The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
January 20, 2008

2 Epiphany – A
Isaiah 49:1-7
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
John 1:29-41

While John the Baptist is baptizing he sees Jesus coming toward him, and says, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” And later in John’s Gospel, when Jesus is condemned to death, he is condemned at noon on the Day of Preparation for Passover, at the very hour that priests begin to slaughter Passover lambs in the Temple. And still later, after Jesus has died on the cross and the soldiers are sent to take his body down, John says that they do not break any of his bones.

And the earliest readers of John’s Gospel, when they read John’s account, they would have thought immediately of that earlier lamb of God, the lamb that was sacrificed on the night of the Passover, whose blood was placed on the door posts of their houses so that the Lord would pass over their homes when he visited death upon the first-born of Egypt. And those earliest readers would have thought immediately of the lambs that are sacrificed every year in the Temple to remember the Passover, the sacrificial victims whose bones are not to be broken.

Neither John the Baptist nor John the Evangelist would have had to explain these images to the people of their day. So when John the Baptist says, “Behold, the Lamb of God,” the crowds understand and the disciples follow Jesus, because they understand that Jesus is the Lord, the Savior, whose blood, sacrificed for us, will deliver us from death.

But what do we think today?

Here’s what I think: I wonder sometimes if we haven’t removed ourselves from the messy realities of life more than is good for us.

I was in one of those big superstores one day, making my way to the peanut butter section by way of sporting goods, where I noticed a young boy watching a video on deer hunting. The little boy was fascinated by it. And what brought him to my attention was his mother, who had finally realized that her son had slipped away from her. And when she saw what he was watching, she rushed her innocent child away. “Come on,” she said,” we don’t want to watch this,” as she quickly ushered him toward lunch at the hamburger franchise in the rear of the store.

We like our beef and chicken and bacon and venison, but we like to get them with a smile from Wendy’s or Albertson’s. Oh, we know where they come from. In our heads we know that the meat we eat comes from some messy slaughterhouse where animals actually die and where their blood flows, but we just don’t want to think about it. So the real world is sometimes a shock for us Americans who go to Asia or Africa, or to other non-sterile parts of the world.

Reality is sometimes a shock for Americans in Haiti, where Billy the Goat is tethered just beyond the tents. You get a chance to know Billy during the week, before he ends up on your dinner plate. Later in the week, he is slaughtered in the usual Haitian manner. His throat is cut, he is hung up on a tree limb by his hind legs until all his blood is drained, he is skinned, and then he is butchered and prepared for cooking. But that is little different from my own grandmother’s way in east Texas, the way of that nice little lady who used to wring the chicken’s neck and then wait for the creature to stop flapping around the yard so she could catch him, pluck his feathers, and put his drumsticks on our plates.

It is a truth of life that is not yet lost on those who still live closer to the messiness of reality than we in America now like to live, a truth that is faced without apology in the Scriptures – the truth that we live because something else dies. That is reality.

And, in the end, we cannot escape this truth. We can’t escape it by purchasing our meat in plastic wrap, or even by becoming vegetarians. For the truth, as Alan Watts reminds us, is that “man lives because of the sacrifice of the wheat and the vine [as well as the sacrifice of the goat and the chicken], and [man], in his own turn, is a sacrifice to the birds and the worms, or to the bacilli which effect his death. This is the inescapably grim fact of being alive, and which most civilized peoples do their best to conceal.” (Myth and Ritual in Christianity, 1968, p. 147)

We do our best to conceal it because we are more comfortable with our sterile environment, our artificially-sanitized culture. We like it this way. For us, for example, death seldom happens at home anymore, whereas our grandparents’ gathering ‘round a loved one’s death bed at home was as commonplace as slaughtering animals for the evening meal.

At one time, too, church families took care of preparing bodies, digging graves, and “sitting up” with the deceased all night before a funeral. It was just part of life. Now, we outsource these unpleasant realities of life. And while our grandparents knew the value of taking an active part in the burial of their loved ones by personally filling in the grave after the burial, it is rare now to find a funeral home that will willingly even lower a casket into the grave while the family is still present.

As these intimate life-and-death moments have disappeared from our ordinary lives, we have grown increasingly uneasy in dealing with death, with illness, and with other such disturbing matters, which means that we have become increasingly uneasy in dealing with life itself.

So it’s no surprise that we have trouble with the sacrificial images the Bible takes for granted. “Build a temple,” the Lord said. “Build a great temple where my name shall dwell. And take animals into the temple, very small animals like doves and great big animals like bulls, and slaughter them there. Take their blood and pour it over all the sides of the altar. This,” the Lord says, “is what I require of you.”

Worship in the Bible, it seems, always requires the spilling of blood. So we sing, or we used to sing: “What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Or: “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins.” Or: “O wash me in his precious blood, my Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God.” Our life is so fragile, we sang, our sin so great, our salvation so costly, that something or someone has to die to pay for it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m thankful that the sacrifice of bulls and goats is no longer a part of the practice of religion. I can’t imagine going to seminary to learn how to bleed an animal, and if we were to sacrifice them at this altar, then we’d need a lot more incense than we are used to here.

But I wonder if the comfortable illusion we purchase by concealing the facts of life doesn’t come at great spiritual cost. I wonder if it doesn’t come at the cost of deluding ourselves about the truth about us, the truth about our real condition and our real need. I wonder if we haven’t lost something important if we do not remember that the blood of Jesus was just as real, and just as messy, as the blood of those sacrificial animals. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” refers to a real altar on which real blood was spilled.

In Leviticus, after Aaron has purified the sanctuary, he is to bring forward a live goat. He is to lay his hands upon the goat’s head and confess, over the head of the goat, all the sins and iniquities of the people. And then he is to send the scapegoat out into the wilderness, where the it will carry the sin of the people out into the barren waste. And there the sin will be released, out in the wilderness.

Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, takes all our sin upon himself. That is the meaning of the wilderness of the Cross. It is the final sacrifice, the sufficient sacrifice, because, unlike the slaughter of animals and the banishment of the scapegoat, Christ’s is a true sacrifice in that it is made voluntarily.

“The Mass is a true sacrifice,” says Watts, “in that Christ submitted deliberately and willingly to his crucifixion, which took place at the very moment when the Jews were sacrificing the Passover Lamb at the Temple.” And the reason Christ’s sacrifice redeems while the old sacrifices of bulls and goats did not is that “the victim of the former is willing, the performer of a self-sacrifice, [himself] at once Priest and Offering.”

It is through this willingness that Christ’s blood washes away sin, delivers us from slavery, shows us the path of salvation, and gives us the promise of life. Christ’s sacrifice does all this because with this sacrifice Christ shows us reality, truth. And he does so willingly, at great cost to himself, because he loves us enough to want us to know what he knows – that we live because something else, or someone else, dies.

The truth is that we human beings do not live by our own efforts or merits. We are not self-made people, and, being mortal, we cannot be. We do not bring ourselves into being, we do not sustain ourselves solely by our own sweat, and we cannot save ourselves from the finality of death.

All life is gift. This is the truth that Christ our Passover reveals to us. All life is gift, the consequence of the sacrifice of something, or someone, else. It is a truth that marks every area of life. For example, the kind of prosperity we in our land have come to take for granted comes at a price. Somebody pays for it when the Dow and the Nasdaq continue to rise, and the ones who pay are often the unsuspecting poor of Third World countries in Asia and Africa and South America who know little of the consumer society we so admire and have come to expect almost as a right.

Recognition of this fact alone is salvific. “One of the most important discoveries of theology in our time,” Shirley Guthrie writes, “is the discovery of the suffering love of the suffering God. All cheap and easy talk about a God of sovereign power who is in control of a world in which there is so much poverty, suffering, and injustice is obscene,” she insists. “All self-confident talk about a powerful church that has the mandate and ability to transform society with this or that conservative or liberal social-political agenda, or with this or that evangelistic program, is increasingly absurd in a disintegrating church that cannot solve its own problems, much less the problems of the world. The only gospel that makes sense, [the only gospel that] can help in what Moltmann calls our ‘godless and godforsaken’ world, is the good news of a God who loves enough to suffer with and for a suffering humanity. And the only believable church is one that is willing to bear witness to such a God by its willingness to do the same.” (“Human Suffering, Human Liberation, and the Sovereignty of God,” Theology Today, April 1996, p. 32)

At its most personal level the gift which life is involves the willing sacrifice of loving parents and family and friends, who bear witness to a loving God by willingly giving up things for themselves in order that their children might have a kind of life they didn’t have, for no reason other than that they love us. It may, in extreme cases, even involve the willing sacrifice of life itself, the literal spilling of blood to save us.

The truth is that we live because something else, or someone else, dies. We live because of the sacrifice of others. Simply recognizing this reality brings healing power, because it saves us from the presumption of believing, contrary to all reality, that we are self-sufficient, and because it leads us to the grace of gratitude.

Gratitude, thankfulness, gratefulness. Gratitude for the generous gifts of God and of others is the only seemly response to the truth of the Lamb of God: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” Christ our Passover, who has been sacrificed for us.

So here’s what I think: I think that the only gospel that makes sense; the only gospel that can help us in light of the facts of life; the only gospel that makes any sense in light of the fact that we live only because something else, or someone else, dies; the only gospel that makes sense in light of the facts of life is the gospel of a God who sacrifices for us because he is a God who loves us enough to suffer with us and for us. And the only appropriate religion in light of these facts, the only appropriate response in light of this gospel, is a religion that helps us become believable people who are willing to bear witness to such a God by our own grateful willingness to do for others what has been done for us. That’s what I think.

What do you think?

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.