In the Year 22008, 2008 Will Be the Early Church

By Rev. Marcia Moret Sietstra

March 9, 2008 Spirit of Peace UCC

In the spirit of the morning, with our delightful Irish music, I want to begin with a few Irish blessings for you! The first one is the blessing my husband wants read at his funeral. It is: May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil even knows you’re dead. Here’s another Irish blessing: May you live to be a hundred years, with one more year to repent! And finally this one just for the men: Health and long life to ye, land without rent to ye, the woman of your choice to ye, a child every year to ye, a long life, and may you die in Ireland!

Well, with the Celtic music and St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, I couldn’t help but think a little this week about some of the beliefs and sayings of the Celtic people. Celtic refers to people around the Irish Sea, including the Irish, Scottish, Welsh Cornish and some groups of Brits. St. Patrick brought Christianity to people of this area, many of whom practiced the Druid religion when he arrived. We know that when the Druid religion gave way to Christianity, some elements of Druid belief were incorporated into the Celtic Christian worldview, e.g. the belief in the Otherworld, where little people and faeries live. One of the most famous legends of Celtic Christianity is that of the Holy Grail, a legend that claims that the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper was brought to England and hidden to protect its mystical powers.

Fairies and holy grails sound archaic and peculiar to us in the 21^st century, but no more so than some things written in the Hebrew scriptures of our Bible, verses about pillars holding up the dome of sky, separating the waters above the sky from the earth, which represented the best of Babylonian science in that day; or texts about a leviathan, or sea monster, defeated by God during creation, which you heard read earlier. My, hasn’t the thinking of people changed enormously over the centuries! Most educated people these days no longer believe in holy grail legends, little people and fairies in a world alongside this one, or sea monsters.

We live in 2008, the age of reason and scientific knowledge, a time in which knowledge is expanding faster than we can keep up with it. No one can dispute that today’s world possesses a far greater amount of knowledge than the ancient people could possibly have known. This morning, I would like you to consider the implications of that for theology, that is, for the way we think about God. Because, you see, our theological knowledge has also changed and grown enormously over the centuries.

This point was driven home to me recently by the lecture series we have been using in Adult Forum (Victory & Peace or Justice & Peace).[i] The lecturer is John Dominic Crossan, an Irishman, a former Vatican priest, and a prestigious church historian. Crossan explains the culture of the first century in which Jesus lived, and using that as a backdrop, he examines what the people of Jesus’ day may have thought about the death of Jesus.

Now we know that the writers of Jesus’ day, whose works were later included in the New Testament, often used the word sacrifice in reference to Jesus’ death. Paul, for example, calls Jesus’ death a sacrifice. But, Crossan claims, Paul and other early Christians would have understood sacrifice differently than many Christians today understand the word sacrifice. Words change meaning over time too. The word gay for example, which used to mean lively and cheerful. Crossan says many Christians today are using the word sacrifice differently than the people around Jesus did.

The most common understanding of the word sacrifice in Christianity today is the one most of us were taught as children. It goes like this: Jesus’ death was a sacrifice because he died on a cross as our substitute. Because humans are sinful and deserve to die a terrible death as a punishment, Jesus became a substitute sacrifice to God, dying in our place, in order to pay a penalty for the sins of all humanity. That is the most widely accepted idea of why Jesus died, in our time. But Crossan argues that this interpretation of sacrifice, that is, being a substitute to take on someone else’s suffering and punishment, would not have been a normal way for first century Christians who wrote the New Testament to think of the word sacrifice.

The early Christians, steeped in Jewish tradition, would have known that for centuries their ancestors in Israel sacrificed animals, and those animals were considered a gift to God. After the blood of the animal was given to God on the altar, often the meat became a meal for the giver, a meal symbolically shared with God. Just as people shared meals with others to demonstrate they were in right relationship, so this holy meal of the sacrificed animal represented being in relationship with God. Crossan says ancient people would never have thought the point was to inflict pain or punishment on the animal, or see the animal as taking on the person’s punishment as a substitute. It is this idea of substitution that is the problem. The animal was not a substitute for the human at all; it was a gift. The animal’s death was necessary only in order to provide the gift to God, and in some cases to provide a shared meal which symbolized right relationship with God.

But by the Middle Ages, about 10 centuries after Jesus lived, a different idea of sacrifice gained preeminence in the Church. You can see the idea take hold in the writings of the Church fathers in about the year 1000, especially with a scholar named Anselm. Before that time, there were several competing ideas of how Jesus’ death was a sacrifice. Here’s what is fascinating: the current idea of sacrifice, that says Jesus was our substitute for punishment appears not to have always been the official doctrine of the Church.

So what else might the first century people who lived alongside Jesus have meant when they referred to his death as a sacrifice? Crossan uses an illustration to explain how people in Jesus’ day might have used the term sacrifice when they talked about Jesus. He uses the example of a firefighter today. Say, for example, that a firefighter goes into a burning house to save a little girl. He reaches the child and is able to throw her out a high window to firefighters waiting with a net below, and she lands safely. But the firefighter doesn’t make it out of the house; he dies in the blaze. The next morning the newspaper headlines read, “Firefighter sacrifices life to save child.” Yes, the firefighter did sacrifice his life, in a sense, because he knowingly risked his life in order to do something noble—to rescue people from fires. But we would never say that God, on that day, declared “I believe I’ll take the life of this child today, but if a firefighter wants to substitute for the child, take her spot, as it were, well I’ll allow him to suffer the pain of burning to death in her place.” No one would say such a thing. But yet we can say the firefighter sacrificed his life. Because he was willing to risk his life, knowing full well he might lose his life by going into burning houses to save people, his death took on special meaning. To be willing to die for a noble cause is to sacrifice one’s life.

Jesus also was willing to die for a cause, in order to show people what a life full of God looks like. He dared to say that God’s kingdom is built on caring for one’s neighbor; God’s kingdom is built on justice for all people, including the poor and the powerless, and it really doesn’t look anything like the kingdom of imperial power we are living under today with the Romans in charge. It was a message that Jesus knew could get him killed, because Rome would not long tolerate such revolutionary ideas. Crossan suggests that everytime Jesus said that God’s kingdom ethics did not look a thing like the ethics being practiced by the Roman occupational government, he was risking his life, the equivalent of entering a burning house.

So what does this mean for us today? Well, for those of you who have always been troubled by the idea that Jesus’ death was a sacrifice required by God as substitute blood shed to pay a penalty for your sin, Crossan gives you an alternative understanding of sacrifice to consider. On the other hand, for those of you who find comfort in believing that Jesus paid a penalty for your sin, this is an alternative you may not need or want to explore. But please realize that there are and always have been a variety of interpretations of why Jesus died and what sacrifice means. The Church has not consistently taught only one view throughout history, as many Christians assume. Just as in science, mythology, and all areas of thinking, ideas about God change over time, even within the Christian tradition. We have often taken for granted that we have the original ideas of the Early Church in our inherited theological teachings. We can’t be sure of that. And if we did, should we assume that the Early Church always got it right? That’s another question for another day!

Before I close, I want to invite you do a simple exercise. I got the idea from a book I read recently entitled The Ironic Christian’s Companion (Patrick Henry). Imagine for a moment that you are keyboarding and you put in today’s date. And when you type the year, 2008, you accidentally type an extra 2, so the year appears to be 22,008. Imagine for a moment, what it would be like to be living in that future year, looking back at the present year. It is 20,000 years in the future, the year 22,008 and you are looking back at 2008. In that year, humans will look back and call us the early church!

When I look at how much the theological ideas that are based on the bible have changed in a mere 2000 years, I can’t begin to imagine how much change there will be in how people perceive God over the next 20,000 years. Maybe in the future, Christians will look at what we thought and rank it as important as what the first century writers thought. Maybe they will find some of our ideas as primitive as we find some of the ideas of the Old Testament or the Celtic people of medieval times.

And consider this as well: human beings have probably walked this earth for 6 million years. If you could see a timeline from the beginning of human life on this planet to the end of human life on this planet, we might be in the adolescent stage of human knowledge. The 2000 years of history that the bible covers would be only a blip on this timeline. How can we think God has finished all revelation?

It seems to me that wise people are the ones who do not claim that the world already has all the truth about God that there is to have. It seems to me it is wise to expect there is so much yet to be revealed about God, and to stay open to that possibility. In the meantime, it seems prudent to admit that, althought there are things we feel we know about God, there is still a great deal about God that is deeply mysterious.

I hope that God is pleased by our searching, by our praise in spite of not having all the answers, and by our openness to the Holy Spirit as it continues to speak to us through our lives. May it be so. Amen.