Proper 21 / Ordinary 26 (Sept 25-Oct 1)
Texts: Matthew 21:23-32;
Phil 2:1-13; Eze 18:1-4, 25-32
YouTube: https://youtu.be/aAAH3zgDkzc
Excerpt Page from Robinette, Klein & Taylor
FOLLOWING JESUS PASSES THROUGH ATHEISM
Have you ever been a spouse at a high school reunion? All the classmates are sharing memories that bind them together, so that you can sometimes feel like the fifth wheel. But last weekend was the third time, I think, that I’ve tagged along with Ellen to one of hers, so I’ve gotten to know some of her classmates. Her friends that I know the best weren’t able to attend, so that was a bit disappointing. But I met some new and interesting classmates who hadn’t been to previous reunions. The guy who had been class clown in high school now warms up the audience every night before the Jimmy Kimmel Live show. He’s a long-time friend of Jimmy Kimmel. And one of the class nerds, who has a Ph.D. in immunology, is currently researching how the immune system sometimes makes Alzheimer’s Disease progress faster and how we might stop that progression. Being a nerd myself, I found it quite interesting!
Having attended several times, I can’t keep a low profile anymore. They know I’m a pastor, so they did ask me to offer the invocation before the dinner. But that knowing I’m a pastor did help lead me into an interesting conversation. One of Ellen’s classmates had come to Jesus as an adult and so his sharing his story was mixed in with attempts to evangelize his former classmates. Knowing I’m a pastor, I think he expected that I would support his efforts. But I took the conversation in a different direction.
I shared, as I have with you, that I don’t believe that Jesus came to convert us to a new religion called Christianity. Instead, Jesus was most interested in leading us to become better human beings, no matter what religious faith we might practice. That’s why Paul argues in the first generation of Christians argues that pagans don’t need to convert to Judaism. In fact, religions tend to divide us, so Jesus in helping us be better human beings, was about practicing religion in ways that bring us together, not split us apart. And I wrapped things up by saying this: “I’m often more comfortable with people who say they are atheists but are trying very hard to be better, loving human beings than I am with folks who are very religious but are doing very little of the things Jesus tells us to do to be better human beings.”
I thought of this conversation as I read today’s Gospel, especially the parable of the man who had two sons, one who said he would do what his father asked but then didn’t, and the other son who said ‘no’ to what his father asked but then did it. It occurred to me that that is like what I said about my experience with some atheists vs. some religious people. Some atheists say ‘no’ to believing in God but then work hard at the kinds of things which Jesus asks us to do in order to become better human beings. They treat everyone with respect and seek to help those in need. They are loving people who work at bringing human beings together. Whereas many religious people work at the opposite, using their religion to bash others and as a justification for dividing the human family. They focus on what they see as sinful and preach hatred toward those we perceive as enemies. They think they are about helping people be good. But I believe that if it is mixed with messages of hate and division, and focused on punishment rather than healing, then they are not following what Jesus teaches us in how to become better human beings. The are ultimately dividing the human family rather than working to bring it together.
This morning with you I’d like to even extend what I said last weekend about atheists. I’ve at least hinted at this before, but let me say it more clearly and straightforwardly this morning. I not only often feel more comfortable with atheists than religious people, but in a way I feel like one of them. I feel like I could claim being an atheist. At least to the extent that I disavow the experience of God which has evolved with humankind. In following Jesus, I feel like he empties out the evolutionary experiences of God, just as surely as he emptied himself out on the cross.
This is the radical proclamation of our Second Reading from Philippians 2 this morning. A God who empties himself on a human cross calls human beings to be atheists when it comes to the experiences of God with which we evolved. We can no longer believe in any of those versions of God. We must be divested of them before we can truly come to know the true God through Jesus. That’s how radical the message of the cross and resurrection truly is. Dying and rising with Christ means dying to all our evolutionary experiences of God and rising to know a completely different God. A God whose power is nothing but the power of love, the power of emptying one’s self for the sake of others — even, and this is the really hard part, for the sake of those we consider enemies. “Love you enemies,” is outrageous, right? Never has this been taught in history. It’s the radical core of Jesus teaching us to be human. Our capacity to love, which we can find through the spirit of Jesus, can be poured out to all human beings, to all creatures, to the whole creation. It is through this pouring out of love that we all are ultimately bound together in ways that lead to the flourishing of life. So much so that death itself is ultimately defeated.
Let me explain a bit more about the evolutionary experiences of God I mentioned. This is why I’ve come to find anthropology so essential. The Bible leads us on a journey to know the true God through leading is on a journey by which we come to know the false gods of our evolution. I can’t emphasize this enough. We cannot know who God truly is without first understanding how wrong we’ve been about who God is. It takes the cross of Jesus to come to fully know this.
The chief issue which our early ancestors needed to overcome was that of a tendency to become rivals with each other — the mimesis I’ve talked about — that spiral into killing each other. The biggest threat to our survival was us. If we didn’t find out how to stop killing each other, we would eventually die out. Perhaps this is what happened to Neanderthals and other previous humanoid species. So how did survive our own annihilation? By stumbling onto the Scapegoat mechanism and turning it into religion. We found — all of this subconscious, or preconscious; we weren’t consciously aware of what we were doing (Jesus on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing”) — but when violence was escalating to the point of everyone against everyone, we found a lightning quick peace by imitating one of the conflicts among us, so that everyone could now turn against one person. All-against-all violence turned to all-against-one violence. It was a peace that everyone could enjoy, minus one.
As I said, this was all subconscious. Our early homo sapiens ancestors weren’t aware that their peace derived by scapegoating one of their own. In fact, this is precisely where and why religion comes into the picture. We don’t ever have to realize that we ourselves are creating peace through murder. We can attribute it all to the gods. The experience of the peace is rather magical, after all. We were at a point of crisis, total chaos, everyone against everyone. And then we weren’t. It feels like something superhuman must be behind it. So that’s exactly what happened. We assumed something superhuman was behind it all. The gods sowed chaos amongst us and then showed us how to it all into law and order. They gave us rules to follow. They gave us rituals to practice — which in its earliest forms was ritual human sacrifice. We reenacted the thing that brings us peace by ritually killing someone on an altar as an offering to the gods who command such things. When we become uncomfortable with killing fellow human beings, the gods allow us to substitute animals.
But this is a sketch of where our experiences of God come from. As we moved on through human history, the scapegoating evolved into institutions of law and order and also of war. The gods show us who the criminals are amongst us whom we must expel or execute. The gods show us who our outside enemies are, from whom we must remain pure of their influence and with whom we must sometimes go to war. Does this all sound too familiar?
These are the gods behind every movement of nationalism and imperialism, for centuries and centuries, for which our leaders consider themselves and portray themselves as godlike. As representatives of the gods who show us our enemies and how to strive for peace through war with them. Meanwhile, thinking themselves to be godlike, they can justify any of their behaviors to themselves. As gods they are above the laws which everyone else has to follow. As gods, they are deserving of all the wealth and power they can accumulate.
But these are the gods from whom we must divest ourselves. Jesus, as God’s representative, as equal to God (Phil 2:6), does the opposite of our kings and emperors. He empties himself on the cross in love for the sakes of every person, every creature, of the whole creation. The true God raises him to new life as the means of finally getting to know who God truly is. This is the moment of revelation that’s most urgent, a God who empties the divine self in love. Through our scapegoat, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, God shows us the way to empty ourselves of all those other experiences of God which require violence to stop our problem of violence, so that it might be replaced with the power of love — a power which we can then regularly empty ourselves of for the sake of our neighbors. We die and rise with Christ, passing through atheism if you will, to the experience of who God truly is, so that we might finally be able to become more truly human. We might finally find our full capacity to love everyone, to love the whole creation, so that we might join God in working to help all life to flourish and to find fulfillment.
After St. Paul tells us how to basically pass through atheism to discover a brand new God who empties the divine self on the cross in love, he goes one to tell us how this affected him personally. Which we will read next week. How he had to give up his previous religiosity, counting it as crap (his word not mine), in order to die and rise with Christ to a new way of living. That’s next week’s portion from Philippians. So we will continue these themes next week. To warm you up, I encourage you to ponder the Excerpt Page this morning. The first part is about the theology, the atheism we must pass through. The second part is the anthropology: how we must learn to see the false gods to which we still remain susceptible through history’s long parade of nationalistic movements — like the one we are enduring right now. More next week on how we can not only endure it but become leaders in how to finally throw it off. And be the new humans God created us to be. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, September 27, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/aAAH3zgDkzc
Excerpt Page from Brian Robinette and
from Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor
