Devotional

Easter Sunday, Year A

Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth. (1 Cor. 5:7-8)

- Amen.

Last Sunday I spoke of our expectations and the expectations of those who witnessed Jesus in the flesh. Most Jews of Jesus’ time were eagerly awaiting for a messiah, for the one anointed by God, to come and drive out the Romans, to remove the wicked leaders and establish God’s kingdom with a son of David upon the throne. We know that several men claimed to the messiah and attempted to do just that only to be destroyed and killed by the Romans. Clearly they were not the messiah. Jesus too was killed, executed by the Romans. Yet…yet he rose from the dead and he lives!

All expectations were shattered. The son of David and God was not a mighty warrior, but a sacrifice for all humanity. As we entered into Lent I preached about Jesus’ death as sacrifice and commented on how difficult this concept is for so many, both then and now. Yet there is no doubting that this is exactly how the church has understood Good Friday since its inception. Described by the author of Hebrews and in John’s letters as our atoning sacrifice.

He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. 1 John 2:2

Jesus’ death is the final ransom for our sins, making us again “at one” with God. The Day of Atonement was and is the most solemn and important festival in Israelite worship. It was the only day of the year when the High Priest would enter the most holy place in the Temple, the inner most sanctuary, and there he would offer the sacrifices for the sins of the entire nation.

In the Holy of Holies the High Priest would sprinkle the cover of the Ark of the Covenant with the blood of the sacrifices for the priests and the people. Thus it is called in Hebrew Yom Kippur or the “Day of Covering.” The term we know, “atonement,” was coined by William Tyndale to express the function rather than the mere action. In this ritual the High Priest was making the nation again “at one” with God.

So too Jesus’ death is an atoning sacrifice that reunites us with God. His death was for the sins of the world, not just Israel. And whereas the High Priest had to enter the Temple every year to offer the sacrifice of animals for Israel’s sins, Jesus as our Great High Priest and sacrifice made one offering for all, for all time. As the author of Hebrews has said,

Heb. 9:11 But when Christ came as a high priest … 12 he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption.

And yet although Jesus’ death was an atoning sacrifice, we also find that there is another sacrificial image associated with Good Friday. It was, of course, for the festival of Passover that Jesus went up to Jerusalem and I have often wondered, since Jesus clearly chose when he would give himself over into the hands of those who would kill him, we he did not choose Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as the festival at which to ascend Zion’s hill. Why not simply go into Jerusalem at that holy day? The city would have been just as crowded and the Romans just as nervous about a revolt. Why not make this connection with the sacrifice of atonement explicit in day and time?

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Homily for Good Friday – The Seven Last Words of Christ
The Fourth Word

Matt. 27:45 From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. 46 And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus’ cry, quoting the first words of Psalm 22, is perhaps one of the most challenging passages in the Bible. Not only is the entire scene gut-wrenching, Jesus, beaten, stripped, hanging from the cross with his mother and friends standing beneath him watching his anguish in anguish of their own, but this great cry of despair should penetrate our very souls. We see and cannot comprehend the physical suffering and then we question even the theology of it.

How is it that God could have forsaken himself? How could he forsake his Son? The short answer is that God did not and would not. Just as we are human, Jesus was fully human and in his humanity experienced both the physical and spiritual horrors of this moment. And in that moment he he did not utter a simple cry of doubt, as it may seem, asking if God could have forgotten him. Rather Jesus was invoking the entirety of that psalm.

Psalm 22 begins

1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.

But it continues

Psa. 22.3 Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
4 In you our ancestors trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
5 To you they cried, and were saved;
in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.

It is, in fact, a rather long psalm and is a psalm of complaint or lament where David calls upon God to hear his cries of suffering and to see the pain and hardship he is enduring for the sake of his faithfulness to God. Such psalms often begin with a “calling out” of God, a demand that God listen or a statement that God has rejected his people. It is jarring and often causes Christian readers to feel that the psalmist is impertinent if not heretical. Who are we to challenge God? And yet far from being blasphemous or the sign of faithlessness, it shows the depth of confidence that the psalmist has in God that they can call to him and he will respond.

What such psalms teach us, that I think we have often forgotten, is that we can and indeed must be honest with God. Our prayers should not be filled with platitudes and flowery language, but rather we our deepest needs and concerns, even our complaints against God. Consider Jesus’ own example when he went to the Mount of Olives, shortly before he was betrayed.

Luke 22.39 He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. 40 When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” 41 Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, 42 “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.”

In his prayer Jesus gives us permission to be honest with God, to ask God to spare us the difficult times. “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” Jesus utters this imperative to his disciples twice in this one passage and it is, of course, the same prayer that we utter in the Lord’s prayer. “Lead us not into temptation/trial, but deliver us from the Evil one.” We are allowed to ask God to spare us trials, tests, and difficult times.

We are not being “spiritual wimps” when we pray for his grace to ease our lives since not only does Jesus command the disciples to pray for this deliverance, he himself prays for God to spare him the trials that he knew were to come. The vital element of such prayer is our willingness to accept such trials if God so desires. We must be honest with God even, and especially, in our darkest and deepest moments of fear and doubt and we must subordinate our own wills to God’s, just as Jesus did.

And in these final moments of his earthly life, when Jesus invokes this powerful psalm, he continues to show his faithfulness to God and his confidence in God’s faithfulness to him. Within the heart of this psalm is the assertion

Psa. 22.9 Yet it was you who took me from the womb;
you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
10 On you I was cast from my birth,
and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
11 Do not be far from me,
for trouble is near
and there is no one to help.

He declares and knows that it is God who will deliver him, the very God who has cared for him since birth, and has guided his life. And the psalm concludes with the confident assertion that God is ruler of all and will deliver him and his people.

Psa. 22.27 All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the LORD;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him.
28 For dominion belongs to the LORD,
and he rules over the nations.

29 To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
and I shall live for him.
30 Posterity will serve him;
future generations will be told about the Lord,
31 and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
saying that he has done it.

This is the what Jesus is declaring, not a doubt as to whether God is still with him, but the honest declaration that he suffers and that only God can bring his deliverance. And with the psalmist he declares that at the last he will raise up his son and all those who call upon his name.

future generations will be told about the Lord…

saying that he has done it.

Amen.

 

My sermon for Palm Sunday, Year A.

The Liturgy of the Palms
Matthew 21:1-11
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
The Liturgy of the Word
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 26:14- 27:66 or Matthew 27-11-54
Psalm 31:9-16

In the unlikely event that you have just returned from a two-year expedition into the canyons of Mars, this is a presidential election year. (Although it feels more like a decade of campaigning.) We are down to essentially three main candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket and John McCain on the Republican side. Others remain on the ballot, but these are the three main players now. We have had months and months of pundits and pollsters telling us who might vote which way and why this group will influence the election but that other group is waning in strength. The candidates have been on the trail stumping with all the gusto of…well, a politician.

In spite of most of our expectations Pennsylvania’s primary is very relevant, even this late in the process, at least for the Democratic side of the ballot. If we have not been aware of the campaign before, we are now. The calls have begun and we the PA voters are being wooed. Modern US politics is, we often hear quipped, a popularity contest. It is less about substance than about appearance and the ability to give rousing speeches. Now that the field has narrowed and the trail is coming to an end people are beginning to ask what it is that each candidate believes and what policies and positions they hold or will seek to enact. The question that guides me is what kind of president do we need. What sort of leader does the United States need at this moment and, more difficult to define, for the next four years?

We will each have our own answer to these questions. We might agree on a candidate but we will likely have very different reasons for believing why he or she is the right person for this time. What are our expectations of a president today anyway? What does it mean to be the President of the United States in this moment and time? (In spite of appearances, this is not a political sermon, so Father Larry need not be concerned that St. Andrew’s will lose its tax exempt status.) I mention all of this to try and bring us into the mind and context of those first century Jews who lined the streets to see Jesus enter Jerusalem, praising God and hailing him as “the Son of David.” Who did they believe they were seeing? What were they expecting of him? And what do we expect of Jesus now?

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