Lenten Challenge Day 2

Post: Leviticus 20:26 – You shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine (NRSV).

Response: To be honest, I wasn't sure about this passage without the context of the rest of Leviticus 20, so I looked it up. And, again, to be honest, I realized this is one of those biblical passages that I don't see eye-to-eye with. In my opinion, the Bible is something man-made that was divinely inspired...therefore I do not believe the Bible to be infallible, but rather a tool through which God can provoke our thoughts and help us make our own decisions. Nothing bothers me more than the Bible-beating preachers who declare the Bible to be 100% true and without error. Sorry - wrong! If that were the case, we'd have BIG problems according to Leviticus! But that's a whole other tirade that I won't delve into, since that's not the point of today's reflection!

More appropriately, I think this passage, "You shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine," is yet another reminder to us of why we do what we do in our Christian faith. We, as humans and Christians, have the power to assemble and worship, to sing praises, to read the Bible, to discuss our religion, and to do works in the name of God. If you compare our privliges to the rest of the world's living things, you begin to understand how blessed we are. We're given gifts from God not necessarily granted to the rest of creation, so we need to recognize those gifts and DO something with them!