Proper 8 (June 26-July 2)
Texts: Genesis 22:1-14;
Matthew 10:42-44
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/live/Zc8FMug2uxo?feature=share&t=1050
PowerPoint Slides for Sermon
TRANSFORMING EVOLVED CULTURES OF EXCLUSION
“Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” In John’s Gospel (1:29), that’s what John the Baptist shouts as he sees Jesus coming to be baptized. It has become traditional in many Christian churches to sing this proclamation as we begin the distribution of Holy Communion. (We still do it here at the 8:00 service.) It is so familiar to many of us that we might not have noticed an important detail. We are accustomed to talking about our sins in the plural. But this verse from John 1 most definitely talks about “sin” in the singular. Is there one sin above all others which Jesus, as the Lamb of God, came to take away?
I’d like to propose this morning that, yes, we might single out one sin above all others because it has been so detrimental to humankind throughout our history. Calling Jesus the “Lamb of God” provides the clue to this sin by pointing the way to the ancient reality of ritual blood sacrifice. (We get a full-dose of this in our First Reading today.) As modern anthropology is increasingly coming to show us, all human religions, and the cultures wrapped around them, began with ritual blood sacrifice. So many different gods, so many different stories, so many different practices, but the one thing they have in common is putting someone on an altar and killing them as part of their worship.
Here’s pictures of one of the oldest they’ve yet to find: a place in modern-day Turkey called Göbekli Tepe. The excavation site is on the left, looking a bit like Stonehenge, but it much older by several thousand years — dating to 9600 B.C.E., nearly 12,000 years ago. And an artist sketch is on the right of what it looked like originally. And, yes, they are also digging up lots of evidence that this was a religious shrine were ancient peoples came to ritually kill someone on an altar.
One of the most important events in my life was discovering the work of French scholar René Girard thirty-one years ago. It’s a full-blown anthropology that begins to make sense of why the religions of human beings, very different in their particulars, all came to have this one thing in common: ritual blood sacrifice. I think he’s really solved that puzzle. At the same time, Girard, who had grown up in France outside the church, came to begin to read the Bible and attend the Catholic Church of his mother’s family. Because Girard’s anthropology also begins to explain why the religions we evolved with might be the sin which Jesus came to take away. What does “Lamb of God” point to? Ritual sacrifice, right? The Passover time sacrifice.
This all has been so life-changing to me that I’m tempted every Sunday to try explain all I’ve learned these past thirty+ years. That’s why I’ve announced that I’m going to take a little bit different approach: shorter sermons (Yea!) and more time in conversation with you in adult education opportunities — beginning with “Gospel Talks” between the services. I’ll start this morning after the service since we only have one service on the holiday weekend.
So here’s my plan for today’s sermon: (1) Sketch out how the sin which the Lamb of God came to take away from us is all human religion as it originally evolved – and how Jesus instead offers us a revolution approach — a drastic change! — to redeem our religions. Our First Reading today from Genesis 22 signaling a first big step in that history.
(2) As LCR seeks to be more welcoming, the central theme of two years of mission exploration, we will notice that theme in today’s Gospel Reading and seek to understand how the difference between evolutionary religion and Jesus’ new revolutionary approach to religion makes all the difference to be truly welcoming. In short, I’d like to propose that our seeking to be more welcoming is a crucial reason why you might want to learn what I’ve been learning about the past thirty years.
That God would ask Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac on an altar is repugnant to us, right? Revolting. Disturbing. To think about a father putting his son on an altar. Especially the son that had been long promised. How could the God of love that Jesus reveals to us ever do something like that? The ancient author of this text tries to explain it in terms of God testing Abraham’s faith. But isn’t that still an incredibly cruel test? Do you buy that? What if we read this not so much from the perspective of the person who wrote this text long before Jesus but instead read it from the perspective of Jesus?
I’d like to make a big — huge! — proposal. If we read the whole Bible from the perspective of Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, might we see the entire biblical journey, from beginning to end, in terms of the movement away from our evolved religions centered on ritual blood sacrifice? I have a handout that proposes just that, how that revolution takes place. The first entry is today’s First Reading where I suggest that the clues we do see in this text involves the names for God used. The first is Elohim, the Hebrew word for any god, including false gods. The name for God used at the pivotal moment of Abraham with his knife raised above his son changes to Yahweh, the Jewish peoples’ particular name for God. So, from the perspective of Jesus, who came to reveal the dead-end of sacrifice, could we say that Abraham at the beginning of the story hears the voice of the ancient gods commanding him to sacrifice Isaac. And at the end he hears Yahweh just in time, telling him to stop! Don’t do that! And what this story comes to signal for the Jewish people is that they are to cease from human blood sacrifice — a huge first step away.
What you see on the rest of the handout, then, is the many Hebrew prophets saying that Yahweh, their God, is making it known that God never really wanted blood sacrifice. Rather, God wants compassion and justice for all, especially the least among us, like the widows and orphans. So here is a slide that gives an overview of the radical difference between the religions and cultures of our human evolution and how Jesus came to revolutionize religion — not so much a new religion to convert to, but a revolutionary new approach to religion that can redeem all our current religions. [Extemporize the content of the slide, especially the difference between gods of wrath and the God of love. Difference of practice: ritual blood sacrifice to sacrament. Difference in core value: law giving way to grace.]
Let’s finish with my second goal for today, glimpsing how this difference in religions can make a definitive difference in the quality of our welcoming at Lutheran Church of the Resurrection. I can begin with the fact that our evolution religions churn out cultures which are the opposite of welcoming. They are cultures which emphasize Us over against Them. Defining who’s in and who’s out. One of the ways we will be trying to hone our welcome is with LGBTQ people, who have long felt ostracized from churches. There is a group of folks who are preparing to lead us in these conversations, a process called “Reconciling in Christ.” I hope today’s sermon helps us to understand how important this process will be.
I’d like to close today with an area of our welcoming for which we’ve already been going through for several decades. I’m talking about our welcome to the central practice of Jesus’ revolutionary approach to religion. I’m talking about the Holy Communion that replaces ritual blood sacrifice. Think back to what you might know about our practice of Holy Communion a hundred years ago. Was it fully welcoming? No! It wasn’t. I remember going to my grandparents Missouri Synod church as a boy: you had to register the week before Communion to make sure you were OK to attend. This central practice of our faith had lapsed back into the exclusions of sacrificial religions and cultures, right? Most every church practiced it as something that only members of the denomination could attend. If you were Lutheran, you couldn’t take Communion at a Catholic Church, and vice versa. Back in the 1960’s we finally began to question this practice. It didn’t seem right to us, so many Christian denominations began to change the practice. We began to welcome all other Christians to take Communion with us.
Next: when I grew up, we couldn’t take Communion until we were Confirmed in 8th grade. We welcomed infants to baptism but not Communion. A few years later that changed to fifth grade. Did you know that since 1997 the official position of our church is that we welcome infants to both baptism and Communion? We still don’t practice it fully that way. But infants are officially welcome to take Communion. Would the goal of being a welcoming church at Lutheran Church of the Resurrection maybe begin to practice that more often?
Finally, there is one last exclusion connected with Communion: whether or not one is baptized. Over the last ten years, our church has even begun to talk about that. To lower the last barrier. Many congregations have already begun to practice Communion as open to all people, even the yet-to-be-baptized. There are, in fact, many instances in these churches where people feel welcomed to become baptized because they were already welcomed to take Communion. Communion became the gateway to baptism.
Here’s the bottom line: if we want to become an increasingly welcoming church, then we need to learn more about how Jesus challenged and came to transform our cultures based on exclusion. Please stay after worship for a few minutes today to begin that learning with a story that I find life-changing. I hope you do, too. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Lutheran Church of the Resurrection,
Racine, WI, July 2, 2023
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/live/Zc8FMug2uxo?feature=share&t=1050
PowerPoint Slides for Sermon
