Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2005-2006
Session #4

Scripture Forum
Session #4
Chizuk Amuno Congregation
January 27, 2006

Texts:
     Leviticus 4:1-15
     Matthew 6:1-16

Introduction to the text and the praxis of Scriptural Reasoning (Dr. Randi Rashkover):

• It might be helpful, especially with respect to the Leviticus text [see below], to have a bit more scriptural context, particularly because we're at a juncture in these study sessions where we might want to begin to tie some things together.
• I am a participant of an organization called Scrip-tural Reasoning, and I want to lend -- cautiously
  -- some of the practices of Scriptural Reasoning
  to this group. To that end, what I want to do this morning is to give us a couple of entry points into the text and then to talk about one aspect of Scriptural Reasoning that I think would be helpful for us, both as clergy people and as people who are thinking about reading texts with their con-gregations.
• We have been dealing with the theme of eco-nomics, not just from a nuts-and-bolts legal perspective, but also from a spiritual, theological perspective. This week we are going to focus on texts that deal with economics from the perspec-tive of debt and forgiveness, texts that link the legal and material economies to the internal covenantal, theological, spiritual economies.
• We need to be mindful of a few things when we look at the Leviticus 4 text. The first thing to note is that this text is contextualized within the first four chapters of Leviticus, which are devoted to spelling out the nature of sacrifice. Leviticus actually begins with the word "and," which links the sacrificial liturgies to be articulated to the preceding narrative in Exodus. So the rituals are not simply a listing of things that need to be done; they are actually contextualized in the narrative.
• The first three chapters of Leviticus deal with what are called "voluntary sacrifices." These
  are sacrifices that can be done by anyone at
  any time, so there's a universal cast to the character of performing these sorts of sacrifices.
• Chapter 4 deals with sin offerings in involuntary sacrifices. The offerings are involuntary because they must be made, but they are made for sins performed inadvertently. This is important for us
  to consider, particularly when we then look at the Matthew text.
• In the discourse of sacrifice here there are three important economies or orders. Again, the purpose of mentioning these things is to jump-start the study and to give us some fuel for comparing this text to the Matthean text.
• The first order or economy: One's economic and social station in life is the place where one begins in the liturgical practice. To say the same thing negatively, one does not begin by immediately stepping outside of where one is socially or eco-nomically. The liturgical order of sacrifice greets one right there in the very reality of one's placement in society.
• The second order to be found in this text is the order of the choreography of the sacrifice itself
  -- the performative order of the sacrifice. What
  I mean by that is that the description offered of the ritual itself is a highly ordered one. There are grand particularities that govern who is to perform which sacrifice, under what occasion the sacrifice is to be performed, the purpose of the sacrifice, and even the spatial environs of where the sacrifice is actually done. Thus, we shall see divergences in the text between the voluntary sacrifice and the involuntary sacrifice with respect to where the blood is placed in relationship to the altar, to the tent of meeting, and to the curtain.
• The third level of order or economy is that of literally standing before God. The order of the relationship to God is, if you will, the almost ultimate economy woven into the two other economies. What is noteworthy about these sacrificial texts in general, therefore, is the
  extent to which the covenantal economy of standing before God is immanent within the ordinary economy of one's social status in life
  and mediated by the sacrificial economy -- all
  of which works together to provide an entire
  set of coordinates for a religious life.
• The final thing I want to address is the potential congregational value of considering all this. In the conversations we've had over the past couple of weeks, we have taken an interest in the extent to which we as congregational leaders might want to encourage folks to critique economic orders.
• Many of us share an impulse that tells us that there has to be an amelioration of the economic orders in which we live. It is noteworthy that the Levitical texts actually provide us with a link between the ordinary economies of our lives and our theological standing before God, such that what is suggested here is the opportunity for economic amelioration and transformation through liturgical sacrifice. This is not an ideological approach to economic amelioration because it is not suggesting that we have to move from one economic system to another. It is an immanent approach to economic amelioration in that it greets us in the economic system in which we
  find ourselves and suggests that amelioration transpires through interior, liturgical transforma-tion. It is noteworthy that we see a very hands-on connection between liturgy and economic status as is, as opposed to some kind of transpositional model.
• Given that the transformation we see here is largely liturgical and interior, it is noteworthy that it is also participant driven. The transformation happens by virtue of the participants engaging in these liturgical performances. The covenantal or theological role in these sacrifices is to a certain extent more passive, simply present by virtue of having set up the system. The grace of having provided the entire sacrificial order is the ex-pression of the divine activity present in the text.
• I want to end with a methodological suggestion gleaned from the practices of Scriptural Reasoning. The sessions have been going beautifully, and one thing we've come to practice -- almost in a reli-gious sense of praxis in Scriptural Reasoning -- is the art of listening. The art of listening incorpor-ates two things. First, we carefully enjoy the waiting between what's being said and what we might want to say. The waiting is an attending to what the person before you has just said. Second, we begin to bear one another's comments. Instead of the conversation's being one of separate and individual claims, the claims begin to carry one another. We go deeper into one another's claims before we assert our own autonomous thinking.

If you would like to read about the rules of Scriptural Reasoning, click here.

The first text: Leviticus 4:1-35 (NRSV translation)

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the people of Israel, saying:

When anyone sins unintentionally in any of the LORD's command-ments about things not to be done, and does any one of them:

If it is the anointed priest who sins, thus bringing guilt on the people, he shall offer for the sin that he has committed a bull of the herd without blemish as a sin offering to the LORD. He shall bring the bull to the entrance of the tent of meeting before the LORD and lay his hand on the head of the bull; the bull shall be slaughtered before the LORD. The anointed priest shall take some of the blood of the bull and bring it into the tent of meeting. The priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle some of the blood seven times before the LORD in front of the curtain of the sanctuary. The priest shall put some of the blood on the horns of the altar of fragrant incense that is in the tent of meeting before the LORD; and the rest of the blood of the bull he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering, which is at the entrance of the tent of meeting. He shall remove all the fat from the bull of sin offering: the fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is around the entrails; the two kidneys with the fat that is on them at the loins; and the appendage of the liver, which he shall remove with the kidneys, just as these are removed from the ox of the sacrifice of well-being. The priest shall turn them into smoke upon the altar of burnt offering. But the skin of the bull and all its flesh, as well as its head, its legs, its entrails, and its dung -- all the rest of the bull -- he shall carry out to a clean place outside the camp, to the ash heap, and shall burn it on a wood fire; at the ash heap it shall be burned.

If the whole congregation of Israel errs unintentionally and the matter escapes the notice of the assembly, and they do any one of the things that by the LORD's commandments ought not to be done and incur guilt; when the sin that they have committed be-comes known, the assembly shall offer a bull of the herd for a sin offering and bring it before the tent of meeting. The elders of the congregation shall lay their hands on the head of the bull before the LORD, and the bull shall be slaughtered before the LORD. The anointed priest shall bring some of the blood of the bull into the tent of meeting, and the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times before the LORD, in front of the curtain. He shall put some of the blood on the horns of the altar that is before the LORD in the tent of meeting; and the rest of the blood he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting. He shall remove all its fat and turn it into smoke on the altar. He shall do with the bull just as is done with the bull of sin offering; he shall do the same with this. The priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven. He shall carry the bull outside the camp, and burn it as he burned the first bull; it is the sin offering for the assembly.

When a ruler sins, doing unintentionally any one of all the things that by commandments of the LORD his God ought not to be done and incurs guilt, once the sin that he has committed is made known to him, he shall bring as his offering a male goat without blemish. He shall lay his hand on the head of the goat; it shall be slaugh-tered at the spot where the burnt offering is slaughtered before the LORD; it is a sin offering. The priest shall take some of the blood of the sin offering with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering, and pour out the rest of its blood at the base of the altar of burnt offering. All its fat he shall turn into smoke on the altar, like the fat of the sacrifice of well-being. Thus the priest shall make atonement on his behalf for his sin, and he shall be forgiven.

If anyone of the ordinary people among you sins unintentionally in doing any one of the things that by the LORD's commandments ought not to be done and incurs guilt, when the sin that you have committed is made known to you, you shall bring a female goat without blemish as your offering, for the sin that you have commit-ted. You shall lay your hand on the head of the sin offering; and the sin offering shall be slaughtered at the place of the burnt offering. The priest shall take some of its blood with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering, and he shall pour out the rest of its blood at the base of the altar. He shall remove all its fat, as the fat is removed from the offering of well-being, and the priest shall turn it into smoke on the altar for a pleasing odor to the LORD. Thus the priest shall make atonement on your behalf, and you shall be forgiven. If the offering you bring as a sin offering is a sheep, you shall bring a female without blemish. You shall lay your hand on the head of the sin offering; and it shall be slaugh-tered as a sin offering at the spot where the burnt offering is slaughtered. The priest shall take some of the blood of the sin offering with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering, and pour out the rest of its blood at the base of the altar. You shall remove all its fat, as the fat of the sheep is removed from the sacrifice of well-being, and the priest shall turn it into smoke on the altar, with the offerings by fire to the LORD. Thus the priest shall make atonement on your behalf for the sin that you have committed, and you shall be forgiven.

The discussion begins:

• Immediate response from a Jewish participant: I love that stuff. I really do. It's so interesting, just fascinating. It's hard to imagine the incredible vis-ceral quality of the religious experience in that system. It's intense stuff.
• Remark: No one fell asleep in that service. (You never know!)
• Remark: I was struck by the ordering of it and wondering if there was something to be learned about the way in which the text is ordered in terms of who sins -- an anointed priest, the whole congregation, the ruler, an ordinary person. The other thing that struck me in hearing the text was that, with respect to the congregation, the ruler, and the ordinary people, the text is very explicit about erring unintentionally. That is not stated
  so clearly in the case of the sin of the anointed priest; it doesn't say, "errs unintentionally" or
  "sins unintentionally." It was very striking to me that, at least in the English translation, there is some distinction made regarding the anointed priest who sins. What am I supposed to make
  of that?
• Response from a Jewish participant: I think the second verse offers a general categorization,
  and since the text then goes on to talk about
  the priest in the next verse, there is no need
  to respecifiy that the sin is unintentional.
• Remark: Maybe because there is a general verse indicating that the text is talking strictly about unintentional sins, we are to assume that this is true for everyone who follows. It is also possible that, because the priest is the priest, it is less likely that he is going to sin intentionally. So maybe it isn't necessary to mention that the
  sin of the anointed priest is unintentional.
• Remark: It struck me that part of that order sup-poses that the gravity, the seriousness of a sin committed by the priest is at a higher level because his guilt spills over and implicates the entire people. I didn't see that same dynamic operative elsewhere.
• Remark: I think it's noteworthy, too, that there seems to be a prioritization of the significance of the sin. Or there could be a prioritization of who needs to be taken care of so that he can take care of others. Those who are most significant, who must be relied on to take care of others,
  must be taken care of first so that they are
  freed up to do what they need to do.
• Response: That may be how to read the ordering; but it is striking to me that, at least in your initial comments, you made a big point out of the ordinary place and people of the text. I read it, obviously, as a Roman Catholic, so I can't read it without a certain kind of hierarchical set of lenses. So I want to say that everybody isn't equal here. There is no sense of the ordinary being equal [to the priest]. This is a very highly structured system, and the importance of each of these categories of people is pretty clear. You take
  care of the priest first, because if he's not taken care of, the rest are not going to survive.
• Remark: It says in verse 3, "If it is the anointed priest who sins, thus bringing guilt on the people"; so the priest's sin is of much higher gravity for the congregation. In v. 13, where it says, "If the whole congregation of Israel errs unintentionally," there is nothing about bringing guilt on the rest of the people.
• Question: Would that give us an indication as to what kind of sin they're talking about? Is a "sin" doing anything, or are there specific sins that a priest would commit that would bring guilt upon the whole people (that is, specific violations of ritual)? Or, in addition to ritual violations, could this refer to priests misleading the people or giving them bad teaching, as they are often accused of doing by the prophets?
• Question: I'm curious about two different groups
  -- the whole congregation (v. 13) and the ordinary people (v. 27). Who are they in distinction to one another?
• Response: Verse 13 is technically the Sanhedrin. There are four categories that we're operating with in the text: the priest; the Sanhedrin, the legislative body; the ruler; and the am ha-aretz, the ordinary people. I want to make a point about something I noticed. Verse 17 says, "the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times before the LORD, in front of the curtain." That happens when the Sanhedrin has sinned. In v. 6, under the circumstances when
  the priest sins, "the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle some of the blood seven times before the LORD in front of the [the holy] curtain of the sanctuary." One of the drashes that I read on this said that the distinction in the text is that, when the priest sins, he sheds the blood before the "holy" curtain; and when the Sanhedrin sins, the curtain is no longer called "holy." This is be-cause the sin that the Sanhedrin has committed
  is more substantial and it actually renders the environment less holy. This is kind of an inversion of what we were suggesting earlier concerning the greater significance of the priest's sin. Neverthe-less, you may be on to something with respect to the fact that the priest's sins may be more signifi-cant largely because he's also the agency of their atonement.
• Question from a Jewish participant: Why are you calling it the Sanhedrin? Verse 15 refers to "the elders of the congregation." In v. 13, edah is used for "community." In v. 15, it is the elders of the community who are laying their hands on the head of the bull. So there's a distinction between the elders of the community and the community.
• Response: It's not the Sanhedrin. It's the leaders as compared to the general community. What I read is that an error by the majority of the com-munity is a by-product of a mistake made by the governing body. That's one way of adjudicating the slippage in terminology, but I see your point.
• Remark: I hear the hierarchical overtones, but above that I hear something very practical. This is like the announcement on the airplane that tells the parents to take care of their oxygen masks before seeing to the children. They have to be okay before anybody else can be okay. So to me this sounds more practical than hierarchical.
• Remark: I think you could also reconcile the problem this way. It is the person who is guilty who lays the hand on the animal. If the ziqnei ha-edah, the elders, are the ones laying the hands, then in some way they are more responsible for the whole community's culpability. You could
  make the case further that this is really about the legislative body collectively making a decision that impacted the whole community. Everybody is guilty because each of them followed along, but the people who actually have to participate in the liturgical ritual of sin are the ones who ultimately bear the responsibility. Then they share their expiation with the ones whom they represent.



• Remark: In the text we have before us, at the descriptive beginning of each group, beginning with the "whole congregation of Israel," it says explicitly that the sin they've committed is unin-tentional. But that is not made explicit with regard to the anointed priest.
• Response: It could just be that the writer thinks you haven't forgotten what's in the introduction immediately preceding the reference to the anointed priest.
• Remark: That's the way the Hebrew reads.
• Remark: The thing that strikes me is that the sins are things that are not to be done. There's no sense of sin in not doing things that ought to be done.
• Response: That's exactly right. The sins that we're dealing with are for what are called negative com-mandments.
• Question: Are there other places in Leviticus that talk about not doing things that ought to be done? (I really don't know. I'd have to look it up.)
• Remark: An aspect that struck me is the necessity of forgiveness for an unintentional act. No matter who does it and even though it's not done deliber-ately, it's as if the act created some kind of a disorder in the world on in the universe. And even though it was unintentional, something needs to be done to correct it.
• Response: I think that's a great point. What puzzles me is the mechanics of how sacrifice works. A kind of participatory choreography has been mentioned, but it seems to me that because of the way in which the priest is located in this dynamic, the real transaction that brings about atonement depends upon the priest. So there are different orders of participation, if you will, and it's the priest's role in this drama that is of the utmost importance. Also important is the fact that blood is involved. Blood is associated with life, so it's holy; yet it's also a source of impurity and contami-nation. This also plays a key role in the whole transaction that brings about atonement. There's an element or a dynamic of transfer, where guilt is somehow being displaced or redirected. I just find the mechanics overwhelmingly complex.
• Remark: The first time I read this I thought, "Oh, give me a break. No wonder this went by the board." But the more I read it, the more I real-
  ized that there is a sense of the gravity of what
  is done that is mirrored by the complexity of the ritual. It's a lot more than simply saying, "Bless me, father, for I have sinned. I'm sorry I did it. Oh, boy, that was fast. Let's get out of here." The expiation is so choreographed and so rigorous.
  This is nothing you can dismiss lightly. There's something -- "appealing" is the wrong word -- but there's something about that notion of the gravity of sin that simply can't be taken care of with "I didn't mean to do it." It matters, whether you intended it or not. There is something about
  that that's very telling to me.
• Remark: I think that this text is about restoring
  a sort or order -- not just internal order, but the external order as well. Even an inadvertent sin renders the external order somehow disordered, to the extent that this whole charged and collective choreography is needed to restore order. Going out on a limb here, I see this in some respects as a very Augustinian kind of text, where there's a real significance in recalling what the value of things is and reordering the world when the cur-riculum of values is upset. There's a pedagogy being performed here that reorders us and brings us into the very act of consciously contributing
  to the reordering.
• Remark: I think the hierarchy also ties into that. It's interesting that the inadvertent sin that dis-orders the universe can be done by the people as a whole or by an individual. It can be done by the leadership of the people, even the most important among the leaders, namely, the priest. That's sort of a basic acknowledgment of humanity.



• Remark: I'm interested in how the sin is made known. Verse 14 says, "when the sin they have committed becomes known." Verse 23 says, "once the sin that he has committed is made known to him." And verse 28 says, "when the sin that you have committed is made known to you." There is no language like that for the priest. So how does the priest find out?
• Response: I think that is one of the questions about the text that's very hard to answer because the underlying assumption is that at some point it would become known. But not necessarily. You would have to think that over and over and over again there were unintentional sins committed and no one ever found out about them.
• Remark: This would have come out of a system in which, if you construe catastrophe or mishap of one sort or another as punishment, then you know that there was a violation, but you don't know what the violation was.
• Remark: It doesn't even have to be about punishment, but something in the external environment is wrong.
• Question: I think I saw in one of the footnotes when I was reading this that the NRSV mistrans-lates the idea of incurring guilt, and that a more appropriate translation might be "and feels guilt." Is it just a juridical statement, or is there some kind of interiority to "incurring guilt"?
• Response: I don't think they were concerned
  with feeling guilt at all. I think it was almost like
  a physics in a way, that they believed that this could be deconstructed and quantified.
• Remark: Part of the sacrifice involves offering ma-terial property. A person offered property that was in keeping with what he could afford.
• Remark: I was struck that bulls were needed for the two tops sins. Bulls are very rare animals and not many are kept around in a herd.
• Response: A priest can afford a bull.
• Question: I was wondering about the lack of in-tentionality with regard to the priest. Maybe we have a higher expectation for the priest because he knows the system so well. Can a priest sin unintentionally?
• Remark: I want to say something about the trans-lation. There is nothing in verse 2 that says, "If a person sins." It says, "A person sins unintentionally going against …" And then the next sentence says, "If it's a priest …" So there is nothing in this text that implies that a priest doesn't do it unin-tentionally.
• Remark: It's also a specific kind of unintentional sin that incurs guilt upon the community, so we're not talking about just personal sins. It's a sin commit-ted by him in his role as priest. He does something and it affects the legal status of the community.
• Remark: It's not that the priest is less likely to sin because he's a better person. The priest's behav-ior is so circumscribed by additional legislation that the likelihood of his sinning is reduced, even though he has more to do. The purity laws around the priesthood are thicker than for everybody else precisely to guard against sin.
• Remark: And it's not a cheap thing when the priest does sin. He doesn't get away with a goat.
• Question: What's the difference between an "anointed priest" and a priest?
• Response: This is the high priest.
• Question: I wanted to ask a question about
  the bull being offered, about the economy of the mechanics here. Is it just not possible for the sin of the priest to be forgiven if he offers a sheep? Everything follows pretty much the same mechan-ics except the bull's blood is poured before the curtain. I don't understand that, either. Is a sheep's blood not worthy enough? Are there different qualities of "bloodliness"?
• Response from a Jewish participant: I don't know. Imagine that a bull in that world was like a Lexus. This was something incredibly valuable that was being handed over, its neck cut, and the blood pouring out all over the place. Maybe the blood is sprinkled in that particular spot not because of the sacrifice itself but because of who was offering it -- the high priest.
• Response from another Jewish participant: I would say that it's the exact opposite. It's not that the priest is a more valuable person. It's because the priest is acting on behalf of the community in their sin, and the bull has to cover everybody. It's the economics of the thing: The Hyundai at $10,000 only has to cover one person. The Lexus at $50,000 has to cover the whole community. (Of course, for a person of limited means, the Hyundai is as hard to give up as the Lexus is for the priest.)
• Remark: This is the high priest. This is the only person who can enter the Holy of Holies. Every-one depends on this person for atonement. I think that's why the blood has to be sprinkled there, because you've got to purify the entrance to the one place the high priest can go where no one else can go.
• Question: I'm curious about whether or not it's correct to understand here that the high priest himself has sinned. Is he performing the task for himself or for the sin of the people? I think he's performing it on his own behalf, for something
  that he did.
• Response from a Jewish participant: He did it, but it was in performance for something he was doing for the whole community, because the focus is on the community. So he did do it, but it was in his capacity as representative of the people, in his capacity as high priest. That's how I read it.
• Response from a Christian participant: I would read it this way: Because of his sin, he is unworthy to function properly as the high priest; and, there-fore, he is bringing guilt on the people and shutting them off from God. It's like an interdict.
• Remark: Listen to Rashi's commentary on this. This is not the plain meaning and it comes a long time after, but Rashi says exactly what you're saying: "When the high priest sins, it's the guilt of the people because they're dependent on him to
  atone for them and to pray on their behalf, and he's become befouled by sin."
• Question: If the community has no high priest who can function as a high priest, what happens to the community? This is a huge issue. The high priest is essential for the well-being of the people.
• Remark: This is why the loss of the Temple was such a scary thing.
• Response: I think it was necessary to have a high priest only on Yom Kippur. I think that the normal priest could perform these sacrifices [in the Levi-ticus text under discussion].
• Remark: I'm interested in the language, which goes to something that was said about Augustine and some of the remarks made about unintentionality. In Roman Catholic theology there is no such thing as an unintentional sin. That's impossible. Sin is of its nature something that is done intentionally. We would call what is discussed in this text an "evil." We can commit evil, or participate in evil or wrong, unintentionally. This is similar to the notion of strict liability in civil law. One can unintentionally create a wrong or an evil; but in Catholic moral theology, and I would imagine in other Christian moral theologies, we would not call that a sin. One of the things that I think is problematic, based on what I hear some of the Catholics saying here, is that we personalize sin. If anybody commits a sin, we immediately have to personalize it to an act of an individual. But if we were talking about an "evil," so that the priest or the leadership be-comes responsible for an evil that affects the whole community, it might change the way we're understanding what this text is trying to get at. This isn't about morality; this is about righting wrongs or rectifying evils.
• Question: So this is a justice issue?
• Response: It would be the same thing as strict liability in civil law, where you put a product out and, whether you intended it or not, it hurts somebody. The law says that you are respon-
  sible for compensating that hurt. It doesn't matter whether you intended it or not; the hurt was done and it's got to be rectified. This isn't personal or individual. The issue is righting wrongs in society. That's what I think this text is getting at. As Christians, we might be personalizing the text because of the use of the word "sin." If you replace "sin" with "evil" or "wrong," then this is really about wrongs in the society that have to
  be rectified.
• Reaction: That's really interesting. It gets my
  mind moving in all kinds of different directions.
  The world view as it's constructed here would suggest that an inadvertent sin corrupts or throws the entire cosmos out of alignment. All of Israel is implicated, but there's a procedure for bringing about the restoration of the community. My understanding is that, within the Roman Catholic Church, there is a notion that the Church is incapable of sinning. There is within it a domain
  of purity. The sons and daughters of the Church can advertently do all kinds of things that are wrong, but the Church has a domain of sanctity upon which it can draw to connect with God. If the institution of the Church, the Body of Christ, were somehow implicated in the disorder, it would be unable to make atonement or bring about for-giveness. I guess what I'm really trying to get at
  is that we're talking about two very different systems with regard to how atonement is effectuated.
• Response from a Roman Catholic: I don't want us to move away from the text too much, but I do want to tweak what you've said. It isn't that there's a part of the Church that can't sin. The theology of the Church says that because the Church is the Body of Christ -- not any old body, not just a group of people who call themselves a body -- it "enjoys" (that's Church language) the same kind of dual nature [as Christ]. The ecclesi-ology is based on a christology. The issue that you're raising -- the notion that the divine nature of the Church cannot sin -- is one that always gets misunderstood. If we were to say that the divine nature of the Church could sin, we would be saying that Christ is sinning. It's not that there is reserved an area of the Church that can be drawn upon and that has to remain pure so that it can correct impurity. It's that the divine nature of the Church, by virtue of its being divine, cannot sin. That's why the distinction is made between the Church and its sons and daughters. That language should never be used in the public media because there is a whole ecclesiology behind it that isn't explicated. As a result, "the Church and its sons and daughters" gets read as: "They're trying to cover their bases by saying a few of the people did something, but not the Church."
• Reaction: My own sense from a Protestant perspective is that to ascribe divinity to the Church would be nothing short of blasphemous. (There was a great deal of excited talking fol-lowing this comment.)
• Remark from a Jewish participant: I think for the same sorts of reasons that we cannot talk here about the personal sins of the high priest. If there would be something off in the cosmos any time the high priest would unintentionally trespass, then there would never be a state where things would be absolutely right with the people and any of this would be able to operate.
• Reaction: There actually is a parallel. There are not two systems at all, but I think the evil-sin distinction is crucial here and it's going to obstruct any overall effort to make the parallels. But having said that, the analogy is between the sacrificial system and the divinity of Christ. That is to say, speaking in theological terms, the sacrificial sys-tem is the sacramental location, if you will, that affords the opportunity for the reordering; and
  the sacrificial system itself remains intact. It's
  the system that provides the very architecture and opportunity for the reordering, in much the same way that Christ and the New Testament
  text provide the opportunity, the location, for reordering.
• Response: So all the members in the system,
  whatever their status, can sin and there are
  ways to expiate or atone for that sin. But the system is sinless, which is the only way the system can work when all its members are corrupted.
• Response: Jews would never talk about it that way, obviously; but there is a static constant
  that provides the ongoing opportunity.
• Remark: I also think we've been bringing out a certain dimension of the meaning of forgiveness because -- to get back to Roman Catholic roots
  -- we're used to someone doing a ritual and there's a feeling that a person has been for-
  given as a result of that ritual. But if there is
  an inadvertent disordering that can happen at
  all levels, forgiveness here has a different qual-
  ity about it than forgiveness of personal sins.
• Response: It's almost as if forgiveness is being re-given the gift of right ordering. Forgiveness is restoration as opposed to a personal transposition.
• Remark: A better word than "forgiveness" might be "reconciliation" because reconciliation implies two parties realigned with each other, rather than just a grant given to one person.
• Remark: The comment about Protestant sin leads me to a text that's very popular in the Evangelical community, Hebrews 4:14-16: "Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weak-nesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with bold-ness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need."
• Remark: We have spoken of "sin" and "forgive-ness" having different qualities -- "sin" as "evil" and "forgiveness" as "reconciliation." I think we should consider a different understanding of the word "guilt" as well. This text comes out of a culture where the internal feeling is not guilt, as
  it is in this country (or as it used to be in this country). This is an honor-shame society, so the internal feeling is one of shame. I think if the word "guilt" is replaced by the word "responsibility," we'll get closer to what the text is actually talking about.
• Response: What may help with that is the physical quality that sin had for them. It was something you could pick up and touch, a solid thing. That's why people put their hands on the animal: The physical stuff moved off of them and onto the animal. It's just like mathematics. You committed this wrong, so this is what you do: You take the sin, get if off yourself, and put it on the animal.
• Response: It's interesting how the materiality of it is what actually mandates a web of obligation. It actually does move, and when it moves, it impacts on a lot of different folks. That is also what man-dates that it be a collective obligation, regardless of how it's stratified.
• Reaction from a Christian participant. Your com-ment makes me think of language. The liturgical language is the language of cleansing. It has that same sense of materiality: Sin is literally washed away. It was on me, and now it's not on me.
• Response: The pedagogy of this is really good. In acting out these rituals, the people grasped the meaning of what was happening.
• Response: Which is interesting, because that speaks to the original question, how do you find out that you've actually done the sin? People are performing sacrifices all the time, and it's so ma-terial, so physical, that it kind of wakes you up.

The second text: Matthew 6:1-16 (NRSV trans.)

Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have re-ceived their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then in this way:

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have re-ceived their reward.

The discussion continues:

• Remark: I do have to say this because many of
  us around this table hold dear in our hearts the memory of Van Hunter, who was a Presbyterian minister and Old Testament scholar who taught at St. Mary's Seminary. He was the only Protestant on the staff. I used to sit next to him as a matter of statement at liturgies because he'd sit in the top row in the back of the bank of pews all by himself. On Ash Wednesday, we would be sitting next to one another, and as everyone was piously walking up to get ashes on his face, every year for thirteen years, he leaned over and said to me, by memory, "Whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, who disfigure their faces."
• Reaction: And this is read on Ash Wednesday!
• Remark: So for Van, secretly, there was some kind of funny bone in the lectionary committee; they had to have known this.
• Response: I think it demonstrates that the Church has a sense of humor to be reading this text on that day because it makes it unmistakably clear that you've got to identify with the hypocrites.
• Remark: To sort of follow up on that, the placing of ashes is a liturgical innovation recently reintro-duced into our tradition. The first time it was done, one of the members of my congregation, who very unwillingly came forward and had ashes placed on her forehead, then read on to the verse that we've omitted (verse 17). She immediately left the service, ran up the hall, went to the rest-room, and washed her face, which is the next instruction.



• Question: What are we supposed to understand from "They have received their reward"? Is it that this isn't really a reward, not the kind of reward you would actually want? Or they're doing their own thing and they're going to get their reward, but this is what you're supposed to do? Or is it, they're going to get theirs?
• Response: I thought it was in contrast with the very first line: "for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven." So if you do this in order to be recognized by those around you, that's your reward. But that's not what praying, fasting, and almsgiving are about.
• Responses: It's not a divine reward. It's limited.
• Remark: This text comes pretty close to being
  so internally contradictory, to generate such dissonance, that it almost collapses into total meaninglessness for me. The whole dynamic of
  the teaching is polemical, so the dynamic of articulating what is the right thing is made known through its contrast with those who don't do it right. It starts with a situation of social dislocation and disorder, and it presupposes that forgiveness never gets around to totally overcoming that dis-order. The text never imagines that we have an obligation to forgive the hypocrites, and that through the mechanism of forgiveness they will be reincorporated into a social whole or an economy in which there is genuine belonging.
• Reaction: I find the word "hypocrites" much more benign than we tend to take it because the Greek word means "actors." That's what actors do, who they are. They live for the applause of the audi-ence, that is their reward, and they get it. It's not that they're wicked. We are simply not to be as shallow as the actor.
• Question: But where is the stage?
• Response: All the world's a stage.
• Reaction: The stage is in the synagogue. That is repeated over and over.
• Remark: This is a contrast with what's going on in society. It's a judgment by the speaker of what's happening at the time. You brought up the idea of forgiveness, which shocked me in a sense, be-cause it seemed to me that forgiveness was a very minor note in this whole structure. The
  whole text is about the general rule, "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them." It speaks about the devotional practices of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting, and contrasts what should be done with the things people do to get praise from others. To make
  this a text about forgiveness is to invest a lot of meaning into a few words. This is really a text that's structured around how you should practice your piety.
• Response: It seems to me that what you're sug-gesting uncouples piety from the behaviors that bring about forgiveness.
• Response: I don't mean to suggest that. I'm just saying the text doesn't deal with that.
• Remark: I think the text is in part talking about how persons actually behave in social contexts and how they teach each other. The negative of performing religious piety is to perform it in such a way that you're doing it in a context where you want to be seen by others. That's contrasted
  with forgiveness, where you have to perform your forgiveness in a positive way towards the social environment: You must forgive others, or your Father will not forgive you. It seems to me that the text is about strategies for being in a commu-nity of obligation. What does it mean to perform religious life communally -- acts of piety, acts of forgiveness, and so forth?
• Reaction: It's not just communally, though. The way in which these acts are performed distin-guishes a person from those in other communities in the society. This text fits within the context of the gentile world and the synagogue. The people to whom the text is addressed belong to neither of those worlds, so they are asking, who are we and what do we look like?
• Response: I would challenge even that. I would say this text lends itself to becoming a very indi-vidualized personal piety because it says piety is significant only in relationship to the Father. In other words, any practice of piety done for the purpose of engaging others is not legitimate piety. Forgiveness of others is not for their benefit; it is for your benefit before the Father.
• Remark: My initial instinct when I read this text was very much what you're saying. I read it in contrast to the Levitical text, seeing in it a no-tion of a kind of one-on-one relationship to God that is set apart from the communal. One's piety must be secret, with God; it shouldn't be an-nounced communally. This is in contrast to the web of obligations that we saw in the Levitical text, which concerns a very extroverted liturgical practice with communal implications.
• Remark: I just assumed that these practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving were deeply rooted in the Hebrew tradition, that they were practices that were simply adopted by the early Christian communities. Just to be personal about it, when Advent or Lent comes up, I think more about what prayer, fasting, and almsgiving mean for me; and I always feel like I'm rerooting myself back through the centuries, engaging in devotional practices that people have done for centuries, and doing them in common with people around the planet today. I don't know what the Jewish traditions really were.
• Response: If we go back and look at the earliest synagogues that have been discovered archaeo-logically, they do have little plaques with the names of donors on them. I think it's Maimonides who in some ways picks up on a theme similar to the Matthew text. He has levels of giving charity, and the greatest form of charity is when you give anonymously to somebody you don't know.
• Remark: I wanted to address what was said about this text being oriented around the synagogue. Verse 7 says, "When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do." To say that this is simply a polemic against the synagogue …
• Response: Well, it is, but it's double-edged.
• Response: I just wanted to make sure we under-stood that the text was broader than just an anti-Jewish text.
• Response: Again, what I find so troubling is it does not seem to envision a restoration that overcomes the binary mindset.
• Response from another participant: Except here's a possibility. I think there's a juxtaposition in the text between the instructions about piety and the Lord's Prayer. The text says that when you give alms, you should do it in secret with God, etc., etc. But the Lord's Prayer says: Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts. The prayer appears, to a certain extent, to be restoring a social fabric.
• Response: That's a very generous way to look at it. I see that prayer as saying, "Look, in contrast to the rest of them, when you pray, this is what you do. Not like them. We do this, and that's what makes us better."
• Remark: We stumble over a lot of the vocabulary in this text, and, unfortunately, we carry a burden of connotation about all of these words. The Greek word for "secret" is kryptos. It doesn't mean "secret" in the sense of "I want to hide it from you." The sense is the people who are watching you do this from the outside don't get it. They're not going to get it when you give not only your coat but also your shirt, or when you turn the other cheek to the person who strikes you. So there is a binary sense of those who understand and those who don't understand what you're do-ing. Those who don't understand are going to get the reward for what it is they're doing, but you who are doing this thing others don't understand will receive a reward as well.
• Question: Is the word "you" in this passage singular in the Greek?
• Response: The usage switches back and forth between singular and plural.



• Remark: Help me here, because I feel a little bit like this may be apples and oranges. We have a Levitical text that focuses on the social fabric and the restoration of the social fabric. And then we have a text from the New Testament that -- if we take the point that piety is a relationship between either me and God or me and my community and God -- in and of itself is not focused on the social fabric. There are other texts in the New Testa-ment that precisely address questions about the social order. I'm happy to study this text, but I don't want to study it as "this is the way Chris-tians figured it all out."
• Response: It's not incidental that one of the liturgically most charged declarations of for-giveness is in this textual context, and it's the counterintuitive character of that that I think
  is worth attending to. Both texts deal with forgiveness in entirely different contexts. That's the luxury that we have of attending to the textual locations of these things that become so liturgically important for us. It's surprising that these liturgically-charged possibilities are situated in entirely different contexts, and in this case in an unexpected context. Maybe you'd much rather have discussions of forgiveness located someplace else. So it's worth looking at the role that forgive-ness plays here.
• Remark: I haven't really thought about this, but it may be significant. Leviticus is full of the ritual practice and the how-to. This may be one of
  the only Christian texts that is a "how-to." I'm
  not aware of too many Christian texts that say, "This is how you are to do something."
• Response: There's a Matthew text about if some-one offends you … [Matt. 5:23-24: So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.] (Yeah, that's another one.)
• Remark: One of the ironies about the Leviticus passage, at least for me, is that, though it's concerned with ritual, and though the primary character who carries out the ritual is the priest, the only instruction that's given in the second person is the last one [i.e., in reference to the ordinary person]. The Matthew passage is clearly not meant for the Pharisees and the Sadducees; it's meant for the am ha-aretz, the people of the land. It's very interesting that a passage [Leviti-cus 4] that seems to be more geared towards the priests at the same time is written as if it's geared towards the general population.
• Remark: Another contrast between the two texts is that the first is rich in liturgical activity but has no liturgical prayers, and the second has a prayer but no liturgical ritual or activities.



• Questions: Focusing on the question about for-giveness of debt and asking just on the basis of these two texts (not what the entire tradition teaches), how does forgiveness work? How is
  guilt transferred? What are the mechanics of it?
  It seems to me that if I ask that question of the Matthew text, my forgiveness is radically tied to my forgiving you, and there's no ritual I can per-form that will remove that obligation. I want to see that as very positive but also as polemical. But leave that aside for the moment because we're talking about the mechanics of forgiveness. This text doesn't say, "If you need to be forgiven, this is how you do it. If you have sinned, this is how you get cleansed." There is an assumption in this text that I need to be forgiven. It's a pretty radical notion that my forgiveness by God is pinned to my forgiving you. Maybe that has roots in an-cient Israelite religion, maybe it doesn't, I don't know. But there's a notion that if you forgive others, then you will be forgiven. I hate that.
• Response: Me, too. It sounds like "works-righteousness." It hinges on what you do.
• Remark: It notches up the Levitical web of obli-gation. That is to say, it's very much like the
  fact that our obligations, our responsibilities,
  are shared; that when I do something wrong,
  it impacts on others; and when I forgive, it's necessarily implicated in other's lives as well.
  But it ratchets it up because it's not just my liturgical practice … I actually have to forgive
  you. That's a huge thing to do in order to be forgiven.
• Remark: It puts the poor in a real bind. Pre-sumably, we're talking about real debts.
• Remark: Actually, I think the poor are better off.
• Question: How are they going to practice for-giveness?
• Response: By forgiving you.
• Reaction: If you take debts quite concretely as things and obligations that are owed, because the poor person does not have the luxury of being able to lend or to give to others, he is at a real disad-vantage in terms of the praxis of forgiveness. (There were strong reactions to this statement.)
• Remark: The statement here is in the past tense. It's not, "forgive us our debts as we are able to forgive our debtors," or "if we are able to forgive," or "when we forgive our debtors." We have an economy here because we talk about forgiveness of debts and declare that those debts have already been forgiven by us. Then the word switches in v. 14, where we forgive others their "trespasses." Nowhere does the word "sin" appear in here. [Scribal note: In the Lukan version of the Lord's Prayer, the word "sins" replaces the word "debts"; "trespasses" is not used; and Luke goes on to say, "we ourselves forgive [present tense] everyone indebted to us." "Indebted" in the Lukan text is a participial form from the same root as Matthew's noun.]
• Question from a Jewish participant: Is there any sense that "trespasses" are sin in any kind of context?
• [Scribal response: The Greek noun used for "tres-passes" is the plural form of paraptoma, which has many literal and metaphorical definitions, including "false step," "slip," "blunder," "sin," and "wrong-doing." The word itself is a compound of the prefix "para," which also has many meanings, including "bad" or "faulty," and "ptoma," which is the nasty little word from which we get our word "ptomaine."]
• (At this point the questioner offered the possibility that "trespasses" might be like the unintentional sins in Leviticus. The dictionary definitions are equivocal: "slip" sounds inadvertent, "wrongdoing" does not.)
• Remark: It's interesting to me that there's a difference between forgiving debts and then forgiving "trespasses." What is a misstep, and is the text focused on a certain group of people's missteps? So that it's not the case that I have
  to forgive every misstep that you do against me, or else none of my sins are forgiven. We've just talked about the gentiles and the Jews, and maybe Matthew is reminding people that there
  are missteps that are going to occur that may be -- I may be extrapolating; you may disagree with me -- focused on the crucifixion events still loom-ing in Matthew. That may be what Matthew was referring to. Is it, "forgive everybody's sin who sins against you, or I'm not going to forgive any of your sins"? Or is it, "forgive this particular set of things that are going to happen, or else your forgiveness, your salvation, is in jeopardy"? It doesn't seem clear to me in the text which is which.
• Remark: I don't really hear anything all that new from Jesus that we haven't heard from the proph-ets in the Old Testament. This brings to mind Micah 6:7-8: "‘Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers
  of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgres-sion, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" It seems to be that the Matthew text is trying to reinterpret the Levitical system or, perhaps, like the prophets, remind people what stands behind it.
• Remark from a Jewish participant: I think also
  that the Levitical text, by its nature, is almost exclusively concerned with ritual sins, ritual transgressions. I think the classic example to use about the Levitical text would be accidentally eating something you're not supposed to eat. You realize later that you ate it, and then you go make up for it. That actually happened to me yesterday. I was on a plane, and I ordered salmon for lunch. The salmon came on a bed of rice. I took a forkful of salmon and rice, and there were little shrimp in the rice. I didn't see them. I didn't know they were there. So then, I've got to go to temple …
• Response from another Jewish participant: I don't think it's just ritual inadvertencies, since there is no distinction in halakhah between ritual and moral. I don't want it to seem like the kinds of in-advertent things that you can do wrong are only these ritual missteps. They can be moral or ethical missteps, too. It's too easy to dichotomize, to suggest that on some level the Christian text doesn't care about ritual particularities, that it's only concerned with moral or ethical missteps.
• Remark: But the other thing is, unlike the Leviticus text, the Matthew text is post-destruction. They didn't have the luxury of trying to reinterpret Tem-ple sacrifice; that system was gone.
• Remark: I want to get back to something that was said earlier. I don't think I've heard anybody else say quite so straightforwardly that "forgiving our debts" is really about forgiving economic obliga-tions. I don't know if anybody else ever thought that that's what that phrase meant.
• Response: I just thought it was a Presbyterian aberration in the way they say the Lord's Prayer
  -- that they use "debts." I always jokingly say that Presbyterians contract debts; Methodists commit trespasses. Both words are used in Matthew, but I don't think it's economics. It's responsibility.
• Remark: We've come to interpret it differently, but the text in Matthew does say "debts."
• [Scribal note: There is evidence that heavy in-debtedness was a serious problem in first-century Palestine. Josephus describes the burning of the debt archives by the rebels at the beginning of
  the war in 66 C.E.]
• Question: So if you were going to paraphrase this so that I would understand it and hear it anew, what would it say? "Forgive us what we owe other people"?
• Response: Forgive the debt. Wipe it off.
• Objection: But it's addressed to God.
• Question: So what does that mean?
• Response: One of the commentaries identifies it as the debt owed to God.
• Question: So what is the debt? Is it my VISA card, or is it a debt I owe to God?
• Question in response: Does it have to be that dichotomy?
• Response: I don't know. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Is there an economic, a material issue going on here? I've incurred ten thousand dollars worth of credit card debt. Are you going to forgive that debt?
• Response: I think our tendency in the Western tradition is to dichotomize the material from some spiritualized understanding as such. So I'm always tempted to read those things as a way to critique our world view instead of trying to make it fit into the way in which we dichotomize what is due.
• Reaction: I want to applaud that. But my question is, How does it work? How does it work if it's ad-dressed to God and it's about my material debts? Why am I asking God to forgive my material debts the way I've forgiven your material debts?
• Remark: I just don't think it's talking about material debts. The New Common English text translation is "sins" -- "forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us." We've gotten into a discus-sion about sin and the different definitions of it, and I think calling us back to the sense of the word being "responsibility" is probably more ac-curate. I think the dynamic here is very similar
  to the one in the Leviticus text, in that you incur an obligation or a responsibility when there is
  a violation of the law, whether inadvertent or advertent. (Supposedly you know what you're doing when you contract a debt.) The respon-sibility has to be transferred, so to speak. We talked about how material it was to lay hands on the animal: You put the sin on the animal and then you take the carcass out and burn it on the ash heap outside so that the sin is carried away. Here there is a person who is indebted to you. He is the one who created the problem, but if you don't forgive him, then the responsibility transfers from him to you. This is really speaking out of the tradition. It's just that at this particular time,
  the first century, there's a lot more interiority.
• Question: Do the dynamics you're describing have economic implications?
• Response: I guess if the offense is an economic offense, yes. But I don't think it's limited to economics because it goes on to talk about trespasses, which are missteps. That is very different from something as contractual-sounding as indebtedness.
• Remark: All of the connotations we talked about with respect to the word "debt" do appear in the New Testament.
• Remark: Right. But what I want to say is that one of those connotations is an economic, material connotation. I appreciate all the other pietistic or moral or personal connotations around the word But I'm interested in knowing if anything radical is going on -- not over against Judaism, but in and of itself. In other words, if one connotation of "debt" is that people owe me money, am I obligated to forgive those debts? And if that were the way our community operated, what are the implications economically for how we live? The text doesn't say, "You're not going to incur debt." What it says is, "When debt is incurred, you're to forgive it."
• Remark: Kind of like the sabbatical year. (Yeah,
  a lot like the sabbatical year.)
• Reaction: Except the text never gives a liturgical time for it. It never gives a calendrical identifica-tion, so the imperative is always there.
• Remark: And it's also been done. The statement in the prayer is, "I've already forgiven you all your debt, so now I'm commanding God to forgive me my debt."
• Unanswered question: Suppose you never lend?
• Remark: It seems to me that it's hard not to read the text metaphorically. It would hardly make sense at all.
• Response: I don't want to leap to other New Tes-tament texts, but there are other New Testament texts in which there are invocations of the jubilee year. Sometimes when it's invoked, it's taken out of its economic context. But there are those ref-erences to the jubilee year where one is hard pressed to ignore the economic part of appro-priating that term.
• Remark from a Christian participant directly addressing a Jewish participant: I think what you're hearing, at least from me and I suspect maybe from others, is that as a general state-ment, by and large Christians love to extract any of these obligations and have them be metaphoric, not having implications for the real economic order so that one is supposed to live differently in the world. So this text is not just between me and God, and how I pray, and where I pray, and who sees me. How I traffic in the world is supposed to be different. I have an obligation to be different. Part of my reaction to the text is that there is a history of getting us off the hook by reading this text as personal piety. That's not to say that there isn't an aspect of personal piety that needs to be incorporated, but I don't want that to be the whole push of the text. I want to press the point that there is something about how I live in the world that the text is commanding of me.
• Reaction: I agree with you because again in the first sentence we stumble over words. The first word we stumble over is "piety," which immediately becomes interiority of the entire text. The word there is actually the word for "justice" or "right-eousness." Beware of doing your justice-righteousness before others in order to be seen by them. It becomes an economy because I become an advertiser of my righteousness. Am I marketing my righteousness? Why am I using my righteous-ness as a market tool in the economy in which I exist?
• Reaction: I'm commodifying and overvaluing my righteousness.
• [Scribal note: With regard to stumbling over the vocabulary of the text, the word "beware" is a theologically-charged overtranslation of the Greek. The requisite piece of syntax that would permit the translation "beware" is missing. The KJV uses "take heed," and the NEB and NIV say, "be care-ful." Another translation that would work perfectly well is "be attentive to."]
• Question: Would a comment to the effect that a society should have a bankruptcy system to help people get rid of their debts illustrate your point? (Yes.)
• Parting remark: The Lord's Prayer in Luke is in chapter 11.

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