Words of Wonder: Atonement

Sermon

When you’re a pastor, you get interesting junk mail. When I was in my first call, I was amazed at the things I didn’t know I needed: Clergy waders and weighted robes for immersion baptisms. A clerical cape to wear when doing outdoor services in the cold and rain. Home communion sets, with tiny cups and a little plate for the bread cubes. (Actually, those have been rather handy.)

But the most bizarre, to me at least, was “Sermons in Chemistry,” a chemistry set which purports to demonstrate an essential tenet of the Christian faith. This set, according to the current ad, “still today is a powerful tool in bringing souls to Christ by seeing the ‘blood’ red liquid completely clear the ‘sin’ black liquid. A must have time-tested and proven teaching aid.” (http://www.bergchristian.com/sermonsinchemistry.htm)

You cannot make this stuff up.

Really, what this particular sermon in chemistry was attempting to illustrate was atonement, that is, how Jesus brings us back to God in spite of our unworthiness. Breaking the world down by syllables may help clarify the meaning of the word: at-one-ment. The atonement understanding in this particular chemical sermon was that it was the death of Jesus – the red blood – that took away our sinful nature – the black liquid – so that we could be pure enough – the clear liquid – for God to love us again.

That’s what’s at play in the scripture we heard from Leviticus. Way back when, as the Israelites were making their way across the desert, out of Egypt and heading toward the promised land, they understood that God was traveling with them. Because they were on the move, they had no sanctuary and instead had a tent where God’s presence was thought to dwell. It was a sacred space, so sacred that only the priest Aaron could enter it.

Being people of faith, wanting to follow the commands of their God, and knowing themselves to be imperfect, the people understood that they sinned and had to make amends with the God they sinned against. So the priest, acting on their behalf, would kill one goat made in offering and sprinkle its blood on the altar. The other goat would receive the sins of the people as the priest laid his hands on its head, and then the goat would be sent into the wilderness, so that the sins of the community were removed from the community.

While we might shudder at the notion of the animal sacrifice, it was a step up from human sacrifice. The God of the Israelites was not a god who required human blood. Still, I worry about both of the goats.

This notion of atonement as presented in the sermons in chemistry is the most prevalent understanding of how we are reconciled with God. The apostle Paul writes about it in Romans 3. “²⁵ God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement,[i] through the shedding of his blood… because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.”

In our hymns we sing about it:

“Who did once upon the cross, suffer to redeem our loss.
Who endured the cross and grave, sinners to redeem and save.
But the pains which he endured, our salvation have procured.”

It’s getting to the point where I can’t find a Lent or Easter hymn I’m willing to sing. Because there are some big problems with thinking that atonement means that a violent God hated us sinful people so much that He wanted to kill us, but He let – or made – Jesus step in and be killed on our behalf. It’s a problem to say that blood sacrifice makes everything all right. Sure, it satisfies a primal need for justice and at the same time for mercy – the sinner needs to be punished, the sinner gets a second chance.

This bloody understanding of atonement is called penal substitutionary atonement, and my friends, I have to tell you, it is bad theology. It depicts an angry God who is so disgusted with human sin that He decides we should be killed. But Jesus, God’s sinless son, loves us so much that he steps in, is killed in our place, and then everything is good again.

This thinking forms the image of a violent, vengeful, hateful God. It creates a religion based on fear. It glorifies suffering and sacrifice. And the sinner doesn’t need to do a thing, doesn’t need to repent. Jesus takes care of it all.

Ever since I agreed to preach about atonement, I’ve been fretting. It’s a big word. It has layers of meaning, a wide swath of theories, and theological tomes that are great for the average insomniac. And then I thought: wait. This does not have to be so hard.

Atonement is not about a violent God who hates us.
Atonement is not about a passive victim Jesus who takes our punishment.
Atonement is not about Jesus paying the price to get us out of sin-jail.

What if we understood, in our hearts and our minds, that God does not require blood, death, hair shirts, or pebbles in shoes in order to love us?
What if we stopped lifting up suffering as a virtue?
What if we named the crucifixion for what it was: evil? What then?
Well, then, we have to figure out what to do about the cross.

Those who aren’t Christian – and some of those who are – might wonder at the primary symbol of our faith – a cross, a means of execution and death. Our Roman Catholic kin have Jesus on the cross, a reminder of his suffering and sacrifice. We Protestants have an empty cross, a reminder that death is in the past.

But still: it is a symbol of execution, a statement about violence. Can we see it in another way? Yes. It is an empty cross, a reminder that in the life of Jesus, death did not have the final word. And it is a reminder that still today, oppressive regimes kill innocent victims, and we are called to free the oppressed and to work on the side of life.

Maybe, too, we can look at the simplicity of the empty cross as a hope that there will be no more innocent victims: no more children bombed to death in Ukraine, no more trans women of color murdered in the U.S., no Tuskegee airmen used as experiments.

What the cross of Jesus has to do with the love of God, of that I am no longer sure. Maybe it’s about God coming down and reaching out to us. Maybe it’s about God in Jesus experiencing the depth of human pain.

Rarely do I wear a cross; I have them, but I have struggled so much with this symbol that it takes some effort to put them on. What I do wear is a little piece my mother bought for me years ago at the Monterey Aquarium. It’s a silver circle with a seed pearl in the middle. For me, it is a reminder not of the death of Jesus but of the empty tomb, of God’s gift of life and love.

For me, that is at the heart of this at-one-ment, of atonement: the nature of the love of God and the nature of human sin. So for us to think about atonement, we have to talk about God’s love.

God is love. That I believe. And I believe that there can be no violence in love. God must reach out to us, reconcile with us, in another way. What does it mean, then, to say that atonement is nothing more or less than reconciliation with God, with each other, and with the world?

When you love people, you commit to their wholeness and wellness. You want good for them, you want justice for them. You put up with them when they are difficult, you sit with them when they are down and out, you rejoice with them when they rejoice.

And when you hurt someone you love – and we all do – you feel awful. Maybe not right away, but if the love is real, and the hurt is real, then you really do feel awful – embarrassed, guilty, sad, repentant. You want to make it up to them somehow – do something for them, something that requires a lot from you. Not something that covers up or erases the harm, but some tangible thing that expresses your remorse.

The onus is on the person you hurt. That’s the tricky part of forgiveness – it’s always the wronged party who has to do the hard thing of forgiving. It’s their choice, to forgive or not, to accept that thing you do in penance.

Forgiveness is the highest form of love, I think. I might be wrong about that, but for today, I will stand by it. Forgiveness is the highest form of love because forgiveness is what enables a relationship not to get stuck, not to fall apart, but to move forward.

I say all of this maybe obvious stuff because that’s how I think atonement works. God loves us, and we love God, however we understand that. We hurt God when we sin, when we cause pain or suffering or harm. It is up to God to forgive us, and because God loves us and desires to stay in relationship with us, God does forgive us.

Because we love God and acknowledge that we have hurt God, and feel bad about it, we do something. We might repent, turn from our old ways to a new way. We might do an act of service, give of our time or talent or treasure in order to help someone who needs it. That shows our commitment to our relationship with God as we live out the commandment to love our neighbor.

That holds for our relationships with each other, and it is hard work. The work of atonement, reconciliation, requires deep honesty and no small dose of humility. It requires listening to the other. It requires risk, stepping out in love even though love might not be returned.

Why choose love? Why wouldn’t we choose love? Because loving is hard? Because love doesn’t always pay? Because love demands so much of us? Yes. All those things. But love also bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Because love never ends. Those are a few reasons to choose love.

And we choose love because God has chosen love for us, and God has promised that atonement, that reconciliation. How do I know? Because I too am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, not things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

That’s atonement, to the glory of God.