Redeemed, Lifted and Carried

Isaiah 63: 7-10

Hebrews 2:10-18

December 29, 2013

Prescott American Baptist Church

I saw a cartoon this week. Somebody shared it on Face Book. Jesus is sitting on the floor by a Christmas tree. He is holding a gift and looking sad. Somebody asks, “What’s the matter, Jesus? You don’t like your present?” And Jesus responds, “Somebody gave me a church and I can’t get it out of the box.”

There’s no doubt at all that Jesus came into the world and got busy organizing. Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Mao Tse-Tung and Ho Chi Minh in Asia, Castro in Cuba all discredit Jesus in their public statements. Yet their debt to Jesus is greater than they would acknowledge. The most obvious debt such leaders owe Jesus is his basic innovation: the idea of striking for power by organizing the poor and powerless. 

Jesus walked into his adult life alone and unknown. He was raised in a culture of discontent. Poverty and oppression gave the ordinary man on the street little to lose if changes were made. So change was not as frightening as it might have seemed. The established power, religious hierarchy and Roman rulers, were divided and so they couldn’t offer a united front against the people’s bid for power. And the myth of the day held the people’s hope: A Messiah would come and relieve their misery, strike down the enemies of the oppressed and make everything right. Jesus walked into his adult life alone and unknown but with a special opportunity to be an authority. The people were watching for a man who could work miracles, a man who could put a face on the hopes of the poor and oppressed. 

He began his work with a strategy. Jesus built a following among the poor and the powerless. His basic tactic was to define the poor as more deserving of power than anyone else and so curry their favor. Early in his public life he announced that the poor were blessed. He called them the salt of the earth, the light of the world. He told the poor people who crowded around him that the meek would inherit the earth.  He selected and developed his elite followers from among the poor and he gained a reputation for eating and drinking with outcasts, people who would not be invited to eat and drink in respectable circles. 

Jesus was an organizer, a successful organizer. And even though he might have thought and we might suspect that his strategy failed when he found himself being crucified in Jerusalem, we also have to acknowledge that the crucifixion extended Jesus’ power beyond the grave. The fishers of men he had gathered and motivated for his mission within the culture of that day were altogether devoted to the organization that Jesus had begun. They had given up everything (prior dreams and plans, careers, family, home) to follow Jesus. They could not and would not let their work and the organization die with Jesus. Thus the church was born. *

After the singing and celebration of Christmas Day, what does the life of Jesus Christ mean for us? How is today’s church shaped by Jesus’ preaching and his values? So many of you, the Prescott congregation of faith, have come to this place and joined this church because of your unhappy or unsatisfactory experience in another community of faith. I don’t need to take your time talking about being left out or under-valued. You already know about the under-belly of the church. It isn’t hard for you to imagine Jesus struggling to get today’s church unstuck and out of the box.

One of our basic problems in the church is the way we have come to understand the theory of atonement. The prophet Isaiah said that the Messiah would come among us himself so that we might be redeemed, lifted and carried by the Messiah’s presence and power. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews said that Jesus, as our high priest, made a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people. It is worth examining this sacrifice and its meaning if the church is worth saving. How are we redeemed, lifted and carried?

I’ll come clean so you won’t have to wonder about my own personal beliefs. I don’t take the virgin birth literally but I like that story and I think it works well in terms of inspiring faith and commitment to doing good in the name of Jesus.  However I do not think the story of atonement works so well. Jesus had to suffer, bleed and die in order for my sins and your sins to be forgiven? I have trouble with that as the only explanation for how humanity might be engaged in the mystery and miracle of salvation.  I trust God. At this point in my relationship with God I am fully convinced that the creator could and did make a way for human beings to be spiritually transformed through a process of discovery that allows us to learn, grow and take responsibility for our own choices and our own actions. Just as Jesus took responsibility and acted with courage and faith, so can we.

If we blithely allow Jesus to be the one with all the integrity, the one whose suffering has all the purpose, then we are set free to be something less than what we can be.

Back in 1996 I was serving as pastor in a Methodist church in a rural community. I was a seminary student living in the parsonage and driving into Memphis Tuesday through Friday for classes. Saturday was reserved for writing a sermon and making worship bulletins. One Saturday morning while I still had bed head and was still wearing my pajamas, I heard a knock on the door. I opened the front door and saw Hershel, a successful tomato farmer and chair of the church council. “I just dropped by to talk,” he said.  I thought a call in advance would have been more appropriate. But I let Hershel inside and we sat down.

Hershel talked about the weather. It was clear that he was working up to the point of his visit. I was aware that I hadn’t yet brushed my teeth.

“You know, Elaine, some of us have been talking. You’ve been here a whole year now. You realize that?” I did.  “And you’ve been preaching every Sunday plus a few special services. Remember that community Thanksgiving service we hosted? Yeah. And we’ve had about four, five funerals this year. You’ve been in the pulpit quite a bit. And not once have you ever said a thing about sin. Now all this talk about love, how God loves us and we need to love each other…. That’s fine for us regular church members. But when are you going to start preaching about sin?”

(I am going to remind you now that I was still in my pajamas, had not yet brushed my teeth and the pressure of an unwritten sermon was pushing on my shoulders.) “Hershel, you want me to talk about sin?”

“I do. We need that because every once in a while somebody comes to church from the outside, you know? And they need to hear what’s right and what’s wrong. Plain spoken. Now some of us are wondering if you're ever going to get around to some real preaching.”

“Hershel, I can preach about sin but I don’t think you and some others would like it very much.”

“We are used to real preaching, Elaine, the kind of preaching that makes people get right with God.” 

“OK, then. I can talk about sin. Maybe I should give it a try right now, just you and me.”

“That’s fine.” Hershel sat up straighter, ready to help the lady preacher get it just right. 

“Hershel, you remember when those Girl Scouts wanted to hold their meetings at our church? And  remember what you and the rest of the church council decided? You decided not to let those little girls meet in our church basement. You decided to keep them out because some of those little girls were black. Now that’s sin and I can build a whole sermon around your racism and what it has cost this church.”

Hershel didn’t stay long after that and I never got another request from anybody at that church to talk about sin. We all sin and we all need to be redeemed, individually and as a community. Redemption is a process of learning to see and value the love of Jesus in the face and life of others.

My problem with the theory of atonement is the way it reduces God’s love for us to a form of emotional blackmail: “Look what I did for you—and you are still sinning in spite of all that I suffered?” Out of guilt or fear we can claim to believe in the power of Jesus’ blood to wash away our sins. But that prevents us from the possibility of discovering and developing a healthy relationship with God. Significant relationships happen within a process over time. Each one of us has our own spiritual journey as we move toward becoming the person God created us to be. One size cannot and does not fit all. **

I don’t think Jesus wanted to create an organization that squeezed all of us into a box, forced us to memorize statements of faith and doctrines hardened like bricks. I don’t think Jesus intended to build his organization with anything like bricks and walls that could keep some people in and some people out. I don’t think Jesus was afraid of curiosity and questions. Jesus had imagination and he wasn’t afraid to use it. Over time and through a process he became the person we admire and worship.

See? The classical understanding of the theory of atonement allows a person to claim salvation without undergoing any process of transformation. People claim righteousness because they attend church and yet they have not yet reflected on what it means to be powerless. People who have not yet learned to recognize their own sin claim righteousness. Too many church people have not learned to ask questions about their own faith so they see anyone who asks questions about faith as a threat. Out of their fear (and not out of their faith) they condemn difference and the other. 

To claim salvation because Jesus suffered without recognizing the dignity of our own suffering is to cheapen the gift of God’s ongoing creative work among us. That kind of short cut and shallow faith has robbed the church of its opportunity to suffer with Christ today. It has stripped the church of its strength by allowing the church to look just like the power structure of politics. I voted for Jesus. He won the election and therefore I am on the inside. This shallow faith has kept the church from becoming the organization that Jesus hoped to give us.

If the Gospel means anything it means that the church is a place for the poor and the powerless. And none of us, not even the poorest and the most humble among us, can come quickly to that level of salvific experience. It takes a lifetime of prayer, living in a faith community, service, study and sacred Sabbath time. 

The prophet Isaiah said that the Messiah would come and in his presence we would be redeemed, lifted and carried-- not so that we would be exempt from suffering and not so that we could look down on those who are different. We are redeemed, lifted and carried so that we might belong to the redemptive process that Jesus began for all people a long time ago.  

Amen

*James Alison, On Being Liked, The Crossroad  Publishing Company, New York, 2003, pages 17-31

**Jay Haley, The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ and Other Essays, Crown House Publishing Company, Bethel, CT, 1986, pages 19-54