2nd Sunday in Lent
Texts: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18;
Luke 13:31-35; Phil 3:17-4:1
YouTube: https://youtu.be/_A8-JrAdD6Q
Sermon Take-Home Notes
BIBLICAL COVENANT: GOD’S SELF-REVELATION AGAINST
THE SACRIFICIAL VIOLENCE OF NATIONALISTIC HUMAN CULTURE
Let’s begin with the verses we might to skip over most of the time, because, to be honest, they bewilder us:
The LORD said to Abraham, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” Abraham brought God all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two.
There’s that thing again. Ritual blood sacrifice! Three times the Book of Genesis gives us an account of God making a covenant with Abraham and Sarah to begin the history of salvation. This is the one that seals it with ritual blood sacrifice. A three year-old heifer, goat, and ram are cut in half. Gross, right? And then God’s presence passes through the middle of the divided carcasses. What’s that all about?
Anthropologists tell us that it was actually a specific kind of ritual sacrifice used to seal covenants in ancient cultures. In this kind of covenant, the parties involved would walk between the bits of the sacrificed animals, symbolically declaring, “May this happen to me if I break this covenant.” In the typical structure of such agreements, the weaker party (such as a vassal king, like Herod under Caesar) would be expected to pass between the pieces, committing themselves to obedience under penalty of death.
However, something extraordinary is represented in this instance. In this story, only God (represented by the fire and smoke) passes between the pieces. Not the weaker party. Abraham is not required to walk the path of blood (because he’s asleep!), meaning that God takes full responsibility for the covenant. This twist on ritual blood sacrifice is radical: instead of demanding fidelity from Abraham under threat, God unilaterally binds God’s self to the promise, essentially declaring that God would rather suffer and die than break God’s word.
This passage is set within a world where gods were often capricious, transactional, and contractual, requiring humans to offer sacrifices and loyalty in order to receive blessings. But the God of Abraham makes a promise without demanding reciprocity — no quid pro quo — and it’s a shocking contrast to the conditional pacts of human rulers and deities. We may grimace when coming upon passages like this in the Bible, with the ritual blood sacrifice on full display. But if we are open to learning the anthropology of it, it just might help us to discover how the God of the Bible is so very different from the other gods. In fact, I’m willing to propose to you this morning, that understanding the role of ritual blood sacrifice in the Bible — anthropologically, so to speak — is the key to understanding the entire Bible. (I’m aware that this is quite a bold statement, which is why the back of your Sermon Notes gives some background on the anthropology behind it.)
Here’s how I would put the matter to you in a nutshell. This morning’s account of the covenant with Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 15 ironically presents God sealing the covenant through ritual blood sacrifice in order to lead humankind on a journey away from the gods of sacrifice forever. Why did God need to make such a covenant, sealed by this twist on ritual blood sacrifice itself? Because human beings had already evolved with the experience of gods of sacrifice at the center of their lives and societies — for many, many millennia up to this point. But that’s never who the true creator God is. God created us in love, and then watched as we wandered down the wrong evolutionary path of ritual blood sacrifice and the gods who command it. We thought we knew who God is, because these sacrifices do help prevent even wider outbreaks of violence that threatened our extinction. But we were wrong. Our evolution had us wandering down a false path, away from the true God.
In two weeks, we will read Jesus’s well-known parable of the prodigal son. Might we read it as a parable of how God, like the father in the parable, watched his children split apart because they didn’t understand who he is as a parent? We know that experience as parents, too, don’t we? Watching our children make mistakes? Especially ones that risk life-changing consequences? What do we do as parents when that happens? When they are young children, we sometimes impose lesser consequences in order to teach them to make better choices. But as they become adults, we sometimes need to simply watch as they make wrong choices. It’s really painful, right? But we can rely on our covenants of love with them, as parent and child. We can make it clear that we are always there with our love and support for the long haul, should they choose to return home.
Now imagine that God, for tens of thousands of years, has watched our species wander down an evolutionary path, that does help us initially to avoid even worse danger, but it is nevertheless a path with its own dangers in the end. Because it believes in violence to stop violence. And a consequence of that dead-end path we took is because we failed to truly understand who our creator is. Who are “father” is. For tens of thousands of years we got it in our heads and our hearts that the gods require us to offer sacrifices in a quid pro quo arrangement: that we must offer something precious to us to the gods, and they will grant us favors in return — like rain for our crops, or victory over our enemies, or healing and protection from the diseases that plague us. If you are the true creator God that has painfully watched your children wander down this wrong path that doesn’t understand that you are a God of grace and love, not quid pro quo and punishment, what do you do? You make a covenant with them that’s not based on quid pro quo, but instead on sheer grace, and you commit to the long-haul of trying to slowly, gradually reveal to them who you truly are.
That, my friends, is how I’ve come to read and understand the Bible. As the lo-o-o-ong journey of God making a covenant with the people of Israel in order to guide them on a new evolutionary path, if you will, away from the violent gods of sacrifice in order to finally know the nonviolent God of love. In short, to finally know the God of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah who suffers our typical violence in order to expose it and to forgive it. The key to revealing who God truly is, in other words, is to have revealed to us who we truly are. We are a species on an ultimately dead-end evolutionary path because we have come to believe in gods who command us to use violence as a solution to violence. But the true God has never abandoned us. Remains in covenant with us. We have always been welcome to choose the path back home to the God of love. To the God whom Jesus shows us by taking on our sacrificial violence and then by being raised up in three days in order to forgive us. In order to begin leading us down a new evolutionary path that leads to abundant life.
That’s why I’ve come to emphasize that it’s not about conversion to a new religion, especially since our religions have tended to lead us back to gods of violent sacrifice. To gods who command us to stop violence with violence. No, what we are offered in Jesus Christ is essentially conversion to a better way of being human. We are being offered a new evolutionary path the leads to endless life with the God of love.
There’s another important ingredient to reading the Bible anthropologically, as the story of God leading us away from the false paths of evolution and onto a true path which leads to life. The part of the story where we wandered down false paths for tens of thousands of years helps us to see why it takes a covenant with God to begin to undo those thousands of years. God knows it will take a long time for us to finally choose the true path without any relapses. The journey onto the true path will itself take thousands of years — hopefully not tens of thousands of years, but still thousands of years. It’s been well over three thousand years so far since God made the covenant with Abraham and Sarah. It’s been two thousand years since Jesus the Messiah fully revealed the God of love to us. And there are brothers and sisters who call themselves Christian Nationalists who seem to still be on the path following gods of violent sacrifice. Does this approach to understanding the biblical journey as evolutionary help us to understand our mission today? To more fully understand ourselves what’s at stake in this covenant to Abraham and Sarah so long ago? To understand the Bible’s revelation in terms of the choice between the path that ultimately leads to violent destruction vs the path that leads to abundant life? And that it all depends on learning to know the God of love who made that covenant millennia ago and still walks beside us? The God of love who absorbed our sacrificial violence on the cross and continues to offer us the path of abundant life? Which is the path of self-giving love?
Let’s end with the picture our Gospel reading offers us today. Jesus is told that Herod is bearing down on him with the threat of the typical human violence. If Jesus was to respond in kind, he might say something like, “Tell that fox Herod that he has a wolf waiting for him, to dish it out more fiercely than he can muster.” But, no, Jesus chooses a mother hen instead of something like a wolf. “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.’ . . . Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
In the face of Herod’s threats, Jesus chose to do brave, humane work of liberating the enslaved and healing the sick. To be with others in covenantal love instead of withdrawing in fear. He insisted that God’s commonwealth wouldn’t arrive by surrendering to empire, to nationalism, but would come with the wing of a sacred embrace. God was not Pilate, Herod, or Caesar. Those were the agents of the devil. But God, the true God of Israel, is willing to suffer with and for us — the Mother Hen who refused to fear the fox. Who refused to run away.
That’s the Lenten story today — another temptation (after reading the temptation stories last week), another choice to choose the right path. Herod or hen? Unholy arms or sheltering wings? Jesus willingly surrendered to vulnerability. Will we? We are here in covenantal love this morning, under the gathering shadows of sacrificial violence. And we’re here to encourage one another to choose the path of self-giving love. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, March 16, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/_A8-JrAdD6Q
Sermon Take-Home Notes
