Sermons

Mar 12 - The Rev. Brian C. Taylor - The Second Sunday of Lent

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent, March 12
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor
Genesis 22:1-14, Psalm 16, Romans 8:31-39, Mark 8:31-38

It’s Lent, so I have a confession to make. I’ve never related well to one of the basic Christian messages. It’s the one about Jesus being sacrificed on the cross for our sins, and his blood saving us. Every year on Good Friday I either do my best to re-interpret this message, or I rely on another interpretation of the cross altogether.

Today Good Friday comes a little early. Perhaps some of this sacrificial imagery is difficult for some of you, too. We’ve got it in spades. The first reading from Genesis is the familiar and disturbing story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. 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. So off he goes to murder his son, lying to him about how a lamb will be provided by God for the sacrifice that they prepare together. Can you imagine?

Christians have always understood this story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac as a prefiguring of God’s sacrifice of his Son, Jesus. In our second reading today St. Paul reminds the church in Rome of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross: [God] did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us. Then he says that each of Jesus’ followers shall also be a sacrificial offering: For [God’s] sake we are being killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.

Then in the gospel, Jesus teaches his disciples about his coming sacrifice, saying that he will undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed.

The theology of Jesus’ blood sacrifice on the cross for our sins has been called abusive by some modern writers. They reject the idea that God was angry enough at humanity’s sinfulness that he took his only son, like Abraham, and killed him, and that somehow this act of revenge washes away our guilt.

While I can understand their repugnance, they’re overlooking something basic about scripture. The Bible was written in specific historical periods, and used symbols and stories that were appropriate to their day. Our job is not to approve or disapprove of those symbols and stories; it is to understand their deeper meaning in ways that are appropriate to our day. There is always a deeper meaning. Hear me carefully again: As people of faith for whom the Bible is central, our job is not to approve or disapprove of its ancient symbols and stories; it is to understand their deeper meaning in ways that are appropriate to our day.

At the time that the Bible was written, from Genesis through the gospels and the letters of Paul, the highest act of worship was animal sacrifice. Rivers of blood flowed from the temple in Jerusalem as sheep, oxen, and doves were killed by the knife. Whether we approve of this or not, it was their world. Why did they do it? Because they were vicious and abusive? No. A reverent sacrifice of a living animal was seen as the highest possible offering to God; it was the offering of life itself to the Creator of life. Sacrifices of life, they believed, resulted in making the one who sacrificed right with God again.

And so when Jesus was executed in the usual manner for criminals by the Roman authorities, his community, over many years, came to interpret this martyrdom with the highest possible significance they could come up with: it was a blood sacrifice beyond all others, because this was not an animal, but a human - and not just any human, but the Son of God. His offering was so much more important than all the thousands at the temple in Jerusalem that it made everyone right with God forever.

We don’t sacrifice animals anymore. The spilling of blood is not for us an everyday, common way of understanding how we re-establish a right relationship with God, as it was for ancient people. However, some today still emphasize this message almost to the exclusion of all others – the evangelical theology expressed so clearly in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ seems to say that the only reason Jesus came to the world was to die a horrible death. Forget his wisdom teachings, his joy, his healings, his message about the kingdom of God. He came to suffer because we’ve been so bad.

But this doesn’t mean that we throw out the whole sacrificial story entirely, dismissing it as abusive and wrong. I think there are other ways of understanding the deeper meaning of it in terms that are appropriate to our day. And the key to this for me is found in the New Testament readings for today.

After Jesus speaks of his coming sacrifice, he then turns to his disciples and says that they, too, will have to lay down their lives. To live into the kingdom of God every one of us, not just Jesus – who showed us the way – will have to take up our cross daily. All of his followers must also deny themselves, take up their cross, and lose their life if they hope to save it. This is, for me, the deeper meaning of the blood sacrifice: On the cross Jesus showed us that in denying ourselves we are opened to God’s kingdom.

For us, the cross is not about a bloody physical martyrdom. It is the daily setting aside of our attachment to our desires, our insistence that things be the way we want them to be, even our definition of who we think we are. It is the sacrifice of the self in service to the greater good of all.
· A mother sacrifices her own needs and desires every day in the service of her children.
· When another person is clearly in trouble and distress, we sacrifice our neat little plans for the day when we drop them and give our total attention.
· When we devote ourselves to a hard job that benefits others we don’t even know, we sacrifice endless hours and energy.
· When we confront someone we love with the hard truth, we may sacrifice their affection for us, at least for awhile.
· When we give a percentage of our income to the church and other charities, when we take time out of our busy days for prayer, when we abstain from certain pleasures that we know are harmful to us, we sacrifice personal gratification.
We make sacrificial offerings to God every day.

Why do we do these things? To make payment to an angry God? To appease the divine by self-abasement? Thomas Merton had this to say about self-denial and sacrifice:

The Holy Spirit never asks us to renounce anything without offering us something much higher and much more perfect in return. Self-chastisement for its own sake has no place in Christianity. The function of self-denial is to lead us to a positive increase of spiritual energy and life. The Christian dies, not merely in order to die but in order to live. And when he takes up his cross to follow Christ, the Christian realizes, or at least believes, that he is not going to die to anything but death. The Cross is the sign of Christ’s victory over death. The Cross is the sign of life.

We take up our cross and die to self so that God will set us free from all that enslaves us and keeps us unhappy. God doesn’t want our guilty blood; God wants us to be happy and free, and to be a blessing to others around us. True self-denial is in service of that divine calling. If our sacrifices are not aimed towards that end, they are not Christian in nature. But remember, Jesus was right about this: If we want to save our life, to become free and happy in God’s kingdom, to be a blessing to others, it will require self-denial, the cross, sacrifice. There is no other way.

And so we die in order to live. We deny ourselves so that we can be led to a positive increase of spiritual energy and life, to become a blessing to this world. And when we sacrifice our ego, our money, our time, our attention, our control, we discover that we’re not dying to anything but death. All that ends up on the cross is the stuff we don’t need, the stuff that gets in the way of our liberation in Christ. Every sacrifice that leads us in this direction is more than worth it. Every hardship along these lines conquers the enemy of life, and brings us into the love of God.

As St. Paul said in the second reading today, [What] will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?... No, in all things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.