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"A Day of Atonement"
Romans 5:1-11
A Sermon Preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley
November 25, 2001
University Baptist Church
Minneapolis, MN
A few weeks ago, Kim and I saw the Guthrie Lab’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. So much of Sondheim’s work is creative gospel and morality tales exposing the blind spots we all experience. Merrily is about three friends and how their lives entwined over a span of 25 years. It exposes joy, bitterness, idealism, cynicism, betrayal, addiction, marriage, divorce, success, failure and friendship that changes in the midst of such circumstances. We were treated to pivotal scenes in those 25 years where each friend makes a decision that contributed to the disintegration of their friendship, if not their lives. I found myself, along with others in the audience, wondering about those words I have left unsaid, those times when I could have or should have acted in another way and the friends I might have left behind because of decisions I have made. I also thought about this sermon that I was preaching on this day of atonement. I was reminded, like all good theater should remind us, that an unexamined life is a shallow one. It was also a reminder that God examines even when we forget the words we speak along the path.
This sermon is entitled, "A Day of Atonement" because I think it is important for us to live an examined life. I want to encourage us today and in the days to come to explore those places in our lives that we would like to fix. Those places where we have fallen short. Or to use theological language, I want us to examine those sins for which we need to atone.
What might it look like for us to ask forgiveness or to confess our sins? I am not talking about entering into worm theology, where we beat ourselves up and say how wretched we all are. I am talking about taking what the 12-steppers call a serious and searching moral inventory and then trying to make amends.
Stop and think about those moments of confession you might need to make.
What are our individual confessions, racial confessions, cultural confessions, national and international confessions? Prayerfully think about that for am moment.
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Today’s scripture from Paul’s letter to the Romans outlines the doctrine that we are saved from God’s wrath by God’s love. This sounds like a contradiction, much like a lot of Paul’s writings. According to Paul, being justified, meaning being in right relationship with God, brings us peace. He gives us a formula: Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope and hope emanates from God’s love and spirit which are poured out for us. If this sounds like religious mumbo jumbo, then try it like this: a bit of southern wisdom from Clarence Jordan’s Cotton-Patch translation of Romans: "Getting banged up makes us tough. Now toughness makes for reliability and reliability for confidence, and confidence doesn’t let you down. For God has given us a love transfusion by the Holy Spirit…While we were real sick, in the nick of time Christ died for people who couldn’t care less for a loving God." This is what Jurgen Moltmann called the "creative passion for the possible".
But that creative passion is only unleashed when we are freed from our inhibitions and our sins. This is what the Christian atonement theology is all about. It is about Jesus dying on the cross to save us from the sins of the world and thereby through our faith attaining salvation. Now this is a wonderful and freeing theology, embraced by millions of believers. But it can be taken too far. It should never be an excuse to ignore our need for transformation.
We can learn from our Jewish and our Muslim Sisters and brothers the power of atonement. The Jewish people fast on Yom Kippur in order to atone for the sins they have committed. In addition to this being Thanksgiving week, it is also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. During Ramadan, Muhammed received his initial revelation and ten years later, he made his historic migration from Mecca to Medina, becoming a great political and religious leader. Muslims fast during the daylight hours during the month of Ramadan in order to prayerfully atone for all the wrong they have done. All of that wrong that sets us apart from God’s plan for us. You feel the physical pain and hunger in your body and it mirrors the hunger in our souls to be in communion with God and in right relationship with one another. Fasting teaches self-discipline, it underscores one’s dependence upon God and it sensitizes compassion. People who have fasted for 29 days will think twice when approached by someone who is hungry. One twelfth of every Muslim year is spent confessing and repenting. Pretty good logic if you ask me.
Unfortunately, us Christians have taken the atonement theology of Paul and used it as an excuse to become lazy in our own need to work for our own atonement—our own forgiveness, our own reconciliation. We don’t have a month of atonement, or a holy day of atonement. What if we did?
Liturgically, this is the last Sunday of our year. Next Sunday, we begin Advent. What might we need to atone for in order to put an end to this year? What might we need to forgive? Remember, forgiveness is not about letting someone off the hook. Forgiveness is about refusing to let another’s actions hook you on the endless cycle of bitterness, anger, rage and hatred. When you forgive, you take your power back.
Who do you need to forgive? To what demon have we given control of our psyches? Prayerfully think about that for a moment.
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Sometimes it’s easier to ignore what’s wrong with us and with the world. Better the demon we know than the one we might unleash if we actually atone. But countries, nations and even Baptists have done the hard work of atonement from time to time.
During Apartheid in South Africa, five different Baptist bodies formed and segregated themselves along racial and cultural lines. The Baptist Association has 3000 members, mostly of Indian decent. Another largely Indian body with 1,250 members is the Baptist Mission. The Baptist Convention has 33,000 members, mostly black. The largest is the Baptist Union with 51,000 members. This body is largely white and had another body break away from it which preferred speaking in Afrikaanse, the language of Apartheid. The Afrikaanse Baptist Kirk has 3,500 members.
As you can imagine, there was tremendous distrust between these Baptist Brothers and sisters. Yet, because of the idealism over the New South Africa and the call of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu to come to grips with its past and reconcile its hostility toward one another, the Baptist convention and the Baptist Union began meeting together. For years it was tense, all of that pent-up hostility and hatred spilling out like sludge from a backed up gutter. Meetings were cancelled. Agendas were competing. Initially, no one wanted to admit they were wrong. Some were more willing than others to admit wrongdoing which fostered more distrust. But they kept at it, wanting to atone for the past and move together for the future. They were interested in Repentance, retribution and reconciliation.
After years of prayer and hard work and the intervention of the Baptist World Alliance, they figured out a way to work together for a new day in South African Baptist politics. The five groups formed the South African Baptist Alliance. Now together they are addressing evangelism, AIDS and poverty. They are able to do this now because they did the hard work of atonement.
Sometimes it’s easier to maintain our prejudices than it is to overcome them. Mathew Fox said a few years ago that all responsible people seeking to understand the religious landscape of the world should do two things. See the Movie "The Apostle" and read the Koran. Both address the need for atonement. I saw "The Apostle" long before I opened the Koran.
I confess to only a cursory knowledge of Islam, the faith of millions of people in this world. But over these past few months and especially this week I have spent some time in my own atonement to correct some of my ignorance. I picked up the Koran and started reading it. Unlike the New Testament which is translated into every language because its original language of Aramaic is lost, each Muslim reads and chants the Koran in its original Arabic. The translations lose the poetry, the play on words and the liturgical imagery which is so alive in Arabic. I learned or at least reminded myself that Mohammed believed that Allah, the high God of ancient Arabian pantheon is the same God worshipped by Jews and Christians. Islam is the act of surrender to Allah which results in Salam, peace. A Muslim is one who has surrendered their whole being to the Creator. Just as there are fundamentalist Christian zealots who abuse our faith, so are there fundamentalist Muslim zealots who misinterpret and abuse the peaceful faith of Islam. Islam is not an evil religion.
The theology of the Koran is not all that different from the Old and New Testaments. The God of the Koran is not as wrathful as we are led to believe. In the Koran, God’s compassion and mercy are cited 192 times while God’s wrath and vengeance are cited 17 times.
There are five pillars of Islam
Karen Armstrong in her History of God reminds us "The Koran teaches that all religious people have a duty to work for a just and equal society." (Armstrong p. 155)
"In the Koran war is held to be abhorrent; the only just war is a war of self-defense."(Armstrong p. 156)
I ask forgiveness of my Muslim sisters and brothers for my ignorance of your faith and my cultural categorizing of your people.
I asked you earlier to think about a confession you need to make. Now I want you to think of how you can make amends for that wrong. How can you do your part to atone for that place where you have fallen short? Are there some concrete steps you can take? Prayerfully take a moment to think about that.
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You may not be ready to confess, forgive, make amends or atone, but I encourage you to take some time to examine your life as we prepare for the Advent of Jesus’ birth. And if you can, take a step toward reconciliation, toward truth, toward wholeness, toward healing. If we all did that, think of the world landscape we would see before us.
As you think of that remember the words again of Paul:
"Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope and hope emanates from God’s love and spirit which are poured out for us." Or in the lingo of Clarence Jordan "Getting banged up makes us tough. Now toughness makes for reliability and reliability for confidence, and confidence doesn’t let you down."
I don’t pretend to have answers to all that is wrong in the world, but I do know that a day a week or even a month of atonement will go a long way to not only making this a better world, but it will bring us closer to one another and closer to God.