Come Eat Supper

Easter 7 - Year B

Readings:  Acts 1:15-17, 21-26   Psalm 1   1 John 5:9-13   John 17:6-19

Lord Jesus, thank you for reuniting us with God, our Father. Amen

There’s a podcast I subscribe to called “This American Life” from NPR in Chicago. Each broadcast, they have a theme, and they tell three or four different kinds of stories based around the theme. The last one I listened to, the theme was “Reunited, and it feels so good…”

Jesus is reuniting God, the Father, with his children. The first step was when he became one of us, when he was born as a baby and became our brother, growing up in a family and seeing from the inside what our lives are like. Then, he started talking to us about God, his Father – our Father - what he’s like, what he wants to say to us and how he wants to relate to us.

Finally, he started telling us he was going to leave, but that we wouldn’t be alone – we wouldn’t be left comfortless, as we prayed in the collect – because we would be able to talk to God, to Our Father, directly now.

Earlier on, people had become afraid to talk to God. When Moses went up on Mt. Sinai to receive the law, there was fire and thunder, and the mountain smoked, and everyone was terrified. They told Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us or we will die.” (Ex 20:1819)

After that, God communicated to his people through the law and then through the words of the prophets, priests and kings, but it was not a perfect system because a good many of those folks were not dependable and garbled up the message or ignored it or said whatever they felt like. So, finally, God sent his own Son to bring the message – to communicate with us, and the way he chose to do that was by becoming one of us.

While that is hard to comprehend in itself: that God’s Son would become a human being – the even more astonishing thing – which is also the more important thing about Jesus coming to live with us, is that in doing so, he brought us back into a relationship with God – and a closer relationship than we had before.

The Exsultet – the hymn at the beginning of the Great Vigil of Easter, says “How blessed is this night/ when earth and heaven are joined/ and man is reconciled to God”

Being reunited to God was a difficult process, certainly not without pain. First, there was the pain of the initial separation – and then a prolonged period of estrangement that was also painful for both us and God. Then, God had to be separated from his Son in order for his Son to enter our lives. That separation was painful for both of them, even though it brought Jesus into a closer connection with us.

Then, once Jesus had reestablished a connection with us, in the bonds he formed with his disciples and followers, he had to leave to go back to God, “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.”

And that meant a separation of one type of closeness with us, even though it began to bring us all back to a closer connection with God.

“The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures but will tell you plainly of the Father. On that day, you will ask in my name. I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf, for the Father himself loves you…” (Jn 16:25b-27a)

Jesus has been telling them he’s going to have to leave, and that things are going to get pretty hairy when he leaves, but that, through him, they have the same access as he does to seek help from God – his Father and their Father.

Then, while they’re sitting there, he begins to pray for them. It’s like he’s bringing God in the room and introducing Him to his disciples and introducing them to Him.

“I have told these folks about you; I told them what you said, and they’ve received it and know you’re the one who sent me. Now, I’m asking you – protect them, and unify them, just like we are. While I’ve been here, I’ve looked out for them, but now I’m coming back, and so I’m asking you to look out for them now.”

And pretty soon after this prayer, he gets arrested and killed, and things do get pretty hairy for the disciples, and they don’t understand what’s going on at first, but gradually they realize that Jesus has reunited them with God, his Father and their Father – Our Father.

When you’ve been separated or estranged from someone, even just briefly, reuniting is difficult – and sometimes it takes some help.

Imagine you and your dad having a fight, and you get really mad and go lock yourself in your room. He tries to talk to you through the door, but you won’t say anything.

After a while, here comes your brother… “Dad says come eat supper.”

“No!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!”

“Can I come in?”

A brother is different than a dad. Your brother can talk to you in a different way than your dad can – and there are things your brother can tell you that you won’t hear from your dad.

That’s kind of the situation between God and his people. There had been a lot of fighting between us and God, and we’d become estranged and weren’t talking to each other. We had locked ourselves in our room, kind of. So Jesus came into the situation from our side. At first, he ferried messages back and forth like a mediator. He would tell us what God said and explain what he meant by it and he would also listen to our grievances and see what we were upset about and then go out to the kitchen and talk to God for us.

So you’re in your room, feeling a bit better and thinking maybe you’ll come out in a while - and your brother says, “Okay, I’m going – it’s time for supper and I’m supposed to set the table; you should talk to Dad.”

And maybe you feel ready for that and maybe you don’t, but he opens the door, and there’s God, standing in the hall. “I told her that you’re not mad and that you just want her to come eat, and she said she believes you and she’ll come out.”

Then he goes down to the table – and God’s there in the hall, and you’re looking at each other for a while, not knowing what to say – and he says, “Why don’t you come eat with us…”

Amen.

Sixth Word

The Sixth Word

“It is finished”

It is finished.    The accounts are satisfied. The debt is covered - Paid in full.

It is finished.    Your ransom has been negotiated. The deal is sealed. Payment made.

It is finished.   The cycle of retribution stops with me.

What is the debt? Why are we held for ransom? What’s the retribution for?

Sin.

Sin is separation, distance, estrangement. It’s emptiness, nothingness – a great blankness from which we can’t escape, like a black hole.

Jesus, who knew no sin, became sin for us. He became empty, became nothing, became separated, distant, estranged, heavy with the weight of the sins of the world. He became sin for us, like a black hole.

Here’s one description of how a black hole is formed.

“As a body is crushed into a smaller and smaller volume, the gravitational attraction increases…. Eventually a point is reached when even light, which travels at 186 thousand miles a second, is not traveling fast enough to escape. (Cambridge relativity site)

Jesus poured himself out into the world completely, to displace all of its emptiness. And making himself a void, he took in all our emptiness. The weight of it began to crush him, and still he took in more and more, like an imploding star, pulling into himself all the pain and sin of the whole world, drawing it all together like a massive source of gravity until he contained it all within himself and nothing could escape.

NASA describes black hole formation this way:

“The star eventually collapses to the point of zero volume and infinite density, creating what is known as a " singularity ".

It’s that single point; that single moment of death on the cross; that single person of Jesus Christ, who drew in all sin, pain and sorrow, taking all our emptiness into himself.

It is finished.

Taking away sin

Year A - Epiphany 2
Readings: Isaiah 49:1-71 Corinthians 1:1-9John 1:29-42Psalm 40:1-12


John the Baptist points to Jesus and says 'Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.'
This is a really central part of how we understand who Jesus is and what he does for us.
Jesus is the Lamb of God
and he takes away the sin of the world.
But it's kind of a complicated idea, and it requires some background to get a grasp on what it means and how it works.
I want to look at three things mainly:
What does 'Lamb of God' mean?
What is sin?
How does Jesus take it away?
First, what does it mean to say Jesus is the Lamb of God?
It's an image that takes a lot from the context of the society in which Jesus and John the Baptist lived. For many thousands of years, people have made their living raising animals for food and other benefits. In the area where John and Jesus lived, many people raised sheep, which were a key component in that society's economy. It might be like the buffalo for the Plains Indians or whales for people groups living around the Arctic. Or it might be like oil or timber for this area.
Many people during the time of the Hebrew scriptures raised sheep, so there are a lot of stories relating to shepherds and sheep. Back in Genesis, Abel, one of Adam and Eve's sons, brought a lamb to offer God. It represented the return on his work, and he was giving it to God. We still do that; it just looks a little different. We don't bring live animals up here and put them on the altar, but we do bring offerings to God from the return on our work - and in a money-based economy, what we usually bring is some form of money. It's even still called an 'offering'.
This idea of an offering of thanksgiving was one association John's disciples could make when John pointed at Jesus and said, 'Here is the Lamb of God...'
Depending on the kind of offering, sometimes the priests and the people who brought it would eat part of it. Today, a lot of people brought food also to celebrate another year at St. John's and hear what the church has been able to do with its resources and time, so if someone brought deer sausage, that would maybe in some way be similar.
Another association is that of a sin offering. Later Jewish laws for worship included an elaborate system of sacrifices to pay for sins. For one kind of sin, if you were the king, you'd have to bring a cow; if you were a prince, you might have to bring a male goat. If it was for a sin you did on purpose, intentionally, you'd probably have to pay extra for it, along with a sin offering. If it was a sin you did unintentionally or just by being careless, the penalty would be less. Under this system, a lamb was one type of offering made to pay for sin.
So, when John pointed at Jesus and said, 'Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,' this was part of the meaning.
Another very important story relating to Jesus as the Lamb of God is the Passover story in Exodus. The people of Israel became slaves in Egypt for a long time until God sent Moses to lead them out of slavery. The only problem was that the Pharaoh didn't want to let them go. God send 10 plagues on Egypt to diminish Pharaoh's attachment to the Israelites. Part of the story of the plagues is the story of the Passover, when God sent the final plague, which caused the first-born of every household to die.
God instructed Moses to tell each family to sacrifice a lamb and put its blood on the door of their house, and they were protected from the destruction of the plague. On that night, Pharaoh let them go, so they were protected from death and also freed from slavery. For more than three thousand years now, since about the 13th century BC, the Jews have celebrated Passover each year, re-enacting and remembering God's deliverance. This story is also part of our story as Christians.
When John pointed at Jesus and said, 'Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!' his students who heard him could relate it to many things: an offering to God, a sacrifice to pay for sins, and a reminder of God's deliverance from slavery and death.
So, on to the second question - What is sin?
Sin is a kind of slavery and also a kind of death, and Christ's sacrifice delivers us from these. But thankfully few, if any of us have any direct experience of slavery, and though we have experience with death, it's still very hard to understand on this side of it.
Sin has also been described as a separation - separation from God. It's a broken connection, a missing relationship that ought to be there, an estrangement.
Sin can be defined in many ways.
One way to think of it is that sin is a kind of debt.
What is a debt?
A debt is when you owe something, like when you borrow money or finance something, or when somebody buys you something and you promise to pay them back.
Now, I should clarify that I'm not saying that debt is a sin. I'm saying that sin can be thought of as a kind of debt. Debt is one metaphor to understand what sin is.
So, if you're in debt, I'm not saying that makes you a sinner. A lot of people are in debt, including me. Probably almost everybody either currently is in debt or has been at some point. That's partly what makes it a good metaphor, because people can relate to what being in debt means. We know what causes it, what results from it, what it feels like to be in debt and hopefully also what it feels like to get out of debt.
So, sin can be thought of as a kind of debt. And a debt is when you owe something.
On a ledger, it's a negative number. It's negative both in the sense that nobody likes it and also in the sense that it's the opposite of a positive number. To cancel it out, you have to put an equal or bigger positive number in there.
Because what is a negative?
It's a lack - an absence - something is missing - it's like a hole.
Here's another way to think of it.
This glass is empty.
How do you get it not to be empty? Do you remove the emptiness? Take away the emptiness?
No, but you can put something in, and when you put something in, it's not empty anymore.
A few weeks ago in Sunday school, we were talking about evil, and there's one idea that says maybe evil is a kind of lack - a kind of emptiness or a kind of nothing - where there ought to be good, there's not. It's similar to the way darkness isn't exactly a thing itself - it's just how we describe where there isn't any light.
How do you get rid of darkness? You bring in a light.
So to get rid of evil, you don't exactly take it away; instead, you put something good there.
How does Jesus take away sin?
He puts himself in the place of the sin - and even after all that the payment of sin takes out of him, Jesus is still infinitely good.
Infinite good minus the sins of the whole world is still infinite good.
What is happening when Jesus 'takes away' the things where we're lacking?
Something positive happens.
How does he remove a separation? By making a connection.
How does he take away emptiness? By filling it.
How does he subtract a debt? By paying it.
Sin is a debt, and Jesus pays the debt of the whole world by becoming a sacrifice. He takes away what's lacking in us by filling it with his Spirit. He dispells our darkness by making himself a light that shines inside us.
Like the Psalmist, who was lifted out of the desolate pit - pulled out of a depressing hole - and God put a new song in his mouth. 'Great things are they that you have done, O LORD my God!...Oh, that I could make them known and tell them! But they are more than I can count.'
And also similar is the way Paul describes God's grace given to the members of the church in Corinth.
'I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind -- just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you -- so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift..'
In a minute, we're going to re-enact a lot of this story by telling it again. We do this all the time - every week, because it's important and we need to learn it and remember it. So pay attention.
It's a good story.
Jesus is the Lamb of God and he takes away the sin of the world.
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Given to St. John's, Silsbee
Jan. 20, 2008