Rediscovering Jesus: Redeemer

You can see a video of this sermon at this link.

1 Corinthians 1: 18-31

I’d ask you as we begin today to take a few moments just to look at the cross we have at the front of our sanctuary. 

 

What are the ideas that come to mind as you look at it?

Pause.

 

It’s a beautiful cross. We have a similar one over our main entrance, reflected in the window behind it, another on the outer wall of this sanctuary facing Gorham Street.

 

Clearly, it is not only a beautiful cross, but also an important symbol of this congregation. And the cross – in whatever shape – is one of the identifying symbols of Christianity throughout the world. 

 

Among the things I think about when I look at a cross is a simple question: Why did Jesus have to die on a cross? If only the answer were as simple as the question.

 

Last week, Pastor Jessica in her sermon invited us to go ice skating with Jesus on Lake Mendota.  So today I am going to go ice skating with Jesus -- on the thin ice out there. Trying to make sense of what the crucifixion was all about has been one of the great controversies in the history of Christianity.

As a kid, I learned a simple – and perhaps the most common -  explanation. Jesus died for my sins. He was my redeemer. And just to make sure that I understood that I had something to do with this, every time I sinned – whatever that meant as an eight-year old – I was pounding one of those nails a little farther into Jesus’ hand. But, thank goodness, he suffered so that God would not hold my sins against me. 

 

Thank you, Jesus!

 

In theological terms, this whole issue is called atonement. As luck would have it, I wrote my thesis for my theology degree about atonement. Don’t worry – I am not going to read my thesis here for you today. (If you are up for reading 75 pages about atonement, I’d be happy to email it to you.)

 

What I would like to do, though, is suggest that there are many ways to think about why Jesus died on the cross. How we think about that can actually affect how we live our lives as followers of Jesus.

 

Even though the phrasing “Jesus died for our sins” is one of the most common explanations, it is hardly the only one. Yes, it is woven through familiar hymns and prayers.  

 

Think about that classic hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross.” 
“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,” it begins. 

 

And the second verse says:  

“In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,

A wondrous beauty I see,

For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died,

To pardon and sanctify me.”

 

All of this comes out of a time when people put Jesus’ death into a model of transactions – maybe calming an angry god with a sacrifice or settling a debt in court. 

Spiritual guide and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr described this as “the strange idea that before God could love us God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for our sin-drenched humanity.”

 

We talk a lot in our time, in this congregation, about God’s love and God’s grace, saying that God loves us, no matter what. No matter what, God loves us. God did not need Jesus to be killed to make things right with humanity. 

 

So I’m back to my question. Why did Jesus have to be killed on a cross?

There are the very concrete realities he faced. His teachings, the way he lived challenged both the religious and political establishments of his time. The Temple leaders and the Roman occupiers held power and they were threatened by this wandering rabbi.

 

We know all too well what can happen when power is challenged, especially if that power thinks it is impervious to the will of the people or to the basic rights of humanity. 

 

We have seen that play out over and over around the world – in the massacres of the indigenous people here, in the colonizers in Africa and Asia and Latin America, in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, in the beatings and murders of people seeking a more just society. 

 

We have witnessed that abuse of power once again in the last few days with the horrifying videos of five Memphis police officers pummeling Tyre Nichols to death, apparently as a way of using brutally to show that they had power.

 

And we have seen the cross perverted into a sign justifying violence, whether on the shields of crusaders in the Middle Ages or on flags as insurrectionists stormed the U.S Capitol on Jan. 6 two years ago.  White nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis have taken that image of the cross that we honor and appropriated it into a symbol of hate.

 

Yes, we live in a world where people are killed for challenging power. That’s what happened to Jesus.

 

The earliest Christians struggled with that, as we heard in that letter from Paul to the people of Corinth that was our scripture reading for today.

 

“The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God… we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ (is) the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

 

Their leader had not only been tortured and killed, but all this had happened in the most public and humiliating way. Clearly a crucified leader was a stumbling block for those who might consider joining his followers. Those followers – and those they were talking to – would have to make that leap of faith to the Resurrection for the crucifixion to make any sense.

 

The cross, after all, does not stand alone. That nimbus – that circle – around our cross can be a reminder that there is life beyond the suffering and death of Jesus. And it can be a reminder that Jesus’ suffering and death need not be explained simply as a sacrificial sin offering but as one piece of a life that reconciled  humanity to divinity, that took the worst humanity had to offer and transformed it from the cross through the resurrection.

 

Having said all this, I don’t want to diminish the importance for some folks of their commitment to the idea that Jesus died on their behalf. That is a belief that clearly has deep roots in Christian history, even in the Gospels themselves.

 

There was the time Jesus was talking under the cover of darkness with Nicodemus when he said one of the most quoted sentences from the Gospels: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” That’s the verse – John 3:16 – you sometimes see on signs at sporting events and other places where Christians choose to publicly proclaim one manifestation of God’s love.

 

Jesus talked about himself as the Good Shepherd who would lay down his life for his sheep. John in his Gospel uses the image of the Lamb of God, connecting Jesus to the lamb sacrificed for the Jewish Passover meal, although in Judaism, that is not done as an atonement for sin but as a remembrance of the Exodus journey to freedom from slavery.

 

In the Gospel according to Matthew – but only in that Gospel – Jesus says as he gives the cup of wine to his closest followers, “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

 

That idea that Jesus died to save us – that Jesus is our Redeemer – can give us a degree of confidence in the way we live our lives, can be an invitation to gratitude for the life and death of Jesus.

For me, though, it is also an understanding that has problems – as do all of the understandings of why Jesus died on the cross.   I’m uncomfortable with the idea that God chose to send his son to die. I’m not convinced that each mistake I make is another hammer blow to those nails. As I said at the beginning, it’s a simple question with complicated answers.

 

Let me offer just a few other ideas about all this.

 

One comes from two contemporary writers – Will Willimon, a retired Methodist bishop, and Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian who has taught at Duke and Notre Dame among other places.  They wrote about the role sin played in the execution of Jesus.

 

They describe those sins as religious and government leaders lining up to protect their powers, allies abandoning him, bystanders mocking him. Violence is used to try to solve a “problem.” Yet on the cross, Jesus asks God to forgive those who are doing this to him. 

That, Willimon and Hauerwas say, “throws a monkey wrench in to the eternal wheel of retribution and vengeance.”

 

I don’t think a monkey wrench hanging over our sanctuary would be quite as beautiful as our cross, but it is a neat image of how Jesus’ actions as he was dying offered a very different way to respond to violence. This does not let violence have the last word. And the resurrection does not let death have the last word either. From that, I can draw hope as I navigate the realities of our world today.

 

Another idea comes from Richard Rohr, who I mentioned earlier. He summarized the teaching of one of his theological heroes named John Duns Scotus this way: “Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.”

 

Instead of counting sins, weighting guilt, punishing people, Jesus offered a new world where, in Rohr’s words, “God's abundance has made any economy of merit, sacrifice, reparation, or atonement both unhelpful and unnecessary.”

 

When we change the trajectory from what we and others do wrong to what God’s love offers all, then we can be reconciled to each other and to God. And reconciliation to God is really at the heart of all of this.

 

One more way I like to think about all of this. 

 

It seems to me one of the continuing themes of Jesus’ life was about forgiveness. When we say the prayer each Sunday – and other times as well – that Jesus taught his followers, we say, depending on our backgrounds, forgives us our debts – or our trespasses – or our sins – as we forgive others.  

 

We can say that knowing how Jesus assured us that God forgives us as well, knowing that Jesus forgave even  those who tortured and killed, who abandoned and mocked him.

 

That’s a transformation – not a transaction. 

 

For that, I give thanks to God.

 

 

 

 

A Year With The Psalms

You can find a video of the sermon (and the rest of the service) here.

Psalm 1 (The Message), Psalm 150 (NRSVUE)

Normally, I am pretty bad at sustaining New Year’s resolutions. I imagine there are more than a few people here who could put me to shame on that. And I imagine there are also a few people nodding their heads saying, “Yup, I sure know how that goes.”

 

But last year, I made a resolution that I actually kept. Well, mostly kept. Close enough.

I decided each morning I would read a Psalm – those fascinating, confounding, comforting, challenging, inspiring poems and songs that make up one of the most famous books in the Hebrew Bible.

I started with Psalm Number One – the psalm you heard a few moments ago in the poetic paraphrase from Eugene Peterson in The Message.  Then I would go to the next one. And the next one. After 150 days – that’s how many Psalms there are and why I also read Psalm 150 this morning – I’d start over. That gets me through 300 days of the year. And then I started again, hitting Psalm 61 yesterday.

Wait, say all you math majors out there. There are 365 days in the year. Three hundred Psalms plus 61 more does not get you to 365. Like I said, I mostly kept that resolution.

 

What I want to dive into today is the way reading the Psalms – praying the Psalms, reflecting on them – gave me a chance to explore my relationship with God, with the people in my world, with myself. 

 

This is hardly a novel idea. In monasteries all over the world, people pray all 150 Psalms each week. That makes me feel like a bit of a slacker. The Psalms show up in Jewish worship and in Christian worship on a regular basis.

They also show up in this conversation in 2015 between the famous rock singer Bono of the group U2 and Eugene Peterson, that Presbyterian minister who did such an engaging translation of the Bible.  Listen to what Bono had to say about the Psalms: https://youtu.be/-l40S5e90KY?t=657 (from 10:57 to 11:50)

 

Bono is hardly the only artist, scholar, writer, poet to be fascinated by the Psalms.

 

Our own Barry Sherbeck started a project a few years back. He described it to me this way: “I'm distilling each Psalm into a haiku and image. Some Psalms might require a trio of these rather than just one.”

 

Here’s one example from Barry. It is his adaptation of Psalm 121. That Psalm begins with these words:

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
    from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
    who made heaven and earth.

 

Here's Barry’s haiku – a brief Japanese form of poetry – and his photo of the hills in Rwanda at morning time:

hands open, palms up
watching, waiting, listening
looking to the hills

 

Barry is using a book by an author named Nan Merrill as one source of inspiration. In that book, Psalms for Praying, Merrill points out one of the challenges for contemporary readers of the Psalms and tries to offer an alternative, a sort of companion to use in dialogue with the original Psalms. 

 

She wrote: “The Psalms of the Hebrew Scripture often reflect a patriarchal society based on fear and guilt that projects evil and sin onto outer enemies. Psalms for Praying reflects the reciprocity of Divine Love that opens the heart to forgiveness, reconciliation and healing.”

 

I know I’ve had my share of struggles with the Psalms over the past year. Some are extraordinarily comforting. I’ll bet most of you are familiar with Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” 

 

There are the reassuring words in Psalm 46 – “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in the time of trouble” with the vital reminder at the end to “Be still and know that I am God.”

 

Ah, yes, you are God. Not me. Help me to remember that one, O God. 

 

And when I stroll off the path of God’s ways, there is always Psalm 51 that Sharol wove into our time of confession today: “Have mercy on me, O God, because of your unfailing love. Because of your great compassion, blot out the stain of my sins.  Wash me clean from my guilt. Purify me from my sin.  For I recognize my shameful deeds-- they haunt me day and night.”

 

And when I doubt whether God could forgive me, there is Psalm 103 – “Bless the Lord, O my soul…do not forget all of God’s benefits – who forgives all your iniquity…who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.”

 

Those are Psalms that help me explore my relationship with God – and God’s relationship with me.

 

But still, there are all these discomforting moments in the Psalms. We lament with the Jewish people when they were in exile in Babylon as they sing in Psalm 137: 

“By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung our harps.” 

 

Then the lament turns to revenge: Addressing Babylon, the Psalm ends with these words we don’t often read in church: “Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us. Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”

 

Yikes! 

C.S. Lewis, who you may know best as the author of the fantasy novels The Chronicles of Narnia, was also a person who dove deeply into his faith.

 

Lewis, in his book Reflections on the Psalms, offers one way to think about what he calls the curses in the Psalms. He writes: “They are indeed devilish. But we must also think of those who made them so. Their hatreds are a reaction to something. Such hatreds are the kind of thing that cruelty and injustice, by a sort of natural law, produce.”

 

That’s the thing about the Psalms. They have, as Bono said, “this rawness, this brutal honesty.”

 

Just think about the Psalm Jesus used when he was dying on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

That’s all that’s quoted from Jesus in the Gospels according to Matthew and Mark as they describe his agony on the cross.  But Psalm 22 goes on:

Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; 

and by night but find no rest.

 

And then it says:

 

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast;

my mouth is dried up like a broken piece of pottery

and my tongue sticks to my jaws;

lay me in the dust of death. 

For dogs are all around me;

a company of evildoers encircles me; 

they bound my hands and feet.

 

This is very tough stuff. 

 

So we struggle with the Psalms. 

 

They are not stitched together in a narrative arc. They are a collection of 150 poems, songs, meditations written by many people – not just by the Israelite king, David, to whom many are attributed. 

 

They are not chronological. Psalm 68 – a Psalm that serves as a victory Psalm for the Israelites over their enemies – is thought to be one of the earliest writings included in the Hebrew Bible. Some of them date to the time before that exile to Babylon, others came later. 

 

There are historical references to Jewish history that are hard for us to understand in 21^st century America. 

 

There are lots of references to defeating enemies, which Nan Merrill in her Praying the Psalmsbook shifts from the enemies without to the enemies within each of us. But that still is challenging as we read them or pray them or meditate on them.

 

Martin Luther – the person who set off the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, wrote in his preface to his translation of the Psalms into German that “everyone in whatever situation they may be, finds in that situation Psalms and words that fit their case.”

 

There’s a scripture scholar in our time by the name of Walter Brueggemann. He has offered what I find to be a useful way to think about the range of the Psalms. 

 

Some of them he calls Psalms of Orientation – Psalms that express “the joy, delight, goodness, coherence and reliability of God, God’s creation and God’s law.”

Then there are Psalms of Disorientation – Psalms that reflect what Brueggemann calls “the anguished seasons of hurt, alienation, suffering and death.” He calls them complaint songs.

And then there are the Psalms of New Orientation, when God makes things new in surprising ways, transforming humanity in the process. 

That’s a lot like our lives, isn’t it? Sometimes oriented, sometimes disoriented, sometimes finding something new that orients us in a totally different and good way. 

 

Think back a moment to the dire situation described in Psalm 22, where the writer feels forsaken by God. But the Psalm does not end there. Suddenly, there are words of hope. Listen:

 

But you, O Lord, do not be far away!
O my help, come quickly to my aid!
Deliver my soul from the sword, my life from the power of the dog!
Save me from the mouth of the lion!

 

From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me.

I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; 

in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.

 

This is part of what I find fascinating in the Psalms. One moment they seem predictable. Then they catch me by surprise. They may give words to my feelings or they may just leave me puzzled. And that’s OK.

 

Someone who has devoted a lot of times to interpreting the Psalms is Richard Bruxvoort Colligan, who lives near Dubuque. He describes himself as “a freelance psalmist serving the wider, ever-evolving church.” Through his Psalm Immersion Project, he is writing new songs that try to capture the essence of each Psalm. And sometimes, he adds video and dance, like he did with this setting of Psalm 116. 

The words of the first four verses from Eugene Peterson’s The Message read like this:
I love God because he listened to me,  listened as I begged for mercy.
He listened so intently  as I laid out my case before him.
Death stared me in the face,  hell was hard on my heels.
Up against it, I didn’t know which way to turn;  

then I called out to God for help:
“Please, God!” I cried out. “Save my life!”

 

Here's Richard’s interpretation:

https://youtu.be/jOaBsjQliUo?t=10 (from 00:10 to 1:25)

 

So there are cries of anguish, prayers of praise, words of comfort. And there are also words that tell us what God is looking for from us – words that were echoed later by Jesus. These words are a reminder that from ancient times until today, God is looking for us to join the dream of a world where both justice and peace can be a reality for all.

 

Bono focused on some of those words in a conversation he was having with David Taylor, an associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Seminary based in California. 

https://youtu.be/WXjEiy_5qQQ?t=71 (from 1:11 to 2:49)

 

So the Psalms are filled with so much that can touch our lives, words that can encourage us, words that can confound us, words that can challenge us, words that can connect us to God. 

 

I am hoping in the year ahead to repeat what I did this year – start each day with a Psalm. Maybe I’ll even hit that total of 365 this year! 

 

If you are interested in doing something similar, I’d invite you to give it a try. And if you want to email back and forth now and then and share the insights you gain, I’d be happy to be a conversation partner with you. (You can reach me at phil@cpcmadison.org.)

For now, let’s just end with one more Psalm in two distinct voices. The first voice will be Bono, reciting the beginning of Psalm 40 as translated by Eugene Peterson. Early in their careers, Bono and U2 composed a song based on Psalm 40 – you can find it on YouTube.

 

The second voice – well, that will be yours as we join together in singing the version of Psalm 40 in our hymnal – “I Waited Patiently for God.” So listen to Bono and then let’s turn the words into music with Hymn #561.

 

Here is Bono reading the Psalm:
https://youtu.be/-l40S5e90KY?t=411 - 6:50 to 7:16

 

Hymn - I Waited Patiently for God (Psalm 40)