Working the Anglers

Mark 1:17

I began a sermon series on Red-Letter Christianity last Sunday—“red-letter” being a reference to those Bibles that print the words of Jesus in red ink. There is a group of people who have taken to calling themselves “red-letter Christians” meaning that they follow these words of Jesus, particularly in regard to his concern for the poor and the marginalized. Inasmuch as Christians of every-color letter follow the words of Jesus, I thought it worthwhile to take another look at what he had to say, specifically in Mark’s gospel, if for no other reason than Mark is the earliest gospel and therefore a source for the others.

Last Sunday Jesus said “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” For Jesus’ original audience, Galilean Jews chafing under brutal Roman oppression, to hear that “the kingdom of God is near” could only mean that the kingdom of Rome was on the ropes. The prophet Daniel predicted as much. He foresaw that “a kingdom never to be destroyed that would crush all other kingdoms and bring them to an end.” Jews in Jesus’ day presumed this never-ending Kingdom to be Israel led by a reconstituted, glorious King David who would arrive to reign on the clouds of heaven. But here instead was this humble Jesus, standing on flat ground and not looking like much of a kingdom-crusher. He had no army. No political power. His weapon of victory was Rome’s weapon of humiliation. Rome used crosses to expose the futility of political resistance and to execute a sentence of death on rebels. But Jesus used the cross to expose the futility of Roman violence and execute a sentence of forgiveness on his crucifiers. Christ accepts rejection and injustice and responds with resurrection. He rules not through the shedding of his enemies’ blood, but by the shedding of his own. In this context, for Jesus to say repent was to call to conversion those who understood kingdom only in terms of ruling power. “If anyone would come after me,” Jesus would later say, “he must take up a cross.”

However in tonight’s passage, Jesus invitation to follow is not yet about taking up a cross, but about dropping down your nets—both literally and metaphorically. Jesus invites four fishermen to drop their literal fishing nets and start dropping metaphorical nets on people. If you’ve been a Christian long, you likely dread sermons from this verse because they’re usually sermons about the E-word. Evangelism. Talking about your faith to non-Christian friends. Catching heathen for the kingdom. Granted, dropping a net on unbelieving and unsuspecting friends usually comes off more like dropping a bomb. I know that whenever I tell people I attend church, never mind that I work at one, the responses I get usually range from quizzical curiosity (you look normal) to outright hostility. Of course, Jesus did say that’s how it would be.

Though it is ironic that we would interpret this verse in terms of evangelism since to catch a fish is to kill it (taking for granted that first century fishing was not yet into fishing as sport). OK, so maybe I’m taking the metaphor too literally, but if you turn over to the red-letter verses in Matthew 13, you read Jesus saying that to catch fish means death for some of them. “The kingdom of God is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away. This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

So it’s not so ironic. Fishing is tied to death. To catch people is to snatch them from death, from the grill fires of hell. Believe in Jesus and stay out of that fiery furnace. But then you turn to the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, from whence Jesus likely got his fishing allusion, and there you read that the bad people getting caught aren’t heathen unbelievers, but the chosen people themselves. In Jeremiah 16, God says through the prophet regarding his own people, “I will send many enemies who will catch these people like fishermen. After that I will send others who will hunt them out like hunters from all the mountains, all the hills, and the crevices in the rocks. For I see everything they do. Their wicked ways are not hidden from me. Their sin is not hidden away where I cannot see it. Before I restore them I will punish them in full for their sins and the wrongs they have done. For they have polluted my land with the lifeless statues of their disgusting idols.”

Putting all this together, it may be that what Jesus had in mind when he made these literal fishermen into metaphorical fishers of men was to first pronounce judgment on those who thought themselves safe and call them back to a true relationship with God. Tie this to the idea that to repent in verse 15 was to repent from wrong ideas about God’s kingdom, and what you have is something that looks like the need to get your own faith in order before you go sharing it with anybody.

In a recent study entitled Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity, the authors argue that younger Americans by and large perceive Christianity to be not Christ-like but unchristian. They write that the church is in danger of losing younger generations, who see modern Christianity as not only irrelevant but hostile to their identity. In the words of one respondent: “Christianity has become bloated with blind followers who would rather repeat slogans than actually feel true compassion and care. Christianity has become marketed and streamlined into a juggernaut of fear-mongering that has lost its own heart.” Author Brian McLaren, a self-described red-letter Christian, cites a young South African healthcare worker who likewise critiques modern Christianity for its specialization in afterlife destinations to the exclusion of addressing significant social injustices in this life. Such a Christianity sequesters the gospel into the realm of the personalized and the private, distorting the good news into a product designed for maximum personal benefit with minimal obligation. All you have to do is believe it and you’re set for eternity, regardless of how you live your life here. In this vein, evangelism becomes a salvation sales pitch rather than a radical call to transform the world. But without evidence of the gospel’s world-changing power in the here and now, it’s hard to get excited about its power in the sweet by and by. As a result, those on the outside find fewer and fewer Christians enthusiastic about their faith, and thus find less and less reason to accept or even consider it for themselves—apart from the threats of hell that is, which lose their effect when those making the threats come off as defensive, deranged or embarrassed about their faith.

You’d think that a gospel that is supposed to be the best news ever would be doing better than this. Why is it that the good news seems so unattractive to so many? Here you have a gospel that offers a relationship with a God who loves you enough to die for your sins and give you a brand new start at life. A gospel that instills joy and hope amidst adversity. A gospel that redeems suffering and pain. A gospel that promotes compassion and care for individuals, societies and the planet itself. A gospel that makes peace between people, their world and their Creator. The problem is that to get to that gospel, you have to get through all the gunk with which the gospel has become encrusted. Ask most who sit outside Christian faith to describe it, and what you hear are words such as culturally intolerant, scientifically ignorant and politically divisive. Shoot, many who sit on the inside use the same adjectives. Is it any wonder we’re ashamed to share it? Maybe Jesus was right that before we can catch people for the kingdom we need to first fish out the trash that’s ruining our nets.

Some of you may recall a story I told in the morning last fall from Donald Miller’s popular book from a few years back, Blue Like Jazz (which I read is actually being made into a movie). In it he recounts a time as a zealous college student during an annual drunken festival when he and his fellow Christians decided to do some evangelism. Donald Miller proposed they set up a confession booth so that the partying students could repent of the many sins they would clearly be committing. Since faith begins by first admitting you’re a sinner, what better way to get the faith process rolling than by setting up a big confession booth smack in the middle of the campus drunk-fest? Donald Miller admitted he made his proposal tongue in cheek. He was just kidding. If they were going to share their faith, there was no need to be jerks about it. But Tony, the leader of the campus Christian group, thought a confession booth was brilliant—which Donald said scared the crap out of him because suddenly he sensed that Tony was really going to go through with it.

“Only here’s the catch,” Tony said. “We are not actually going to accept confessions. We are going to make confessions. We are going to confess that as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for the Crusades and Columbus, we will apologize for the televangelists and the politicians, we will apologize for neglecting the poor and the lonely. We will apologize for being judgmental. We will ask people to forgive us and we will tell them that in our selfishness we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus and that we are sorry.”

So Donald Miller and his friends built their confession booth and Donald took his turn inside first and waited and waited as the raucous partying went on outside. Nobody came in. “What a stupid idea,” Donald thought. “Obviously this was not God’s idea. There is nothing relevant about Christianity. Is it even true?” Just then the door swung open. A guy named Jake stepped in and laughed, “So what is this? I’m supposed to tell you all the juicy gossip from the partying that’s been going on? Want me to confess my sins?” “Not exactly,” Donald replied. “You see, we’re a group of Christians on campus who’ve come to realize that we haven’t been very good at following Jesus. In fact, a lot of Christians haven’t. Anyway, we wanted to confess that and our other sins and shortcomings as Christians to you.” “You’re serious,” Jake said, his amusement replaced by shock. “I’ll keep it short,” Donald said. “Jesus said to feed the poor and heal the sick. I’ve never done very much about that. Jesus said to love those who persecute me. I tend to lash out. I know that a lot of people can’t listen to me when I talk about my faith because I’m judgmental and I tend to carry an agenda into the conversation instead of letting the message of Jesus speak for itself. I am sorry for all of that and a whole lot more.”

Donald Miller goes on to describe how Jake forgave him and how bowled over Jake was by the gesture and how even though he wasn’t really interested in becoming a Christian, he was curious what it was that Christians were supposed to believe. So Miller went on to explain about sin and God and the cross and faith. Jake left to think about it and another person was waiting. Donald wrote how he ended up confessing to over thirty people that night. It went on for several hours. He wrote, “All of the people who visited the booth were grateful and gracious. And I was being changed through the process. I went in with doubts and came out believing so strongly in Jesus I was ready to die and be with him.”

To authentically share the gospel you first have to authentically experience the gospel. Authentic witnesses are not authentic because they are flawless, but because they are honest. Their lives match their speech even when they fail miserably to love God and their neighbors as themselves, because it’s then that they exhibit repentance and redemption. Christians are called to be people of compassion and love but also people of firsthand grace—screw ups who fall down and get up due to God’s mercy and are therefore eager to show God’s mercy. Grace, compassion and love are not lofty theological ideals but earthy, ethical practicalities. The gospel is shared in the concrete things people do to, with and for other people. Salvation’s goal is not merely a ticket to heaven, but a life lived on earth that looks like it will in heaven. Such a life can prove catchy to outsiders (in keeping with the fishing metaphor), because it looks like Jesus.

“Come, follow me, I will make you fishers of people,” Jesus said. Mark informs us that the fishermen dropped their nets at once. There was something about this humble carpenter that proved too compelling to resist. Reading their story is to read of spectacular failure, and of spectacular redemption, of spectacular love and faith, of sacrifice, bravery and world changing power both here and for eternity. Their story is the story of every disciple who has ever dropped their net to take up a cross. May it be your story too. May the Jesus who lives in you and through you likewise prove too compelling to resist.

Red Letter Christianity

Mark 1:15

Fans of the Colbert Report may recall the Super Tuesday eve episode where the parodying Colbert characteristically went off on the huge role conservative Christians would play in presidential primary outcomes. “As a candidate,” he said, “you either have to appease evangelicals or get out of their way!” Colbert stressed that in addition to Barack Obama (who is a radical Islamic terrorist) and Hillary Clinton (who is Hillary Clinton) John McCain was going to have a particularly hard time. Eight years ago he called Pat Roberson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance” and “as we all know,” Colbert deadpanned, “Christians do not forgive. It’s not in their nature.” Ha-ha. Colbert then introduced his evangelical guest for that night, Tony Campolo. The erstwhile sociologist and popular speaker for years has pushed to bring issues of social justice back into the evangelical mainstream. During the self-indulgent eighties, he made headlines on the Christian conference circuit for asserting that driving a BMW is a sin. Lately he’s back in the headlines with a book entitled “Red Letter Christians.” Baited by Colbert, Campolo remarked that unlike the media stereotype, he was an evangelical who was not anti-environment and was not pro-war … at which point Colbert interrupted. But wasn’t Jesus pro-war? Did the Lord himself not say, “I have not come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword!”? Ha-ha. OK, so Jesus did say that. But not about war. Campolo retorted that Jesus also said, “love your enemies” which he interpreted to mean “don’t shoot them.”

Campolo is both passionate and prolific. In one of his blog posts he wonders whether in fact evangelicals are not only losing any moral authority we once had, but whether we are also “losing our opportunity to carry out what we believe is our Biblical imperative to preach the whole Gospel to the whole world. One of the distinguishing traits of we Evangelicals has been our zeal to carry the good news of Christ’s salvation to every nation. Sadly, one of the consequences of our support of our nation’s foreign policies is that the doors for missionary work are being shut. Because Christianity, throughout the Muslim world, is associated with America, anti-Americanism has heated up anger against Christians in many parts of the Islamic world. Tens of thousands of Christians have fled Iraq under a siege of discrimination and even persecution. Churches are being burned down in Baghdad for the first time. There is little doubt that evangelism, which ironically was allowed by the evil dictator America drove from power, will be curtailed under this new government which we helped establish.”

While I tend to wonder similar things, my particular interest for the sake of this sermon, and the ones that follow, are these red-letters of the New Testament that Campolo has chosen to rally around. If you have a “red-letter” Bible, then you know that it as the words of Jesus printed in red ink. In his book, Campolo argues that to be a red-letter Christian is to have a high view of Scripture, to believe that Jesus is alive and salvation can be had through faith in him, and to have a passionate commitment to social justice which inevitably leads to an intense involvement in politics. Inasmuch as this is an election year and politics are front and center everywhere you look, I thought it worthwhile to remind ourselves again of what Jesus said and how obedience to his sayings informs not just our personal piety, but public and civic engagement. Now so-called “Red-Letter Christians” tend to be Democrats (ironic given that the letters are red). I myself am a registered Republican. But as far as I can tell Jesus was neither. Thus to look at his words is not to seek support for a particular political platform (though we do that all the time), but hopefully to better understand whether and how what he said may have political implications.

Take tonight’s passage for instance. “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” On the one hand, you read this and interpret it as Jesus speaking primarily about heaven and salvation and personal faith in him. But then you look more closely, especially at the word near, and you discover that it’s a word that could also be translated as at hand, or even right here. Suddenly you wonder whether Jesus is speaking about something other than heaven out there, or even heaven in your heart. For his original audience here in Mark, Galilean Jews chafing under brutal Roman rule, to hear that the rule of God had arrived could not have been construed as anything other than a radical denouncement of Roman rule. This is what made it such good news. And what made it political. Jesus proclaims that Rome’s time is up. God’s kingdom has come.

It’s just what the prophet Daniel had predicted. In Daniel 2 we read, “The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.” And then in Daniel’s vision of chapter 7, “As I watched, a ferocious fourth beast waged war against the saints and defeated them, until the Ancient of Days came and pronounced judgment in favor of the saints of the Most High, and the time came when they possessed the kingdom.” Their rescue would come by one “given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language will worship him.” Jews understood the fourth beast to be Rome. The “one given authority” was the Son of Man himself. For oppressed Jews to hear Jesus say that “God’s kingdom had come” meant that God’s justice had come too and that the power to rule would soon be theirs. Never mind that the one standing before them making this pronouncement was an unemployed, homeless carpenter—and not much of a Messiah.

Mark doesn’t tell us how Jesus’ first sermon was received (though I imagine some people probably thought, “wow that was short!”). However in Luke, you’ll remember, when Jesus announced the arrival of God’s justice in his home church, folks there came close to throwing him off a cliff. Why? I used to think it was because they thought Jesus was mocking their faith. How dare some vagabond homeboy declare himself the anticipated bringer of God’s justice! It’s like Ralph Nader declaring his candidacy for president again. Who can take that seriously? But on second thought, I don’t think it was Jesus’ appearance, social status, lack of experience or outrageous assertions that proved so offensive. I think the thing that would have gotten everybody’s goat in this short sermon would have been another word repent. Think about it. You’re the victim. You’re the one who’s been run over and abused by a tyrannical government. You’re the one who needs rescue and justice. And here’s Jesus telling you to repent? You’re like, “What did I do?”

The answer may be found by taking another look at yet another word, this time the politically charged word kingdom. Then as now, to say kingdom is to imply power, and specifically, the power to control. In regard to Rome, kingdom power meant military power, control by brute force. Historians may describe Pax Romana as a time of world peace, but the peace of the Roman Empire was a peace by way of war, extortion and the elimination of enemies. Roman apologists naturally called such imperial domination good news, which it was as long as you weren’t an enemy of the state, a slave, an immigrant, a woman, poor or Jewish. For the Jews of Jesus’ day, good news was not Caesar’s rule, but his downfall. That God promised to bring this about fueled their own audacity of hope. But they’d been hoping for a long time. Too long for some. Among the Jews were those called Zealots, people who believed that they needed to hurry God’s kingdom and that the only way to do that was through open revolt. Meet violence with violence. Others, known as Pharisees, opted for a cultural war. Bring on God’s kingdom by righteous legislation. Follow all the rules and compel God to reward. Scapegoat the sinners and shame society into submission. The Sadducees, on the other hand, figured that if God was going to take his time they might as well take advantage. Cozy up to the Romans and reap the benefits of proximity to political power, even if it means hiding your faith under a basket for a while, or even redefining it altogether.

For each of these groups—Zealots, Pharisees and Sadducees—kingdom-come still meant ruling power. Whether through violence, legislation or accommodation, the end game was all about getting your hands on the reins. It’s a narrative that’s played out through church history too. From the Crusades to witch trials to Northern Irish violence and Rwandan genocides, Christians have long used God’s name to sanction state violence. From indulgences to prohibition, money and marriage, ongoing attempts at legislating Christian morality without the accompanying Christian faith constantly founder, too often due to the exposed hypocrisy and immorality of the legislation’s proponents. Moreover, cozying up to political power never works either. It only dilutes Christian faith into a civil religion not worth its salt. All of these efforts fail because in the end, governments are not God. Governments lie and therefore cannot be trusted. Only God can be trusted. Therefore trust God.

For Jesus to say repent in this context is to call to conversion those who understood kingdom only in terms of ruling power. As theologian NT Wright puts it, in Jesus, “God was issuing a fresh challenge to Israel, echoing back to his promises to Abraham: Israel is indeed the light of the world, but its present policies have been putting that light under a bucket. It’s time for drastic action. Instead of the usual military revolt, it was time to show the pagans what the true God was really like, not by fighting and violence but by loving one’s enemies, turning the other cheek and going the second mile.” Nowhere is this more evident than in Christianity’s calling card. Rome viciously squelched insurrection and political resistance with crucifixion. Rome used crosses to expose the futility of political resistance and execute the death sentence on rebels. But by contrast, Jesus uses the cross to expose the futility of Roman violence and religious complicity with it, while executing a sentence of forgiveness on his crucifiers. Christ accepts rejection and injustice and responds with resurrection. In his kingdom, peace is not made and kept through the shedding of enemies’ blood, but by the king shedding his own blood. God’s kingdom makes and keeps peace by way of nonviolent suffering, humility, grace, reconciliation, generosity and love.

Just as Jesus said trust God rather than public applause when it comes to practicing your piety, and trust God instead of money when it comes to storing up your treasure, here he says trust God rather than governmental power when it comes to the kingdom. “Repent and believe my version of good news instead,” he said. Granted, for Jesus’ followers, viewing crucifixion as good news was not an easy thing to do. Not even after Jesus rose from the dead. It really wasn’t until Pentecost and the Spirit burned it into their heads that they finally got that to follow Jesus by carrying a cross was a right thing to do. Popularity, moral accomplishments, monetary achievement, political influence and status—none of these went with crucifixion. To carry a cross was to become poor and powerless, to recognize that to such belonged the kingdom of God. As the apostle James wrote, “God has chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him.”

To be poor is not to be pitied. To be poor to be free of the enticements of wealth, free from the delusions of power. Study after study indicates that happiness has an inverse relationship to personal possessions; that those who are poor who are more generous toward others than those who are rich. Personal experience teaches that to be without engenders more faith. The poor trust God because they have no other choice. Little wonder, then, that to be poor is to be happier and more generous (which of course helps keep you poor and happy). Last Sunday our church collected over $30,000 to support the work of World Relief, serving the poor through the work of the church in Sudan, China and elsewhere. Many of you have signed up for our Love Boston Day this coming Saturday where we will spread out all over the city cleaning up trash, feeding and clothing the homeless and befriending the aged (You can still sign up on the church website). Next month a number of you will participate in the Boston Faith and Justice Network’s World Fair Trade Day, also supported by our church, where you will learn to support economic policies and products that do not exploit working farmers and that empower low-income neighborhood businesses.

And many of you will vote in November. One of the things we love about America is that our democracy not only invites but expects our participation. And Colbert was right: Christians do vote. Campolo says that for Red-Letter Christians, voting is an obligation (though I’m not sure where Jesus said that unless somehow you count “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”). While we do not put our trust in princes, we do express our faith when we vote for candidates whose policies at least approximate kingdom values rather than oppose them (beyond merely professing faith in Jesus—candidates always do that). I read how US military expenditures run some 21 times larger than diplomacy and foreign aid combined. Our country remains dead last among developed nations in foreign aid as a percentage of gross national product. One-half of one percent of the US Military budget, if reinvested in foreign aid and development, would cut hunger in Africa in half by 2015. Ten percent could nearly eradicate current global poverty. I can’t help but believe that America did that, if we voted for candidates who supported that, we could do more to eliminate our enemies than all the bombs we’ve heretofore dropped.

Personally, I possess no postmillennial hope of humanity doing anything but eventually sinking under the deluge of persistent human evil and greed. For me to trust God is ultimately to hold out for the Biblical vision of a brand new earth once Christ returns. But this does not mean I can just sit back and wait in the meantime. Until our prayers are finally answered and God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, the church floats on as a counter-cultural Noah’s ark—defying the status quo through its sacrificial faith and life. Historically whenever the church has borne its cross, that’s when it taps into its resurrection energy. “The kingdom of God is at hand,” Jesus said. “Repent and believe the gospel.” And then follow where it leads us.

666

Revelation 13

This sermon title has a familiar if ominous ring. Even people who know nothing about the book of Revelation know about the mark of the beast. We read, “If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.” In ancient times each letter of the alphabet had a numeric value (akin to Roman numerals). Deciphering a number from a name was simple. But deciphering a name from a number remains downright impossible. This explains why 2000 years later we’re still guessing at the identity of the beast.

Most scholars believe that John, the presumed writer of Revelation, was referring to the ruthless Roman emperor Nero. The only problem is that for Nero Caesar to add up to 666 requires a Hebrew transliteration of the Greek form of a Latin name—and that with a defective spelling. The normal spelling of Nero produces the number 616, which is the area code for Grand Rapids, MI. Bad news for Calvin College and numerous Christian publishing houses. Mathematical finessing of the numeric 666 has produced all sorts of candidates. After Roman persecution of Christians ended, some early church fathers thought the beast to be an apostate Jew from the tribe of Dan, since Dan is missing from the tribal list in Revelation 7. The later Middle Ages turned their attention back to Rome and to the corrupt occupants of the Papacy. By the Reformation, every occupant of the Vatican was suspect. The 1646 Westminster Confession read: “The Pope of Rome is that Antichrist, that man of sin, that son of perdition, who exalteth himself in the church, against all that is called God.” Of course on the other side, Roman Catholics also had a name for the Antichrist: they called him Martin Luther. Hitler, Stalin, Ayatollah Khomeini, Prince Charles and Ronald Reagan have all made the list too. As have American Airlines, Microsoft and Mastercard.

The possibilities remain endless. The erstwhile children’s television character Barney the Dinosaur has been linked to 666. As a dinosaur, Barney is clearly a beast, albeit a cute one. Take the phrase CUTE PURPLE DINOSAUR, change the U’s to V’s, extract all remaining Roman numerals in the phrase, convert them to Arabic, add and you get six-hundred sixty-six. My first name has six letters. Slide just one letter from my last name over to my middle name and you get a sequential 666 (not a surprise to some of you).

If 666 referred to a specific individual, we assume that John and his persecuted readers knew the name. Thus 666 may be not so much about deciphering an identity as about describing that identity. Throughout Revelation the number 7 symbolizes perfection and completion. Revelation’s seventh seal, seventh bowl and seventh trumpet all herald the kingdom of God, the abode of the faithful. By contrast, the sixth seal, the sixth bowl and the sixth trumpet all herald God’s judgment and wrath, the destiny of evil.

We took a detour from Revelation last month to look at the book of Leviticus (a book that ranks right up there with Revelation in terms of incomprehensibility). It was Christmas, therefore, when last I preached from Revelation. Chapter 12, you may remember, offered an interesting twist on Christmas: A mother gives birth to a child destined to rule the nations. An evil adversary seeks to devour this threat to his power. But rather than some small-time tyrant, the adversary of Revelation 12 is a serpent, a dragon, the very devil of hell.

The battle lines between drawn are long established ones. God said to the serpent in the Garden: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers, he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” Throughout Israel’s history her enemies all were portrayed as serpents: the Egyptians, the Assyrians the Babylonians. It is no surprise that a serpent shows up in the final book of the Bible. He’s here to finish what he started in Genesis. The dragon knows the Genesis curse as well as anyone, which is why he crouches in wait to make a meal of the newborn king before the king crushes him. Yet like Herod in the Christmas story, God foils the dragon. The child gets snatched up to heaven while the dragon gets hurled down from heaven. Satan falls to earth eliciting cheers from above. “Now has come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ,” we read, “for the accuser of our brothers and sisters has been thrown down.”

Unfortunately the news on the ground is not so upbeat. Chapter 12 continues, “Woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you filled with fury.” Some commentators try to wrangle the Greek to make it read as if only unbelievers are subject to Satan’s fury. But an authentic rendering and common experience both teach that the devil has the church in his crosshairs too. He’s mad because God has tossed him out of heaven. And he’s mad because God has numbered his days. That he would take out his anger on God’s people should be expected. That God lets him do it presents a perennial problem, but that is not Revelation’s problem. For John, Satan’s fall to earth is ironic good news since it represents the first step in a two-step demotion. In chapter 20 the devil will be hurled the rest of the way down into an eternal lake of fire.

Yet in the meantime, like any frustrated predator, his fury is stoked by his being so dismissively kicked to the ground. Therefore, upon landing on earth, the dragon lunges after the mother, chasing her into the desert. But as with the Israelites of the Exodus, God rescues the woman and evil is thwarted, which is what always happens to Satan in the desert (Jesus defied the devil there too). So the dragon turns to take on the rest of the mother’s offspring, those faithful Christians “who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.”

For the early Christians, persecuted and martyred as they were by the Romans, this explained everything. Though they had been saved by the blood of the lamb, they nevertheless suffered like sheep led to slaughter because they were not ashamed of the gospel. The vengeful dragon was still on the loose. Only now he recruits henchmen. Chapter 13 opens with the dragon looking out on the sea, the domicile of potent evil. From it ascends another monster, a beast with ten horns and seven heads. Note the family resemblance. Both dragon and beast have seven heads and ten horns, perfect and complete numbers that here emphasize perfect and complete wickedness. Old Testament readers will also recognize the resemblance to Daniel’s vision of four beasts, which here John rolls into one ferocious fiend. In verse 3 we read that one of the heads of the beast seemed to have a “fatal wound that had been healed.” At first you think: “Genesis head-crushing curse.” But a more literal rendering of verse 3 has the beast looking “as if it had been slain,” which on second thought is the exact same expression used to describe Christ the crucified Lamb in chapter 5. Suddenly you realize that the beast from the sea is a demonic parody of Jesus, a genuine anti-Christ. Toss in the dragon who grants his power and authority to the beast, as well as the second beast-to-come who inspires the world to worship the antichrist, and what you really have is a complete anti-Trinity.

The contrasts are clear. God in heaven sent Christ the lamb to suffer and die for others. Satan who is kicked out of heaven sends the beast to make others suffer. God grants His power to the Lamb who abjures its violent use. The dragon grants his power to the beast who violently wields it. The Lamb endures death for people from every tribe, language and nation. The beast inflicts death on people from every tribe, language and nation. The Lamb establishes a heavenly kingdom to bless God’s people. The Beast operates behind worldly kingdoms to oppress God’s people. Like Daniel’s beasts that represented historic earthly regimes hostile to God, there is little doubt that for John the beast was manifest in the tyrannical Roman Empire which claimed religious sanction for its gross injustices. Caesar decreed that he alone was “Lord and God.” This was the ultimate blasphemy. The Bible may command obedience to governments, but once the state oversteps its bounds and demands worship of itself, Christians must refuse to submit.

Nevertheless, verse 10 commands that Christians who refuse to submit to the state must still submit to the punishments the state lays down for noncompliance. John writes, citing Jeremiah, “If anyone is to go into captivity, into captivity he will go. If anyone is to be killed with the sword, with the sword he will be killed.’ The citation seems odd. In Jeremiah, God allows Israel’s captivity and death as punishment for their unfaithfulness. Are we to understand that God allows the same punishment here for the faithful? Ironically, yes. Such is way of the cross. The captive suffering Israel suffered as punishment for their sin gets redeemed by the cross into the voluntary suffering Christians suffer for their faith. John calls it the endurance and faith of the saints. Paul experienced it as strength made perfect through weakness. Jesus said, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven.”

How this operates has been evidenced no better than in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s. “We’ve come to see the power of nonviolence [and endurance],” Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. “We’ve come to see that this method is not a weak method, for it’s the strong man who can stand up amid opposition, who can stand up amid violence being inflicted upon him and not retaliate with violence. You see, this method has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale, and at the same time it works on his conscience, and he just doesn’t know what to do. If he doesn’t beat you, wonderful. If he beats you, you develop the quiet courage of accepting blows without retaliating. If he doesn’t put you in jail, wonderful. Nobody with any sense likes to go to jail. But if he puts you in jail, you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame into a haven of freedom and human dignity. And even if he tries to kill you, you’ll develop the inner conviction that there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they are worth dying for.”

I get convicted by these words. They scare me too. So much so that I often will reduce my own faith down to matters of my own personal salvation and my own personal comfort. It makes following Jesus easier to manage. Best not to think too much, or at least too seriously, about everything else Jesus requires of me—be it evangelizing the world, eliminating injustice, making peace, promoting life or just plain feeding the poor.

Author Brian McLaren writes recently of a meeting of ministers he attended in Cape Town, South Africa. As the pastors discussed their ministries to the poor, a healthcare worker also in attendance grew agitated. Eventually he blurted out, “You pastors are causing such destruction, it reaches to the skies. I know you mean well, but you don’t realize the that you cause devastation in the lives of the people among whom I work. You come to the slums every Sunday and you set up your tents, which is good, but then you only preach three things: be healed, be saved and tithe. You tell people that they can be healed of their HIV and some of them believe so they stop taking their medications. But when they stop, they develop new resistant strains of the disease and they spread these tougher infections to other people, leaving them much sicker than they were before. You tell people they need to be born again, but after they’re born again on Sunday, they’re still unemployed on Monday. If they’re unemployed, they’re going to be caught in the poverty web of substance abuse, crime and gangs, domestic violence and HIV. And then you tell them to tithe. You tell them to sow financial seed into your ministries and they will receive a hundredfold return. But you’re the only ones who get a return.

“You could be helping so much. Who else loves the poor and forgotten people of the townships? You could motivate them to learn employable skills, you could teach them how to be friends without having sex, you could help them find things to do—sports or music—or better, teach them the necessity of getting up and showing up and keeping your word and working hard and being honest. You could network through your churches and other contacts to start businesses so the people could get jobs.”

Naturally the pastors on the receiving end of this rebuke got defensive—and furious. They denounced this fellow Christian healthcare worker as a heretic. Did he not know that getting saved, getting healed and tithing were biblical? But of course, so are economic justice, friendship and honest work. We believe in Jesus, yet so often we reduce that belief down to matters of our own personal salvation and our own personal comfort. It makes following Jesus easier to manage. It also makes our faith “a benign and passive chaplaincy to a failing and dysfunctional culture” [McLaren], rather than a force for societal transformation.

John would have recognized this dilution of the gospel as the perverse work of the second beast from the earth, the last member of the unholy trinity. This second beast will get labeled “the false prophet” by the time we get to chapter 16. He also has horns like a lamb, but the reference is more literal here. The lamblike appearance of the second beast denotes gentleness and harmlessness, the kind of false prophet Jesus warned comes as a ravenous wolf in sheep’s clothing. The second beast speaks like the dragon, yet his voice is not a fire-breathing rant; it is the slithering and deceptive whisper of the serpent. This false prophet performs great and miraculous signs, verse 13, “even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of all people.” But Jesus warned about that too. He said, “False christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to deceive even the elect—if that were possible.”

By adding if that were possible, Jesus assures against the believer’s deception. “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me,” he said. “No one can snatch them out of my hand.” These sheep are the same elect Revelation describes in chapter 9 as having the mark of God on their foreheads. Yet if you’ll remember back to chapter 9 you’ll remember that these marks hearken back to Ezekiel and the forehead marks there on those who expressed remorse for Jerusalem’s ruin—a ruin for which they were to blame. The Ezekiel passage has a definite Passover feel to it. Just as the angel of God passed over those in Egypt whose doorposts were marked with the blood of the lamb, so in Ezekiel’s Jerusalem, those who were marked with the mark of God likewise were passed over when judgment arrived. So many years hence, this same judgment has been understood as doom for all who refuse to repent and heed Christ as the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Jesus rescues us from the final judgment Revelation portends.

Yet as I mentioned on Maundy Thursday, there’s a problem when you turn to the apostle Paul. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.” Paul’s pronouncement of final Christian judgment tacitly indicts that ancient tendency believers have always had to take God’s grace for granted and to treat the doctrine of election as unchallenged incumbency. We read “Jesus loves me just as I am” as permission to stay that way. It is the gospel truth that just as you can do nothing to earn God’s grace, you can do nothing to lose it either. But at the same time, you must do something to show you’ve received it. Revelation labels the faithful as those “who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.” “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom,” Jesus said, “but only those who do the will of my Father.” “My sheep listen to my voice and they follow me.”

“They will not follow a stranger,” Jesus said, “but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” This may be why the false prophet chooses familiar language. He constructs an impressive talking idol of the first beast, a foreshadow, perhaps, of the technologies in our own day that so effortlessly entertain and distract. He yanks an economic leash, an acknowledgment perhaps, to money’s own pull to which we so readily succumb. The beast may be a parody of Jesus, but sometimes we prefer the parody: A Jesus we construct in our own image. I’ve mentioned before a book from a few years back by BU religion professor Stephen Prothero entitled, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. Professor Prothero resourced sermons and theological works, but also movies, novels, news media and popular music in order to show how “Americans of all stripes have cast the man from Nazareth in their own image.” Democrats portray Jesus as a democrat, Republicans have him resembling republicans. Jesus comes off as a radical for the radicals and a corporate CEO for business types. Not so surprisingly, a New York Times reviewer pointed out that by the end of his book, Professor Prothero’s own portrayal had Jesus looking a lot like an urban university religion professor. Chances are that if you were asked to describe Jesus in your own words, the description wouldn’t be a long shot from how you see yourself—with the same friends and the same enemies as you have.

In the end, there is support for understanding 666 as a generic symbol of imperfect and incomplete humanity. People marked with the mark of the beast are people devoid of endurance and devoid of faith: both faith in Christ and faith like Christ. Martin Luther King Jr. was right: “There are some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they are worth dying for. And I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

The Last Leviticus Sermon and Easter Video

Happy Easter and Jubilee
Leviticus 25
(the video appears at the bottom)

For my last sermon in Leviticus, I turn to chapter 25 and a remarkable practice mandated by God called the Year of Jubilee. Every 50 years, a trumpet sounded (jubilee means blow the horn) to announce a wholesale overhaul of economic and social conditions. Jubilee signaled a new beginning, a time when all who had failed at life and work were given a do-over, and when all who had benefitted from others’ failures let go of their gains. Land reverted back to its original ownership, debts were forgiven, slaves set free the score set back to zero. As a year-long extension of the Sabbath, everyone took a year off to enjoy, stress-free, the fruits of their labor with thanksgiving. Of course in a predominantly agrarian society, the question undoubtedly arose as to how you would eat if you didn’t work your land for a year. God assured everybody by announcing “I will send you such a blessing in the year before that the land will yield enough for three years.” Even the earth needed a break. Jubilee represented Old Testament environmentalism at its best.

It represented Old Testament economic justice at its best too. Jubilee prevented the amassing of wealth into the hands of a privileged few. Every fifty years accounts were squared and equality was reestablished. Jubilee curtailed the human desire to accumulate more and more by yanking down social and corporate ladders. Greed got checked. The rich were kept humble and the poor were made hopeful. Everybody understood that we are but tenants on this earth and not owners. All things ultimately belong to God. People were not allowed to take advantage of each other in life or business because to do so was to take advantage of God.

This Levitical vision proves so captivating that a movement is currently afoot called Jubilee USA. Its purpose, supported by many churches, is to promote passage of House Resolution 2634, entitled the Jubilee Act. In the world’s most impoverished nations, the majority of the population do not have access to clean water, adequate housing or basic health care. These countries are paying debt service to wealthy nations and institutions at the expense of providing these basic services to their citizens. The United Nations Development Program estimates that 30,000 children die each day due to preventable diseases. Debt service payments take resources that impoverished countries could use to cure preventable diseases. The Jubilee Act mandates debt cancellation for these countries. Ironically, these nations have already paid back their debts time and again. The crisis set in once interest rates rose and compound interest made repayment impossible. It explains why the Hebrew word for interest is literally the verb “to bite.”

It may be that you’ve felt bitten yourself of late. Many assert that the United States itself is descending quickly into economic recession, in large part due to the subprime mortgage crisis. Mortgages packaged as investments grew riskier as expectations of return grew higher. Since real estate in America had always been a good bet, people figured the sky was the limit. But even the sky has its limits. The inevitable nationwide default on ever riskier housing loans crunched credit on Wall Street and on Main Street. The government has been forced to intervene with huge infusions of cash to keep the whole house of cards from crashing down—cash for which the government has had to go further into debt itself to pay.

The crises of Leviticus 25 read like the subprime mortgage mess. A farmer fails at farming, defaults on a loan and loses his land but not his obligation to his creditors. It reminds me of a time I stumbled on the credit card bills of a family member I had agreed to help through school. I thought she was counting her pennies and being a good steward of my generosity, but it turned out that she had run up extraneous debt to the tune of $30,000. Because I had chosen to financially expose myself for her sake, I ended up with the bill which meant refinancing my house to pay it. Had I been living by Leviticus back then, chapter 25 would have allowed me to enslave this family member until she worked off the debt. This may sound like sweet revenge, only Leviticus prohibits any harsh treatment of a person indebted to you. I would have had to restructure payments according to her ability, and if the year of Jubilee arrived before she fully paid me back, her entire debt would be forgiven. Which sounds unfair until you realize that the bank which held my mortgage would forgive my debt too. Of course that just sounds unrealistic.

So unrealistic in fact that there is no evidence that Jubilee was ever observed. Though commanded by God, it never happened. Maybe it was deemed too impractical. Or maybe it just took too much faith to do it. Or maybe those who’d made it to the top were too unwilling to let loose of their achievements. For whatever reason, Israel’s unwillingness to follow the law led to their downfall. Redeemed from their slavery in Egypt, delivered into a rich promised land, God’s people took advantage of his goodness. So much so that they lost their land and their freedom. If you’ve read the story, you know that the Babylonians ransacked Israel and drove its population into captivity. Nevertheless, because God has a thing for sinners, he announced through the prophet Isaiah another shot a Jubilee. Speaking of the Messiah to come, Isaiah said, “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor.” This is the Jubilee language.

But again, if you’ve read the story you know that this Jubilee likewise went unfulfilled. True, by God’s grace, the Israelites were rescued from their captivity, but human nature being what it is, things quickly reverted back and the people found themselves in captivity again, this time to the Romans, with no hope on the horizon. But again, God has his thing for sinners. So he sent Jesus who walked into his local synagogue, dusted off the book of Isaiah and read those Jubilee promises again. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” The congregation might have appreciated Jesus’ attempts to restore their hope had he not gone on and audaciously added, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Excuse me? In Luke chapter 4, Jesus announced that he, an unemployed carpenter from Nazareth, was the bringer of Jubilee. He was their Messiah. So offended was the congregation by what seemed like a mockery of their plight, that the Bible says “they got up, ran Jesus out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, and tried to throw him off the cliff.”

Jesus slipped away that time, but it was a temporary escape. Before long he’d be strung up on a cross; executed as a criminal and a blasphemer. However, the New Testament imports an image from Leviticus to show what really happened on the cross. Once a year in Leviticus, the Jewish high priest would take a goat and would symbolically transfer all the sins of the people onto it and would then chase this scapegoat out of town to die. Later Judaism would go so far as to throw this so-called scapegoat off a cliff to assure its demise. The apostle Paul writes of Jesus, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.” Jesus is our scapegoat.

Because it is Easter, you know how the story turns out. Jesus rises from the dead and in doing so, he establishes justice and yanks down the ladders. He squares our accounts with God. He settles our debts. The poor are exalted and the weak lifted up. The last are first and the lost are found. Death proves the way to victory. Sinners get a do-over. A new start. “Jesus died for all,” Paul writes, “so that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. …If anyone is in Christ, you are a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” And not just for this life. But for eternity. Paul writes, “We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. The trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” “So blow the trumpet loud and long,” Leviticus sings, “proclaim freedom in the land for all its inhabitants, this will be your Jubilee!”

Loading the Goat

March 23, Palm Sunday

Last Sunday’s break from Leviticus provided some breathing space for the homestretch in our Lent-long look at this esoteric book. Rarely studied and even more rarely preached, I nevertheless wanted to take a shot at it which I’ve done with generous assistance from 21 people in this congregation who spent the month of January with living according to its precepts. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to read about our experiment up on Facebook or on the church blog. Not that this has necessarily has made Leviticus more comprehensible. I got an email just this week that read, “I watched the videos and read the write-ups and I still do not understand it. Trying to follow all those laws didn’t work out well for the Jewish people so God instead put his Spirit right inside us. Why go back to the idea that because Jesus stated that he came to fulfill rather than abolish the law Christians need to follow a set of laws? I am not trying to argue with you, I just don’t get it and you guys are supposed to be a good bible-believing church.”

Actually, it’s because we are a Bible-believing church that we even bother with Leviticus. Leviticus is in the Bible. But remember it’s not in the Bible to make you feel bad or even to show you your need for grace as much as to show you what grace is for. The Israelites were already God’s people before Leviticus ever made it onto parchment. Now granted, determining which parts of Leviticus still apply to Christians is an ongoing discussion—one that has been a constant part of our own exploration. But given that Jesus cited Leviticus 19 as the summation of all the law and the prophets clearly indicates that you can’t write it off. This is why we read it.

Not to worry though. We have just two more sermons, tonight’s look at the Day of Atonement, in line with our entry into Holy Week. And next Sunday’s Easter sermon from Leviticus 25. I know, who’s ever heard of an Easter sermon out of Leviticus? But hey, all the more reason to come and see if we can pull it off. And even invite a friend too, especially if you have a friend who’s already heard the one about the resurrection.

For those of you who are Jewish or grew up Jewish, then you know that Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, is the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Once a year, everybody gets their sin taken care of over the course of an exhausting 25 hours of prayer and abstinence from work, food, drink, sex, bathing and leather shoes. I read that the prohibition against leather shoes has to do with not wanting to be presumptuous by appearing before God shod in the skins of a slaughtered animal. Yom Kippur is spent sitting in synagogue as a long list of sins are confessed, not only individually but corporately. Even if you hadn’t committed a particular sin listed, you still confess it. Jewish tradition teaches that each person bears a certain measure of responsibility for sins committed by others since everybody is part of the same community.

While all this contrition and confession may sound depressing, the Talmud labels Yom Kippur one of the happiest days of the year. It’s the same reason its Christian counterpart is ironically called Good Friday. Atonement means your sins are forgiven.

These days, neither the Christian Good Friday nor the Jewish Yom Kippur look much like Leviticus 16. There are no animals slaughtered, no scapegoats chased off into the wilderness, no mercy seat on which to sprinkle blood. However, for the ancient Israelites, all of this was required to purge the tabernacle of a year’s worth of pollution due to their unholiness and impurity. Perhaps you’re thinking, how could there be any sin left to pollute the tabernacle given all of the blood of those innocent animals run through the sacrificial system day after day? But you have to remember that the sacrificial system only took care of unintentional stuff. Intentional, deliberate sinners weren’t allowed to sacrifice. Their offenses remained in God’s face and got all over his house. And therefore once a year, the high priest risked his life to purify the sanctuary so that those who could sacrifice would have their sacrifices accepted.

It was very risky business. In Leviticus 26 we read God say “If you do not obey Me and do not carry out all my commandments, if instead, you reject My statutes, and if you abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant, then I will do this to you: I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will waste away the eyes and drain your life…I will set My face against you so that you shall be struck down before your enemies… If you still remain hostile toward me and refuse to listen to me, I will multiply your afflictions seven times over, as your sins deserve.”

Kristi, one of our Levites for the month experienced what she considered a dose of Leviticus 26. She wrote, “Last night after a very healthy [and kosher] dinner of fish and vegetables, my stomach started feeling a bit queasy. Then an hour later I thought, ‘something is certainly amiss here. But what could it be? Is there a bug going around? No way is it food poisoning.’ I went to bed at 10:30, convinced that a little sleep would fix everything. Two hours later, feeling horrible, I and the bathroom had our first intimate visit of what turned out to be many as I was attacked by Levitical affliction in all its horror. The next seven hours were agonizing, excruciating, abysmal, you get the picture. It felt as if dementors were trying to suck my soul from my body. Seriously. I fail to remember a sickness having such a profound effect on me. My inner dialogue went from: ‘It’s just a stomach bug, you pansy, quit complaining’ to “God, please, PLEEEEASE take me now! I can’t go through this again! AAAAHHHHH!” (Kim, another Levite and mother of two, remarked how she’d had food poisoning once and that giving birth was better.) “I contemplated sleeping in the bathroom,” Kristi continued, “it was pitiful. Now I know, I think, it was just a stomach bug, and not God smiting me. But it FELT like a smiting. God declares in Leviticus 26, ‘If you do not obey Me and do not carry out all these commandments, I will appoint over you a sudden terror, consumption and will increase the plague on you seven times according to your sins.’ If you ask me, that description strangely resembled last night’s experience.”

Sin defiles, and not only individuals, but communities and institutions too. Look no further than the enormous mess down the Pike in Albany, New York last week. For the ancient Israelites, their conduct was inextricably tied to the holiness of God’s house. When they were faithful, the sanctuary radiated their commitment. When they were unfaithful, the sanctuary reflected their failing. If it was not cleansed, God threatened to depart and leave the community to its futility—a threat that he carries out once we get to Ezekiel. And after Jesus departs the earth, God’s now totally vacated house gets totally leveled by the Romans. This is why the Jewish practice of Yom Kippur no longer adheres to Leviticus 16. There’s no earthly sanctuary left to cleanse.

At the center of the Leviticus ritual sat the mercy seat, a golden slab atop the ark of the covenant that functioned as the boundary line between God’s holiness and human unholiness. It was adorned with two statues of cherubim on either end, their wings touching in the middle. Enthroned between the cherubim, within the holy of holies, God appeared in a cloud to accept the atoning sacrifices offered by the high priest. Lest the high priest glance at God and die, incense was burned to screen him from peeking. Sacrificial blood from the bull and a goat was sprinkled on the mercy seat to purify it and then seven times in front of the mercy seat to re-consecrate it for holy use. Afterwards, from behind the curtain that shielded the congregation, the high priest then emerged liturgically loaded with both the people’s impurities (their sins that polluted the sanctuary) and their iniquities (their sins that polluted themselves). With both hands the high priest transferred all this wickedness and rebellion onto a live but doomed second goat. Chosen by lot, this so-called scapegoat hauled all of the toxic waste out into the wilderness to destroy it. Later Judaism would go so far as to push the scapegoat off the edge of gorge in order to assure its demise. Nobody wanted a year’s worth of wickedness finding its way back into town.

Nevertheless, even for people who have experienced God’s grace and forgiveness, it is as if we each have our own personal and pesky scapegoat that keeps finding its way back anyway, unloading our sin onto us all over again. Simon, another one of our Levites for the month, decided to take stock of his own holiness over the course of a seven-day accounting where he judged each of his thoughts and deeds of each day as either holy or unholy. He wrote: “No day existed in which the HOLY items outnumbered the UNHOLY items. Not only are there very few holy items in total, but they are offset by some horrendously unholy things, sometimes separated by mere hours in the same day. Items marked HOLY tended to be really ordinary, core Christian values that I should be living already and are not heroic by any stretch of imagination. Items marked UNHOLY, however, were spectacular to behold—in the same way that a train wreck can happen in a thousand ways, each more spectacular than the one before.

“[To make myself feel better,] I made an attempt at detecting unholy things that other people may be doing (just trying to keep an honest scale, in accordance with Leviticus 19:36). However, the LORD was not at all interested that I keep records of other people’s wrongdoings. Instead, He kept bringing up all the things for which *I* alone am responsible. Living by Leviticus has been like ‘standing naked in front of a mirror’—not only are your sins exposed, but you’re not allowed to look at anybody else’s sins just so you can change the focus for a second.”

The need for atonement is so palpable that we were tempted, as an object lesson, to rent a couple of goats for the services tonight. We thought that watching your sins get killed and carried away might make grace more real. Of course renting a couple of goats is one thing. Finding somebody to rent us a goat to sacrifice is something else. And even with the goat that draws the lucky straw, you still had the problem of bringing back to the 6 pm service a scapegoat loaded up with the sins of those at the 4. Gordon suggested that perhaps we could have one of you dress up like a goat. But you still have the same problem: Who in their right mind would give themselves for the sins of everybody else?

I mean except for Jesus. He is our scapegoat. As we will intone from Isaiah this coming Good Friday: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians. And then to the Romans: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement.” Or as other translations have it, “a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” If you trace this English word propitiation back through the Latin translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, you get to the word in Leviticus 16 translated mercy seat. Jesus is our mercy seat too. He dies at that boundary line where God’s holiness meets human unholiness and atonement gets made for good.

For the first 15 chapters, Leviticus generally addresses proper worship—how to approach a holy God. In chapters 17-27, the issue is proper ethics—how to be a holy people. We’re all familiar with the deep distance between the two. You come to church, perhaps even tonight, and fill this room with your praise and prayer; only to leave this room and fail to love your neighbor or refuse to love your enemy, the very things that the God you just worshipped commands that you do. Jesus rightly asks, “Why do you call me Lord but not do what I say?” This distance is what we label sin. The Old Testament provides a varied vocabulary to describe it: rebellion, infidelity, disloyalty, getting dirty, wandering, trespassing, transgressing and missing the mark. But because sin remains a perversity that pollutes God even more than it pollutes ourselves, amending our lives and promising to do better isn’t enough. The only way to span the distance between our worship and our failure to live as we worship—between God’s expectations in chapters 1-15 and their implications in chapters 17-27 is with chapter 16. Atonement. Leviticus 16 is the bridge. Once a year the high priest risked his life to purify the sanctuary and the people, but as the author of Hebrews reminds, when Christ came as high priest, he gave his life. Jesus is both the priest and the sacrifice who Hebrews declares has “entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. How much more then, will then the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!”

Atonement takes away our sin and makes us into holy people—people whose ethics can square with their worship, people who can preach what they practice. Yet somehow the distance remains. How is it that people made holy by Christ still act so unholy? Part of the problem may have something to do with a flawed understanding of atonement itself. To experience atonement is more than to be declared “not guilty” before God. To experience atonement is to be changed by God. Our tendency is to embrace the former while resisting the latter. We read “Jesus loves you just as we are” as permission to stay that way. But one look in the Levitical mirror and you realize that if forgiveness hasn’t made you a different person, then maybe you’ve not been forgiven.

“I had a hard time with Leviticus month,” Kristen, another one of our Levites wrote, “For about thirty days and eighteen hours, I groused and complained. My postings were progressively getting darker and darker. It wasn’t going well. Early in the month I had been reading through the sacrificial section and was convinced that the modern-day, post-Jesus equivalent is confession. This is something I knew about from my Catholic days, but had never been part of my life. I had ‘gone to confession’ a grand total of once, when I was ten years old. I was not interested in doing this again—but the way I was not wanting to do this made me think that I really ought to. So I looked up the Episcopal liturgy, made arrangements with an accommodating confessor, who, not being Catholic, had really not signed up for this, took a very deep breath and jumped in.

“I don't know what I was expecting, but this was not what I was expecting. This was Large. This was a Major Life Event. I spent hours dredging up the muck in my life and preparing my list—and then it was all washed away. Gone. I was walking on air. And all of a sudden I knew that I was in a really good place and I did not want to muck it up anymore. ‘OK God,’ I prayed, ‘this is fantastic. I want to stay here. Whaddya want me to do?’ Needless to say, reading through Leviticus again looked so different in the light of grace.”

Keeping The Feasts

Leviticus 23

For most, the experience of reading through Leviticus elicits such adjectives as tedious, onerous and even oppressive. All those rules about fabric and food and mildew and skin—no wonder the ancient Israelites found obeying God so difficult. But then you come to chapter 23 and you’re struck by an inescapable irony. Leviticus may be the heaviest rule book in the Bible, but amongst those heavy rules is the rule to celebrate heavily. Eight times over the Lord commands that his people party, that they cease their work, strap on the festival feedbag and enjoy the grace and goodness of God.

Now whether our Levites-for-the-month actually experienced this fun side of Leviticus is hard to say. As you know, 21 people from this congregation spent the month of January living by the book of Leviticus as part of a reality sermon series. You’ve been hearing a lot about it and hopefully reading about it too here and on the Facebook site (accessible to your right). I know that for me, trying to heed all the intricacies of Levitical law left little time for rejoicing. The Psalmist sings that “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul…. The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart,” but mostly it gave me a headache. Obviously I was missing something. What good is following the law if all it does is make you not want to follow it? Maybe this is why God inserted chapter 23. The Lord fills up the social calendar to make the true joy of obedience unavoidable.

Verse 2: “These are the appointed Feasts of the Lord…” At first it seems strange to have a calendar that marks only time off work. Our work is what gives us identity and security, working holidays gets you complimented as ambitious and industrious and dedicated. Climbing the corporate ladder takes such precedence over enjoying the fruits of labor, that taking time off can make you feel guilty. Leviticus turns all that around. Rather than treating holy days as intrusions on our time, Leviticus views holidays as sacred time, previews of time as it shall one day be spent. “Do no work,” Leviticus commands, “it is a Sabbath to the LORD. “There remains a Sabbath-rest for the people of God,” the book of Hebrews declares, “those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from his.” “I heard a voice from heaven,” Revelation concurs, “‘Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord.’ ‘Yes,’ says the Spirit, ‘they will rest from their labors.’ Jesus Christ as the Lord of the Sabbath, declares himself the source of that Sabbath rest: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Since the Lord “Sabbathed” or “rested” after creating the world, he commanded his people to take the seventh day and “remember the Sabbath by keeping it holy.” However, the LORD rested not because He was tired and needed a nap or because work was a bad thing. God’s rest reflected his satisfaction with the goodness of his work; His enjoyment over a job well done. Sabbath celebrates completion, fulfillment, satisfaction and triumph—for work that is done and work that will be done.

Sabbath is part of all the holy days in Leviticus 23. The concept, while generally applied to the seventh day, is not solely confined to it. The Day of Atonement, which falls on the 10th day, is also called a Sabbath. Pentecost and Tabernacles, both holy weeklong festivals, emphasize the 8th day as a Sabbath. The precise day was not at issue as much as precise behavior; namely, no work. Unfortunately, Jewish rabbis worked so hard to define “not working” that their interpretation of Sabbath stiffened into strictures so strict that you would be happier spending the day at the office. By the time we get to the New Testament, even Jesus’ works of mercy get cited as a Sabbath violation, a problem that carried over into much of contemporary Christian Sabbath practice.

You might remember Cathy Maxfield’s story of growing up in a Dutch Reformed church where keeping Sabbath meant no running or playing. Sunday was a day of rest. Take a nap. Fortunately, Cathy’s parents weren’t that strict; but they sure didn’t want their Dutch Reformed neighbors to know that. Cathy’s family had a backyard swimming pool and on hot summer Sundays, Cathy’s parents mercifully allowed her to swim, but only as long as A] she stayed off the diving board (since otherwise she might appear in the air over the fence for neighbors to see) and B] she didn’t go under the water (since wet hair in evening church would be a dead giveaway of Sabbath flouting). So Cathy begrudgingly bobbed.

“The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath,” Jesus said. Jesus’ own practice and precepts have led some to speculate as to whether Sabbath applies to Christians anyway. If Jesus’ coming inaugurates the ultimate rest toward which Sabbath points, we’re already there. In Christ our yoke is easy and our burden is light. But even with this as the case, the earliest Christians still set aside a day to assemble and worship, to cease from work and break the bread of communion in anticipation of that communion they would one day share everyday with Christ and each other. Call it Sabbath or the Lord’s Day, weekly sacred time calls a time out to the aggravation and disappointment of earthly toil. Freed from the worries of this world, weekly worship expands your horizons to encompass the horizons of heaven. At the core of our creeds is the conviction that in Christ, what is coming far exceeds what now exists, even in its most glorious renderings. By reminding us that this life is not all that there is, Sabbath whets our appetite for eternity.

During January, a number of our Levites-for-the-month tried with varying degrees of success to experience genuine Sabbath-ness. As it turned out, anticipating eternity is tougher than you’d think. Kristen wrote about doing all the work that doing no work on the Sabbath required: “I suppose I could have been really on the ball and gotten all my ‘general life’ stuff done during the week but I’m not that on top of things. [Therefore according to Leviticus], I’m in trouble. I’m to rest on the Sabbath day, not some day that works best for me. If your life doesn’t fit with the Law, change your life or get stoned.” Rest is serious business.

Lisa offered us a glimpse of the work that’s required to rest. Here she is getting ready for the Lord’s Day on what the gospels rightly called “Preparation Day.”

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=16300125223

Now given the tone of Lisa’s preparation, you may wonder whether all the extra work was worth it. But turns out it was. Here’s photographic proof.

Brandy, who shared Sabbath with Lisa and Kristi for the month wrote, “I know that it often feels like the Law is about making life difficult and complicated, but I actually don’t think that was God’s point. The point wasn’t even to separate the Israelites from other people—at least, not in the sense of causing them to live in a non-interactive bubble. The setting apart wasn’t so much to set you apart from others as to set you apart for God.”

Sacred time is God time for people. We need it. And while as Christians we no longer keep these particular Levitical feasts, vestiges of them show up all over the Christian feasts we do keep. The Lord’s Day has superseded Sabbath, but aspects of Sabbath still apply. We stop work in order to enjoy its fruits. We worship. We enjoy each other. We eat. Likewise with Passover in verse 5. For Jews, Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread (they’ve been joined together) are their sacred remembrance of deliverance from slavery to the Egyptians (unleavened bread because you had to hurry to get out of Egypt). Jesus makes Passover his Last Supper and then the Last Supper the Lord’s Supper. He takes the bread and wine of Passover and announces that these are now his body and blood shed for our deliverance from slavery to sin. Paul joyfully proclaimed to the Corinthians, “Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast….” Regrettably, however, we mostly keep the funeral, treating communion more as a time to bewail our sinfulness than to be glad for our redemption. Not that bewailing our sin is a bad thing, but if it’s the only thing we do then we miss communion’s main point.

Perhaps the Israelites missed the point too. Thus God made sure they got it back by ordering the Feast of Firstfruits. The seven-day Festival of Firstfruits, verses 9-14, celebrated the barley harvest, the first crop to rise from the ground. Paul described resurrection as a harvest rising from the ground and the risen Jesus as “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Firstfruits thus corresponds to Easter, always a joyful celebration. Promised to rise from the dead, we rejoice and give thanks to God by giving him the firstfruits of our earthly harvests. We tithe as a way of showing that we mean it when we say God comes first in our lives.

Fifty days after Firstfruits (seven Sabbaths plus one day—the eighth day always a marker of heaven) came the wheat harvest and time to party again. The Feast of Weeks or Pentecost, verses 15-22, meant a feast of leavened bread, since nobody was in a hurry to get out of Egypt anymore. Jesus compared the kingdom of God to yeast—a little bit permeates an entire batch of dough and raises it up. In the book of Acts, the Feast of Weeks was the occasion of the Holy Spirit’s leavening that small band of believers into an ironic, cross-shaped power that through defeat and persecution overwhelmed the Roman Empire and took the gospel to the whole world. Pentecost remains the birthday of the church.

During the Pentecost harvest, Leviticus reminds everybody to leave some of the crops for the poor to gather. This practice, called gleaning, allowed the unemployed to enjoy the dignity of work, but it also allowed the unemployed to join the party. Throughout Leviticus God provides discounts to the poor when it comes to sacrifice. For those who couldn’t afford an animal, grain offerings could substitute. Gleaning supplied the grain.

Next came the Feast of Trumpets in verses 23-25. Time to blow a horn. Trumpets sounded the start of the seventh month, a Sabbath month, the end of harvest and the biggest festival month on the Levitical calendar. The apostle Paul and Revelation both blow trumpets to signal the end of harvest, a metaphor of Judgment Day, the day Jesus described as the day that wheat and chaff get separated. Therefore the trumpet is first a call to repentance. 10 days after the horns, verses 26-32, is the Day of Atonement, a day we’ll examine more closely on Palm Sunday. Here Leviticus calls for self-denial or fasting as a way of reorienting your hunger toward God. Day of Atonement finds its Christian expression in this season of Lent and particularly in the liturgy and practice of Good Friday.

The Feast of Booths, or Tabernacles, verses 33 and following, is the only feast that doesn’t have a clear Christian parallel, though it was the Feast at which Jesus decalred himself to be the light of the world and the water of life. The Feast of Tabernacles features the pitching of temporary tents or “booths” that call to mind Israel’s wilderness sojourn on their way to the Promised Land and how God himself traveled alongside in a mobile home of his own.

Mary Frances constructed a tabernacle. She wrote, “In an effort to make all of this levitical-ness more tangible, I thought it would be cool to have my own little sanctuary and reminder of God’s dwelling in my apartment. I love to build things and love architecture, so this was right up my alley. However, building an actual structure when you only have 400 sq feet of living space to start off with was challenging.”

However the main point of Tabernacles—at least from a New Testament perspective—was not to remember Israel’s time in the desert (especially since they didn’t spend 40 years wandering around as a reward for good conduct). The main point of Tabernacles was to remind how as sojourners we, like the Israelites, are still on our way to the real Promised Land. In time God will usher his people into a new heaven and a new earth where He will abide with us in permanence forever. We keep the feast to remember that this world is not our home, that we are resident aliens of earth and citizens of heaven. All this should make you happy, and if it doesn’t, Leviticus says you are to be “cut off from your people.” The Lord does not like a party pooper.