Priest and Sacrifice

Hebrews 9:15-28
Palm / Passion Sunday
March 29, 2021

William G. Carter

For this reason {Christ] is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, because a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant. Where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. Hence not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For when every commandment had been told to all the people by Moses in accordance with the law, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the scroll itself and all the people, saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God has ordained for you.” And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

 

Thus it was necessary for the sketches of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves need better sacrifices than these. For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

 

Over the years, our church has worked with a lot of kids. We do our best to explain this coming week. We tell them it’s Holy Week, the last week that Jesus was with us before he went to heaven. A lot of things happened this week, leading up to Easter, the day that God raised Jesus from the dead. One way to understand this week is to understand that some of the big days of Holy Week have a name.

Today is Palm Sunday. There is joy in the air, glad songs of praise. We shout a great word: hosanna! It’s a word that creates a buzz. We lift it from one of the Psalms, Psalm 118, which is a Passover psalm. All the people were gathering in the city to celebrate the great feast of Passover, when God rescued them from slavery. “Hosanna” means “rescue.” Rescue us, save us. Hosanna!

When the crowds saw Jesus, that’s what they shouted. Rescue us, save us! Hosanna! They put their cloaks on the street, a poor person’s red carpet to welcome him. And they cut branches from palm trees and waved them as a sign of victory. They heard about his power. They saw him heal the sick and feed the hungry. They rejoiced that he was riding right into the city.

Some of the people knew Jesus was riding down the hill to face trouble. Indeed, the first few days after Jesus arrived, he had nothing but trouble. The city leaders questioned him, attacked him, tried to trip him up. But Jesus answered every question. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, he dismissed every challenge. The hosannas ran true from Palm Sunday.

The next big day was Thursday. We call it Maundy Thursday. The name comes from the Latin form of the word “mandate,” as in “I give you a new mandate, a new commandment, to love one another as I have loved you.” This is what Jesus said as he gathered his friends to celebrate the Passover feast. They shared the story of how God brought them out of slavery in Egypt, leading them with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

With the grand traditions of that feast, Jesus and his friends remembered how their ancestors had suffered. They broke the bread of affliction. They remembered the ten plagues, the terrible power of God, the smearing of lamb’s blood over the doorframes. And they poured the cups of blood-red wine.

Suddenly Jesus broke into the old tradition with new authority. He held the bread and said, “This is my body broken for you.” He poured another cup and said, “This is my blood, poured out for you.” And then, he took a towel and a basin of water, and he washed their feet as if he was their servant. Then he looked at them again and said, “Love one another. This is my mandate.” Maundy Thursday.

As we recount all of this, the kids are still with us. They get it. Then we get to Friday. We tell of the horrible crucifixion. And somebody always asks, “Why do we call it Good?” What’s so good about Good Friday? No matter how we’ve answered the question, no matter how quickly we’ve moved on to Easter, resurrection, and all the hallelujahs, it is a question to consider again and again. Some Christians believe it is the most important question of all.

What’s so good about Good Friday? The quick answer is that Jesus died for our sins. But what does that mean? We’ve heard a lot of broken sermons about this, bits and pieces of extracted doctrine. Preachers and teachers toss a lot of theories and theological equations into the air. Before we latch onto any of one of them, let’s confess the obvious. Jesus died because of our sins. All the accounts of his death agree on this point.

It's easy to blame the Jewish leaders who were threatened by him. It’s obvious the Temple priests were offended by him. The Roman officials wanted to squelch any trouble by this troublemaker. They were brutal in exerting their power. And then there is crowd of those who shouted hosanna on Sunday and crucify on Friday. It was the same crowd, as far as the four Gospels were concerned. Jesus was crucified because we put him on the cross.

This is the hardest truth to face about Holy Week. If we had our druthers, we would skip from Palm Sunday to Easter, from hosanna to hallelujah, and pretend Friday never happened. But the reality is we put him on the cross. This was the human response to the grace of God that we encountered in Jesus of Nazareth.

It is difficult to face this. Want to know how difficult it is? Try having a conversation with someone about gun violence. Families disagree. Friendships break down. Polite people want to change the subject.

Just the other day, after ten people were shot in a Colorado supermarket, I saw something offensive on Facebook. Normally I try to mind my own business. Don’t try to convince somebody on the internet they are wrong. Just let it go, keep moving. But this time I couldn’t do it. After some otherwise normal person was ranting how the government was going to take away all his guns. All I wrote was, “It sounds to me like you are afraid.” Well, that set off an internet powder keg, some back and forth, some piling on. I couldn’t understand the fear, the anger, the demand for blood.

And then I remembered what we did to Jesus. Call it sin. Call it brokenness. Call it rebellion against the God who commanded, “Thou shalt not kill.” God gave us that commandment because God knows what we are capable of doing. Jesus was the best person anybody ever met, and we had to get rid of him. He was completely innocent, and we nailed him to the cross. How can we call it Good Friday?

This was a problem in the early church. People expected a glorious Messiah. The primary expectation of the Messiah is that he would never die, he would live eternally. The crucifixion was a scandal. It’s there, even in some of our Easter stories. “We thought he was the One, but he was killed as a common criminal.” And even after the resurrection, the critics would ask, “What do you mean, God’s Son was nailed to a tree?” Certainly, the cross has always been a mystery. We’ve had a lot of time to think about it.

That’s where the text for today steps in. It comes from the letter to the Hebrews, an anonymous sermon from an early Christian leader. It is a dense document, not easy to understand. If I were to announce, “We’re going to study the letter to the Hebrews,” some people would miss. Especially the second week.

But if we can listen to chapter nine, some of the fog may roll away. The preacher is talking about Jesus. That’s what preachers do. And this preacher refers to Jesus as a priest. At a human level, that’s curious. Jesus wasn’t related to any priest; Joseph was a woodcutter. At most, the Bible says Mary had a distant relative named Elizabeth, and her husband was a priest. Jesus wasn’t a priest. Except, Hebrews says he was a priest.

What does a priest do? A priest stands between God and the people. A priest bridges the gap between God and the people. The preacher from the book of Hebrews says Jesus is a new kind of priest.

·         The old way was to send a priest into the Jerusalem Temple on behalf of the people.  The new way is to see Jesus go into God’s very presence on our behalf.

·         In the old way, the priest sprinkled the blood of an unblemished lamb seven times on the seat reserved for God. In the new way, Jesus is like an unblemished lamb, who offers his own blood on the cross.

·         In the old way, the priest offered a sacrifice for every sin, which meant he did so over and over and over.  In the new way, Jesus offered one single sacrifice – himself – and he did it only once.

·         The old way required the priest to repeatedly convince God to be merciful and forgiving. In new way, Jesus doesn’t need to convince God of anything.

As a priest, Jesus offers a sacrifice in the presence of God. It resembled the sacrifice the priests offered in the old house of God. The greatest difference between the old way and the new way is summed up in a single word: once. Three times in our text, the preacher says, “Jesus died once.” Not again and again. Not Friday after Friday. Not year after year. Once. It is a revelation of God’s forgiveness.

On the Friday of Holy Week, the human race nailed the Son of God to a cross. Looking from below, it was the worst thing we have ever done. And in response, from above, what does God do? God listens to the priest Jesus, who enters his presence to say, “Father, forgive them.” (Luke 23:23) God declares, “They are forgiven.”

As the letter to the Hebrews declares, Jesus is like God and can help us. And Jesus is like us and will help us.

The deep magic of Christian faith happens when we accept with complete trust that the High Priest’s work has been done. Sin is forgiven and released. The priest has made the final appeal on our behalf. He has offered the one sacrifice that can release us. He has reconciled heaven and earth through his work on the cross.

And this is the covenant that God makes with us through Jesus. Jesus is our priest. And Jesus himself is the sacrifice. There is nothing we can do to erase the power and authority of what Christ has done on the cross. He has done the work for us. Our work is to claim the finality of his work which has been done once.

But there’s the rub. Guilt hangs overhead like a shadow. Regret lingers. Fear creates hostility. Rebellion casts off responsibility. We doubt the sufficiency of the cross. Sometimes we remember things that God has long since forgotten.

In his book, The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning tells a fun little story about a woman who claimed she was having visions of Jesus. She was a Roman Catholic, and the word spread all over the diocese. The archbishop heard about her and called her in for a meeting. He asked, “Is it true, ma’am, that you are having visions of the Lord?”

“Yes,” she replied.

The archbishop said, “Next time you have a vision, ask Jesus to tell you the sins that I confessed on my last confession.” The woman was stunned. She replied, “Did I hear you correctly, your grace? You want me to ask the Lord to tell me that sins you have confessed?

“Exactly. Please call me when you hear from him.” She departed.

A week and a half later, she called and requested a meeting. The archbishop agreed. He asked, “Did you do what I asked?” “Yes,” she replied, “I asked Jesus to tell me the sins you confessed in your last confession.”

He leaned forward. His eyes narrowed in anticipation. The archbishop said, “What did the Lord say?” She took his hand, looked into his eyes, and said, “Your Grace, these are his exact words.” Yes, what did he say? “Jesus said, ‘I can’t remember.’”[1]

Jesus reveals the God who loves us enough to let go of our sins. That’s why the favorite New Testament word for forgiveness is “cancel.” Whether we call them “debts,” “trespasses,” or “sins,” they are cancelled. Not by us, but by the One they offend. Christ the priest offers the one sacrifice that sets us free. He will not cling to the terrible things we have done or left undone. Nor does he want us to keep doing them. So it’s our work to cancel them, too.

Even before we get to Easter, the cross announces our sins are forgiven. And when God raises up the very Christ that we crucified, it is further confirmation that this is the way of God in a world like this. God wants to take the very worst that we can do and transform it. God wants us to proclaim this Good News and to join Christ in his mission to take in the world for repairs, moving all of us toward the day when all things shall be redeemed.

We are forgiven through Jesus Christ, who is both priest and sacrifice.

So that’s the reason, that’s the only reason, why Good Friday is good.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Brennan Mannin, The Ragamuffin Gospel, (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishers, 1999) pp. 115-116.

Read the Small Print

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Lent 5
March 21, 2021

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.


As we have traveled through the season of Lent, many of the weekly scripture texts have spoken of God’s covenant. Today Jeremiah announced a new covenant, and our ears perk up.

It captures our American hunger for what’s latest and up to the minute. Laundry detergent gets repackaged, and the manufacturer calls it “new,” as if new signifies the clothes will sparkle even brighter.

Or the auto dealer brings out the latest edition of a favorite car. It has the same name, smells the same. Perhaps the designer lengthened the front hood by an inch, moved the dome light two inches, or improved the fuel efficiency by three inches per gallon. This qualifies it as a new car. The last one drove very well. The new car should drive even better.

We like to hear something is new. It’s a lot more exciting than what is old. Or what is durable.

I wore my new blue blazer to worship today. Maybe the last one lingered for a dozen years or more. Made by Land’s End, you could toss it in a heap, hang it up next week, and all the wrinkles would just fall out. It was a great jacket despite the worn elbows, a couple of impossible stains, and the threadbare lining. So it was time to retire it and ask Santa for something new.

Our landfills are stuffed full of good things that are no longer new. Some of them function perfectly well, but they lost their shine, and somebody lost interest in them. So, out they go.

All this bears on Jeremiah’s announcement about a new covenant. Some Christian people hear Jeremiah and think he’s talking to them. After all, that old Jewish covenant has lost its charm. All those animal sacrifices, that hierarchy of priests, temple worship in a building that no longer exists: those things are old, and therefore expendable.

We had a Sunday School teacher who said as much. He said, “The old covenant was with Israel. The new covenant is with Jesus. The old is over, the new is here. And the new covenant is better.” Then he had us open our Bibles to the page right before the Gospel of Matthew. It reads, “The New Covenant, Commonly Called the New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Years later, I discovered he was well-intentioned, but confused, and probably wrong. He is correct. There is a new covenant in Jesus. We will get into that next week when Jesus rides a donkey into Jerusalem to begin Holy Week. And Jeremiah’s not talking about that.

He is not saying that someday Christianity will replace Judaism, as if it is new and improved. No, Christian faith is born out of Judaism and comes alongside of it. As the Jewish apostle Paul would declare, “God keeps the covenant made with Israel. The Christians are grafted onto that as wild shoots on an olive tree.” (Romans 11). Without Jewish parents, the Christian faith is an orphan. It would have no past, and therefore have no hope. If we don’t remember where we come from, we forget where we are going. I realize we prefer what is new and reject what is old, but when faith is concerned, this is a mistake.

So what is Jeremiah is talking about? He’s talking the old covenant, and how it appears to have come apart.

Jeremiah is one of many preachers trying to make sense out of a long-term national crisis. About 600 years before Jesus began to preach, the Jerusalem Temple was pulled down by the Babylonian army. It signaled the destruction of the nation, its faith, and its economy. Some of the smartest and most capable people were pulled off to serve the Babylonian army. The country splintered and a lot of Jerusalem never came home.

Jeremiah is one of the prophets who wants to know why. Was God punishing the people? Did God lose interest in Israel? Was Jerusalem too corrupt? The leaders too cynical? The people too self-centered to care about their neighbors? Some of the prophets had warned about all of this, and it all still happened.

In the reading we have today, Jeremiah pulls no punches. God established a covenant, and the people broke it. In an intriguing metaphor, God took a marriage vow to Israel and Israel didn’t remain faithful. God had taken them by the hand, led them out of slavery, and said, “Here is how I want you to live: no other God, don’t steal or kill, honor your mom and pop,” and all the rest. The people thought they could do better, and God’s experiment came unraveled.

Yet in the middle of the crisis, Jeremiah hears God speak afresh. “I’m going to write a new covenant,” says the Lord. “This time, I’m not going to carve it on stone tablets. I’m going to engrave it on their hearts. Everybody will know they belong to me. Everybody will know the covenant – better yet, they will know me. They will not have to learn it. They will not have to teach it to others. Everybody will know it.” Thus says the Lord.

If we hear this announcement in its context, we wake up to affirm Christianity isn’t any better than Judaism. We have the same issue! We have heard what God has to say – but it doesn’t seem to stick. We know how God wants us to live – but we move on to our own pursuits. We have recorded the Words and Deeds in an enormous Book – but those words and deeds don’t often sink into our souls. Rather they defect off some pretty tough armor.

So God reminds us of his intent to get under the skin and into the heart.

In the Hebrew language, “heart” has little to do with emotions. Emotions are like whims that come and go. They blow like the wind. They react to something or somebody outside of us. By contrast, the heart is the ruling center of someone’s being. It is the integrating center of the will, the mind, and the passions. The heart expresses who we are and directs what we do.

God is saying to his Jewish people what God-in-Christ says to the rest of us, “I know you. You belong to me, and I want you to know me.” All the external promises are to be inscribed within. The aim is for obedience to move from responding to what we’ve been told to something we want to do.

We can take a cue from Jeremiah’s metaphor, where God says, “I was their husband, I was their spouse.” Those of us who have been married know that if the relationship is reduced to one person telling the other what to do, the clock is ticking. Didn’t I tell you to take out the garbage? Aren’t you going to put the laundry? I told you to pay those credit care bills! Tick, tock, tick, tock.

By contrast: Honey, I picked up those cookies that you liked. Now that the snow is melted, I cleaned up the backyard after the dogs. Or to score a small point, I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed getting you a brand-new blue blazer. I know you asked Santa for it, but I didn’t want to wait for him. Can we hear the difference? The intention has been written so deeply upon the heart that the heart directs what we shall do. There are no empty promises nor antagonistic reprisals. In their place, there is integrity. The words are written on the heart.

Rabbi Jacob Neusner knew about words. When he died five years ago, his obituary in the New York Times reported he had published over nine hundred books. I don’t know what you have been doing with your time, but I know what he did with his. In his book, The Enchantments of Judaism, he points out that God runs the universe through words. “Let there be light, and there was light…” and that was only the beginning. When God speaks, God creates life and directs how life should be.

Rabbi Neusner compares these commandments. which constitute God’s covenant, to the printed notes on a page of music. God’s teachings are like the little black dots on a musical page, and then he says:

The musical notes are not the music and do not make the music. The musician makes the music, guided by – responding to – the notes. The two violinists, the violist, and the cellist of the quartet form the silences, define the rhythm, therefore also create the logic and power of the sound. The notes do not make the music; the musician-artists make the music. …The musical notes on paper are necessary but never suffice. So, too, in religion, God made the world with words. But the notes are not the world: they are necessary but not sufficient.

The words of religion do not make religion… God or the composer – creators above or below – send out the words, the notes, to those who will receive them and makes something of them. And while not all of us can make music, all of us are, or can be, artists in religion.[1]

It's a wonderful quote. To see it come alive, watch the bell choir when they play in a few minutes. They have rehearsed the piece. They have “worked it up.” They know when to ring the F# and when to pause because they have done this and done this. If they are nervous because they are still learning the piece, we can be patient and gracious. The music will soar, not when they are afraid of making a mistake, but when the notes have become part of them.

That’s just how it is when the promises of God are written upon the heart. What is new is not the song, but the singer. What is brought alive is not the material on the page, but the one who lifts it off the page.

Let me say a good word for every artist in religion. They are so many of you! You worship with us. You pray with us. You hum along with hymns that you know. You read the Bible. You stretch your imagination and your intellect. You keep in touch with one another. You give generous gifts to make good things happen. You are living out the promise of new covenant – and it is obvious. Thank you. Truly, thank you.

This pandemic has been a hard 53 weeks for all of us. Some of us have gotten sick. Some of us are passed on. Some have lost jobs or made major decisions about life and work. All of us have felt the stress. All of us have had our lives disrupted. If there is any single lesson from all of this, it is simply to keep going. To keep trusting. To keep living lives of grace and graciousness. Don’t stop. Stay at it.

I have a good friend who is a Biblical storyteller. He can stand up and recite large chunks of scripture. Once I heard him recite the entire Sermon on the Mount. It was the greatest sermon in the world. With passion and clarity, he recited 108 verses of scripture, letter-perfect. Afterward I said, “How did you do that?” You can guess his reply: “If you repeat something enough times, it becomes part of you.”

So let us offer a good word on behalf of repetition. We can repeat the promises of God until they are written upon our hearts. We can bend our knees in prayer until we know where to turn for help. We can share what we have with others until we develop a habit of generosity. We can speak words of affirmation until we see the good within them. We can thank God for everything until we actually become grateful.

This is my suggestion for those whose faith has lost its flavor. The way to deepen faith is by keeping at it, until God’s promises are written in a place where they cannot be erased. And when the day comes when we need it most, we discover that our ancient faith is fresh and new.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

[1] Jacob Neusner, The Enchantments of Judaism (New York: Basic Books, 1987) 13-14.

Bound By Ten Words

Exodus 20:1-17
Lent 3
March 7, 2021
William G Carter

Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. 

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. 

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. 

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. 

You shall not murder. 

You shall not commit adultery. 

You shall not steal. 

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Here is a text we have heard many times before. So many times, in fact, that we are certain sure we know what the Ten Commandments are going to say even before they speak.

This was brought home to me by a teenager in our church family. I don’t remember the setting, but I remember what he said. We were reviewing some of the basic texts in the Bible, those passages which we encourage one another to learn and memorize. Not only that, can you put in your own words? This tall kid blurted out, “I can tell you what the Ten Commandments have to say?” We turned to look at him, ready for an answer. He cleared his throat and said, “No!” “No what?”

He said, “That’s my summary of the Ten Commandments: No! That’s what they say. No!”

He had a point. Eight of the Ten begin with a negative:

No other gods. No idols. No abuse of God’s name.

No murder. No adultery. No stealing. No false witness. No coveting.

 No, no, no, no, no. One prohibition after another. And it doesn’t take much effort to flip the two remaining affirmatives into negatives:

     “Keep the Sabbath” becomes “no work on the seventh day.”

“Honor your father and mother” means “no disrespect for your parents.”

Now, he knew the basic content. But he also took all the oxygen out of the room. Nobody was smiling. All the surging energy of teenagers evaporated. And I was struck that this is how a lot of people summarize religion, that religion primarily tells you what not to do, and the successful religious person is the one who enjoys not doing all those things.

Perhaps you have known some of those successfully religious people. They take pride in their restraint. They don’t need to have any fun. They are certain that those who get out of line will be punished, and that gives them great comfort. And they love the Ten Commandments!

What they are missing, I’m afraid, are three things. First, they miss the fact that the Ten Commandments weren’t given to them, any more than they were given to you and me. Second, they miss the truth about what it means to be human. Third, they can’t quite swallow what the Bible itself says about the Commandments.

Let’s take these up in order.

First, the Ten Commandments were not given to you and me. Were you there when the mountain started to shake? Was I present when the trumpets blasted and the thunder roared and the sky turned black? No, we weren’t there. But a tribe of liberated slaves was there. The commandments were given to them. This is critically important.

There has been an infamous attempt to separate the Commandments from their setting. They were not given as abstract principles for all times and in all places. No, these are the words of God for a tribe of liberated Hebrew slaves. The setting is in the very first verse. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” 

You know the story. The old movie is rerun every year. Moses returns to Egypt and says to Pharoah, “Let my people go.” There is a contest back and forth. The God of Moses, the Lord God, prevails. His prophet Moses leads the slaves out of Egypt and into the freedom of the desert. Thanks to the powerful works of God, they escape their slavery. And it’s all because God had set his heart on them.

As we heard last week, God put a claim on Abraham and Sarah, their children, and their children’s children – even when they found themselves in Egypt. And it’s in the important Burning Bush moment when God calls Moses aside and says, “I have seen the misery of my people.” (My people).

And right before God speaks the Ten Commandments, God looks over that hapless, disorganized horde of former slaves. God smiles, and declares, “The whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” In a King James voice, God says, “You shall be my ‘peculiar treasure’” (That’s the King James phrase)” This is who they are – and then God adds a little two-letter word – “if they obey God’s voice and keep the covenant.”   

What’s their side of covenant? The Ten Words, the Ten Commandments. They can’t ignore God, they can’t use God, or they can’t belittle God in any way. They can’t plunder one another, lie to one another, murder one another, or want one another’s stuff. Plus they gotta take care of Mom and Pop and spend one day out of seven remembering who made them and who has released them from slavery. This covenant is for the freed slaves.

Second, there is the truth about what it means to be human. That’s the truth that, when someone tells us what to do, we push against it. It seems to be a necessary individuation, as old as Adam and Eve, as fresh as the two- year-old who is learning to think for herself. “I can do what I want.” Ever hear anybody talk like that? Act like that?

God did not create us as robots. God did not plant an obedience chip in our operating system. Obedience is a learned behavior, usually after some bumps and bruises from leaning in our own direction. It does not come easily. If mandated, it can become another form of slavery. And the human tendency is to push back, and some times – many times – to get away with it.

Picture the man who says to his pastor, “The lung scan didn’t turn out very well. I’m full of cancer.” The sympathetic pastor says, “Is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?” The man says, “Can you pick up a carton of Marlboros and drop them by the house?” The doctor had said, “Smoking is killing you.” But the patient thinks maybe he will push back. Do it his way.

Now, I don’t judge this. I know what it’s like to be created with a free will by a God who loves us. And most of the sidewalk psychologists can take a lesson from the apostle Paul as he admits his own urges. “I don’t understand my own actions,” he writes in one of his letters. “If I hadn’t been for the [commandments of God], I would not have known sin. I wouldn’t know what it is to covet, if the Ten Commandments had not said, “Thou shall not covet.”

This is a most profound insight into who we are and what we push against. He goes on to say, “Sin seized an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me, and killed me... I do not do the good that I want to do.” (Romans 7:7-21). For this reason, Martin Luther taught that the Ten Commandments not only teach what to do; they expose what we are ultimately unable to do, at least unable to do under our own power. And that is why we need the Gospel of Jesus Christ – to expose, to forgive, to heal, and to restore.

Just remember the conversation Jesus had one day. A young man approaches, kneels before him, and says, “Good Teacher, what must I do to gain the life of God’s eternity?” Jesus smiles at him, loves him, and says, “You know the Ten Commandments, right?”

The young man says, “Oh, yes, yes, I’ve done all those things my whole life long.” Jesus smiles again, loves him, and says, “You’re missing only one thing. Give it all up. Give up your riches, give up your superiority, give it all away, and heaven will fill you with another kind of riches.” And the man can’t do it. He still wanted to live under his own steam. He would not entrust his life, his abilities, his failures to the grace of God’s eternity (Mark 10:17-27). This is the dark side of what it means to be human.

And so, here’s the third thing we miss if we reduce a living faith to merely saying No ten times: we miss the joy of saying Yes. When scripture speaks of the Ten Commandments and all the other teachings of God, the scripture speaks of delight. There is joy when we align ourselves with God’s will. There is freedom when we bind ourselves to God’s promises.

We could hear it in our opening hymn, which is a paraphrase of Psalm 19, a Torah psalm:

Your law, O Lord is perfect, the simple making wise;

How pure are your commandments, enlightening my eyes!

More to be sought than riches, your words are my soul’s wealth;

Their taste is sweet like honey, imparting life and health.

Sweet like honey – that’s how it tastes to align your life to the commandments. To put it as simply as I know how, what God calls us to do is good for us. It creates wellness. It grounds us in good health. And as Jesus himself declares, the summary of all the commandments is love – the love of God and the love of neighbor. We do not cheapen our Creator. We do not harm the neighbor. All the commanded restraint is to make room for love, respect, justice, and grace.

So perhaps we are another tribe of liberated slaves, you and I. We did not stand at the foot of Mount Sinai when God carved the commandments into tablets of stone. But as those who belong to the tribe of Jesus Christ, we are also learning that we are not slaves to our own worst impulses. We sin, we make mistakes, sometimes we do terrible things to one another or ourselves. 

Yet beneath it all, and above it all, God’s blessing to the Hebrews is also a blessing we claim in the Christ who says to us, “You are my peculiar treasures, a holy tribe, and all of you are the priesthood of all believers.” In this way, the Ten Commandments come to us as a gift. They teach us how to live. They promise to save us from destroying ourselves. That’s good news. 

The poet Tom Troeger offers this in one of his reflections on the “no’s” and the “yes’s” of God’s commandments. Listen:

  God marked a line and told the sea / its surging tides and waves were free
  To travel up the sloping strand / but not to overtake the land.

  God set one limit in the glade / where tempting fruited branches swayed
  And that first limit stands behind / the limits that the law defined.

  The line, the limit, and the law / are patterns meant to help us draw
  a bound between what life requires / and all the things our heart desires.

  But discontent with finite powers, / we reach to take what is not ours
  And then defend our claim by force / and swerve from life’s intended course.

And then comes the lesson. Listen to this:

  We are not free when we’re confined / to every wish that sweeps the mind,
  But free when freely we accept / the sacred bounds that must be kept.[1]

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Thomas H. Troeger, “God Marked a Line and Told the Sea,” The Presbyterian Hymnal #283.  1989.

Do What?

Do What?
Genesis 17:1-16, 23-27
Lent 2
February 28, 2021

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.”

God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring. Both the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money must be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

 Then Abraham took his son Ishmael and all the slaves born in his house or bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham’s house, and he circumcised the flesh of their foreskins that very day, as God had said to him. Abraham was ninety-nine years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. And his son Ishmael was thirteen years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. That very day Abraham and his son Ishmael were circumcised; and all the men of his house, slaves born in the house and those bought with money from a foreigner, were circumcised with him.

 

Of the many foolish things that I’ve done over the years, at the top of the list is a sermon that I preached on this text. I was the guest preacher at a national conference in Philadelphia. Over a thousand Christian Educators had gathered in the convention center. About eight hundred were women and I preached a sermon about circumcision. What was I thinking?

Given the audience, the sermon went better than it should have. Most of them were gracious, or at least polite. The four pieces of hate mail that I received that day all had a legitimate point: what does this have to do with us? That is often the American church’s question. What does the Bible have to do with us? And that was the theme of the conference. As we look back into the archives of the scriptures, what are the hidden treasures to bring forward here and now?

Admittedly our Bible text sounds like a text for men, and men only. It’s a risky text to read to a congregation that has always had strong female leadership. You can get the clear impression from the text that faith is passed along only to the men and the ladies aren’t included. Maybe that’s why the practice of circumcision gets spiritualized a little later in the Bible. The specific action becomes a spiritual idea. The practice becomes a principle. It happens by the tenth chapter of Deuteronomy, as Moses says, “Circumcise your hearts and do not be stubborn any longer.” (10:16). That is a text available to everybody.

Of course, some aren’t convinced. This is Jewish text about a Jewish covenant – and the argument is, “But we are Christians.” That is an old argument, as old as the country of Turkey in the late 50’s, in an area called Galatia. As the Christian movement spread westward, some Christians insisted the uncircumcised pagans had to become Jews before they could become Christian – specifically, that they had to be circumcised before they were baptized. The apostle Paul said, “That’s ridiculous.” He wrote an angry letter to those people and said, “Who bewitched you? Christian faith is about freedom.”

Well, we can guess what happened. Once his letter to the Galatians was printed in a Bible, a lot of Christians have said the Jewish covenant has nothing to say to us on us. One early Christian trimmed away all the Jewish references from his Bible. To the church’s dismay, there wasn’t a whole lot left. So the church decided to keep the Jewish material in its Bible, recognizing the Christian church comes from the Jews, as Jesus comes from Sarah and Abraham.

So I’m wondering what to say about all this. On the one hand, something that gets us much Bible ink as all this seems ancient and archaic. And yet, this is an ancient practice that could be a corrective in the church. The key is what God speaks: “This is my covenant, for you and those who come after you.” The promise is broadly inclusive. It begins with one household and extends sideways to all connected to Abraham. When the covenant is “cut,” it includes the slaves and servants and resident outsiders in Abraham’s house. When God commands it, it comes with a holy blessing.  

The covenant also reaches into the future. God says, “No longer will your name be Abram, which means ‘father.’ Now your name will be Abraham.” That means ‘big daddy of an enormous multitude.” Old Abraham, ninety-nine years old and dry as an old dead stump, is promised offspring through surgically altered equipment. It’s no wonder Sarah laughed when God announced she would have a baby. Either it was too sad to be true or too impossible to comprehend. God gave them a child anyway, a child named “Isaac,” the Jewish word for Laughter.

The point here is the ritual is connected to the promise. What the Jews say of circumcision is the same thing that Christians say about baptism. This is when we are marked and claimed as the children of God. In the words of Rabbi Jacob Neusner, the great Jewish scholar, ‘A minor surgical rite of dubious medical value becomes the mark of the renewal of the agreement between God and Israel…It is meant to accomplish a specific goal: to secure a place for the child, a blessing for the child.” [1]

So it’s more an action. Words surround the action! We learn this from the Jews. A table blessing recognizes a meal as a gift. The prayer at death, the kaddish, announces God is holy and the Messiah is coming. At a circumcision, at least ten Jewish men gather around a male child on the eighth day of life. They verbally bless this child into the covenant that God has made.

Like baptism, the ritual offers a sign that is both deeply personal and profoundly communal. It announces you belong to the God who brought you out of slavery in Egypt. You belong to the God who promised Abraham and Sarah that they would flourish as parents. Through this outward sign and the words that go with it, you belong to God. The story of your belonging is marked in your skin. It is a continuing reminder of who you are. It was done before the child can say no. As I think about it, that might be the most important insight of all.

I have friends who grew up during the sixties. They were raised to question every other authority. So when they married and had children, they decided to give their kids a choice about whether they or not wanted to go to church. They let the kids sleep in until they were sixteen, and then said, “Do you want to go to church?” The offspring had never sung with other people, or prayed with other people, or listened to the scripture, or even sit and be quiet for any longer than ten seconds. So guess what the kids decided?

I have two daughters who had no choice about what they did on a Sunday morning. It’s only fair; nobody gave me a choice, so I didn’t give them a choice. I chose for my children to be baptized in the name of the Trinity; it was my responsibility to make sure they know what that means. As they were shaped by scripture and the practices of the church, they have been shaped to make choices that honor the Lord Jesus Christ. If I had given them no guidance in how to live their lives, that would have made me an unfit parent.  

So this is what the Jews do: they circumcise and say, “You belong to God.” Your story is God’s story. You were in Egypt, and God freed you from Pharaoh’s brick quota. You were wandering in the desert, and God gave you a teaching. We were in the Promised Land, and God gave you milk and honey, and all along the way, God said, “Don’t forget who you are.”

All of this brings us to the primary benefit of circumcision, which is also the primary benefit of baptism. Are you still with me? Are you writing this down? The primary benefit is this: when you wake up in the morning, you don’t have to wonder who you are.

Your identity is given to you by a community that says, “You are God’s child.” You are given a story that is greater than your own stories of pain and despair and loneliness. Your life is enrolled in a story that is greater than some advertiser telling you what you should want or what you should buy or what you should consume.

That’s why we always celebrate Christian baptism. The Christian life is rooted in the moment when the church says, “You belong to God, because we belong to God.”

And I know as well as you, there are times when faith wavers, wanders, or even evaporates. The journey of the heart does not always travel in a straight line. Along the road there are detours, potholes, and the occasional dead-end. Things happen. Life happens. But that does not mean the journey is over. The road is still beneath our feet and it is God’s road. Every step we take is on the firm foundation of God’s love. Every step is a response to the claim God has on our lives.

And who knows? Maybe what we thought was a dead end is actually a new beginning. Maybe if we fear we have wandered too far off the holy highway, it could be an invitation to venture onto new land.

The greater truth is that wherever you go, wherever you find yourself, you are a child of God. God’s story is your story. God chooses you to be part of that story. God's choices precede all of our choices.

• We didn’t choose for Jesus to be born. That was God’s decision. It was made for us.
• When the human race chose to get rid of Jesus, God chose to raise Jesus from the dead. That wasn’t our decision. God did that, so Jesus can keep interfering with us until we know who we are.
• We didn’t choose “church.” Church was God’s idea. Church is God’s experiment. God sends the Holy Spirit to fill, and inform, and commission. We didn’t choose all of this; it was chosen for us.

Now, if you’d rather do it your way, and go on your own, there’s no tell how that will turn out. Just like Adam and Eve. There’s a great line by Frederick Buechner, when he describes Eve after she and her husband got thrown out of the Garden of Eden. He says, “Like Adam, Eve spent the rest of her days trying to convince herself that it had all worked out for the best.”[2] I suppose we can convince ourselves of anything we want. As for me, I’d like to spend my time convincing you that belonging to God is more important than anything else, in life and in death. 

On the eighth day of life, God says, “You shall mark the Jewish child as a sign of the covenant.” It is the eighth day, I suppose, because that’s the first day of a new creation. The top of our baptismal font has eight sides: one for each day of the first creation, and the eighth for God’s new creation. The covenant is God’s new creation, by which we are shaped and given direction. It is God’s announcement that we matter and that we have a purpose still unfolding. It is God’s blessing, given from one generation to the next, so that when our days are over, or if our days are still going on, we know that nothing separates us from God’s steadfast love.

From this day forward, we belong to God. That’s what we believe and what we teach. Through the grace of Jesus Christ, all of us are adopted into the family. And the word for our belonging is covenant.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Jacob Neusner, The Enchantments of Judaism: Rites of Transformation From Birth Through Death (New York: Basic Books, 1987)

[2] Buechner, Peculiar Treasures (San Francisco: Harper and Row)

The Bow in the Sky

Genesis 9:8-17
Lent 1
2/21/21
William G. Carter

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

 

God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

Years ago, my Uncle Fred built an ark. He didn’t use the kind of lumber that Noah did. Mostly he used scraps of wood from around the garage. And it was an impressive little project! The front door swings down to become a ramp. It’s sturdy enough for the elephants and tall enough for the giraffes. Up on top, there are living quarters for Noah and his family.

With a jigsaw, Uncle Fred cut out the animals from a large piece of plywood. He produced them two by two. When he finished, my Mom painted each one and put faces on Mr. and Mrs. Noah. For years, this was a cherished gift for my children. When they moved on to other pursuits, we brought Uncle Fred’s project to the church nursery, where other children have continued to imagine the Bible story.

All of this was intended by my uncle. He attached a brief note when the ark first floated into my home: “This is for the kids to enjoy.”

This is how we often regard the story: as a gift for children. It is the subject of Vacation Bible School lessons and youth choir musicals. Kermit the Frog sang about rainbow connections. A famous comedian who goes unmentioned these days had a great comedy bit: “Hey Noah, how long can your tread water?”

And I'll tell you what: during this sermon, you could go online to order the Fisher-Price version of Noah and the ark. For only $41.99, you get two elephants, two zebras, two lions, two giraffes, a 600-year-old man, and a big plastic boat that won’t sink in your bathtub. Additional animals sold separately. It's something for the kids to enjoy.

Except that it’s not. The story in Genesis is a dark story, a terrible story. It’s the story of how God intended to get rid of all the people of the world.

Certainly, God had his reasons. God made the world, but it was turning out poorly. One day, God looked around and saw the cruelty and the violence that people inflict on one another. God said, “All they think about is evil. All they do is hurt and destroy.” And God had enough. God was heartbroken about making an imperfect world.

Since God has been around before making the world, God didn’t need a world full of wretched people to feel complete. So God decided to wipe the slate clean. Wash everything away. God would be free to go other places and do other things.

The only kink in the plan is that God looked down and saw Noah. God remembered him and said, “Well, Noah isn’t so bad. In fact, he’s rather good. His wife, his sons, and his daughters in law are good too.” Thanks to the eight of them, that’s why you and I are here today. If it weren’t for Noah, the human race would be extinct. But God remembered Noah, and God said, “Maybe there is a glimmer of hope.”

When we read this story as adults, we hear all kinds of legendary touches. Noah was five hundred years old when he became a father. He was six hundred years old when the rain started to fall. At that advanced age, he was able to build a huge boat, line up the crocodiles and tigers without getting hurt, and make room for the mosquitos. And I imagine Noah and his family made the voyage as vegetarians; there’s no use in eating your cargo.

Just for the record, I happen to believe all of this without having to take it literally, because I happen to believe the deeper truth: that God had every reason to wipe out every person until he looked down and remembered Noah.

It must make God sad to create a world that doesn’t turn out very well. God creates people with the capacity to love and their hearts are bent on destruction. God gives them seeds to plant gardens, and some of them hoard the produce while others go hungry. God gives them hands to work with metal and they build spears. God gives them land of incredible beauty, and they sell tickets for admission and strip-mine every available mineral. 

God made the humans good, but they turned out worse than the animals. In the jungle, at least, animals survive by being fit. Human beings, on the other hand, manipulate, exploit, scheme, and plunder. They don’t have to sink their claws into one another, but they do. Unlike the wild animals, grown-up humans torture one another, teenagers play mind games, and grade-school children humiliate their classmates. No doubt, God has always had every reason to be incredibly sad. In the words of one rabbi, “The great flood was supplied by God’s tears.”

But through the tears, God looked down and saw Noah. And God saw Noah’s wife, whose name was Mrs. Noah. And God saw their three sons and three daughters in law. Something softened in the Creator’s heart, and God thought, “Maybe I can work with them after all. Maybe I can make something of them without having to start over from scratch.”

Several years ago, Bill Moyers brought together a lot of different voices to talk about the stories of Genesis. This is a text held in common by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Moyers thought it would be fruitful to host conversations around the ancient stories, and he was right.

For the Noah story, Moyers asked his panel what kind of headline they would write to describe it. A newspaper editor said the headline should be, “God Destroys World.” Across the table from him sat the Rev. Dr. Samuel Proctor, for many years the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the leading church in Harlem. Dr. Proctor said, “Oh no. The headline ought to read, ‘God Gives Humans Second Chance.’”

Proctor said, “I learned the Noah story from my father, a Sunday school teacher. When we grew up, we laughed at the far-fetched details, but we didn’t try to rewrite the story. We drew our lessons from it what it said. And it held before us the possibility of another opportunity to get things right.”

He said, “Every Wednesday, my daddy would press his trousers and go down to the Philharmonic Glee Club rehearsal. These sixty black guys – table waiters, coal trimmers, truck drivers – would give one big concert a year to the white population. Even though our daddy was singing, we had to sit in the back. But in the midst of all that rejection, hate, and spite, they went. And every concert they ended by singing the same song: ‘Yesterday the skies were grey, but look this morning they are blue. The world is singing the song of the dawn.”

He said, “That’s the story of Noah! Sixty black guys in tuxedos in the 1920s, with lynching everywhere and hatred. But they had something we need to recover right now. I can’t let go of this story of Noah and the flood because after all of the devastation, there’s a rainbow. I’m not going to live without that kind of hope.”[1]

Here is the hope: after every thunderstorm, there is a rainbow somewhere. God takes his archery bow, the very weapon of war, and hangs it up in the sky. The point is: there will be no more arrows from heaven to earth. God has promised to deal with us by another way. God will influence us without resorting to intimidation or wrath. God decided to wash away the world once before, and realized it was a bad mistake. Why? Because there’s always Noah, that interesting 600-year-old man whose very presence is proof that the human race is worthy of a one more chance.

Our text today is the conclusion of a three-chapter story. God is doing all the talking. Noah can’t get a word in edgewise, and he doesn’t dare interrupt. After forty days and nights of rain, after the terrible washing-away of sin and sinful people, after the better part of a year floating on a flooded earth, God gives a speech to the eight human survivors and a whole lot of animals. The speech is summed up in a single word, a word God uses seven times in nine verses. The word is “covenant.”

“Covenant” begins as God’s word. That’s our word for this season of Lent. A covenant is an agreement. When God makes a covenant, it sounds like God says, “This is the way it’s going to be.”

As we hear the scriptures today, the very first covenant is given to Noah and his children. That means it’s a covenant with us, an agreement with the whole human family. Every person alive today is not only a child of Adam and Eve, but also a child of Noah and his wife. All of us are great-grandchildren of the flood.

The first covenant that God makes is a self-imposed restraining order: “I won’t use nature to wipe out the human race and the animals around them.” That is God’s commitment. What we do with that is up to us. If we choose to poison the environment, we must figure out what to do with the consequences. If we change our own climate by putting toxins in the air, we have a responsibility to thaw out Texas. There is continuing evidence of short-sighted human behavior and self-destructive tendencies.

But sometimes we see Noah – and we remember we have a second chance to get it right.

All the while, God promises to stick with us. “When I look at the rainbow,” God says, “I will remember my steadfast love and self-restraint.” No more annihilation. No more holocaust. No more fury and destruction. Not from heaven, at least. That rainbow is God’s eternal Post-It note. It is the continuing reminder that the Creator of all things is in favor of all people, in favor of the whole rainbow of different colors that make up the light of the world.

Elie Wiesel once said, “God created us because God loves good stories.” The story of the human family keeps on. No doubt, God is regularly disappointed with some of the plot twists. As God knows so well, a flood never did wash away the all-too-human tendency to goof up our lives. Sometimes we get stuck in the mud. Yet God chooses to keep living with all of us.

This is the promise of God’s covenant. God is the beginning of our story. God will be the end of our story. And in the middle of it all, as we heard today in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus steps out of the water – the water of his own baptism - and his faithfulness saves the world from drowning. This is the Good News.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved. 

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[1] Thanks to Carlos Wilton for passing along the story.