still going wrong. We begin with Moses atop Mt. Nemo. God shows Moses a great swathe of land, lays out the boundaries from Gilead to Zoar, and says this is the land I promised to Abraham and his descendants. This is the promised land!

But remember that God blessed Abraham with this land to be a blessing. In Leviticus, Moses laid out the rules for how to do that. Unfortunately, Moses then turned things over to Joshua and died.

Deuteronomy claims that Joshua was wise and that “the Israelites obeyed him, doing as the Lord commanded Moses.” But if we turn the page, very quickly we come to realize that this is simply not true. Joshua and the Israelites didn’t go in, settle down, and bless their new neighbors. They went in and violently conquered them. Joshua ushers in one of the bloodiest and most violent chapters in Israel’s history, a legacy we are still perpetuating and contending with.

I know the Israelites were a small band of people in a frightening and violent world, but I can’t help but wonder if it had to be that way. I can’t help but wonder if they could have entered peaceably, paid attention to these verses in Leviticus, and written a different story.

I wonder the same thing about the modern resettlement of Israel. I wonder if they could have entered in a different way, paid attention to these verses, and written a different story.

And sure, it’s easy to point fingers at Israel and the horror unfolding there…but right now, in this very moment, you and I are also standing on stolen land that was conquered violently. We are living in a town that prospered thanks to the labor of stolen people who were brought here by force. I wonder how different the world would be for you, for me, for people like Phyllis, if our ancestors had come here peaceably and held to these verses in Leviticus? I wonder how different the story could have been for us all.

You see I’m starting to think that the moment our ancestors chose to dominate the promised land with violence was the moment they lost it, because they lost out on the promise God had not just for them, but for all people. I’m starting to think that maybe the promised land isn’t so much a physical place as it is a spiritual one, a place we create when we live lives that honor the holiness in ourselves and others.  A place we lose when we desecrate that holiness by doing harm to one another.

I’m starting to think that the promised land isn’t a place with clear boundary lines- but a state of being.  Our job is not to make it there and it’s certainly not to take it from anyone else. Our job is to actively love it into being here, by loving our neighbors - especially those who don’t look or talk or worship like us - the way we want to be loved.

Love in such a way that we bring healing to the ones still carrying the trauma of our past failures because we are actively doing things differently.

Love in such a way that every child knows that they matter, because we’ve built a society that cares for them so well, they can’t help but know that they do.

Love them the way a little 6 year old girl in a bright orange shirt deserved to be loved.

Amen.