While Pam and I were away speaking at the TransFORM conference, Sharon Linnea and Bob Scott led our worship this past Sunday. Bob is the Director of Trinity Institute. Here's his message:
Have you ever had
an experience so awful that the one thing you could hope for was that maybe it would make a good story someday? Our family had
to replace both of our cars last spring, and somehow our insurance company messed
up both new registrations. I found that out when I was pulled over by police
officers on two separate occasions within about two weeks. Both times they told
me that my license plate flashed on their data base of suspended registrations,
so driving was – what’s the word? Oh, right – a crime. They gave me court dates
and explained that it had to be those particular days, because that’s when the
district attorney would be there. My first court date was in the town of
Tuxedo. I arrived early, but the clerk explained that people who brought
attorneys got to go first. Attorneys! Now I was REALLY anxious. It only got
worse when I listened to the first cases, because the assistant district
attorney, or ADA, talked about things like jail time. When my turn came, the
judge asked if I wouldn’t really rather come back next time with a lawyer. I
said I didn’t think that was necessary, and I hoped I was right! I showed the
ADA my little document from the DMV. He scowled at it and started to ask questions,
but then he spotted the word “rescinded.” Apparently that means that the
violation ought never to have been issued in the first place, because he
immediately turned to the judge and said, “This is an insurance company
mistake, your honor. The people move to…” and then he said the magic words: “‘dismiss
in the interest of justice.’” The judge smiled and she said, “Dismissed in the
interest of justice.” Wow. “Dismissed in the interest of justice” had the ring of
such total vindication it made me almost glad the whole thing had happened. A few weeks later I went through
the same routine in Goshen. Again, it felt great.
Reflecting
on that experience, I think the desire not only to be rescued from a bad
situation, but to be truly vindicated, runs very deep. We know that something’s
not right; that things are not what they could be – in our personal lives, our
relationships, and our society. We have a gut feeling that, as Paul says in
today’s scripture, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” In
short, we need to be saved, not just in the next world, but here and now.
The Hebrew
Scriptures talk a lot about this need. God is called redeemer, rescuer,
righteous judge, savior. Many of the psalms say either, “God, why haven’t you
rescued me yet?” or “Thank you for saving me.” Some psalms say both! The Jews believed
God could save them by some surprising ways and means. For example, when the
Persian king Cyrus defeated the Babylonians and allowed the exiles to return to
Jerusalem, they saw God’s hand at work. The word Isaiah uses for this pagan
king is a familiar one. It means “anointed.” The word is “Messiah.” It’s the
very same word Andrew uses in John’s gospel when he tells Peter, “We have found
the Messiah.” It could also be translated, “Christ.”
Of course we know
that Messiah and Christ aren’t proper names for Jesus. They describe who he is
for us. The early Christians found in Jesus the same thing they looked for from
God: salvation. But they had to deal with what appeared to be a contradiction. Jesus
was crucified. He died. But some people were saying God resurrected him. Some had
even seen him. The disciples became convicted that Jesus’ very death was God’s
way of saving all humanity. But how could that be?
The oldest
writings we have about the saving power of Jesus are the Apostle Paul’s letters.
Today’s reading comes from Paul’s epistle to the church in Rome. Now, Paul
wrote “occasional letters,” meaning not that he wrote them every once in a
while, but that each one was prompted by an occasion. His purpose was always to
help a faith community deal with a particular issue.
Through the
centuries, though, theologians have often treated Paul as if he were doing what
they were doing: writing a systematic explanation of the faith. As a
consequence they’ve built theories that are based on things he said, but which themselves are not things he said. Now,
that’s okay. We have to interpret scriptures in order to apply them in our
lives. But it’s our responsibility to put our traditional beliefs into dialogue
with the scriptures and our experience, because Christianity is a living faith.
Recently Bible
scholars have talked about a “New Perspective on Paul.” Sometimes “new
perspectives” can be like New Coke – a bad idea to begin with. But the thrust
of this new perspective is about asking what Paul actually said, paying
particular attention to the context in which he said it. This morning we’ll look
at a couple of key ideas in this reading and ask what they may mean for us as a
faith community today.
The first thing
I’d like to acknowledge is that this passage can be challenging for modern
readers. But I would hazard a guess that all of us here have been taught – or
at least told about – some way of understanding salvation that has been shaped by
how theologians have interpreted this passage. The other thing is, I don’t
think the passage is dense in the way reading, say, Aristotle is dense. Paul
isn’t trying to intellectualize. He wants to convey an experience he’s had. To
do that he’s using references that would have been immediately recognizable to
his audience, but which don’t have the same meaning today. It would be as if we
read a short article that mentioned “American Idol,” “Tiger Woods,” and
“Avatar” but didn’t explain them. To us each one is a story that we know, but
someone reading it in another time or place would need to do some research in
order to understand the article.
In the Epistle to
the Romans Paul was writing to a church that was a mixture of Jewish and
non-Jewish Christians. They struggled with questions like what to do about the
Jewish laws and the temple rituals that were so central to Jewish faith. Did
the non-Jews need to adopt those practices? Did the Jews need to continue them?
Paul begins by
explaining that while the law God gave the Jews is good, it can’t make them
righteous. It can’t save them. It can only help them to see how far short of
the mark they fall. Gentiles don’t have the law, but they have a God-given sense
of right and wrong, so they know they’re missing the mark, too. The problem for
both, he says, is that they haven’t put God in the center of their lives. That’s
the textbook definition of idolatry. What we worship instead of God doesn’t
need to be a Golden Idol. It could be money or nation or our own egos. And
after a while, Paul says, we can’t even tell what the right way looks like any
more. It’s as if we’re slaves to sin. So how does Jesus rescue us from that
situation?
Listen to what Paul
says: “But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed,
and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through
faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”
When Paul says
that Jesus shows us “the righteousness of God” he’s drawing on a primary theme
of the Old Testament: God is the righteous judge who sets the oppressed free. He
builds on that courtroom imagery when he says that we all are “now justified by
his grace.” “Justification” can be a kind of theological buzzword. But the
Greek verb translated “justify” could as accurately be translated, “to acquit.”
If Paul were talking to me he might have said, “God is the judge who says
‘Dismissed in the interest of justice.’”
Next Paul speaks
about “the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Some early theologians took
that word “redemption” to mean that God had to pay a ransom to the devil for humanity,
as if the creator of the universe has to bargain. But if you were a first
century Jew you knew exactly what Paul was talking about. In Israel if someone
became a slave either because they were captured or to get out of debt, a
kinsman had the right and obligation to “redeem” them, to buy them out of
slavery. Paul is saying. “Think of God as your kinsman who doesn’t say, ‘How
did you get yourself into this mess?’ He frees you because you’re a member of
the family.”
Notice that so far
Paul isn’t offering any single theory about salvation. He’s saying “you could
picture it this way, or that way.” And he isn’t done yet.
He goes on with an
image that’s powerful, but which has gotten us into trouble over the years. The
translation we’re using says that Jesus was “a sacrifice of atonement through
his blood.” Now, “atonement” is simply a coined word put together from “at-one-ment.”
We could also say “reconciliation.” So far so good. But the Greek word Paul
uses – hilasterion – also has other meanings
that point in radically different directions.
In classical Greek
literature the word referred to the appeasement of angry gods. Remember that
the Greek gods were petty and vain and you could fairly describe them as having
anger management issues. So, some theologians interpret Paul’s use of this word
to mean that human sin made God so angry that God wanted to wipe out the human
race, and the “good news” is that he punished Jesus in our place. One of the problems
with that interpretation is that Jews didn’t worship a primitive, angry deity
who needed to be appeased. They knew God as the sovereign creator who sought
them out when they were nothing in order to form a relationship – to save them.
As Christians we believe that in Jesus we see who God is, but that interpretation
takes our image of God a giant step backwards.
So what is Paul saying? We don’t need to look far. In the Biblical
Greek that Paul knew as a rabbi, hilasterion doesn’t mean appeasement. It means forgiveness. That’s
why some translations call Jesus the “mercy seat.” The mercy seat was the cover
of the Ark of the Covenant, kept in the innermost part of the temple. On the
Day of Atonement the high priest went there to perform a ritual that involved
sprinkling the blood of animals on the altar. God would then look away from the
sins of the people. The relationship was restored. Paul is saying that Jesus is
the new mercy seat, the place where God forgives our sins.
So how is Jesus’
death a sacrifice? Another thing that makes Jesus divine for Paul is that he
lived his human life totally centered on God. He followed God’s way of love,
accepting and forgiving and healing those the world rejected, restoring their
dignity as children of God, refusing to play the world’s game of exclusion and
domination. He remained faithful even when it became clear that the powers that
be were so threatened that they would put him to death. So Jesus was a
sacrifice, but not to God. He was God’s Word, God’s perfect expression of love,
and he was sacrificed to humanity’s anger and violence. He was sacrificed to us. His death says, “You see? This is what you do – but
you don’t have to. There is another way. It isn’t easy, but it’s good, and Jesus
walked it.”
Paul is saying
that Jesus is God’s declaration of love for all, with no exclusions. You don’t
need to earn it. You can’t lose it. That’s grace. But you can miss it. It won’t necessarily make a difference in
your life. Paul says that the way God’s love touches our lives is “through
faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” Today we often think of belief as
an intellectual matter, and faith as something else, but they both have the
same Greek root. In Paul’s time they both meant trusting wholeheartedly and
acting on that trust. We still have that meaning today. If I say to someone, “I
believe in you,” I don’t mean I think you’re actually there. I mean “I trust
you; I see your good qualities; I will support you.”
If we want to know
that God’s love is real, we have to behave as if it is. That’s faith. By the
way, the phrase translated “faith in Jesus” can be translated just as
accurately as “the faith of Jesus.” And
both are true. The faithfulness of
Jesus shows us how to be fully human. “The glory of God is a human being fully
alive,” said Iraneaus in the second century. And we follow Jesus’ way by
putting our faith and trust in
him.
For Paul, the only
way to do that was in community. That’s why baptism was so important to him. It
wasn’t some magical act that made us worthy of God’s love or saved us as
individuals. It was our initiation into the community of faith – what you could
call the community of salvation.
What would that
community look like? The series on James that Pastor Heatley has been preaching
has a lot of practical advice about that. So what I’d like to do to conclude
this morning is to share a parable for us to reflect on as a community. I think
it says something about what we can be together. Maybe it doesn’t. That’s for
us to decide. It’s a parable the late M. Scott Peck used to tell, called “The
Rabbi’s Gift.”
“The
story concerns a monastery that had fallen upon hard times. It was once a great
order, but now there were only five monks left in the decaying house: the abbot
and four others, all over seventy in age. Clearly it was a dying order.
“In
the deep woods surrounding the monastery there was a little hut that a rabbi used
for a hermitage. It occurred to the abbot that a visit to the rabbi might
result in some advice to save his monastery. The rabbi welcomed the abbot to
his hut. But when the abbot explained his visit, the rabbi could only say, ‘I
know how it is. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore.’ So the old abbot
and the old rabbi wept together. Then they read parts of the Torah and spoke of
deep things. When the abbot had to leave, they embraced each other. The abbot
said, ‘Is there nothing you can tell me that would help me save my dying order?’
“’I
am sorry,’ the rabbi responded. ‘I have no advice to give. But, I can tell you
that the Messiah is one of you.’
“When
the abbot returned to the monastery his fellow monks gathered around him to
ask, ‘Well what did the rabbi say?’
“‘The
rabbi said something very mysterious. He said that the Messiah is one of us. I
don’t know what he meant.’
“In
the time that followed, the old monks wondered whether there was any
significance to the rabbi’s words. The Messiah is one of us? He probably meant
Father Abbot. He has been our leader for more than a generation. On the other
hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas. Certainly Brother Thomas is a holy
man. Certainly he could not have meant Brother Elred! Elred gets crotchety. But
come to think of it, even though he is a thorn in people’s sides, when you look
back on it, Elred is virtually always right. Maybe the rabbi did mean Brother
Elred. But surely not Brother Phillip. Phillip is so passive, a real nobody.
But then, almost mysteriously, he has a gift for always being there when you
need him. He just magically appears. Maybe Phillip is the Messiah. Of course
the rabbi didn’t mean me. He couldn’t possibly have meant me. I’m just an
ordinary person. But supposing he did?
“The
old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the chance
that one among them might be the Messiah. And they began to treat themselves
with extraordinary respect. People still occasionally came to visit the
monastery in its beautiful forest to picnic on its tiny lawn, to wander along
some of its paths, even to meditate in the dilapidated chapel. As they did so,
they sensed the aura of extraordinary respect that began to surround the five
old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of
the place. There was something strangely compelling, about it. Hardly knowing
why, they began to come back to the monastery to picnic, to play, to pray. They
brought their friends to this special place. And their friends brought their
friends. Then some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started
to talk more and more with the old monks. After a while one asked if he could
join them. Then another, and another. So within a few years the monastery had
once again become a thriving order and, thanks to the rabbi’s gift, a vibrant
center of light and spirituality in the realm.”[1]
Peck’s story is a
simple, maybe even simplistic parable about people who know something is deeply
wrong but who find salvation as they come to see one another as God sees them.
They discover that each can be the Messiah, the agent of God’s saving grace,
for the others. Can Vision be such a community? For that, we’d have to trust the
gift of rabbi Jesus by being his disciples and walking his way.
It
isn’t easy. But it’s good.
[1] Adapted from the Prologue of M. Scott Peck, A Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (New York: Touchstone: 1st ed. 1987).
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