Sermon on April 18, 2010
Sermon for the Episcopal Church of St John the Baptist, Capitola,
given by Rev. Steve Ellis
The Episcopal Church of Saint John the Baptist welcomes all to worship God and to share Christ's love in the world. We are a parish family committed to provide liturgy, Bible study, music, counseling, and Christian education for children, youth, and adults, and to equip all our members for life and for service to others.
Sermon: Atonement #1 - Anselm
Welcome to an interactive sermon series. These three sermons will be exploring a central tenet, but not doctrine, of the Christian faith. We will be exploring atonement. How does the life, death and resurrection of Christ heal our humanity and our relationship to God?
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;
That says what happened. It goes on to say things about the forgiveness of sins and the life of the world to come. It doesn’t say what it was about Jesus’ birth and life and death and resurrection that brings us these benefits. And we like explanations.
I want to let you in on something. The Bible has lots to say about these things. It has a number of metaphors for what God accomplished in the whole of the Christ event. But – here’s the surprise . . . the metaphors didn’t come first. And when they did come they didn’t arrive in sealed envelopes with the signet of the Almighty on them. First what happened is Mary Magdalene encountered the Risen Jesus and he spoke to her, and told her to tell the disciples he was risen. Then Peter saw an empty tomb and was shocked into a state of profound and confused ecstacy. Then some disheartened disciples headed out of town met a mysterious stranger and spoke of their disappointment and he made sense of Jesus’ death for them, said it was necessary for the Messiah to come to a bad end, quoted the Scriptures, the Servant Songs from Isaiah, and so on, and that night at dinner they realized, with all this hindsight, that they were talking with the Risen Christ. Next, maybe was ten disciples, maybe more, but we know Judas was dead and Thomas wasn’t present, so at least ten were in a locked room and Jesus showed up and gave them God’s peace, then breathed the Holy Spirit on them and charged them to forgive sins – he sort of told them to be him, wherever they went. A week later, he came again when Thomas was there, and encouraged them to believe. And somewhere in there he found Peter and some of the others fishing – not what he had told them to be doing. He fed them some barbecued fish and asked them what they would do with their lives and insisted they feed his sheep. . . no matter what the cost to themselves.
This is what came first. Not doctrines. So when we want explanations we have to get in a long line with other people who wanted them before we did, people who have spent their lives being Jesus’ presence, serving the power of the Holy Spirit they saw working in lives all around them. They couldn’t necessarily tell you how the Christ event had transformed their lives, only that it did, and was continuing to do so.
This is how it begins, and then we begin to create language for it. The early Christians struggled with the Hebrew Scriptures a lot. Their stories told of God’s desire to have a moral people, a just people, a people who experienced shalom – the good life. Of God’s desire that people be justly governed, and of hero’s among their people who had thrown off oppression from time to time. Of the prophet’s demands for justice to all and the call for true worship - not only ritual and sacrifice, but also integrity in action.
Like any people, they sometimes heard the parts they wanted to hear: that God would throw off the oppressors, and the part about the good life. So it was hard for them when Jesus, who seemed to be the Christ, died the way he did. He did not himself enjoy long life and prosperity, and died disgraced as a blasphemer and a pretender, and at his death it seemed he’d come to nothing but shame.
But instead he became the lens through which they began to read the Hebrew Scriptures. His manner of dying, his willingness to embrace his fate with integrity, his words, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” – all this convinced them that God was not vengeful, but determined to save rebellious humans. His words took on new significance for them as they began to see life not through their expectations of empire but from their experience of how he lived and died and rose. Their experience of Jesus risen, their Lord and brother, convinced them that they had to see God as loving, reconciling, forgiving, able to overcome death.
But they had no explanations.
I want to start with a theory of the Atonement that is often taught as the only theory. I want to deal with it today, out of order, because it is very distracting. So many people are offended by it, and so many are attracted by it, both believing that it is some kind of absolute, and that conversation and even understanding to to a sudden halt. Let’s get past that.
St. Anselm was born in 1033, in Italy, and died in 1109 as Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the foremost theologian of his century, a steady worker, and the author of Why God Became Human. In this work he tried to show that human beings had given up their ability to do right, lost their freedom to be just - all through sheer egocentricity. Now they were enslaved to their own selfish desires with a momentum they could not break. Many of us have experienced just that.
Anselm went on: humans had affronted God by choosing deciding they could get along better on their own. What was needed was a human who chose to love God with all of their heart and mind and soul and strength. Then human rectitude would have a beginning.
Human beings were sold out to their own rebellious self-rule. God couldn’t just ignore the subject as if we were doing just fine, cheating and killing one another. That would leave us forever in our miserable state. So Anselm thought it was necessary for God to become human. The fully God/ fully human Jesus Christ would be able to make the free choice, the freeing choice. And the affront to God’s dignity that was human rebellion would have an alternative – and by God’s own gift.
Now, I don’t know if you are moved by that theory or if it makes you mad. We are going to find out in the forum next week. Well ask: How does it help? How does it hurt? But first I want to clear away one or two misunderstandings. Anselm and others use terms like “substitution” (of Christ’s suffering for the suffering that would naturally have come to us), and “satisfaction” of a debt we owed to God. But please, don’t go misuse the metaphor when you deal with this. When the Son of God dies on the Cross, it is not as if God the Father is a literal Father and Jesus is a literal, subordinate, other person. Take the doctrine of the Trinity seriously. Take the infinite seriously. It is God who becomes a human being, who lives and dies and experiences being human at first hand. It is not abuse of one person by another, for they are, together with the Holy Spirit, the One perfect unity at the heart of everything. The Christ will have said, “Send me.” And the Holy Spirit will have said, “No, no, I’ll go, I love them.”
Human bondage is conceived by Anselm, I think, as the inability to do what we know we should do, the loving thing, the thing that would make us whole and happy.
It is overcome by God’s gift on the Cross, after which we can live as one with Christ, no longer in our own will, but in God’s, feeling the Christ in us, being the Christ in the world. Our lives are no longer just our own.
We are now free and fearless to live for God and others, with a will that is not thwarted at every turn by the illusions of our own ego and its temptations.
I’d invite you to ponder the questions that are raised by this theory. Does there have to be substitution? To satisfy God or to satisfy us? Would God become human? Could God have the humility to be human and play fair? Does God love you, and me, that much?
Next week I’ll talk about Peter Abelard and a much earlier theory.