"The Cross as the Moment of Glory - He Did Not Die For Your Sins (11a.m.)" - Sermon

once I introduce our speaker this morning but first I want to acknowledge that Bishop John Shelby Spong is part of a team Christene Spong his wife and is the one who actually makes sure that he's here and I have known them working together as a team for many years actually christine has a spiritual gift the gift of administration and it is truly a ministry and a vocation that has allowed many people to experience John's gift in a traditional church ministry so I want to acknowledge Christine as ally as organizer as muse and as companion to Bishop John spawn can we honor Christine [Applause] Bishop Spong is a legend in the church and he's a legend that deserves all the accolades that he has accumulated he's been an advocate and an ally for marginalized people in the church throughout his entire ministry have you read his autobiographical books you know that he talks about how encountering racism and challenging racism is where he learned what really means to be a priest and to be a minister and he has continued as a part of a continuum of liberation work to be an advocate for marginalized people or gaining women in unprecedented numbers to serve in the Episcopal Church at a time when it was new and suspect and then ordaining openly gay people also in the Episcopal Church before it was fashionable to do so and it's a little fashionable in the Episcopal Church I think we can say that now but it hasn't always been and that's because people like Bishop Spong took genuine risks personally and professionally to stand in alliance with us another piece of John's work has been that he has been a scholar the whole time he uses his work based in community to inform his intellectual interests and he uses his intellect to serve people in the church his books have brought life and liberation to many people his biblical scholarship his social analysis all of those things so we welcome him today to our pulpit as a person who is an embodiment of all that we hope church ministry can be he is a prophet a priest a minister a scholar a mystic a companion to those in need of liberation so will you welcome someone who has not just modeled ministry to us but ministry with us [Applause] I'm always glad when I get introduced by Jim it last a week or so there's only one significant achievement in my life of which I am singularly proud and that is I married well above my station I'm delighted to be here I've come to this church over a period of about 20 years I've watched you in various stages of your life's journey and it's right exciting to be here again had a particularly critical and crucial time in that journey where you will be under the direction of your gifted interim pasta redefining yourself and making decisions that will govern your future because once a learned man who said you have done an audacious thing you have been an audacious congregation so do not now tremble at your own audacity but grasp it anew and step into the future and seek that vocation for this congregation that is appropriate to the future it is not the same day today as it was when this church was started but your vocation can be equally powerful and equally audacious be aware that many people not only in this community and in this city and in this state and in this nation but even throughout the world many people are aware of the witness of this congregation and we will watch with pride and with gratitude as you make a decision about who will lead you into your future be aware that prejudice is a very national thing I don't think I fully understood the irrationality of prejudice until I watched a gay activist group in New Jersey decide to picket a Mormon Church in New York because of the Mormon Church's participation in the passage of Proposition 8 in California and so a group of gay and lesbian activists from New Jersey went to this Mormon Church and two kids about 12 years old carried a great big banner that said my two mothers can beat up your 14 wives [Laughter] [Applause] and that's when you know how irrational prejudice is I want to speak to you this morning on the fourth gospel because I have consumed my life in the study of the fourth gospel for the last five years and I believe one always speaks out of his passion in the earliest service I went through a series of what I call bullet points that distinguish the fourth gospel from all of the other writings in the New Testament I do not have time to repeat those but I want to isolate the last one and develop it the most distinguishing mark of the fourth gospel is that this gospel alone does not climax its story with Jesus resurrection nor is the climax the Ascension of Jesus nor the time when Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon the disciples had John's version of Pentecost the climax for John's gospel is the crucifixion it was the crucifixion that would be the moment when Jesus was glorified and that theme dominates john's gospel from the very beginning Jesus calls the crucifixion my hour he is not willing for his hour to come until all things are ready so he rebukes those who try to pressure him into acting before the time is right he declines to act in the second chapter he declines to act in the seventh chapter and then in the twelfth chapter which you heard red is our gospel for the day in a very special setting Jesus announces that his hour has come and then John's story turns immediately to the narrative of the crucifixion where's the context in which that hour came was when some Greek citizens came to the disciples of Jesus and said serve we would see Jesus and two of the disciples Philip and Andrew led these Gentiles into the presence of Jesus and that's when he said my hour has come when the Son of Man is lifted up when the chosen one is lifted up that will be the moment when he will draw all people to himself so John's Gospel approaches the crucifixion very differently it's a triumph not a tragedy it's a moment of ultimate commitment and not a defeat again in the gospel you heard read Jesus does not go into the Garden of Gethsemane in the fourth gospel and wrestle with whether or not he shall drink this Cup he says for this purpose I was born and he walked toward his destiny he's also for this reason that the fourth gospel never records Jesus on the cross crying out the words of despair the cry of dereliction my God my God why have you forsaken me the cross is not a tragedy in the fourth gospel so Jesus says the work you have given me to do is complete it is finished I've accomplished my mission there is no atonement in the fourth gospel there is no wallowing in the sinfulness of humanity there's no portrayal of Jesus as the divine rescuer who comes to save the sinner the Redeemer who comes to give value to the worthless the rescuer who comes to lift up those who have fallen those ideas are not in the fourth gospel the fourth gospel would never lead anyone to say something that we hear in worship almost every Sunday in almost every Christian Church namely that Jesus died for my sins that is not a fourth gospel idea the fourth gospel portrays one who is so full and so free and so whole that in the giving of his life away he achieves the fullness of what humanity is all about when I am lifted up I will draw all people to myself when I am lifted up then people will know who God is then people will know I am that is the Jesus that is presented in the fourth gospel Jesus that calls you and calls me Jesus who expects you and expects me to take his gift and his power and step into a new understanding of what it means to be human what it means to be you we have fallen so far away from that idea I can't tell you about your liturgy but I can tell you that in the Episcopal Church we spend most of our time in liturgy on Sunday morning insulting our humanity we tell God what wretched miserable offenders we are we tell God that we have not done the things that we ought to have done and we have done the things we ought not to have done we tell God there is no health in us we tell God we are not worthy even to gather up the crumbs underneath God's table and we cannot even sing the very familiar hymn Amazing Grace without reminding ourselves that the reason God's grace is amazing is that it saved a wretch like Jim Myrtle Sookie for you or me sometimes I wonder how we get up out of church on Sunday morning and walk out with any sense of self-respect our primary prayer is have mercy have mercy have mercy sometimes we get so tired of hearing that prayer we say it in Greek and so we say carry a Laius on but it still means lord have mercy that is not the portrait of the Christ that we find in the fourth gospel that is a distortion of the gospel brought into the Christian faith in the fourth century when the Creed's were being written and when we spent an awful lot of time talking about the fall of human life the John presents a very different portrait it is only when Jesus is able to give his life away that we see the meaning of God what he supposed John got this idea he got this idea because John was Jewish as was every writer of every book in the New Testament the only debate is about Luke and Luke appears to been born a Gentile and converted to Judaism before he came into the Christian movement so when you read the Bible you are reading Jewish literature and you might want to know what Jewish literature means to Jewish people and there was a portrait drawn in the Old Testament to which the fourth gospel was deeply dependent let me take just a moment to put that Old Testament episode into its context the little Jewish nation whose sense of its own Worth was that it was the nation that was bound to be a blessing to all the nations of the world that's what it meant to be the Messianic people that was their destiny and in the early years of the sixth century this little nation was crushed by a Babylonian army under the leadership of a king named Nebuchadnezzar now that it was this nation crushed but its walls were torn down its temple was razed to the ground and its people except for the halt the lame and the blind were marched off into captivity where they would live for two or three generations before they were allowed to return home none of the people who went into captivity actually made it back but when they went into captivity it became imperative for this people to devise some means that they could keep themselves cohesive so that they could someday return and fulfill their god-given messianic vocation to be the people through whom all the nations of the world would be blessed and so in captivity they devised symbols of their separation that's when circumcision was reinstituted that's when the kosher dietary laws were instituted that's when the strict Sabbath day worship was instituted they wanted to be different only in difference could they remain separate and only in separation could they return to their land and reclaim their historic destiny some sixty or so years after this episode Cyrus of the Persians defeated the Babylonians and allowed the captive peoples to go free and so a group of them began the journey back to the Holy Land and all during this time they had kept their dreams alive by listening to their grandparents and their parents talk about the glory and the Wonder and the beauty of Jerusalem and of Judea so they went with great expectations and when they finally arrived their heart sank in absolute despair there was no sign of greatness the temple was a few piece is a broken pottery in a field overgrown with weeds the walls were destroyed it began to dawn on these early pilgrims that never again with the nation of the jurors be great there would always be weak pitiful victims how could they possibly fulfill their vocation to be the nation through whom all the nations of the world would be blessed and it was one of these people we have no idea who he is or what his name was or even that it was a he or him one of these people on that early expedition went into a kind of depression I don't know how long it lasted but in that depression he began to forge a different way of understanding what it means to be Messiah and when he emerged from that depression he wrote his thoughts down to be the Messiah he says is to be like a suffering servant who is willing to bear the abuse of the world without returning abuse in kind who is willing to absorb the hatred of the world without returning hatred in kind it became the job of this victim to absorb hatred and abuse and to transform it as love and forgiveness so this unknown person penned this portrait he talked about one who was despised violated betrayed he talked about one who would be like a lamb being led silently before those who would slaughter it and he called on his people to accept this vocation of absorbing hatred and abuse and transforming it in love of allowing their weakness to be the vehicle through which the life of God was communicated now that was not a happy portrait most people do not like to volunteer for a life of masochistic suffering but someone thought enough of that portrait to take the words of this unknown prophet and to attach them to the scroll of Isaiah so this prophet is known as second Isaiah and its work constitutes chapters 40 through 55 of the Book of Isaiah and it is far more familiar to you than you imagined because George Frederick Handel set many of those words to music in the popular oratorio called Messiah so we are familiar with it and we even think he's talking about Jesus he's talking about the servant the Lamb he was despised forsaken a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief we know the words very well no one paid much attention to these words until a period of time passed about 600 years but these words were carried in the sacred scriptures of the Jewish people so that they were always there a kind of Minority Report and then a man named Jesus of Nazareth appeared in the meaning that people found in his lives they found interpreted in the portrait of the servant from second Isaiah the lamb silent before the slaughter the one who absorbs hatred and abuse and rejection and betrayal and denial and who returns it as love this is not a savior of the fallen a rescuer of the condemned this is a portrait of human life that has crossed all of the defensive barriers of our existence and who is free not to survive but to give his life away in love for others so John took this portrait out of second Isaiah and he used that as the lens through which he interpreted the life of Jesus no for John Jesus was not God's victim Jesus did not die for your sins what a strange and terrible idea that is it makes God an ogre who would demand the death of the son that makes God the ultimate child abuser it turns Jesus into being a masochistic sufferer it turns you and me into being guilt Laden people because we become responsible for the death of Jesus and besides that it's not so that mantra that we hear repeated every Sunday is not so you and I were not born in sin we were born in complete we do not need to be rescued from sin we need to be empowered to become all that we are we need to get beyond the defense barriers the survival barriers that we erect for our own needs which are the harbingers of all of our hatred of other people all of our rejection of other people we reject others before they can reject us we build ourselves up by tearing other people down we participate in the irrationality of prejudice and we think it's a virtue I listen to an Arizona politician about two weeks ago who said that he was first of all a Christian and second he was a conservative and third he was a Republican but when he talked about what he meant to be a Christian it reminded me of my own childhood I was raised in a Christian Church an evangelical Church in Charlotte North Carolina that taught me that segregation was the will of God that women were by nature inferior to men that it was okay to hate other religions and especially the jurors that homosexual people either mentally sick and they needed to be cured or they were morally depraved and they needed to be converted and they quoted the Bible to justify all of those prejudices the gospel of Jesus has been deeply distorted God does not call you to be religious indeed I don't really like religious people that's sort of an occupational hazard in my profession the religious people seem to be so small-minded so dedicated to tearing someone else down I like hole people in real people people who can accept themselves as they are and can accept other people as they are and enable both to grow in the meaning and understanding of faith and it is that message that John records in the crucifixion so the moment of Jesus glorification is the moment when he reveals that he can give himself away totally even while he loves those who are taking his life from him that was a new kind of humanity that was a new vision and that's where John says the glory of God was revealed in the life of Jesus of Nazareth his was a humanity that could be denied and he loved the denier and humanity that could be betrayed and he loved the betrayer a humanity that could be Forsaken and he loved those who forsook him a humanity who could be tortured while he loved his torturers a humanity that could be killed while he poured his love out upon his killers Christianity it's not about guilt or a religion it is about being made whole it's not about surviving it's about becoming free enough to give your life away it is about becoming deeply and fully human that's why John has Jesus say my purpose is that you might have life and have it abundantly John opened my eyes to a very different way of understanding the Christian faith and so I see in the call of the Johanna and Christ the invitation to live my life so fully that I can give life away to others to learn to log so wastefully that I can share my love with others to have the courage to be everything that I can be so that I can have the courage to enable others to be everything that can be that is what the Christian life is all about and that is what the death of Jesus meant to John the author of the fourth gospel the man whom I believe was a Jewish mystic and that is why we can still sing in our churches today in the cross of Christ I glory amen [Applause]

Channel: Cathedral of Hope

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Length: 27min 57sec (1677 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 10 2014