Emerging Christianity Conference

Day One

In the morning, Shane Claiborne reflected on his experience with the Simple Way community in Philadelphia. What does it mean to be fully devoted followers of Jesus? Orthodoxy must bear fruit in Orthopraxis. This means a lifestyle based on the widely and radically inclusive vision of Jesus, and all that entails: restorative justice, reconciliation, cultivating goodness and order. We have to keep laughing and dancing. The tyranny of the urgency can't hijack our joy.

Claiborne is always inspiring and exciting. The question is how do we learn from his experience and apply it in our different contexts. I am particularly interested in whether and how the church does ministry in suburbia. More on this as we go through the week, no doubt....

In the afternoon, we heard from Richard Rohr who talked about non-dual consciousness, which is the same as contemplation, and which is the goal of the Christian life. It is Ken Wilber who said that the purpose of religion is to bring people to a new and broader consciousness. Carl Jung suggests that the greatest problems are fundamentally unsolvable, expressing the necessary polarity of every living system: problems cannot be solved, only outgrown, which is something that happens as the fruit of suffering... if we can find the grace in the suffering.

Karl Rahner: to know we don't know is the beginning of religious consciousness. This means respect for mystery, leaving the horizon open: contemplation. Which is the opposite of dualistic thinking.

Jesus assumes a unitive relationship between God and the person. He creates a moral equivalence between God and humanity, between himself and others, and between any person and God. The Spirit is indwelling in the human person: so finally there is a moral equivalence between all people.

Humanity's deepest need is not for answers, but for communion. We need meaning; to be held rather than to hold.

The traditional model in Christian spirituality is Purgation/Illumination/Union. The purgative way brings our wounds out of the unconscious into consciousness, and into community. Mainstream religion generally does the purgation thing fairly well. And this is helpful in a broken and weak society. But obedience to religious laws is just the first stage of the spiritual journey.

(We did an exercise in non-dual thinking, which involved walking meditation and contemplating a found object.)

Rohr later discussed the difference between being "driven" and being "drawn." The former is anxious, compulsive, goal oriented, with irritation when our goals are not met. The latter is more responsive to the world: interactive and reciprocal.

People need to be into the illuminative stage, which means recognizing the shadows, including some holy dissatisfaction. Only then are they ready for the emergent conversation. We need to be shoved into the world of ambiguity.

In short, Claiborne kind of embodies in gritty urban reality the kind of thinking Rohr is talking about.

Atonement Notes: 3

Hebrews 9:1-15; Isaiah 53

I.

In the movie, The Poseidon Adventure, (the first one,) there is a scene in which Gene Hackman is a young priest leading the intrepid group of people trying to escape up through the bottom of an overturned cruise ship. At some point, after having faced and overcome impossible obstacle after impossible obstacle, they run into yet another one. It is as I recall an impassible spray of steam directly in their path.

At this development, Hackman has had it. He jumps off the catwalk, and, gripping and hanging from a pipe, he challenges God. I don’t remember his words exactly, but the effect is he says, “Okay, God, if you demand a sacrifice before you will help us, so be it!” And he lets go of the pipe, and falls to his death. At that instant the steam abruptly stops. And the group is permitted to go forward.

I think the movie-makers were thinking of him as a Christ-figure, giving his life so that others may be saved. And they depicted God in the way that has become standard according to this model of the atonement. That is, God is a heartless monster who will not forgive or redeem unless and until someone pays for it in their own blood. Once he has been dutifully bought off in living flesh, God is satisfied and withdraws his wrath.

This is the way we have been taught to think of God. It shows up again in the more recent movie, The Passion of the Christ. God demands blood. And this blood had to be extracted through such monumental and terrible suffering — after all, he’s got billions of people’s sins to pay for — that Jesus is brutally whipped and mercilessly beaten for a large part of the movie. In the end, he is covered by enough blood and gore and open wounds to impress even Quentin Tarantino.

The gospels, however, do not devote endless verses and whole chapters to detailing Jesus’ every wound. They include no graphic descriptions of his bleeding and pain. His flogging and beating are not the main focus. They are mentioned, but only tersely in a few words.

This gruesome and grotesque theory, about God demanding suffering and blood to appease him before giving up his wrath and bestowing his forgiveness on anyone, is a product of medieval theology. It is not in the Bible, although it has been so consistently read back into the Bible that most people think it is there. Yet it is still assumed that this model is what we mean when we talk about the atonement.

Is it possible to love this God? Is it possible to imagine this God loving Jesus, let alone any of us? Does God really require a violent, horrific death before he will save us? Is that the condition? Is that the God Jesus reveals to us? Is that the God of the Prodigal Son story, for instance?

Of course not. God says to Ezekiel: “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone” (Ezekiel 18:32). And to Hosea, God says “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6.6). And, of course, nothing was more abhorrent to the God of Israel than human sacrifice.

II.

So what is going on here? How does Jesus’ cross save us?

The early church wove together several different traditions in the Hebrew Scriptures. Hebrews shows how Christ fulfills Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) from Leviticus 16. And the church has always understood the Suffering Servant passage which we read from Isaiah 52 and 53 as prefiguring Christ’s suffering.

In the Day of Atonement, the blood of the sacrificed goat is used to purify the sanctuary, and by extension, the whole creation. Blood represented, or was, life. This is something we need to get through our heads before the cross makes any sense to us. Blood in the Bible does not usually represent horror or violence or suffering or murder or death. Blood is life. The animals that were used in sacrifices were not made to suffer for sin. They were killed quickly and so their blood could be offered back to God and their meat shared in a communal meal of reconciliation.

The blood was then used by the priest to anoint the sanctuary as a way of blessing, restoring life, and reconnecting or reconciling the creation to God. The life, represented in the blood, is good and blessed. By spreading the blood upon the sanctuary, representing creation, the brokenness of the people was mended and healed.

In Christ we see that it is the Lord himself whose life-blood is offered. This ultimate atonement ceremony does not have to be repeated annually. God sees it and accepts the creation as sanctified once and for all; and then we participate in it repeatedly and continually. This blood is less our protection from God and more our connection to the God of life.

In the Isaiah reading the violence inflicted upon an innocent person shows that suffering is often inevitable for anyone who resists the powers of evil at work in the world. If we live the life of divine goodness, we are likely to draw down on ourselves the hatred and violence of the powers.

But this suffering is not in vain. It is a manifestation of discipleship and loyalty to God, and therefore blessed. Following the way of truth and love is its own reward. Life in harmony with God is eternal.

The Servant of God is not just a substitute for the people, but their representative. He doesn’t suffer and die so we don’t have to, he shares in the suffering that comes to those who trust in God... and he reveals its powerlessness to stop or hinder the love and redemptive will of God.

We see this in the last few verses, about seeing his offspring and prolonging his days, and about the will of the Lord prospering, coming out of anguish, finding satisfaction, making many righteous, and being allotted a portion with the great.

III.

The insight we acquire from this is, as Paul says, “if we have died with him in a death like his we will surely be united with him in a resurrection like his.” So, even here in Isaiah, it is not the suffering that is the point, but the resurrection — Christ’s resurrection and our resurrection with him.

So, God is not placing obstacles in our way. God is not demanding to be paid in blood. God is not balancing our sin with our suffering. God has no pre-conditions for reconciliation and forgiveness. God’s love is out there, woven into the very fabric of the universe. God’s love permeates the creation the way blood flows to every cell of our bodies. God’s love is the life of the whole universe.

It is as if the forces of evil invest all their time and energy in killing the God of life. They use horrific and gruesome violence.. but in every place God’s blood falls miraculous new life sprouts and grows and blossoms forth. They thought they were exterminating God’s love; instead they were causing it to spread.

And it spreads through us, through the vows we make and keep when we participate in his Body and Blood, and in the way that participation energizes our ministry and witness in his Name.

The challenge of Good Friday is to keep in our hearts the good news of Jesus’ resurrection and the Kingdom of God. For even when our faith brings us to difficult days, times of loss, failure, pain and heartbreak, times of confusion, betrayal, and sorrow, these do not have the power to break us... unless we give in to their terror. They don’t have the power to break us because they are not ultimately real. It is the end of the story that matters, and we know that the end of the story is resurrection life.

We have to make that end present in our daily lives now, by living together in peace, justice, reconciliation, and love. This begins here in this place... and then it extends outward into the whole world.

+++++++

Atonement Notes: 2

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 9:1-15a; Leviticus 16 (sel.); Mark 15:16-41

“For Us”

I.

“Christ died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3). “Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “One has died for all” (2 Corinthians 5:14). These verses describe one of the basic articles of Christian faith. The Nicene Creed says, “For us and for our salvation [Christ] came down from heaven.” This “for us” character of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, is fundamental to what it means to be a Christian. Somehow what Christ did has something to do with us. What he did he did for us.

But what does that really mean, “Christ died for us”? For the word “for” is very vague and can mean many things. My dictionary lists 34 meanings of the word “for” in English. In the original Greek the word is “‘uper,” which is a preposition that can mean “on behalf of,” “in the place of,” “with reference to,” or “on account of.” From ‘uper we get the prefix hyper-. And its oldest and deepest meanings are “over,” “across,” or “beyond.” Someone who is hyperactive is overly active; hypertension is when blood pressure is over what is normal; if you are hypersensitive you are over-sensitive.

Were we to read the Scriptures this hyper-literal way we might say “Christ died over our sins.” That is, Christ died because of or on account of the wrongs we have done. Our sins were the cause of his death. This is not hard to imagine.

While it is true that we were not each personally around at the time of Jesus’ death, the sins we commit were. Even if it was not we who committed them, the same sins we commit were being committed by others.

It was the sins of the dominant system of his time, the religious and political leadership of Jerusalem, that killed him. Their sins are no different from sins of the dominant system of our time. We should not fool ourselves and convince ourselves we would have done otherwise. If we are at all honest, we are all too aware that had we been in the position of the scribes, Pharisees, and priests, or of the Roman authorities, we would probably have used the same reasoning to do the same thing to Jesus.

I say that because we still do the same kinds of things, using the same reasoning, causing the suffering and death of innocent people all over the world. We show all the time that we agree with Caiaphas the High Priest who said, “It is better... to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:49). We still reserve to ourselves the right to decide who gets to die for our vision of the way things should be... which is always closely related to what serves our interests.

We are united in sin with Pilate and, to a lesser degree, with Caiaphas. We continue to do the same things they did. Christ died because of what they did, and people continue to die because of what we do. Therefore, when we say “Christ died for (or over) our sins,” we literally mean that our sins caused his death. And this insight is in some ways reflected in our hymnody. We just sang a hymn with the line “‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied you; I crucified You.”

II.

If that were all it meant to say that “Christ died for our sins,” or “Christ died for (or over) us,” the only response would be guilt and self-punishment. Not to say that this isn’t a major component of the way we Christians have talked about Jesus’ death over the centuries, but this can’t be all it means. Guilt only goes so far. Clearly these confessions mean more than that we are responsible for his death. They also imply that there is some benefit that we gain by his death.

Indeed, we confess and affirm that we gain salvation, forgiveness, acceptance, new life, and even union with and in God in and through Jesus’ death. How does this happen? How does Jesus’ dying ‘uper, over, or “for” us, accomplish this?

The theological doctrine which discusses the meaning of Jesus’ death “for us” is called the atonement. For nearly a thousand years the Western church has thought about the atonement in terms of a blood payment to make up for our sins, made by Christ to satisfy God’s absolute righteousness and justice. This view of the matter shows up all over our hymnody and prayers. It is so common that most Western Christians think it is the only way to talk about the atonement. According to this approach, “for us” means “instead of us.” Christ endured the just punishment of an angry God in our place. He was a substitute for us, enduring the punishment we deserved. Now that God’s righteous wrath is satisfied, there is no barrier to our being reconciled to God.

Unfortunately, this model bears very little resemblance to the ways the atonement is actually expressed in the New Testament, or the Hebrew Bible, for that matter. It has more to do with the Medieval mindset and feudal context of St. Anselm, who dreamed up this way of putting things in the 11^th century.

Contrary to this view, the God we know in Jesus Christ is known for love and forgiveness. Think of the gracious Father in the story of the Prodigal Son. The God whom Jesus reveals does not have a rigid sense of justice that can only be satisfied by punitive suffering. Other ancient near-eastern deities demanded blood as the price of their favor. The God shown in Jesus does not.

Even in the Hebrew Scriptures, when God asks for blood sacrifices, it is not to appease or satisfy God’s wrath or buy God’s favor. Rather it is to offer back to God what belongs most clearly to God: the life of the animal. In Hebrew thought, blood represented life.

When the blood of the lamb is spread on the doorways of the Israelites in Egypt, it was not an offering of blood demanded by God, but life given as a sign of God’s protection of the people against the death of the first-born in the tenth plague. And when the blood of one goat is sprinkled in and around the Temple on the Day of Atonement, it is not a matter of appeasing God but of restoring the purity of the Temple, protecting it from the effects of the people’s sin. The sin itself is not “paid for” in blood to God but loaded on the head of the other goat (the “scapegoat”) and sent away into the wilderness. There is here no sense of suffering for sin. On the one hand the sin is sent away; on the other the Temple is repaired of sin’s destructive effects.

III.

The Hebrew word for atonement is kippur. And this word means “cover,” “recover,” “cover again,” or “make good a torn or broken covering.” Atonement, then, has to do with covering something. This is not so much to hide what is covered, but to protect it or to make it shine. As we might protect and enhance a silver plate by polishing it, or a book by putting a cellophane cover on it.

The relationship in English between the words “over” and “cover” is obvious. A cover is something that goes over something else. Thus a relationship is disclosed between ‘uper and kippur. They both reflect a relationship of one thing over, or covering, another.

It is not that difficult to imagine Jesus, as he is lifted up on the cross, being raised over us, looking down upon us from a higher vantage point, mourning and grieving over us and what we have done, who we have become, surveying the wreckage of a creation God declared very good, and at how the image of God in us has been defiled and defaced in us, in our allegiance to violence and fear.

This is particularly clear in John’s gospel. Especially in chapter 3, Jesus says, “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” John sees this as one fluid, continuous, lifting-up motion: cross, resurrection, and ascension.

On the cross, Jesus literally dies over us in this sense, as he dies actually hanging above the heads of the witnesses who gathered around. He is lifted up ‘uper us, over us. At the same time and in the same action he kippurs us, he covers us, he Atones us, he makes us one again with God by shedding his blood over us, so that his blood becomes a kind of window connecting God and God’s creation. Thus the life of the Creator is reconnected to the life of the creation by the blood, or life, of Christ. Life is connected to life by life.

It is his blood therefore that, in a sense, covers us symbolically and figuratively, spiritually and imaginatively. It protects us and separates us from evil and death like the blood of the slaughtered lamb protected the Israelites during the Exodus; it draws us out of Pharaoh’s regime and into God’s Kingdom. It also restores us and the whole creation to wholeness like the blood of the sacrificed goat in the Day of Atonement ritual restored the sanctity of the Temple. His blood, representing his life, the very life of God and at the same time the true life of humanity, is, in a sense, spread out over us, between us and God, connecting us to God and to each other.

IV.

This is why we regularly and frequently share in his body and blood in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. When we take in his blood we take into ourselves this protection and this receptivity to life. Like an inoculation that preserves us from disease and also energizes us and enables us better to metabolize what truly feeds us. What was over us, covering us, is taken into us and becomes part of us. Now it covers us from within, which is where the real danger comes from anyway.

So when we say things like “Christ died for us,” “Christ died for our sins,” Christ freed us from our sins “by his blood,” or even “he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities,” we are saying that by the death of Christ the whole creation is covered by God’s protective and energizing grace over us. Sin and death no longer have any power over us other than what we choose, out of our fear, blindness, or foolishness, to give them. Christ’s blood now intervenes, separating us from violence and injustice, sin and death, fear and anger; his blood now is what unites us to God.

With this blood over us, covering us, we our existence cannot be dominated by the corrupt and destructive rules of secular power. Under his blood we cannot reason and justify our actions by the standards of fear, anger, violence, and sin. With Christ’s blood covering us the pure love of God may shine fully into our lives, freeing us to live according to the standards of peace and love, goodness and truth, forgiveness and grace, kindness and compassion, faithfulness and hope, justice and righteousness, knowledge, peace and love, that we may perfectly love God and each other, that we may worthily magnify God’s holy name, and walk in beauty forever, in Jesus Christ.

+++++++