Behold, the Lamb who takes....
Second Sunday of Epiphany - January 20, 2008
|
Please note: The following sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him. |
|
Here are the headlines: Mass graves in Darfur containing untold thousands of bodies. Three thousand of our own citizens killed in a pile of twisted steel, cement, and hatred in NYC. Persons killed and maimed in random violence in our own city these days.
William Golding was the author of the book The Lord of the Flies. This novel told of a group of supposedly cultured boys who were stranded alone, and gradually made up their own society which was base, violent, and brutal to each other. He was asked what he had learned in his lifetime of observing humanity. He replied, “I have learned that humanity makes evil the same way that bees make honey.”
The elementary student who “accidentally” knocks all of a fellow student's books to the floor as well as the observer who laughs instead of helping to pick them up is in training. The teenage driver who thinks that the admonitions about alcohol and driving don't apply to him is well on the way. The dim bulbs who go along and break newly-planted trees along the curb are practicing disregard for anything but their momentary pleasure. When we shake our fist at the idiot driver in the car that cut us off, we're only proving the observation that the difference between us and Attila the Hun is that Attila had an army. It is enough to make one ashamed of the entire human race. From top to bottom, we are engaged despicable things, common things, hateful things, ordinary things, shameful things, ...sinful things.
In today's Gospel, John the Baptizer calls Jesus “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” And , oh, do we need that! It is a statement, not a question. Hebrews [12:1] talks about the sin “that clings so closely” to each one of us, and it does. That, too, is a statement, not a question. I attended a funeral one time where a 30+ age woman was going on and on in one of those maudlin tributes about how much she had learned from her grandfather. Well, it wasn't quite enough. She had a child, then married, then divorced, didn't seem to be paying much attention to her child, and at the same time was busily pursuing a college-age young man far her junior.
Oh, we needn't sniff at that woman, we are all in it, tasting sin in an endless variety of ways, little nibbles turning into gulping mouths-full of sin, like the cows back home who would escape and run to the lush alfalfa field and start eating greedily. It may look amusing, but it is a terrible crisis. A cow with a stomach full of fresh alfalfa will produce a life-threatening bloat. It can kill the animal, quickly. I remember Dad saving one such foolish animal. There was no time to wait for a vet to be called. So Dad got out a trocar, a sharp hollowed instrument that without anesthesia he jabbed into the cow's side in order to let out that gas. The intervention was essential. The wounding worked; the pressure was so great that the gas whistled as it came out through the trocar; the cow survived.
Our sin so great that emergency action is needed. That is the essence of our situation before God. That is why Jesus is come among us as a real person; nothing else will do.
Let's talk about this business of sacrifice. Its first impulse is right. How can I say thank you to the God who has given me everything? By giving up something under my temporary control, by pouring it on the ground or burning it, or throwing it to the wind. God, the maker and owner of all, receives it. Thank you, Lord God, we are to say.
[We always will have the grousing types who will say that whatever it is could have been sold and the money given to the poor. I think his name was Judas, who wasn't concerned about the poor but merely lining his own pockets.]
But soon, very soon, it always gets twisted around in our mind. From a Thank-You to God, we soon turn it into a bribe paid to God in order to secure God's favor for our next schemes, Or, as a pay-off for guilt for the sin of thought, word and deed in which we have participated, or, even more perversely, as a payoff for the sin that we are still planning to commit! Oh, how a good thing has been twisted! From a prayer of thanksgiving attached to an object, a sacrifice becomes a payoff or a bribe aimed at God Does that work? Of course not!.
We should be thinking carefully about what is going on when the offering plate is passing by. How many of our bribes have attached themselves to our thanks? It is a mixed up mess.
Our words are good:
A Lord God of the disciples; C Here at your table we present what we have, gifts from you, the One who gives life and makes all things new. Feed us with Word and Sacrament so that you may send us out bearing the victorious life of Jesus Christ our Lord Amen. Our words are good; but our reality is much darker, mixed up; confused, twisted up with sin. An animal sacrifice won't do. Our ancestors in Abraham turned it so easily into a payoff or bribe. Read the prophets and hear them thunder about the situation. Those sacrifices were made with unwilling victims; the bottle of wine, the sheaf of wheat, the dove, the lamb had no say in the matter. Only a person could take the place of those kinds of sacrifices. But any person who would try to be that pure sacrifice, that prayer with himself being the object would also fail because of his own impurity. There is no way for him to avoid the bloat of sin that leads to death. Everyone is swollen with it.
Only the one who can offer himself truly. Only the one who can become the object and voice the prayer truthfully. Only the one who can take the place of every lamb ever offered. Only the one who can voice the prayer without guile or malice: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Only the one, who is Jesus, can voice what a freely given sacrifice should say: “Thanks and praise be to you, the one who is worthy of all thanks and praise. Father, for my sake, forgive them. For the sake of the love we share and that I have shown to them, forgive them, by your Holy Spirit, stir them, re-direct them, re-make them through baptism and the remembrance of that baptism throughout their days.” That is the kind of thing that the true sacrifice, our Lord Jesus, says and does for us.
With wisdom even beyond his knowing, John the Baptizer says, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” We are daily engaged in a struggle with sin, and by ourselves, we're losing. The Agnus Dei, the hymn that we sing next, and that we sing again with a different melody just before we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, is our regularly repeated prayer. “Have mercy, Lord; rescue us from our latest mess, our continuing messes... He can, he will, and he does. And the prayer ends, “Lord, give us peace,” the kind of peace that means wholeness, everything in its proper relationship. “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” And, at last, it is so. Amen
|