“Salvation: By God or From God? Pt. 2” – Sermon on 3/25/12
March 25, 2012
Scripture: John 12: 23-28
Jesus said, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”
Sermon: Salvation: By God or From God? Pt. 2
by: Rev. Doreen Oughton
You came back! For those of you who were not here last week, today I am preaching the second part of a 2-part sermon. The gist of last week’s sermon was the struggle I had with the idea of Jesus’ death on the cross as an act of salvation, especially with the understanding of Jesus as the perfect sacrifice for our sins, the only sacrifice that could meet God’s demand for atonement for all of humankind’s sins. I struggled with the notion that God would demand or even want the sacrifice of an innocent person to make up for our sins. It seemed to me that God could just decide to forgive us without this sacrifice. I also struggle with how glorification of the crucifixion has led to glorification or justification for innocent suffering in our world. For a long time I just rejected the cross as important to our salvation, focusing instead on the incarnation of God in Jesus, the ministry of Jesus in his lifetime, and the ongoing power of the Holy Spirit as the things that save us. But I know now that this is incomplete, that I lose a great deal by rejecting the cross. And so today I want to share with you how I came to be awestruck by it instead. How I came to appreciate that Jesus’ death does save us, how Jesus did pay a price for us, and is the sacrifice that ought to end all sacrifice.
It is wonderful how the lectionary reading recommended for today includes these verses about how the death of a grain bears much fruit, about how Jesus is troubled by what awaits him, and how the thing that troubles him is the reason he came and is what will glorify God’s name. Because the death of Jesus is both a troubling, terrible thing that never should have happened, and it is the fulfillment of God’s purpose which saved the world. That is the paradox of the cross. It is a good bad thing. It is the story of a sacrificial offering, a scapegoat if you will, given for the purpose of reconciliation. However, it is not God that demanded such an offering. It was humanity. God didn’t dictate this system of atonement, but was willing to enter into it in order to save us from it.
One of the most important things about human beings is how relational we are. I have often wondered if that is what it means that we were created in the image of God, where God is triune, or relational in nature. We learn about ourselves and the whole world by what we see reflected in the faces of those around us, by the reactions and responses of others. We learn what is valuable, what makes us happy, what is scary, what is sad, what makes us angry, in community. We are genetically programmed to be programmable through interaction with our environment, especially our social environment. One person’s discovery or fortunate accident can quickly become a shared habit or knowledge, and passed on for generations. As part of this characteristic, humans project feelings and motives onto others. In a way, we can only love because someone loved us. Someone directed love and care toward us, we responded, and projected it on others. Love spreads.
Unfortunately other emotions and ideas about motives are easily spread also. Suspicion, fear and anger can catch like wildfire, ricocheting from one mind to another. And so we have hostility, conflict, even war. We react not just to overt actions, but to perceived intentions. An accidental injury is interpreted as an intentional attack, and we retaliate. And it escalates from there. That may be one way to understand original sin. The programming that enables us to love and unite and work together carries the risk of spreading hate, causing destruction. So as humanity evolved over the millenia, it struggled with terrible outbreaks of conflict and violence, which kept it from really moving forward. Communities couldn’t hold together, couldn’t get off the ground. But then, they did. How did that happen? They found a solution, an antidote to the escalation. They discovered a new projection. They discovered scapegoating. Instead of having a war of each against all, they discovered the effectiveness of having a war of all against one. When conflict began to tear at a community, suddenly there was widespread agreement that it was caused by an individual or a small group – usually someone who was different in some way, perhaps in appearance or ability, someone new to the group. Irrational collective violence is focused on individual or group, they are sacrificed, the community is reconciled and at peace again. At least for awhile.
It worked, and it continues to work. Doesn’t it? Think of the bond you have with people who have the same enemies that you have. I’m listening to a book on tape now set at the end of WWII, told from the perspective of a German family who talk about the unifying power of Hitler for a nation that had been so fractured and broken down. Their joining in suspicion and hatred for the Jews brought harmony and prosperity for the majority, at least for a time. In this country we’ve had the Red Scare, and the Ku Klux Klan as just two examples of mass scapegoating. And it is awfully tempting even now, isn’t it, to get stirred up about Muslims or Mexican immigrants as we deal with so much turmoil in our nation. Oh yes, we look for sacrificial offerings.
The thing is, this scapegoating process is usually invisible to us. We don’t say overtly, even to ourselves, we really need to find a scapegoat to cool things down. We become persuaded that the danger and threat from the target is real. Just like the religious leaders in Jerusalem and the Romans were convinced that the threat of Jesus was real. Perhaps in their minds he really was trying to form an army to kill and overthrow them, or lead all the people to revolution, tearing asunder their communities, their very nation. And so they killed him.
This was a human invention, scapegoating. God saw how effective it was, and God saw how very, very wrong it was. God knew that there could not be true reconciliation among people, there could not be a Beloved Community, that God’s kindom could never fully come, while this system was in operation. So God entered into it to reveal it and to end it. Jesus came to show us the terrible cost of it, and to teach us a new way to deal with the inherent risk of our relational natures.
The Gospels tell us how wrong it was. They emphasize over and over that Jesus was innocent of all charges against him. They tell us that Jesus taught over and over that we are not to fight violence with violence, that we are to love our enemy and turn the other cheek. He let himself be killed rather than fight back. They tell us that Jesus did not want to die, that he sweat blood, that he asked that this cup be taken from him. He says in today’s reading that his soul is troubled. It is a terrible thing and ought never have happened. Yet because it did, we can never see scapegoating in the same way.
My discomfort with the cross is an indicator that it was effective. We get distressed at the idea of innocent suffering. We are outraged now when victims are blamed or encouraged to accept their lot. We might still be tempted to do it, to scapegoat, to unite over a common enemy, but when we become aware of it, it is harder and harder to stick with it. We have seen the results, and we are called to do it differently. I’m reminded of the 1980 film Brubaker, based on a true story, in which a new prison warden has himself incarcerated undercover to learn more about the conditions and corruptions of the prison. He doesn’t just expose, then forget them. He works to change them. He entered into a broken system to expose it and fix it.
God does not want, has never wanted the sacrificial offering of innocent blood. It is a sign of the effectiveness of the cross that we now have a different understanding of sacrifice. We understand it more now as standing in solidarity with victims, working to protect people who are vulnerable or different, even when it costs us something personally, even when we are at risk in some way. Those are the sacrifices we now know are acceptable to God.
It is true, what I said earlier, that God is free to forgive us as a gift, demanding nothing in return. But God knows that blanket forgiveness of our sinful ways does nothing to bring about reconciliation if we don’t even know what our sins are and we keep on doing them. God knew that the system of innocent sacrifice to bring about temporary peace would continue unless exposed and redeemed. God’s forgiveness without intervention would have no impact on our estrangement from God, each other, and all of Creation. What great love it took to step into this evil, what deep commitment and obedience to God’s will this demonstrated.
So when I think, that God, his son not sparing, sent him to die, I scarce can take it in. Now all those hymn verses, all those words of institution that used to make me cringe, they make me fall ever deeper in love with my savior. They stir in me such gratitude and humbleness. “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,” “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation,” “this is my blood, poured out for you,” “twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died to pardon and sanctify me.” We are indeed “reconciled in his blood,” and we are free now to live without the kind of reconciliation that requires blood. We are free to live and grow and learn and project, and we are protected when we do it through Christ. We are free to do so, but are not required to do so. It takes awareness and effort and willingness and, yes, even sacrifice to live in such freedom. God has done her part. What will we do?
