Roots…

Atonement

Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham

October 1, 2006

Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, commences at sundown today. It comes at the end of the ten Days of Awe, which start with Rosh Hashanah. These ten days represent an opportunity each year to seek forgiveness from God and from anyone whom you may have wronged in the course of the previous year. The Talmud tells us that

Although God is merciful and pardons the sins of man against [God], he who has wronged his neighbor must gain that neighbor's forgiveness before he can claim the mercy of the Lord. "This must ye do," said Rabbi Eleazer, "that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Lord (Lev. 16: 30). The Day of Atonement may gain pardon for the sins of man against his Maker, but not for those against his fellow-man, till every wrong done is satisfied." [1]

While the celebration is particular to the Jewish tradition, it provides and opportunity to ritualize an aspect of our living together which is universal. “I’m sorry.” “I forgive you.” Recent scholarship suggests that Yom Kippur may have been an observance that carried over into Christian practice as the Fast of the Seventh Month long after many of the ties between Christians and Jews had long been severed.[2]

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is described in the book of Leviticus as having been instituted when the Laws of Moses were first given to the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai. The ceremony as described there included sacrifices by Aaron, the high priest, who entered into the Holy of Holies to make atonement for the sins of the people, allowed only on this one holiest day of the year. First, a bull was to be offered on the altar to atone, or cover over, the sins of Aaron and his family, and then one goat was chosen to be sacrificed on the altar for the sins of the Children of Israel.

[Lev 16:16] Thus he shall make atonement for the sanctuary, because of the uncleannesses of the people of Israel, and because of their transgressions, all their sins; and so he shall do for the tent of meeting, which remains with them in the midst of their uncleannesses.

After the sacrifice of this first goat, the instructions continue:

21 Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task.

22 The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.

This second goat has traditionally been termed a “scapegoat.” Of course, the sacrifices described in Leviticus ceased with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E., and so the holiday is now celebrated in the synagogues without sacrifices.

By now, I hope you’re beginning to ask yourself, “What is this about? What does this have to do with us, anyway? And on the day of the celebration we’re having—this is a little heavy for me!”

Of course, what it’s about is “I’m sorry.” “I forgive you.”

The original form of Yom Kippur involved the sacrifice of animals; the two goats dramatize two aspects of the annual drama: sins are forgiven on the basis of a substitute life (the first goat) and forgotten on the basis of the second goat, the scapegoat who carries them away to the desert.

“Sins?” How did we sneak sins into this place? We don’t like that word much, either. As used by Jesus, the word in the Greek is hamartia (ham-ar-tee'-ah), whose definitions include: to miss the mark; to err, be mistaken; to miss or wander from the path of uprightness and honor, to do or go wrong. Nothing especially controversial there. We all miss the mark sometimes, fall short of our expectations, hurt people when we don’t intend to, wander from the path we know we should follow. So how do we return to the right path? Usually we just pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and go on. Sometimes, though, we’re left with a bitter taste. Sometimes we can’t just carry on the way we were. Sometimes someone does something to us or we do something to them that is—well, unforgivable. What do we do then? The High Holy Days ending in Yom Kippur provide a structured time and place to carrying out some of that rectification of life in a community. Creating an occasion for self-examination, asking forgiveness, atonement, creates a context in which the community can continue to function year after year, generation after generation, century after century.

This notion of “sacrifice” gives us pause as well. Making sacrifices to gods seems to be almost universal. We hear of the first sacrifice in the Bible when Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve, offer grain and meat respectively as sacrifices to God. The fact that God favored Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s also led to the first murder recorded in the Bible. Veneration of ancestors in East Asian cultures is often accompanied by foods as sacrifices to the ancestors, and Hindu temples provide many opportunities for sacrifice. Human sacrifice was not unheard of either in the ancient world recorded in the Bible or in the Americas, most famously among the Aztecs and the Mayans; a practice used by the Conquistadors to justify forced conversions of the natives to Catholicism and enslavement on encomiendas under conditions which resulted in so many deaths that we might as well say that the Spanish, too, practiced human sacrifice.

The Hebrew Bible strenuously discourages human sacrifice, but there is a terrifying story in Genesis read each year as part of the High Holy Days about how God orders Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son of promise, Isaac, on Mount Moriah, only to provide a ram as a substitute at the last possible instant after Abraham has proved his faith by binding Isaac on the altar and raising his knife to slay him.

The notion of sacrifice as we use it today raises connotations of a loss we have suffered or something of which we deprive ourselves—as during Lent or a national emergency. The concept in Leviticus, on the other hand, is not negative; it signifies giving up something for some greater good, a joyous dedication of something valuable to one’s Lord. The word sacrifice in English comes from a Latin word meaning “to make something holy.”

The notion that a god would insist on animal sacrifices for appeasement gives us an image of God which seems strange to us—what would be the point of such sacrifices, and what sort of God would insist upon sacrifices? On the other hand, a belief in the need to make such sacrifices has been nearly universal, so we must assume that it fills some need in human beings to offer such sacrifices. More than that, the notion of animal sacrifice as described in Leviticus becomes central to the Christian understanding of the role Jesus Christ plays in the economy of salvation. As Karen Anderson describes it,

The classic theology was expressed by Anse1m, Bishop of Canterbury (103 3-1109), in his treatise Why God Became Man. Sin, he argued, had been an affront of such magnitude that atonement was essential if God's plans for the human race were not to be completely thwarted. The Word had been made flesh to make reparation on our behalf. God's justice demanded that the debt be repaid by one who was both God and man: the magnitude of the offense meant that only the Son of God could effect our salvation, but, as a man had been responsible, the redeemer also had to be a member of the human race. It was a tidy, legalistic scheme that depicted God thinking, judging and weighing things up as though he were a human being. It also reinforced the Western image of a harsh God who could only be satisfied by the hideous death of his own Son, who had been offered up as a kind of human sacrifice.[3]

This concept of Jesus as a sacrifice to an angry God was one of the key points on which our Unitarian and Universalist forebears disagreed with their orthodox counterparts. After all, if God is Love, then the notion of an angry God who demands the sacrifice of God’s own son seems a contradiction to the Loving Father whom Jesus describes and to whom he prays. More than that, both Unitarians and Universalists questioned the doctrine of the Trinity; if Jesus was only a man, albeit the greatest of all men, he could not play the role required by the classic doctrine of the atonement. The questions arising from the attempt to develop a Unitarian doctrine of Atonement were a preoccupation during the first half of the 19^th Century. For example, there were some thirteen full-length articles in the Christian Examiner, the Unitarian journal of opinion, from 1824 to 1866. The most famous attempt to solve this puzzle in Universalist circles was by one of the most effective early leaders, Hosea Ballou, in his 1805 best-seller A Treatise on Atonement; in which the finite nature of sin is argued, its cause and consequences as such; the necessity and nature of atonement, and its glorious consequences, in the final reconciliation of all men to holiness and happiness. Ballou’s thinking was equally influenced by a deep commitment to understanding the Bible from a Universalist viewpoint and an equally strong commitment to the Rationalism expounded by Ethan Allen, himself a Deist. Ballou denounced the classic doctrine like this:

The belief, that the great Jehovah was offended with his creatures to that degree, that nothing but the death of Christ, or the endless misery of mankind, could appease his anger, is an idea that has done more injury to the christian religion, than the writings of all its opposers, for many centuries. The error has been fatal to the life and spirit of the religion of Christ in our world; all those principles which are to be dreaded by men, have been believed to exist in God; and [those who profess Christianity] have been moulded into the image of their Deity, and become more cruel than the uncultivated savage! A persecuting inquisition is a lively representation of the God which professed christians have believed in, ever since the apostacy.[4]

Instead of this intolerant and cruel idea of atonement, Ballou argues:

Let it be understood, that it is man who receives the atonement, who stands in need of reconciliation, who, being dissatisfied, needs satisfaction; and not place those imperfections and wants in him who is infinite in his fullness[, namely God]; and the doctrine of atonement may be sought for in the nature of things, and found to be rational to the understanding.[5]

Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, president of the UU Starr King Seminary in California, argue in their book Proverbs of Ashes that the orthodox Christian focus on the violence of the cross as the source of salvation encourages the belief that problems can be solved by violence. They say:

…Western Christianity claims we are saved by the execution, that violence and terror reveal the grace of God. This claim isolates Jesus, as violence isolates its victims. When the victims of violence are made singular, solitary, unprecedented in their pain, the power of violence remains.

Jesus' death was not unique. The torture inflicted on Jesus had been visited on many. It continues in the world, masked by the words "virtuous suffering" and "self-sacrificing love."

We cannot say what would have happened if Jesus had not been murdered, but unjust, violent death is traumatizing. His community retained the scars and limitations of those who survive violence. Christianity bears the marks of unresolved trauma.[6]

I’m spending some time on this point because, much as we might wish that the theology of an angry God had been vanquished by the efforts of our forebears—and indeed the more liberal theology the Unitarians and Universalists in the 19^th Century became widely accepted in mainstream churches down to the present day—the fact remains that in Evangelical and Fundamentalist circles, the classic, angry doctrine of atonement still prevails. The work of our Unitarian and Universalist forebears has by no means been completed. The focus of that theology on a transaction between Christ and God sometimes leads to undermining the real, practical teachings of Jesus about how we ought to conduct ourselves with our neighbors. As Hosea Ballou noted in his day, some Christians use their particular interpretation of their faith to justify cruelty and intolerance rather than forgiveness. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” To put it in other terms, “Forgive us for the wrongs we have done as we forgive those who have done us wrong.” Or, to use a four letter word, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” We could use the words sin, or trespass, or miss the mark, or fall short of what we ought to have done—we fall short as do all other humans, and we need forgiveness and can expect it to the degree we are willing to extend it.

“I’m sorry.” “I forgive you.”

William Ellery Channing and Hosea Ballou were deeply aware of the reality of the fact that we trespass, that we miss the mark, that we sin. They did not disagree with their orthodox contemporaries over the fact that good people do bad things, or that bad things happen to good people, or that there is evil in the world. Their disagreement was over how we might deal with our shortcomings and how we might learn from our errors rather than simply confessing ourselves unable to do anything without divine intervention. One of the issues we have in our faith tradition is that we are a proud people, and it is sometimes difficult to admit that we make mistakes, that we miss the mark, that our lives aren’t going the way we’re committed to making them go, that we—sin.

The other morning I was sitting quietly doing my morning reading, focused on preparing my sermon, off in my own happy cocoon of concentration in my chair with my cat in my lap when Deedee noted that she wasn’t able to get into email. I was slightly irritated but made a few helpful suggestions hoping the problem would pass quickly. It didn’t. Now, I have my foibles, among which is an irrational belief that I have or ought to have some magical touch which heals problems with computers (among other things). I also happen to be the second of two sons, so I also have an irrational belief that that if my older brother (or some other mythical magician) were around, he would fix the problem instantly and I would feel like a fool. After working about an hour the other morning to fix Deedee’s computer in all the many different ways in which computers can go wrong, completely distracted from my reading, this sermon and our cat, I had become, well, angry. Not strictly at Deedee, but she hates it that I get mad when I try to fix something I’m positive I should be able to fix easily and then can’t. The problem in the end was very simple and could have been detected easily if I had started by asking the right question. I figured it out. I went up to take a shower. I realized as I was relaxing in the warmth of the shower that this is what “trespassing” is about. It gave me an opportunity to say “I’m sorry,” and to get the response “I forgive you.”

In our history, our Universalist ancestors were tended to come from more modest class backgrounds than our Unitarian ancestors. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were less stuck up and sometimes better at recognizing that human failure is part of the human condition, that failure and salvation are part of the same story. David Hubner, newly retired as the head of the Department of Ministry at the UUA, captures some of the pride in our achievements many of us feel in our churches and communities:

In the community in which I live, the cultural insistence is always on how close to perfection are one’s children, one’s home, and one’s life. We teach that second best is not acceptable. Our children should certainly achieve much, and do it grandly. And in most of our churches, I sense, there is a similar expectation of the highest levels of achievement.

I’m not suggesting here that we add back the concept of absolute human sinfulness to our Purposes and Principles, but, rather, that we work a bit harder to build into our theology and our lives a deeper appreciation that being human means not only aspiration and hope but also failure and loss.[7]

Hubner remembers with fondness a mother who rose during joys and concerns in her congregation to tell how afraid she was about her son returning home the next week after a prison term. He suggests that far more Unitarian Universalists are like the third generation UU mother in a congregation he served who confided in her pastor but swore him to secrecy about the fact that her son was in and out of jail on drug charges.

As a community, I believe we can serve better when we are willing to confess what is really troubling us, to share our sorrows and fears as well as our hopes and aspirations. It’s hard to imagine how one of our congregations might do this, but confessing our shortcomings, our wrongdoings, our sins, would be a way of building a stronger community. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The customs of Yom Kippur which call for an acknowledgement of falling short have a powerful function. Many of us probably have hidden resentments or grudges we bear against members of our family, friends, members of our church. Someone slighted us, disagreed with us in a way we find unforgivable, did us wrong; or we did something we’re ashamed of, that we wish we had not done, that we’re sorry for. That brokenness, that tear in the fabric of community can be repaired with five magic words:

“I’m sorry.” “I forgive you.”

There have been disagreements in this church over the past thirty-odd years. Some have resulted in grievances long nursed. Some have resulted in good members of the congregation walking away. Some have resulted in tensions which made guests uncomfortable in our presence and sent them to other churches or to none. There may be old friends who have left the church to whom it would be good to say, “I’m sorry.” There may be old friends who will approach you to whom you could say “I forgive you.” As we set off on this new beginning of ministry together, we have a wonderful opportunity to avail ourselves of the opportunity to be forgiven even as we forgive, and to give real meaning to words in the prayer of Jesus, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

We Unitarian Universalists have a gospel to share about Love rather than Anger, about Forgiveness rather than Vengeance. Let’s hold up that gospel here in our own company as well.

“I’m sorry.” “I forgive you.”

May it be so.

Amen