A New Song

“A New Song” (formerly Seeing and Testifying)                    

Over the next week, Grant High School’s Theater department will be presenting “The Lord of the Flies.”  Have you read the book?  The novel is about a group of British boys who are marooned on an island, when their plane crashes, during a wartime evacuation.  These well-educated boys, all age 13 and under, are left by themselves in a tropical paradise and far from modern civilization.  They descend rapidly into savagery.  Before the boys completely destroy themselves, a naval ship arrives to rescue them.  At the end of the book, arriving moments before main character Ralph’s, impending death, the Naval Officer is surprised and disappointed to learn that the boys' society has collapsed into chaos. He states that he would have expected "a better show" from the British children. 

In the light of our nation’s past week of violence and angry rhetoric, we may feel the same way:  We expected a “better show” of ourselves.  Looking back, we regret mental illness issues that were not met.  We regret provocative words.  We regret access to guns.  We regret the role of media in inflaming rhetoric.  But, however we cast the blame--don’t we yearn for something “better?” In his speech honoring the victims of the Tucson shooting, President Obama remarked:
“I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness and the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.  I believe that in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed.  I want to live up to her expectations. . .”

Don’t we all want to live up to those expectations?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate this weekend, and whose assassination was a crushing reminder of our brokenness and division, said:
"We must work unceasingly to uplift this nation that we love to a higher destiny,
to a higher plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness."

It seems that in our nation, our world and maybe even in our very human nature, violent divisions and polarizations are our constant leaning, throughout history and culture.  Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.  Notice that in our reading from Gospel today, John sees Jesus and proclaims:  “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” 

Notice that he says “sin”.  Not “sins.”  That would suggest our collective turning away from God.  Our separation from God and from one another.  The immorality of our collective, group sin, which sometimes bursts out in violent, frightening ways that break the heart.

The human path to anger, rage and violence may seem like an unavoidable pit.   All those things that spin out of fear, insecurity, envy, rivalry, jealousy, pettiness, covetousness, greed, hatred.  It's the stuff of everyday life, creating the worlds we live in. It becomes its own reality. It becomes Sin.

    “Lamb of God” is the language of atonement.  The traditional understanding of atonement is something like this: 
Jesus died for our sins.  Jesus is the sacrifice for sin.  Jesus died in our place.  Jesus is the payment for sin.  Remember Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie, The Passion of Christ?  It emphasized that Jesus had to go through humiliation, arrest, torture, condemnation and death—all because of our wrongdoing.  He died in our place.  And the greatness of his suffering was because of the greatness of our sins.  This is what many of us believe, and what some of us avoid, because it makes us squirm.  And maybe what makes some people stay away from church.  It does raise some questions, such as:
What does this mean about character of God? What is the character of humanity?  What does it mean that Jesus is the Lamb of God?

    What does that say about the character of God?  Well, that we have a God in heaven, and he demanded that someone pay the bill.  Jesus paid the bill, and the rest of us are off the hook.

    But, wait, just who is it demanding sacrifice at the cross?  Is it God?   Is it God who has his fist in the air, shouting, "Crucify him!"? Who demands that Jesus die?  The crowd.  The mob.

What if the demand for atonement was really a demand from us?  What if it is that part in us that fervently, sometimes self-righteously, and blindly, demands justice?  Could it be that the cross reveals to us our own idols:  violent gods (small “g”) who justify our violence?   

    The whole notion of a scapegoat is ancient.  The scapegoat was the victim in the Israelite ritual that was celebrated in the great ceremony of atonement (Lev. 16:21).  The high priest would place his hands upon the head of a goat, and by this act was supposed to transfer onto the animal everything likely to poison relations between members of the community.  Then the goat was driven away, into the wilderness.  What made this effective was the feeling that the sins were expelled and that the community was rid of them.  This all may sound foreign to us now. But don’t we still manage in our modern world to transfer our hostilities in ways that are unreasonable and destructive?
    Think about it for a moment:  That friend, who disappointed, even betrayed us.  The former lover or mate who left.  The one who made life so painful that we couldn’t bear to picture him or her ever happy again.  The boss who was so demanding that we literally saw red.  We imagined him (with a little glee) miserable and lonely.    Or the times we were so stressed from work that as we drove home, the slightest provocation by another driver or bicyclist prompted our rage and name-calling.

Roxanna Green, the mother of Christina Green, the nine-year-old girl born on 9/11 and killed in the Arizona shooting, eloquently summed it up: "I think there's been a lot of hatred going, and it needs to stop". 

Maybe we really do need to focus on atonement, for we need to take full ownership of our own violence.   Because what Jesus, the Lamb of God brings, what cripples the cycle of violence, fear and blame is this:  Forgiveness.
Through the love of God in Christ, we may know ourselves to be fully loved and forgiven.  When we know that in our very being, when we are centered in Jesus, the Way, then there will be nothing we cannot forgive, no wound that can stand in the way of love.

Etty Hillesum, a young woman who died in Auschwitz in 1942 wrote:  “Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves …and to reflect it toward others.” 

We reclaim peace in ourselves and reflect it toward others when we care for people who think differently, and even express those differences passionately, but with the foundation of a shared life. That kind of service, to one another as neighbors, comes with discomfort, and is not easily done. Being with people like us, who think like we do, is much easier, at least in the short run. But we will never be well, as a nation, until we cling to the truth that we are all in this together. Left and right, Republican and Democrat, millionaire and homeless person, veteran and pacifist, meat-eater and vegan -- we will always have our differences, but we can create and hold onto a genuine sense of community. Then we will know that winning isn't winning when it comes at a cost to the greater whole.

The Psalmist, as we heard this morning, knew that same desolation, that seems to be our human trap.  But he sings of God’s steadfast love that drew him from the miry bog and put a new song in his mouth.  “Happy are those who make the Lord their trust, who do not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods.  . . Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear.  Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. . . I delight to do your will, O my God, your law is within my heart. . . I have told the glad news. . .I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation. . .”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his fellow clergyman from the Birmingham, Alabama jail, about his disappointment in the church’s failure to take a bolder stand in the face of the injustices and brutality displayed during the movement for civil rights.  He wrote:
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.  Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of people willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.  We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.  Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. . .”

What if the new song that God gave us was a deep sense of forgiveness for wrongs done us, both small and  great?  What would our lives be like if we saw and recognized in ourselves our own violence?  And what if we trusted that God sees that, forgives us and loves us, warts and all?  What if we loved our enemies and prayed for those who persecute us, as Jesus taught?  Who then, could we forgive?  Who would we love?  What would our community and our world be like, then?