Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 1, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

A few days ago one of our number asked me what the Ash Wednesday service was all about. When I said that it was mostly about the imposition of ashes and “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” she said “That sounds gloomy!” I replied that yes, it is rather gloomy; but it marks the beginning of Lent, and Lent is a somber is not necessarily a gloomy season in the church calendar. Lent is a somber season because it is the time of preparation for commemorating a somber event. You see, Lent isn’t really about preparation for Easter. At least to me it isn’t. Lent is primarily preparation for Holy Week. Lent reaches its culmination on Good Friday. It reaches its culmination, for me at least, not in Christ’s glorious Resurrection but in his decidedly inglorious Crucifixion.

In a way, I suppose, its surprising that Christianity ever developed and became the major world religion that it is at all. Think about it for a minute. Christianity’s central event isn’t very appealing. It is the torture and murder of its central character as a common political prisoner by an oppressive imperial power. Jesus doesn’t lead a successful worldly revolution like Muhammad. He doesn’t end up in some ethereal state of enlightenment like the Buddha. He is tortured and executed by the Romans. He cries out in despair “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is an ugly scene at best, but the truth remains that Jesus’ earthly life ended not in glory or even in a peaceful death at the end of a full and accomplished life. It ended as an utter, total, abject failure. It ended in the ruin of his entire life’s project. It ended in his own belief that his Father God to whom he had entrusted everything had failed him. To people who don’t already believe in the Resurrection Christianity must seem an almost bizarre belief system, having as it does the ancient instrument of torture and death that killed its central figure as its primary symbol.

I’m not trying to turn you all into Unitarians here, but I think it is important to remember this central fact about our faith. Most of the time we’d rather ignore the Crucifixion. We much prefer Easter to Good Friday, as our attendance patterns amply demonstrate. Yet when we ignore the Crucifixion we make what I believe to be an important spiritual error. When we do that, I believe, we miss some of the most profound spiritual truth that our faith has to teach us. And so during this coming Lent I want to focus in my sermons, or at least in some of them, on the meaning of Jesus’ death. And before you all get up and walk out on me, let me tell you that the end of this story is powerfully hopeful and powerfully uplifting. The end of this story, even before Jesus’ Resurrection puts the final exclamation point on it, is a story of the incomprehensible love of God for each and every one of us. So hold on and bear with me. I think it will be worth the effort.

From the very beginning Christians have been unwilling to see the Crucifixion as the proof that Jesus was a total failure that at first glance it certainly appears to be. From the very beginning Jesus’ first followers tried with all of their spiritual and intellectual might to find meaning in his death. Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the entire New Testament consists primarily of attempts by early Christian writers to find meaning in Jesus’ death.

Those spiritual and intellectual efforts that are preserved for us in the New Testament are not idle exercises, nor were they written in a vacuum. Like all profound religious truth, those spiritual and intellectual efforts were grounded in the human experience of their authors and of the early Christian community as a whole. From the very beginning Christians experienced not just Jesus’ Resurrection but also his death as filled with meaning. Specifically, they experienced Jesus’ death as having saving significance. From the beginning Christians have proclaimed Jesus not only as Lord, which they certainly did, but also as Savior. The New Testament contains many different statements of that experience and many different theological explanations of it. Christians have been told for so long, and told so falsely, that there are no contradictions in the Bible and that the entire Bible proclaims only one truth that we may find it hard to see just how diverse the New Testament’s various treatments of the experience of Jesus’ death as saving really are. This Lent, I want to introduce you to some of those different treatments, and today we start with one that you may not be familiar with from the book 1 Peter.

That little passage has a lot of words about Noah. Those words are not what I’m interested in this morning. I’m interested in the first line we heard: “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.” This little verse contains three statements about the death of Jesus that became central to the Christian tradition’s understanding of the significance of that death. The first is that Jesus’ death has something to do with human sin: “Christ…suffered for sins….” I’ll have a lot more to say about sin as it relates to Jesus’ death. An awful lot of nonsense has been written about it. All this author says about it is that Christ suffered for sins. He doesn’t say how or why. He doesn’t explain the relationship between Christ’s suffering and death and sin. He just says there is one. Note for now that he doesn’t say that Jesus died to “pay the price for sin.”

Second this author asserts that Jesus was “righteous,” that is, that he was himself not a sinner but was in right relationship with God. Thus, he didn’t die for his own sin but for ours, another idea that became central to the Christian tradition.

Finally there’s his line “to bring you to God.” This one is, if anything, even more mysterious than the connection between Jesus’ death and sin. How is the torture and judicial murder of an innocent man supposed to bring us to God? On its face it doesn’t make any sense, yet from the very beginning Christians have insisted that Jesus’ death does indeed bring us to God. Just how that is I hope to explore in sermons on the coming Sundays in Lent. For now, I invite you to think about it. To meditate over it. To pray over it. To try to discern for yourself how Jesus Christ on the cross brings you closer to God. And I invite you to stay tuned. Amen..