“Hush,” cried the sophisticated Pharisees. “Be quiet. You’re crazy! This guy isn’t our King. He’s not going to save us from the Romans and usher in the Day of the Lord.”
“You’ll see,” predicted Jesus. “You might silence this crowd, but a new creation is coming. No one can stop it. If the people don’t proclaim the New Creation, even these stones will tell the story.”
And oh, how many stones cover the ground in the Judean Hills, almost as many as we find all around us in Colorado.
Are our stones still telling the story? Because we ourselves seem to be tongue-tied. We wave our palms, feeling a bit foolish. “Hosanna!” we mumble out of habit. “God saves!”
“God saves from what?!” people ask.
“Umm, well, I mean, Jesus saves. Jesus saves us from … our sins?” we respond shakily. “Or … maybe from the Devil? Or maybe Jesus saves us from God’s anger, since we’re so sinful ….?”
The sophisticated people reply, “Be quiet. You’re crazy. I don’t care about sin. You’ve just got hang ups. And a horned devil with a pitchfork? You’ve got to be kidding me. You just want to judge me. You’re just like those self-righteous Christians waving the Bible and storming the Capitol. Besides, if your God is so mean and full of anger that somebody has to die to make him happy, then I don’t want anything to do with him.”
I sure hope the stones are doing a better job than we are.
You see, our ancient Christian language has been misunderstood, sometimes deliberately misappropriated for human ends, and often shrugged away, even by those of us who claim it. It’s ancient language. And so often we repeat it without making it our own. Before we walk with Jesus to the Cross this week, let’s think today about what it means to claim that God, in Jesus, saves us.
For over 2000 years, people have tried to explain how Jesus saves us. There are all kinds of theories, and I don’t have time to mention them all in this short sermon. You might be surprised to know that none of the theories has ever been lifted up by the whole church as the “right one.” They are all just “theories of atonement:” Images for how God and human beings are reconciled; how the world is made whole; how relationships are healed. (The word salvation means “healing,” you know! Think of the “salve” that you put on your skin wounds.)
There is one theory, though, that I think leads us astray in our day. Bear with me just a minute while I explain. In medieval times, when feudal lords had the final word in their fiefdoms, the way to reconcile a law-breaker with the community was for the law-breaker to satisfy the honor of the local lord by paying him back for the transgression, plus some. Using this feudal image, a twelfth-century theologian named Anselm developed a story of how we are saved. Because we mess up and break God’s law, Anselm explained, we owe God big time. We have to pay God back. God can’t just forgive us, because that’s humiliating to the honor of an all-powerful Lord. Too much free mercy would make God look wimpy. The problem for us is that we can’t pay God back ourselves, because we are just little human beings. In order for us to be reconciled with God, then, Jesus has to satisfy God’s honor by suffering a painful death on the cross for us.
Anselm’s medieval “satisfaction” language worked its way deep into our Christian psyches. You’ll hear echoes of it in our Eucharistic prayers, in our hymns, and in many of the praise songs that we have sung for years in many churches, including St. Ambrose: Jesus as a satisfaction for our sins; Jesus as a substitute, receiving the wrath of an angry Father God in our place. But this image has real problems. First of all, our God is above all a merciful God. Both the Old and New Testaments speak over and over again of God’s loving-kindness and mercy. If God wants to forgive, God can forgive us: no one needs to die to make our God a merciful God.[1] The people these days who reject a God who sends his own Son to die a painful death—they have a point. Secondly, when we say that Jesus saves us by dying painfully on the Cross in our stead, we are discounting the rest of Jesus’ ministry. What about the healings? What about his teachings, his way of love? Do those not matter? Do those not bring us healing and reconciliation, too? Finally, if Jesus dies only for human sins, what happens to the rest of creation? What about the sparrows and the lilies of the fields, so beloved of God?[2]
Instead, what if Jesus didn’t have to die on the cross for us to be saved? What if Jesus died on the cross because the religious and political leaders of his time wanted him gone. The power of Love was a threat to the power of Empire. What if the healing of creation comes instead from God uniting with God’s beloved creation in Jesus’ birth? What if our salvation is found in the whole movement of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection? That’s what St. Paul tells us in today’s Epistle. Paul describes salvation as an outpouring of God into the frail stuff of this world, an outpouring of longing, an outpouring of love. Theologians call it “kenosis,” or “self-emptying:” Almighty God, “taking the form of a slave.” God, willingly joining the suffering of our feeble flesh, even though we would crucify him for loving too much. By joining Godself to this fragile, mortal, and messed up creation, God can then lift all flesh up again when he rises, for death cannot hold God for long. It’s a continuing sweep of longing and lifting, of downward love and upward restoration. We see it in Jesus, and we are called to join it ourselves, again and again, participating in the Christ-shaped movement of God’s healing love.
I spent some time this week watching Bill Bigum take stones singed from the Marshall Fire and build our community cairn with them. Some of the stones were both blackened and cracked from the flames. When Bill picked them up, they often split in two, revealing that the insides of the rock were burned, as well. I thought of creation, cracked and damaged through and through, weakened, full of pain, full of grief. I could picture God, right there in these shattered stones, passing through the flames with them.
I then watched Bill carefully take the burned stones and wedge them together, leaning them one on another. I watched the pile of stones rise, higher and higher, stronger and stronger, the broken pieces filling in the cracks, helping the structure to stand. I thought of Philippians, of Paul’s admonition that we are to take on the mind of Christ, that we are to join in God's outpouring of longing love, the love that holds together like glue and that rises from the ashes, the love that builds up. I heard the stones crying, “Hosanna! God heals! It is God who makes whole all that is broken! Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord!”
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