Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

In the 1995 romantic-comedy titled “While You Were Sleeping,” Lucy Eleanor Moderatz is a lonely fare token collector for the Chicago Transit Authority. The role is played by Sandra Bullock. 

She secretly loves Peter Callaghan, a handsome daily commuter, though realistically they are strangers. On Christmas Day, she rescues Peter from the oncoming Chicago L- train after muggers push him onto the tracks. 

She accompanies the comatose Peter to the hospital, where a nurse overhears her musing aloud, “I was going to marry him.” Misinterpreting, the nurse tells his family that she is his fiancée. They actually haven’t seen him in a while. So an entire mess unfolds between then and New Year’s Day as he finally awakens from his coma. 

They nearly marry before Bullock’s character embarrasses herself and straightens the whole thing out. This poor man, Peter, spends most of the movie trying to unravel everything that happened during his coma, otherwise known as while he was sleeping. 

Now that we have covered Genesis and Exodus in this One Story series, many of you know what’s coming. Moses will download some instructions.

If you had your wish, today we might magically find ourselves over in roughly the book of Joshua. You might wonder how we got there so fast. I would have to explain that it all happened, “While you were sleeping.” 

You know that in reality, we are about to march through Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy in order. I am not trying to bait you into skipping this column for the next few weeks. 

Actually, it’s the opposite. Because I would argue that if you or I don’t know much about a given biblical book, and think that there’s nothing happening in that book, that’s the one we may need to study the most. 

I would implore you to stay with me, and let’s see if this doesn’t come out better today than we might first think it will. 

“Why bother with it? No one reads this stuff anyway?” a young research assistant wrote to their supervisor. The supervisor was an Old Testament professor, and the note was speaking of a unit they were about to teach on Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. 

Of course, that professor who received the note turned out to be one of the scholars who later published a major, full-length commentary on the third and fourth books of the Pentateuch. We know them as Leviticus and Numbers. 

What I do hope we’ll find here today is, among other things, a new affirmation of the importance of Worship. Because that very well may have been the original reason for this book being written in the first place. 

Leviticus. Levite. “Priest” in English. Leviticus is known by some as “the priestly book.” On the surface, our disconnects with this book could be many. 

This biblical book will talk about sacrifices, priests and purity laws in great part. A Day of Atonement is also featured here. Jesus Christ taught us that any time we prayed might be a good day for atonement. Holiness is another code that is explored in Leviticus. 

We might counter that holiness is a state of being. Holiness is a state of otherness that our practices and fidelity to law could not achieve for us. Finally, that the apostle Paul said something about these kinds of codes as having been “…done away with in Christ.” 

Holiness. The need to practice Sabbath and to admit we are not the Holy One. The need to humble ourselves equally in the presence of the mighty Creator of all around us. That’s what Leviticus really was about!

The practices and priorities of Leviticus, that seem so foreign and different to us, were actually intended to help this early group of our spiritual forebears to lead lives that acknowledged and prioritized holiness. 

Did you know that the Hebrew words used centrally here in Leviticus, Quodosh (meaning Holy One) and Qodesh (meaning holy things/seperate or other) come from a root word meaning “to cut off” or “to separate.” 

Twenty-six chapters here that were really all about one thing, by the time we reach the end. The need to build and to hold onto a relationship with the Holy One. 

Now, how irrelevant and uninteresting does that sound to you? Guess what we New Testament Christians are going to find over in our third of the Bible? You guessed it.  A lot of emphasis on closeness to God. May it be so. May the wise pay attention.

DR. CHARLES QUALLS is senior pastor at Franklin Baptist Church. Contact him at 757-562-5135.