What God Has Made Us

18 March 2012

Ephesians 2:1-10

           When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, and the spirit of God swept over the waters and God said, Let there be. And there was. And God saw that it was good. Indeed, it was very good.

So, what happened? Why, when we get to the end of the book which has such a promising beginning, why are Christians seeing the world so differently? Why are they writing as if the world were something other than God’s good creation? Why are they writing as if the world was irredeemably corrupted, and the source not of life but of death: as in:

            “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient.”

            This dualism—the distinction between the way of the world and the way of God--represents a change from Paul’s early letters, and that change leads scholars to believe that this writing is later and probably from one of Paul’s disciples, and not Paul himself.

            Jesus seemed to see the world as an evidence of God’s goodness and endless blessing. He saw God’s fingerprint in the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. He and his disciples enjoyed the produce of the land and the vineyard. Jesus lived as if the earth was full of the goodness of the Lord, a perspective that is consistent with the Hebrew Scriptures.

            Despite the dualistic heresy evident in today’s epistle lesson, there is a nugget of pure gold in the expression, “we are what God has made us.” We are created for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. Echoes of Moses, and Joshua, and Jeremiah: Walk God’s way so that it may go well with you in the land you are about to inherit. Choose this day whom you will serve. God set before you the way of life and the way of death. Choose life that you may live!

            We are what God has made us, we are not our own, we belong to God. And those who are different from us, who believe differently, they are also people whom God has made. And the earth including the fire the flood, the earthquake and the hurricane, are as God has made them. When people go to war with each other, or when the earth seems to be at war with people, it is too easy to resort to dualism: to say one people is of God and the other of the devil. The gentle rains are of God but the flood is of the devil. Or one is for reward and the other for punishment. It is all of God, created for good, meant for blessing and not curse.

            When we experience the world as a harsh and hellish place, it is best to remember that it isn’t always going to be this way. Best to remember God’s saving history in the world: that when people cry out in their distress, God hears, and God makes a way out of no way, provides healing, and help, rivers in the desert and bread from heaven.

            We are what God has made us and God has made us with an independent will, and the ability to choose. To choose the good, and reject the evil, to choose life and not death, to choose to be liberators and not captors.

            Wait for the Lord, you who trust in God, for God seeks to save. If salvation seems to be delayed, wait for it! Help is on the way. And when God comes as promised to deliver the oppressed, where will we be? Among those who are seeking to alleviate suffering, or among those who create it? We were made for good. Let us be and become what God has made us.

           

            

At-one -ment is our natural state

11 March 2012

 Last week’s sermon included a critique of the substitutionary sacrifice theory of atonement, and offered a different way of seeing the cross, not as a sacrificial offering for our sin, but as the consequence of a life of obedience to God. I received a follow-up question by e-mail the next day, asking me to say more about atonement.

The word atonement can be defined by picking it apart the way I did in the sermon title: At One Ment. Atonement means repair of something that is broken into pieces, making it whole again. Atonement in practical terms is restorative justice: like the program of the same name, that provides a way for young offenders to repair the damage they did when they broke somebody’s window or vandalized a public building. Atonement is fixing the window, and cleaning up the mess, and promising never to do anything so stupid again. But more than that, atonement is repairing the broken trust, the trust that allows people to live together in community.

Theologically, atonement is repairing the broken trust between God and people, becoming at one with God. Scripture says that we are made in the image of God, male and female. Scripture also says that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. We are dust animated by the spirit of God which is within us. Which means, at-one-ment with God is our natural state. We come from God and to God we return. It’s the middle part that is tricky, the part where we grow up and move out of God’s house, to make our own way in the world. It isn’t easy for us; but any parent can guess that it isn’t easy for God either.

During this season of Lent, our first scripture lessons have been the covenant stories of the Bible: The rainbow covenant after the flood, the covenant with Abraham, and today, the covenant at Sinai, also known as the ten commandments. These covenants trace the history of God reaching out to creation, like a parent reaching out to a lost or estranged child. God said to all creation: I am sorry about the flood. That was wrong, I was too harsh, I learned my lesson. I declare a unilateral disarmament. Here, I will hang up my bow: I put it in the clouds. Whenever you see my bow in the clouds remember: I am for you.

And later, God reached out to Abraham as he wandered from his home: Saying, Abraham, walk with me. I will be your God, and you will be my people, you and your descendants forever. I give you a name, and a land, and descendants, and my presence, always.

And when the people were enslaved in Egypt God called them out, and taught them how to live, so that it might go well with them. The commandments were given not so people could break them and give God a reason to retaliate. The commandments were given so that people could live, so that it would go well with them. They had been slaves, whose only rule was, do what your master says. God knows freedom isn’t easy, and God said, this is what freedom means: you have to be accountable to each other now. Here’s some guidelines. This is how you walk with me.

From time to time, God sent prophets to remind the people of the covenant on Sinai. You wonder why things aren’t going well, the prophets said, you wonder why your enemies surround you, you wonder why the people rebel? Remember the covenant. Remember the way God taught you to go. How’s that working for you? Oh, you forgot the covenant? Well, turn around! Repent!

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. Walk with me.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, sin is not original. Sin isn’t a sickness, sin isn’t an inevitable state of being. Sin is wandering from God, wandering away from the paths of righteousness that God mapped out for us at Sinai, the paths of righteousness and justice, the paths of mercy and compassion. And we make atonement by turning around, which is what repentance means, turning around. Turn back!

In the fullness of time, God sent Jesus, to be the living embodiment of God’s covenant. Jesus was the rainbow, the sign of peace. Jesus was the promise to Abraham, the one through whom all the nations of the world would be blessed. Jesus was the living Word, faithfulness personified. Jesus was the way, the living map of the paths of righteousness. Jesus’ life is the map, Jesus’ resurrection is the sign of victory snatched from the jaws of death.

Jesus is the key to living the life that is truly worth living, in the meantime. From God we come, to God we will return; in the meantime life can be hell, or life can be at one with God. We, the church of Jesus, we, the followers of Christ have a mission: To keep to the paths of righteousness, as best we can, with the help of the Spirit; and to seek out and save the lost from their living hell, to help them find the way of at one ment with God. May the Spirit help us in our mission, and keep us on the right paths, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

The Cross and The Last Turn

4 March 2012

Mark 8:31-38

“Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”

            I have been reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone, the distinguished professor of theology at Union Seminary in New York. James Cone, you could say, is the father of Black liberation theology, a great man, and a great voice of the church and to the church. I found the book on a table at Barnes & Noble, and I was intrigued because, frankly, I have a problem with the cross. Honestly. After all these years of study and prayer and life in the church, I find the common theology of the cross incredible, as in unbelievable, and the substitutionary theory of atonement inexcusable.

            Now, let me go back to what I learned about the substitutionary theory of atonement in college, in the simplest language possible. The first point of the theory is that God is great—God is so great, so perfect, so righteous. The second point is that people are sinful—people are so sinful, so foul, so irredeemable. Therefore, the third point, people cannot be at one with God, people cannot be in the presence of God unless some sort of sacrifice is made for their sins, to cancel out their sins in the balance of things. But, the problem is because people are so foul they are incapable of providing a sacrifice equal to the task. So God, according to this theory, being great and also good, created a son, his one and only son, completely perfect, without a flaw, so that this flawless son of God could be killed as a blood sacrifice for people’s sins.

            How messed up is that? A story of divine child abuse, and human sacrifice, to wipe away the sins of the people. The substitutionary sacrifice theory of atonement is more pagan than Christian. It follows from a theory of god who has more in common with the Titans or the Norse god Odin than with the God Jesus knew.

            I agree with John Dominic Crossan, that Jesus was killed because of sin; but that doesn’t mean he was killed for our sin. Jesus was killed because in this imperfect world, when someone comes along and speaks the truth to power, they will be killed. That’s what power does when it is threatened. Christ’s death was not a ritual sacrifice to appease and angry god. It was murder by a mob, with the complicity of the state.

            I think the substitutionary theory of atonement is bad theology which has been used badly to venerate violence. We keep spilling blood over and over again in war, in execution. We even use the term sacrifice to describe those who are killed in the course of war. Why do we keep spilling blood as if that will save us? As if the smell of blood were somehow pleasing to an angry god. Our God, the God we know through the scriptures, takes no delight in sacrifice. “But God has shown you, O people, what is good, and what does God require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)

            What we are doing here today is deconstructing the old, common, theology of the cross—the substitutionary atonement theory—and we are going to see if we can build a new one. If we are going to have a theology of the cross it has to make sense, it has to follow from our understanding of the God whom Jesus knew.

            I believe that we are created in God’s image, as the scripture says; I believe that God is merciful and God forgives, as the scripture says, both the Hebrew and the Greek, the Old and the New Testaments. I believe that Jesus’ life is more significant than his death, and his resurrection is a declaration that death, no matter how violent or how shameful, does not win over life.

            So, in preparation for the season of Lent, I was mulling over the problem of the cross and the substitutionary theory of atonement which underlies and has inspired much of our traditional liturgy and our hymns, especially the hymns for Lent. And on one of those days before Lent, I walked into a Barnes and Noble for a coffee and I saw this book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and I knew, I knew I needed this. I need this book, I thought to myself, because if James Cone can find something redemptive in the cross from the Black American liberation perspective, then there must be something to it.

            And there is, But it isn’t easy to read about, and it is even more difficult to talk about, and this isn’t going to be easy to hear. In this book, James Cone makes a personal testimony which invites us to walk around in his shoes. He shares some of his own story of growing up in Arkansas in the 50’s and 60’s; he invites us to imagine what it was like to live every day in fear, knowing that you, your brother, your father, your uncle, your best friend could be killed by a white mob and nobody would be able to do anything about it.

            Lynching was no secret. It was a public spectacle. The dates, times and places where a lynching was to take place were sometimes even published in the newspaper. It mattered not greatly who was to be lynched, if the supposed transgressor could not be found, any black man would do. (Talk about your substitutionary sacrifice.)

            Lynching is distinguished from hanging, you understand: Execution by hanging was a sentence carried out under the law after a trial by a jury of peers. Lynching was mob violence. And, blacks weren’t the only victims of lynching in America. We have our own horrible history of a lynching that took place in Brainerd in the summer of 1872, by The Last Turn Saloon. Two Ojibwe brothers were hung together from the tall pine tree that stood across the street from the Last Turn.

            The brothers had been arrested and jailed in the disappearance of a white girl in Crow Wing, but before evidence could be presented in the case, a mob of white citizens took them from the jail, marched them to the tree, and hung them there one at a time, until they were nearly dead. Then someone grew impatient and a shot rang out. When the bodies were removed from the tree the next day, they were riddled with fifty bullets. Inquiries were made, as inquiries are, but no one could be found who was present at the lynching, except, as the newspaper put it, one person who offered up a prayer for “the poor devils” before they were hung.

            The cross has power for victims of violence because crucifixion was the Roman way of lynching. It was the most shameful, most degrading, most torturous death imaginable; a form of killing reserved for the most despised and rejected people. And despised and rejected people get it. They get it that God takes no delight n the blood of the innocent, but that God is with the man who hangs on the tree. Despised and rejected people get it, that the man who hangs on the tree emulates Jesus. And they get the tragic irony that the crowds, who think they are doing “God’s work” by lynching the black man, have more in common with the Romans and the religious and civil authorities who thought they were in the right when they crucified Jesus. But, in fact, those Christians who did nothing to prevent the deaths of innocent men and women were crucifying Christ all over again.

            So, here is where we begin to create a new theology of the cross. We should bear the shame of the cross, not because we crucified Jesus all those years ago in Jerusalem, but because we continue to crucify Jesus, or we stand complicit while others crucify him.

            We should see Jesus on the lynching tree by The Last Turn, and Jesus in the face of Matthew Shepherd, left for dead on a fence post outside of Laramie. And we should see Jesus in prison in Guantanamo, and Jesus wherever and whenever people are despised and rejected by scribes and elders and statesmen. If we can begin to see Jesus crucified wherever and whenever people suffer violence unjustly, than we can, perhaps, redeem the theology of the cross.

            The cross is worthy of reverence when it shows us where we should stand while we live. What are we willing to live for? What are we willing to live and perhaps even die for? What are we willing to live until we die for?

            Let us consider what the Spirit is saying to the church, through the image of the cross and the lynching tree.

About the lynching: The story is told on brainerdhistory.com., a reprint of an article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The original publication explains that the author, H.L. Bridgman, was commissioned by President Grant to inspect the first section of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1872.

Mr. Bridgman supposed that “The Last Turn Saloon” was named for the lynching tree. Local sources suggest that the establishment’s name predates the lynching, that the saloon was the last on a long block full of drinking establishments (not much has changed) and it was therefore, the last turn before you left town.