The Rev. Ann R. Lougee March 4, 2007 The Idea of Sacrifice Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18a; Luke 13:31-35 The ritual that Abraham enacts to seal a covenant between himself and God seems very strange to us, yet it would have seemed perfectly normal to ancient Middle Eastern people. It comes from custom that was ancient even then: sacrifice, defined in the dictionary as "the offering of animal, plant, or human life or of some material possession to a deity, as in propitiation or homage." The symbolism of sealing a covenant in this way was that one of the covenant partners walked between the split carcasses as a gesture of saying, "If I don't fulfill my part of the covenant between us, may my own body be split apart as these are." What's very interesting about this story, is that here, it's God that is swearing the oath of covenant, not Abraham. So it's the fiery symbols of God that appear to pass between the carcasses in Abraham's deep sleep vision. The message to Abraham is that he can count on the fulfillment of what he has understood as God's promise to him. Sacrifice to deities had a long history before Abraham's time. Child sacrifice, was part of several ancient Middle Eastern religions and even early Judaism. The story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, later in the Genesis saga, suggests this. Part of the reason, indeed, for that story may have been to help abolish the practice of child sacrifice. There were also other Hebrew writings that fulminate against the "passing of children through fire" in worship of the god Moloch. This practice was over time replaced with the animal sacrifice that was very much a part of worship in the Old Testament and at the heart of the Jerusalem temple cult. The Passover observance was marked by the sacrifice of the paschal lamb. This was done in remembrance of the lambs slaughtered to put their blood on the lintels over the doorways of Jewish people in Egypt. This was done, you recall, so that the Angel of Death would pass over them while striking dead all the first born of animals and humans of the Egyptians. After this last of God's signs and wonders, Pharaoh let the Jewish people go from slavery in Egypt. Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, was also marked by the sacrifice of a "Lamb of God," whose blood was thought to cleanse the people from their sins. In the liturgy of Yom Kippur, a perfect Lamb of God was slain and its blood spread on the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies, the most interior chamber of the temple, that was thought of as God's place of occupation. Therefore, to come to God, people had to come through the blood of the lamb. Then a second animal, a goat, was brought out and the priest began to confess the sins of the people. As the priest confessed, the sins of the people were thought to leave the people and land on the back and head of this animal. Then, burdened with the sins of the people, this animal was driven away into the wilderness. The sin bearer (called 'the scape goat') thus carried the sins of the people away. Both the sacrificial, or "paschal" lamb and the sin-bearing goat became symbols by which Jesus was understood. It was all but inevitable that the crucifixion of Jesus would be interpreted against the background of these two Jewish worship traditions. Paul calls Jesus our "new paschal lamb" and the images of Yom Kippur are present throughout the New Testament, in such places as when Paul says: "he died for our sins." In the Gospels we find those same images, as when Mark calls Jesus' death a "ransom;" and when John refers to Jesus as "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world." Even the story of the cross in which we are told, "none of Jesus' bones were broken," was drawn from the liturgy of the Yom Kippur sacrifice. Many liturgies today still say "O Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." Just because that was how 1st century Jews interpreted the death of Jesus because of their familiarity with such animal sacrifices to atone for their sins, however, does not mean that we need be bound by that thinking forever. The concept of Jesus' death as a sacrifice required by God to overcome the sins of the world makes God's demands gruesome and Jesus the victim of a sadistic deity. The idea of a substitutionary atonement deeply violates the essential message of the Gospel which is that God is love calling humanity to love. If that negative understanding of substitutionary atonement is removed, as I believe it must be, then questions like 'What is the meaning of the cross?' and 'Why did Jesus die?' become much more positive questions. They must be preceded, however, with the question "How did Jesus live?" From all the gospels and other first-century writings that we know, the essence of what Jesus taught and modeled for his disciples was that the kingdom or realm of God was available to them right then, in their daily lives under Roman oppression. It was among them, he said, if they would just see it, behave with compassion for all, and strive for justice. He taught by his own actions and words that they must set into motion a revolution of love and spirituality that demonstrates love for God by treating the needs of even the least of God's children as holy. He was therefore on the journey to Jerusalem, to go into Herod's territory, to upset the temple authorities, to confront the powers, to risk his own life and safety, to get that message across. Do I think that Jesus was mentally ill and seeking his own destruction? Far from it! We can see through all the gospels a person who loved life, loved people, loved good times, loved the outdoors, and loved God. But we can also see that he put the importance of establishing God's realm of justice on earth above the importance of his own life. We can then see Jesus' death as being in harmony with and an extension of Jesus' entire life of self-giving. We can then see that, instead of clinging to his own fleeting existence, he is brave and faithful enough to see his mission through to the very end, to give away his very life, even though he is put to death unjustly. This goes to a different dictionary definition of sacrifice as "the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim." I believe it's time to give up the image of Jesus' crucifixion as a sacrifice in which he was the victim -- the lamb and the scapegoat rolled into one. I believe it's time to get away from the message of guilt and control that we hear in the pious but destructive phrase, "Jesus died for my sins." What I see in the crucifixion of Jesus is the infinite love of God calling the world to a new level of humanity, calling us beyond survival mentality toward the deepest secrets of transcendence. I believe it's time to see the journey of Jesus to the cross as the ultimate expression of the radical humanity of one who was so whole and so free that he could sacrifice his life to demonstrate that even when you kill the love of God, the love of God still loves its killers. That is a picture of a whole new level of human consciousness. That is what the cross means to me, and it moves me deeply. So if we speak of sacrifice in connection with Jesus, let's use the word in the sense of the second dictionary definition I read before: "the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim." That's the kind of sacrifice I believe Jesus freely made by refusing to play it safe, pursuing what he felt was his goal and meaning in life. In her book Jesus: The Compassion of God, Monika Hellwig writes, "To find and acknowledge one's goal and meaning in life as something beyond oneself, beyond one's own survival, is to experience liberation from the crushing burden of that desperate fear of death." May we find in the model of Jesus the power to live fully, the grace to love wastefully and the courage to be the fullest expressions of true humanity that we can be. Amen. Some of the material in this sermon is borrowed from Bishop John Shelby Spong's Q & A on-line posting of May 3, 2006, entitled "Child Sacrifice and Christianity."