Sunday, March 27, 2011

Exodus 12:1-13, 21-28


03/27/11
Exodus 12:1-13, 21-28
Hudson UMC

We have been taking time this Lenten season to consider the theme of atonement and sacrifice throughout the biblical witness.  First, we looked at the story of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden, then we looked at the story of Abraham and Isaac.  In the first, we saw that, though humanity had sinned and hidden themselves from God, clothing themselves in fig leaves, God reaches out to them, clothing them instead with skins.  In the second, we saw that even the very best that we have to offer to God is replaced by what God himself gives, on our behalf and in our place.  We have seen that atonement and sacrifice, far from being a nice and clean thing, is messy and often quite stressful.  We turn to the next major story in the Bible that deals with sacrifice, the Passover.  In it we see a third theme; sacrifice as ransom.
To understand the sacrifice commanded for Passover, we need to understand the context that led up to it.  One of Jacob’s sons, Joseph, was sold into slavery by his brothers because he was hated by them for being the favorite.  Years went by and Joseph rose to tremendous power within the Egyptian government.  When a famine came upon the whole region, it came to pass that Joseph was able to provide for his family, taking care of them instead of taking revenge on his brothers.  Four hundred years passed.  In that time, the Pharaohs forgot about Joseph and how he had saved the nation from the famine and even made the government even more powerful.  They looked around and saw that, from the original seventy or so people who immigrated to Egypt, the Israelites had become a powerful nation within the nation.  They realized that the Israelites had far deeper loyalties to their God and to their heritage than they ever would for Egypt, so they made them slaves and put them to work.
Soon, not even that was enough.  The Egyptian leaders were so worried about an Israelite uprising, that they commanded that every male child should be thrown into the Nile.  When Moses was born, his mother followed those orders, except that, when Moses went into the Nile, he was in a waterproofed basket.  By the amazing providence of God, Moses was adopted into the Pharaoh’s family and grew up a mighty leader.  However, the time came when, after years of living in exile, Moses was called by God to be a liberator of his people.  He did everything he could to avoid it, most famously hiding behind his speech impediment; but God called him nonetheless. 
The Exodus story is one of the most memorable of the entire Bible.  Because of Pharaoh’s hard heart, ten plagues were unleashed on Egypt:  The Nile was turned into blood, frogs, gnats, flies, disease broke out on the livestock, boils covered the people and animals, severe thunder and hail storms, locusts, and extreme darkness all afflicted the people.  Just in case one wanted to say that Egypt was just having a tough year, the Israelites were spared from all of these.  But the last of these plagues was the worst of all, it was the death of the firstborn in each household.  It was this that finally made Pharaoh let the Israelites go, though even after that, he still chased after them.
The reason why this story fits in with the major theme of these Lenten reflections is that there was nothing magical about the Israelites that protected them from harm.  It was not as though this plague took genetics into account.  God gave very specific instructions as to what the Israelites needed to do and, in this case, obedience or disobedience was the difference between life and death.  It was not as if the Israelites avoided this final plague without any cost whatsoever.  It is true that their firstborns did not die, which is a wonderful thing, but we need to remember that it is not as if nothing died.  Each household lost a life, but, instead of the life of a human being, it was the life of a lamb.
The key is the emphasis that God puts on the blood.  After commanding the people to wipe the blood of the lambs on the doorframes, God explains the significance of this act.  “The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live:  when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.”  There is something about blood that is crucially important.  Again, in our modern, enlightened world, we don’t like to talk about sacrifices in the literal sense.  We like to talk about the sacrifice of doing without some convenience, or the sacrifice of our time, but to actually speak of killing an animal and applying its blood seems to us to be barbaric. 
Animal sacrifice is something that we tend to associate with ancient people, with those who simply did not understand everything that we now know to be true, with people who were profoundly superstitious.  And while it is true that, often times, it was the case that animal sacrifice was carried out in just such a way, it was profoundly different in the case of Israel.  After all, Israel’s sacrifices were the opposite of superstition.  The sacrifices were not something thought up by the people, but commanded by the one God of Israel.  Random sacrifices for whatever the people thought up and carried out however the people wanted to were clearly forbidden.  It is interesting that there is a growing movement in modern-day Israel of people who desperately want to restore Temple sacrifice in that twenty-first century, scientifically enlightened country.
There is a strong sense in the Passover story that the deaths of the lambs and the sparing of the firstborns are deeply connected.  If one of them does not die, the other one will.  The lamb is understood to be a substitute for the human being; that is, the lamb dies in place of the firstborn.  This substitute is understood as being grace from beginning to end.  The question is never asked, “Why is God killing the firstborn?”  After all, Pharaoh had shown by his actions that keeping the Israelites as slaves was far more important to him than the well-being of his people, allowing them to undergo intense hardships.  Clearly Pharaoh would not be convinced by anything less.
The question might be raised, “Why could God not simply protect the Israelites instead of making them sacrifice the lambs?”  After all, after declaring, in the last chapter, that this plague was coming, God said, “But not a dog shall growl at any of the Israelites – not at people, not at animals – so that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.”  If God makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel, why does this whole process need to take place?
God did indeed make a distinction between Egypt and Israel.  It was a distinction that had gone back all the way to Abraham.  God called Abraham from his hometown and promised to be with his descendents in a special way.  Even in that call, however, the distinguishing of the Israelites involved response.  To be an Israelite without response was a contradiction in terms.  If Abraham wanted to stay in Ur, he could not have been the father of the people of God.  If the people refused to let God set them apart in Egypt, they would be cut off from the people and treated like Egyptians.  The institution of Passover is the concrete manifestation of the distinction that God made between the Israelites and the Egyptians.
There is a sense of retribution in the story of the exodus from Egypt.  The Israelites were told to borrow gold from their neighbors right before the final plague happens, then they walk out of Egypt, taking its wealth with them, which has been seen as God compensating them for their four hundred years as slaves.  It might be said that the killing of the firstborn can be seen along these lines.  When Moses was born, the Egyptians were killing, not only the firstborn of every family, but every single male child that was born.  When we compare what God does with the cruelty of humanity, and when we consider how strongly the selfishness of the Egyptians played into Pharaoh’s refusal to let the Israelites go, God is truly seen to be merciful, even in judgment.
What is interesting is that the practice of Passover was not a one-time thing.  Rather, God instituted it as a perpetual ordinance, something that will be celebrated every year, to remind them of the fact that, when God struck down the Egyptians, he saved his people.  It is a festival that marked one of the high points in the Jewish year during the life of Christ and continues to this day.  In fact, since the whole celebration of Passover lasts for seven days, our celebration of Easter will fall right in the middle of it.  Though the ancient Israelites did not think of time as simply repeating itself, but saw history as moving to a particular point, they took advantage of the yearly cycle to remember what God had done and to reinforce their identity in the midst of the pressures of life.
If the key aspect of sacrifice that we saw in the story of Adam and Eve was atonement and the key aspect of sacrifice that we saw in the story of Abraham and Isaac was substitution, the key aspect of sacrifice we see in the story of Passover is ransom.  God was delivering his people with an outstretched hand and a mighty arm; Israel was being preserved by the slaughter of lambs.  By their obedience, they would be rescued from foreign oppression.  The lambs died so that the human beings did not have to.  A price was paid.  The Israelites were freed, but only at the price of a lamb, sacrificed and eaten by the people.
We will come back to this point again later in this season of Lent, but it is this idea of ransom and deliverance that helps us to understand what Christ has done on our behalf and in our place.  In Luke’s account of the Transfiguration, we read the following:  “And behold, two men were talking with him; and they were Moses and Elijah, who, appearing in glory, were speaking of his departure which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”  The word translated “departure” is the Greek word εξοδον, which means that, when Jesus speaks of his departure, it could be translated that he was speaking of “his exodus which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”  When we see it this way, we see that Jesus did not see his self-sacrifice to be nothing more than a tragedy, but rather a doing of a work that was so incredibly significant as to rival, if not surpass, the powerful movement of God in the Exodus from Egypt.
The point is that, when we think about the death of Christ on our behalf and in our place, we need to think of it not simply as the covering of our sins, not simply as the substitution of even the best we have to offer to God, but as a ransom, as a liberation from captivity, of a freedom from oppression and a new life under the command of no one but God.  Overnight, the entire situation of the Israelites was changed.  One moment, they felt that Moses, and the God working through him were doing nothing but making their lives harder, promising deliverance but only upsetting the Egyptians, who increased their workload because of it.  And yet, the next day, they were released, they were not only let go, but they were driven out.
That is why they had to eat the lamb quickly, that is why they had to use unleavened bread, which takes much less time to bake, because they had to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.  It was not long before Pharaoh changed his mind once again.  Time was of the essence.  And so it is today.  There are seasons in our lives where we do not feel that God is moving, or that, if he is moving, it only seems to make our lives harder rather than easier.  However, we must always remember that God has worked hard to redeem us, that our deliverance is coming, and that we must be ready for it.  Who knows whether our deliverance might come this very day and that our whole lives are transformed in the blink of an eye.  In a single night, God transformed Israel from being an oppressed nation of slaves to being free people who possessed the wealth of one of the mightiest nations on the earth.
Brothers and sisters, we have been bought with a price and we belong to God.  If the Israelites did not take their distinction from the other nations seriously, they would have been swept up with the tragedy that struck the Egyptians, but they realized that being called by God required obedience, even when God called them to do something that seemed so silly as to trust that they would be freed when their bondage had never seemed more extreme.  We, too, have been called and set apart, so we must trust that God can still do miracles, can still change lives, can still set us free from that which binds us, for that is a key part of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Monday, March 21, 2011

Genesis 22:1-19


03/20/11
Genesis 22:1-19
Hudson UMC

Last week, we considered the story of the Fall of humanity, when Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden of Eden.  First we explored the standard interpretation of the passage and then looked at it from a slightly different point of view, looking to see what it told us about the nature of the atonement that God works out for us.  I want to do something similar this week.  First, let us consider the standard interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac.
Abraham, after being chosen by God to be the father of a mighty nation, after becoming the father of Ishmael through his wife’s handmaiden, after becoming the father of Isaac through his wife, Sarah, is told to do something quite serious.  We read, “After these things God tested Abraham.  He said to him, ‘Abraham!’  And he said, ‘Here I am.’  He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.’”  Of all the most shocking things we might imagine God saying to his people, this surely tops the list.  Surely, even God does not ask for one’s only son.  Astonishingly enough, we read, “So Abraham rode early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac…” and went off to do what he was told.
Now, we have just heard the story so we know what happens.  Abraham takes his son to the mountain, prepares to sacrifice him, goes so far as to lift up his knife, ready to strike, and then is interrupted by God, who provides a ram instead.  It leaves us wondering, “What in the world just happened?”  It is at this point that we begin to hear slightly different variations on how we are to understand this passage.  Some suggest that Abraham was effectively going through the motions, knowing that God would not actually demand his son from him, though we are forced to admit that there is absolutely nothing in the text that leads us to believe that this is so.  Others will quote from Hebrews, chapter 11, where we read, “By faith, Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac.  He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, of whom he had been told, ‘It is through Isaac that descendents shall be named for you.’  He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead – and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”  In this case, Abraham was willing to sacrifice his own son because he knew that, as a worst-case scenario, God would raise him from the dead.
Regardless of some of those details, the interpretation usually ends up along these lines:  “What set Abraham apart, what really made him the father of faith, is that he was willing, at a moment’s notice, to give the very best that he had to the God who had given him everything.  If we are to be true children of Abraham, we need to be ready to give up whatever is dearest to us, we must be willing to really make God first place in our lives.”
All of that sounds pretty good, but there is something about it that just doesn’t seem right.  Nineteenth century Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard wrote a book called Fear and Trembling which is devoted entirely to trying to understand this single story.  He raises some challenging, sometimes fearful, questions that can be somewhat troubling.  What is most significant for our purposes is that he periodically pokes fun at the practice of Danish preachers at the time.
One thing he says is about what might happen if someone heard a sermon that heavily proclaimed that what really set Abraham apart was his willingness to give his very best and that we should go and be like Abraham, giving our very best.  We read, “Should someone in the audience be suffering from insomnia [that is, not thinking clearly], however, there is likely to be the most appalling, most profound, tragic-comic misunderstanding.  He goes home, he wants to do just like Abraham; for the son is certainly the best thing he has.  Should that [preacher] hear word of this, he might go to the man, summon all his clerical authority, and shout:  ‘Loathsome man, dregs of society, what devil has so possessed you that you wanted to murder your own son?’  And this [preacher], who had felt no signs of heat or perspiration while preaching about Abraham, would be surprised at the righteous wrath with which he fulminates against that poor man; he would be pleased with himself, for never had he spoken with such pungency and fervor before…If the same [preacher] had some slight excess of wit to spare he would surely lose it were the sinner to reply coolly and with dignity:  ‘It was in fact what you yourself preached on Sunday.’  How could a [preacher] get such an idea into his head?  And yet he did so, and the mistake was only that he hadn’t known what he was saying.”  You know, sometimes, we preachers don’t really know what is coming out of our mouths.
The point is that, if the real reason why Abraham was set apart was because he gave the best he had, why shouldn’t we go and do likewise?  Shouldn’t we go and give the best that we have, that we might step out in faith?  If that is what we really believe about the story of Abraham and Isaac, why should that not be our conclusion?  But when we think about someone doing what Abraham was willing to do, we don’t consider them a hero of faith; we consider them a murderer!  And yet, we do indeed consider Abraham to be a hero of faith and not a murderer.  Clearly, either we are guilty of affirming an incredible double standard, or there must be something more going on here.
Why do we think that this story is about Abraham giving his very best?  We like to think of such a willingness to be extravagant with our giving because we know that it is so difficult to do.  We know that it is a real sacrifice to give our very best and that, if we decide we are going to give God something less than our best, God cannot possibly be happy with it.  If we look at pagan cultures throughout time and space, we can see that there is always a drive to sacrifice the very best, to give up something that would really be a hardship.  Since it is the season of Lent, a time when people often choose to give something up, we tend to roll our eyes when someone tells us they are giving up something trivial for Lent; we know that if it doesn’t make a difference in the way we live, it isn’t worth it.
We might even say that there is some strong support for giving only our best when we read through the law that was given to the Israelites.  When animals were given for sacrifice, they were to be of a high quality, not broken or sick, but the prize of the flock.  In the book of Malachi, the last prophet in the Old Testament, we read this lament of God.  “A son honors his father, and servants their master.  If then I am a father, where is the honor due me?  And if I am a master, where is the respect due me?  Says the Lord of hosts to you, O priests, who despise my name.  You say, ‘How have we despised your name?’  By offering polluted food on my altar.  And you say, ‘How have we polluted it?’  By thinking that the Lord’s table may be despised.  When you offer blind animals in sacrifice, is that not wrong?  And when you offer those that are lame or sick, is that not wrong?  Try presenting that to your governor; will he be pleased with you or show you favor?  Says the Lord of hosts.”  The giving of inferior sacrifices was seen to be a desecration of God’s altar.  If we wanted to, we can read these texts as supporting our conviction that what God really wants is for us to give up, or at least be willing to give up, the best we have.
But this whole way of thinking is called radically into question by the simple fact that, though Abraham even had the knife raised so that he was only moments away from sacrificing his son, he didn’t actually do it.  God did not actually insist that Isaac had to die.  In fact, lest we should interpret God’s testing of Abraham here as a command to sacrifice our children, God says otherwise over and over again throughout the Old Testament.  You see, one of the nations that was near Israel had a god who insisted that the people sacrifice their children.  When the Israelites followed suit, perhaps because of the reasoning we have just been talking about, because it really is a giving of the best, God rebukes them, saying that it never even entered his mind to ask such a thing from us.
So, someone might say, “Pastor, are you saying that we should hold back our best from God?  Are you suggesting that God should settle for second best?”  My response would be that the facts don’t actually fit into that way of thinking.  Let us look at what actually happens in the story of Abraham and Isaac.  Abraham goes out, willing to do this terrible thing, valuing obedience more even than fatherhood.  He is absolutely willing to do what has been asked of him, but what does God do?  God does not allow Abraham to follow through.  God says, “Stop!”  But Abraham and Isaac do not leave the mountain without making a sacrifice to God.  What do we read?  “And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns.  Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.  So Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide.’”
Abraham sacrificed the ram that God gave in Isaac’s place.  What has God done?  God has given a sacrifice that was intended to replace the very best that Abraham could have given.  It is as if God was saying, “The very best that you have is not good enough.  Instead, I want you to give me what I have given you to give.”  You see, what matters most is not the size of the gift, or even how important it seems to us, but the fact that it is God who has called for the sacrifice and that it is God who has provided for it.
That is why Abraham is the father of faith.  When we really get down to it, we can see that it doesn’t really take any faith to sacrifice what is most dear to us.  We could say it involves faith in the sense of stepping out into uncertainty because we don’t necessarily know what we will do without the thing or person who is dearest to us, but as a sacrifice to God, there really isn’t any faith.  It is easy to trust that God will be happy with the best we have; after all, we have some pretty good stuff.  Also, it is easy to think that, if we have given the best we have, God has to accept it because we can’t do any better.  There is, however, a slight fear, just in case the best we have is not good enough and God won’t accept us, even though we have given the best we have.
It does take faith, however, to trust that God’s ways are better than our ways.  Abraham had to believe and trust that God’s gift of a ram was actually a better sacrifice than his only son.  Abraham had to believe that, though he had hundreds of animals he could offer to God and only one son, this one animal was better than all of that, simply because it came from the hand of God.  This little ram was better than everything that Abraham could have come up with.  It is faith to cling to the fact that what God has done is better than what we can do and to trust in that so completely that we do not live our lives worried that we have not done enough, but rejoicing that God has done it all, so we do things his way.
I want to make a further connection that does not show up in our text for this morning, but arises when we look at the Bible as a whole.  Abraham was told to take Isaac away from home and go to Mount Moriah, a mountain that was a three-day journey away.  Why that mountain and not another one?  Does it really matter which mountain Abraham went to?  Couldn’t God meet him anywhere?  We read in the history books of Israel that there was a time when King David, the one whom the Bible says, both before and after he was king, was a man after God’s own heart, incited the wrath of God and brought a plague upon Jerusalem.  However, God had mercy and told David what he needed to do.  He needed to go and purchase a threshing-floor that belonged to a man named Ornan and build an altar there and make a sacrifice.  David did so and the plague was ended.
We read in the books of Chronicles that it was on that same spot that Solomon built the Temple to God and that these events happened on Mount Moriah, the very same place that Abraham sacrificed the ram in the place of his son.  Where God once demonstrated that Abraham, the father of the people of God, could not offer a sacrifice good enough for God but needed to trust in what God himself provided instead is the same place where the people of Israel were reminded day by day that their relation to him was based, not on what they have done, but on what God has done.
This connection gets even stronger when we realize that it was only a stone’s throw away from this location that Jesus was crucified.  Here we have the most incredible example of God providing the lamb that is accepted in the place of the best we have.  The difference is that, while we might have thought that a ram in the thicket is not as good a sacrifice as Isaac would have been, surely we can think of nothing greater than the sacrifice of God’s only Son on our behalf and in our place.
Indeed, God’s grace is far greater than we can even imagine, and it is a grace that has been poured out on humanity since the very beginning.  In order to tie our reflection from last week on Adam and Eve and the Fall of humanity together with the story of Abraham and Isaac, and even with the cross of Christ, I want you to hear the words of this poem by Madeleine L’Engle.
Asked to leave Eden
Where I, with all the other beasts,
Remained after the two-legged creatures left,
I moved to the gates and the cherub
With the flaming sword
Drew aside to let me by, wings folded across his eyes.

I trotted along a path through woods,
Across a desert, made a long detour
Around a lake, and finally climbed
A mountain, till
The trees gave way to bushes
And a rock.
An old man raised a knife.

He stood there by the rock
And wept and raised his knife.
So these are men, I thought,
And shook my head in horror, and was caught
Within the springing branches of a bush.
Then there was lightning,
And the thunder came,
And a voice cried out to me:
O my son, my son,
Slain before the foundation
Of the world.

I felt the knife’s edge.
For this I came from Eden,
For my will is ever his,
As I am his, and have life
In him, and he in me.
Thus the knife pierced his own heart.

And the old man laughed with joy.

Let us pray.   AMEN

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Genesis 3:1-24


03/13/11
Genesis 3:1-24
Hudson UMC

The third chapter of the book of Genesis is well known as the story of the Fall of humanity.  In some ways it is among the most fascinating chapters in the entire Bible.  Some have used it to defend particular doctrines, some have used it to uphold their sexism, and some have used it for many other purposes.  Just in case not everyone is aware of it, I want to run quickly through the standard interpretation of this chapter.
God created the heavens and the earth, along with everything in them.  At every stage of the creation, God declared that it was good.  When God finally created human beings, both male and female, he declared the whole creation to be very good.  Because of that, we cannot imagine that God created evil.  The question that we must ask, since the fact that evil exists is far too obvious to ignore, is “how did evil come to be?”  The story of Genesis three is then put forward to explain that evil entered the world through sin, when human beings decided that God’s rules weren’t good enough anymore and that they wanted to be like God and call their own shots.  This fundamental sin, this unbridled desire to be in charge, is seen as being the root of all others and the reason why our world is marked by evil and death.
Of course, this doesn’t wrap everything up nicely.  After all, where does this evil idea come from?  How could a human who was created totally good come up with such an evil idea?  We read that the serpent put the idea into their heads, and did so in a way that made it not seem quite so evil to Adam and Eve.  This preserves the initial goodness of humanity, but where did the serpent, who was part of the good creation, get such an evil idea?  The text simply doesn’t tell us, and no amount of careful interpretation will take care of all the loose ends.  However, even though some questions remain unanswered, the major thrust of the text is clear.  Human beings are sinful, not because of any fault in God, but because of our own desire for power.
The text can be read almost as a transcript of a group therapy session for a dysfunctional family.  Adam says, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit from the tree, and I ate.”  It isn’t my fault, God.  Eve then says, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”  It isn’t my fault, either.  What is amazing is that God doesn’t, strictly speaking, take sides.  The serpent tricked the humans, so he needs to be punished, so he loses the legs that he presumably had before all this, and becomes a slithery reptile that many people have hated over the years.
However, Adam and Eve are not simply let off the hook as if they had done nothing wrong.  Though they were not the masterminds behind this sin, the fact remains that they did indeed eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Even if it wasn’t their idea, the deed was done and, because that deed had such profound implications, God couldn’t simply pretend like it hadn’t happened.  The only other option I can even think of is that God would somehow remove the knowledge that humanity had gained, which doesn’t seem to me to be any better of a choice.
So, because God loved Adam and Eve, he allowed the consequences of their sin to come upon them rather than turning back time and preventing it from happening.  God chose to deal with his people as adults, as people who answer for their actions and don’t rely on other people to make good choices for them.  The brokenness that entered the world at that point is profound.  We suffer from it to this day.  Each of us has, to a greater or lesser degree, endured the difficult, sometimes arbitrary effects of the evil that still permeates our world.  And if that were the end of the story, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of hope.  Though we did not have an Ash Wednesday service here this week, the key words from such a service are in this chapter.  “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
But that is not where the story ends.  We have, even in this very passage, words that the church has, since the very beginning, taken as a prophecy for the coming of Christ.  God spoke to the serpent, saying, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel,” words that have classically been interpreted as a foreshadowing the cross, where Jesus was crushed, but who, even in that very act of defeat, defeated Satan and paid for the redemption of the world with the very blood of God.
During this Lenten season, I want to spend some time thinking about the atonement that God has worked out for us, because it is something that we don’t often want to think about.  Atonement literally means at-one-ment, where we human beings, who are in a state of separation from God, are reconciled to him and at-one-ment is attained.  The problem is that atonement implies that, without it, we really are alienated from God, that we are not as we should be, that we need help because our difficulties are far greater than we can free ourselves from, and that can be a scary thought.  We also don’t always like to think of atonement because, according to the Bible, atonement always involves blood.  When someone sins, something has to die.  We don’t often have that in the front of our minds because we don’t sacrifice animals in the church, we don’t connect our sin to the shedding of blood and we, in our enlightened and modern age, often think of sacrifice as barbaric, if not pagan.
And yet, when we look at the whole Bible, we find that this idea that human beings are not what they ought to be and that atonement must be made through the shedding of blood is everywhere.  What might be surprising, though, is who takes the initiative to reconcile humanity to God.  It isn’t humanity.  What do we see here in our passage for today?  When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, what do we read?  “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.  They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”  The first thing that humanity did when they realized they had done wrong was run and hide.
“But the Lord God called to man,” even though Adam and Eve have sinned, even though they have hidden themselves, God calls out to them, reaches out to them, “and said to him, ‘Where are you?’  He said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’”  I wonder if the nakedness of humanity might mean something more than just that they were physically naked.  Perhaps it means they had nothing to offer to God.  It had always been the case, only now they realized it.  Regardless of what it might mean, the man and woman whom God had loved when they were naked before, were terrified that he might not love them now, so they cover themselves with fig leaves, another way of hiding from God.
We are all aware of the fig leaves.  When we imagine Adam and Eve, we often picture people who are wearing nothing but leaves, but why is that?  According to our passage, they only wore fig leaves for a relatively short period of time.  Way towards the end of the chapter, we read “And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.”  This is absolutely fascinating.  This sets up the pattern for what we see happening over and over again.  God made human beings good, human beings sin against God, often quite seriously, human beings invent some way of hiding from God, God provides an actual means of reconciliation.
There is a certain foolishness to thinking that we human beings could think up a good way of being reconciled to God.  After all, we are the source of the problem.  That would be like someone who cheated at a game saying, “I know that I was the one who broke the rules, but I am going to call the shots and decide on the terms by which we can continue playing.”  If we are the sinners, who, even when we are at our best fail to live up to the standards that God has given us, what makes us think that we can somehow figure out, by our own act of genius, how we can get back on God’s good side?  The thing that we need to remember is that we do not have any examples in the Bible of human beings messing up and then doing something that they thought up to make God happy.  We always see God taking the initiative, we always see God saying, “Though you have sinned, though you have wronged me, I will seek reconciliation with you and I will tell you what you can do so we can have fellowship again.  It isn’t something that you think up, but what I tell you to do.”
Even when we think about this as God’s mighty grace taking the initiative and paving the way for atonement, it is still easy to hear it as harsh and authoritarian.  If we choose to, we can hear God’s offer of mercy and compassion as if he were the insecure kid who says, “If we don’t play by my rules, I’m taking my ball and going home.”  Yes, it is indeed true that God insists that we give up doing things our own way so we can do them his way, but why does he do that?  For one thing, if it was doing things our own way and not his way that got us into trouble in the first place, it sure isn’t going to make things better after the fact.  But there is something more important than that to consider.
When human beings tried to think up a way to make God happy, they covered themselves in fig leaves and, because they weren’t entirely sure that it would work, they hid from God.  What does God do?  He says that their fig leaves are no good.  They do not help the situation.  But God doesn’t leave them naked, does he?  No, he clothes them in skins.  He gives them clothing that is far better than the best they could come up with.  He provides in ways that are far more extravagant than they would have dared to do.  After all, they were sinners, what business did they have wearing fur?  And yet, when God insists on his way, it is not because he wants to be on a power trip, but because his way is better for us to start with.
However, we cannot ignore the fact that skins don’t just come out of nowhere.  Skins come from animals, which means that, in order for God to clothe the people who had sinned against him, animals needed to die.  Sin is serious business, so serious that it never gets dealt with without the shedding of blood.  This is a theme that we will explore throughout the season of Lent.  Adam and Eve’s sin did not just make their lives harder, it meant that life had to be ended.  Every time they thought about their clothing, they had to remember that they were not killed for their sin, for their spitting in the face of God.  They were allowed to live, but something died, something had its blood shed and it was shed for them, on their behalf and in their place.  When God forgives, it is never a pretending that sin never happened, but an acknowledging it in all its seriousness, even a seriousness that we would rather it didn’t have, and dealing with it in a way that has real consequences, consequences that are so severe that the sin of humanity resulted, not merely in the death of animals, but in the death of Christ himself, God with us.
There is one more aspect of this story that I think needs to be mentioned, and that is the very end.  After God has clothed Adam and Eve, we read, “Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’ – therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.  He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.”
This act of God has often been seen first and foremost as a continuation of the punishment.  We want to cry out, “Adam and Eve have already been punished for their sin, do they need to suffer death, too?  Why can’t they have the tree of life?”  We only ever hear of the tree of life one other time, and that is in the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible.  When we see it there, it is basically the same as we see it in Genesis, it is in the very presence of God and it is, indeed, associated with immortality.  The question we have to entertain is, “What if being in the unmediated presence of God while broken by sin isn’t a good thing?  What if God sending Adam and Eve away was the most merciful thing he could do for them?”  After all, if they don’t live forever, it means that their brokenness will not last forever, they will one day be free of it.  I am certain that most people have known someone whose body was so broken with age and disease that they welcomed death.  Though death is consistently portrayed in the Bible as the enemy of humanity, there are times when death seems a less harsh enemy, even if it seems more final.
We also get the impression that to really be in the presence of God while we are still broken by sin is not good at all.  After all, what does God do?  After humanity fell, God casts them out of the garden, but we see that he never gives up on them.  He takes a particular man and his family and begins to reshape the way they live and think so they can understand him, so he can re-forge, as it were, the connection between him and us.  Finally, it seems that the only way that God could really deal with the issue of sin is for God to actually become a human being, to take the brokenness of our world onto his shoulders, and to suffer unto death alongside of us.  Only after God has radically shaped culture and life so that we can receive him, only after God has done the impossible and become a human being, only after God has done what is more impossible still and died for us, on our behalf and in our place, does he invite us in a deep and personal way to be in the unmediated presence of God.  If that is so, as I believe it is, we are not dealing with a God who wants to keep us away, but with a God who loves us so much and wants us to be with him so much that he is willing to quite literally do anything for us.  That is what we should always remember when we come face to face with the incredible cost of redemption and reconciliation, that God loves us so much that he is actually willing to do it.  And if our God loves us that much, he is worth entrusting our lives to and living every day for.  Let us pray.
AMEN

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Colossians 3:1-17


03/07/11
Colossians 3:1-17
Hudson UMC

We live in a culture of sound bytes.  If it takes more than a moment to say, many people don’t want to hear it.  What we want are short, easy snippets of information that we can tuck back in our minds and pull out when the need arises.  Attention spans seem to be getting shorter and shorter and if we want to get and hold people’s attention, we are told, we need to be flashy and edgy.  This, unfortunately, simply compounds our tendency to approach the Bible as if it were a collections of short instructions whose meaning is obvious at a glance.  People will speak of having a favorite Bible verse, but you seldom hear people speak of having a favorite Bible passage.  When I was in college, people in the Christian community would be passionate about Bible memorization, but would only grab a verse here and a verse there, little proof texts or aphorisms that could be whipped out but something that, unfortunately, produced something less than a thoughtful understanding of the whole Scriptural witness.
What this means is that there are many people who, if they were asked to find the main point of Colossians chapter three or even the letter as a whole, they would point to the ethical exhortation of this passage and perhaps the next, make them into a list, and present them as Paul’s main argument.  I hope, I pray that we might all have learned Paul better than that.  Paul spent a whole chapter and a half doing nothing other than emphasizing the absolute centrality of Christ, that he is the image of the invisible God, the one through whom and for whom all things were created, the one in whom everything holds together, the firstborn from the dead, the one who reconciles us to God, the very mystery of God, the one in whom we are rooted and built up in faith, and the one in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily.  In the second half of chapter two, Paul critiqued the major systemic ways that Christ was being pushed out of central place in the Colossian community.  So, if Paul has spent so much time emphasizing that Christ is what really matters, that Christ is the center of the universe and so ought to be the center of our lives, that Christ is the one in whom we have died and been raised to new life, it seems that his main point is not to give us a list of things to avoid and a list of things to do.
The rest of Paul’s letter to the Colossians could be said to be answering the question, “If what you say is true, how then should we live,” and, as such, it does indeed give us things that we should do and things that we should avoid, but they are not merely lists that we can detach from what he has said so far.  He even begins this section by placing it in the context of everything he has already said.  “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed in glory.”  All of what Paul has to say is rooted deeply in the fact that in Christ, God has done something remarkable that has changed the world and utterly transforms our whole situation.
He continues, saying, “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly:  fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire and greed (which is idolatry).  On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient.  These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life.”  What Paul is saying to the Colossians is something like this.  “Once upon a time you were disobedient people.  You were engaged in all kinds of destructive and sinful behavior.  However, that sinful, disobedient person has died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  Your life is so bound to Christ’s life by the power of the Holy Spirit that nothing in all of creation can separate you from him.  So, because of all that, set your minds on things that are above; put to death whatever in you is earthly because, though you used to do those kinds of things, they are completely incompatible with who you have become, the children of God.”
The point is that Paul does not do what so many people have done throughout the ages.  He does not point his finger at the Colossians and say, “If you don’t shape up, God’s going to get you.”  He doesn’t put them on a guilt trip, but simply proclaims the Gospel to them again.  He reminds them that, in Christ, they are utterly new creations, people who have been made whole and empowered by the very Spirit of God dwelling inside of them.  That is why they need to put to death the things that are earthly, not because God will get them if they don’t and so because they are afraid, but because the very life of Christ has been implanted into them and there is nothing more absurd than people who are defined by the life of God in them behaving as if they were dead like those who do not know God.
When we look closely at the way Paul speaks, we might get a little confused.  First he says that the Colossians already have been raised from the dead with Christ and that their lives are hidden with Christ in God; then he says that there are certain things that they have to do.  We can almost imagine the people saying, “Wait a minute, Paul.  If we are new creations, why do you need to tell us that we need to live a certain way?”  This question might come more easily to us today than it did back then because we are so often surrounded by people who either say, “You aren’t a new creation until you get your act together,” or “You are a new creation, so it doesn’t matter what you do.”  Paul doesn’t fit into either mold, and, because he doesn’t fit into either mold, it is very easy to misunderstand him.
What Paul does here and in many other places has been described by Biblical scholars as the Indicative/Imperative couplet, that is, he makes a statement about what is the case, then tells the people what they must do.  People often speak of this as an element of Already/Not Yet; that is, God has already done the work, has already made you new and has already won the decisive victory, but the implications of this are not yet totally evident in our lives for one reason or another.
The reason why I bring this up is to show you that, if you have noticed that Paul does this, you are not alone, that many others have noticed it, too, and have thought about how we are to understand it.  It helps us to realize that, though nobody believed in the power of God to transform the lives of men and women as much as Paul did, after all, he was transformed into one the greatest champions of Christian faith after he had tried to destroy it by hunting down many Christians so they could be killed, he also wants to make sure that we understand that Christians are not yet perfect.  Christians still need instruction, they still need to be reminded of the Gospel.
What I really want to lift up here, though, is that Paul is not content to tell us what to do and what to avoid as if, so long as we just had a good enough understanding of right and wrong, we wouldn’t have any problems.  Before he was a Christian, he was a Pharisee, one of the most dedicated people to God’s law.  If doing all the good things and avoiding all the bad things were all he cared about, he would have never become a Christian; he could have stayed how he was.  He would not have made the authorities upset, he would never have had to go through all the incredible suffering he had in his life, and he certainly would not have been executed for his devotion to Christ.  Paul is interested in something that is far bigger and far more powerful than morality.  He is interested that people have their lives hidden with Christ in God, that they might truly be those who live with the life of God.
What really matters is Christ and being united to Christ through faith.  Why, then, does Paul care how the Colossians live?  Why should he give them such specific advice if what really matters is that they are in Christ through the Holy Spirit.  We hear things like this all the time.  We hear, on one side of the church, people who say, “Simply believing in Christ is not enough, you need to live like we tell you,” and, on the other side, people who say, “Believing in Christ is all that matters.  How you live really isn’t all that important.”  I think the reason that we fall into those extremes, and sometimes go back and forth between them, is because we do not understand just how radical it is to be united to Christ.  When Paul says that Christ is central and that, at the end of the day, Christ is all that matters, there is a sense that he has made things easy for us; after all, we don’t have to elaborate a complicated way of life, we just need to look at Christ. 
However, living consistently with the fact that Christ really is the incarnation of God among us, the God who utterly transforms us and empowers us like he empowered the apostles who were ordinary people like us and then the Holy Spirit drove them to do amazing things, is not easy.  When Paul says, “Because your life is hidden with Christ in God, live this way,” he is saying, “What you are is a child of God, a brother or sister of Christ, a fellow-heir with him of the kingdom of God.  If that is so, you simply can’t be living like an enemy of God.  It simply makes no sense.”  That is why we need to put to death whatever is in us that is earthly:  fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed.  That is why we must get rid of things like anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language.  That is why we must not lie to one another.
Paul gives positive advice as well.  “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”  It is here that we really can understand just how serious the call to holiness really is.  By saying that Christ is central and of paramount importance, Paul is saying that Christ is our standard of behavior.  We ought to do the kinds of things that Jesus did, say the kinds of things that Jesus said, and think the kinds of things that Jesus thought.  It means we ought to avoid all the things that Jesus avoided, which includes absolutely every kind of sin.  It means that, unless we have somehow reached the purity of life and heart that Jesus had, we still have farther to go and we ought to be far more concerned with what God is calling us to and not so much about the sin we perceive our neighbors to be committing.
The rubber really meets the road in the words, “if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”  We are to forgive others like we have been forgiven.  But what does that mean?  It is possible that there are some here who don’t think of themselves as forgiven because they don’t think of themselves as having done anything needing forgiveness.  However, most of us are probably all too aware of the fact that we have made mistakes, that we are not as we ought to be.  To simply say that, because we have been forgiven for not being what we ought to be, we also should forgive others for not being what they ought to be, would be something that most of us would have a hard time doing.
But that is not all.  How does God forgive?  He does not just wave his magic wand and pretend like we never did anything wrong.  No, rather he came to earth, being born of a human mother, the almighty God of the universe small enough to hold in your hands, the very Word of God unable to speak.  Even though he was the Lord of all creation, he had to go through those years of childhood, where he had to follow the rules of his parents, which could not possibly have been perfect, because they were people like us, and I wonder if any parent can look back and say they never made a mistake.  He had to endure the awkward years of adolescence, no longer a child and yet not yet an adult.  He had to learn to work hard to make a living and then he gave it up to become a Rabbi; but not a successful, well-loved Rabbi, although the poor and the weak loved him.  Instead, he was a Rabbi that was largely hated by the ruling parties, who was beaten mercilessly, even though he had never done anything wrong, and then executed as a political criminal.  Though he was the God who created human beings in the first place, he was killed in a manner that was reserved for those who were considered to be sub-human.
And while the mob of people was crying out that they should crucify the Son of God, the one who loved them more than they could ever love themselves, Jesus prayed, saying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”  Jesus did not stand idly by while people wronged him.  Rather, he came even closer, so that the people could abuse him more than ever.  He not only received our abuse, he provoked it to its highest pitch and took it all on his shoulders and, as Paul has already said in this letter, nailed it to the cross, healing it so that we might be like he is, not by a wave of a magic wand or by brute force, but by astonishing self-giving love.  That is what God’s forgiveness looks like and that is the kind of forgiveness we are called to have toward one another.
That is why, in the end, Paul says what he does.  “Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body.  And be thankful.  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom.”  To say that Christ is the center of everything and that everything we do, say, and think must be rooted in Christ is not a cop out so we can be loose with the way we live, but the highest and most demanding of life imaginable.  After all, we are talking about living with the very life of God, which is far more than just a list of rules.  And so, let us hear these last words from Paul in our passage.  “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”  Let us pray.
AMEN