We are so used to the separation of church and state: that makes much of the book of Leviticus – and indeed much of the Bible – seem strange to us. But if the people of ancient Israel were to look at present-day America, they would be astonished at the notion that believers would separate who we are as God’s people from who we are as citizens of the United States. The book of Leviticus insists that there is one law for everyone: the rules are the same for the children of Israel and for the foreigners living in their midst.

Everyone knows that it isn’t safe to eat roadkill; you want to know the meat came from a clean slaughterhouse. Still, hungry people will take advantage of a dead animal they found, and so there’s a rule about it: “All persons, citizens or aliens, who eat what dies of itself or what has been torn by wild animals, shall wash their clothes, and bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until evening” (Leviticus 17:15). It’s a religious law in the Bible, but it makes sense in terms of preventing possible infection, and it applies to everyone, citizens of Israel or foreigners living among them.

But this principle – there’s one law for everybody, whether you’re a citizen or a foreigner – has a wide application. It applies to key religious festivals, like everyone getting a Sabbath day off from work on the Day of Atonement: you “shall do no work, neither the citizen nor the alien who resides among you” (Leviticus 16:29). The temptation in ancient Israel would be to assign the foreigners to do all the work on Yom Kippur, so that the citizens could relax and enjoy the holiday: but as Moses would say in the recapitulation of the Ten Commandments, everybody gets a day of rest on the Sabbath, including “the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you” (Deuteronomy 5:14).

The text reminded the people of Israel God Almighty had made a covenant with them; that reality placed an obligation on them, individually and communally, that required obedience. That’s harder for us to get, because we think that religion is something that we choose, and that we can choose to interpret or apply as we like. But when we decide that each of us should be the personal arbiter of ultimate authority, we become almost incapable of recognizing that God’s call is bigger than we are, and indeed bigger than whole communities or nations.

* * * * *

And yet you, O Lord, are the Creator of heaven and earth; you are the one who has chosen to be in covenant with us; you are the one who has established for us a redemption that we do not deserve, and that we so often ignore: a redemption for all the people, including the strangers and aliens in our midst.