Stirring it up

A sermon preached on December 16, 2007 at Faith Episcopal Church.

This third Sunday of Advent is often referred to as stir it up Sunday because of the collect that we heard earlier. “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us.” So, as the obedient little vicar that I am, let me see what I can do to stir things up.

We’re in the middle of Advent and it might be a good time to ask the question, what are we waiting for? One more performance of Handel’s Messiah? One more excellent Christmas Eve sermon? Or the most excellent holiday party? According to everything we read and proclaim, we are awaiting the birth of the Savior – again. That means that we are waiting to be saved. Christianity has organized itself around the idea that Jesus came to save us from our sins. We talk more about baptism as cleansing us from sins than about initiation.

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of a Baptist preacher who moved his wife and four daughters to the Congo to save the heathens. He thundered Bible verses at them in English which of course, they couldn’t understand. The local young man who translated was at a loss to help them make sense out of being called sinners when there was nothing in their existence that supported it. The thing the preacher wanted more than anything was to baptize the village children, to save their souls. He saw that he had children that had been born into sin and there was a river. Who could refuse such an offer? Well actually, the entire community refused. He couldn’t understand how they could pass up the chance to save their children’s souls. Try as he might, they didn’t seem to be as concerned about ut sin as they were the crocodiles in the river. Nothing this crazy man said made any sense to them. How could their beautiful children have sinned any way?

Kingsolver’s book describes well the culture clash that often exists because of language in the Christian faith that comes from a time and situation that no longer exists. Our faith vocabulary is drawn from Israel’s political reality as a country occupied by a powerful nation and its Temple worship that included animal sacrifice. Sacrifice, with all of its regulations had several purposes, the primary being to please God through an offering of grain or animal. This is a tradition that predates Judaism. Among the types of sacrifices was something called a “sin offering.” A sin offering was used to cleanse the sanctuary of impurity and it involved a lot of blood. We just had this place cleaned on Thursday and I really glad they decided to use Lysol.

Within the temple system, the priestly understanding of sin was like a tear in the fabric of creation. The purity laws that were designed to maintain the integrity of that fabric were things like the dietary laws, laws against mingling crops or fibers, rules about contagion and how to be cleansed from it. The rules that governed women’s lives and those who came into contact with them all come from this priestly body of regulations. The only way to make something pure again was the application of the most holy substance – blood. Blood is the stuff of life therefore it is the only thing that can restore the order of life.

This is the language that was used by the earliest voices to explain the phenomenon of Jesus and his death and resurrection – in particular Paul, a well educated Pharisee. This was the way he would understand sin and sacrifice. Paul and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews both talk about Jesus as the sin offering for humanity. We say it in our Eucharistic prayer. “By his blood he reconciled us; by his wounds we are healed.” This theology claims that Jesus blood mended the tear in the fabric of creation that was caused by human sin.

Interestingly, it does not appear to be how Jesus spoke about himself. I’m getting a double dose of Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan right now. Along with their The First Christmas I have recently finished their other collaboration The Last Week; What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem. Their project was to take a close look at the Gospel of Mark, as the oldest of the four Gospels, and hold up the story known as the passion story for comparison to the religion that has evolved. Their conclusion is likely to stir things up. No where in this earliest Gospel does Jesus claim to be the kind of messiah or savior that his community awaited. Never does he claim divinity. He calls God “Father” but does not call himself the Son of God. He does not talk about saving people from their sins. His message, first and foremost, is the Kingdom of God. “Jesus passion was the kingdom of God, what life would be like on earth if God were king, and the rulers, and empires of this world were not. It was the world that the prophets dreamed of – a world of distributive justice in which everybody has enough and systems are fair.”

The problem for Jesus and his followers was that to talk about the kingdom of God when you lived under the thumb of the Roman Empire was to invite trouble. Borg and Crossan reframe Jesus’ death from “Jesus died for our sins” to “Jesus passion for the Kingdom of God got him killed.”

Because we continue to encounter religious language about being saved from our sins, when it is clear that we as individuals and humanity as a whole has not overcome its ability to sin on a grand scale – we are challenged to make sense of Jesus and his role in our lives. Advent is the time to ask the question, “What are we waiting for?” Are we waiting for someone to come and make it all happen? Or are we awaiting the birth of a new community within our own hearts and within the heart of the human family?