Enjoying Fellowship and Gaining Cleansing

Enjoying Fellowship and Gaining Cleansing
LEVITICUS 3: 1- 4: 35

I just had an invitation to a Thanksgiving dinner and was in a quandary about how to respond. Our first one or two Thanksgivings were very meaningful because we were thankful for God’s goodness in connection with our move here. We could identify with the Pilgrim fathers and mothers in some small way. Then that feeling got overlaid with another awareness. To a foreigner, someone outside the culture, the dinner was a strange ritual. Through the rest of the year, I would never eat roast turkey or pumpkin pie, and the ritualized sharing of reflections on the past year seemed, well, ritualized—which for an outsider means artificial. It’s my problem, of course. There is nothing wrong with the ritual if you are an insider...