Finding Salvation - Easter Sunday

Rev. Amy Russell - 2010-04-04

The puzzling story about a Father God who gave his permission for his son to be executed on a cross as payment for the sins of humankind has troubled me all my life. This God that I was taught was loving and forgiving being the architect of a violent and cruel death for his son made no sense to me. The very image of a bleeding and dying young man being nailed to a cross as an image that we grew up with as children as an inspiration for us to also be willing to sacrifice ourselves is unbelievably grotesque. This violent image that many of us grew up with, we never were taught to see it as something abusive that a Father would never do to a son. Instead, we were to understand that Christ's willingness to suffer in this way is a model for us to be willing to suffer for the God that loves us.

The doctrine of “substitutionary atonement” which means that Jesus stands in for us and our sins and takes our punishment as payment for our sins was first described by the Bishop of Canterbury Anselm in the third century. In this doctrine, God presents us with a deal. That we accept Christ as our “savior” and our sins are therefore “washed away” by Christ's blood. This is the language of the church- Our sins are “washed away” by his blood. Can you imagine this image to children? Someone else's blood pouring down over our heads and making us clean?

Universalist theologian Hosea Ballou raised these questions in his “Treatise on Atonement”. He wrote, “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,

Christian UU theologian Rebecca Parker speaks about how this image of sacrifice was so endemic to her understanding of Christianity that as a Christian she felt she should accept suffering and abuse as her ticket to salvation. She uncovers memories as an adult that she suffered sexual abuse by a neighbor and buried this experience in her effort to be a good girl for her parents and a society that expected her not to talk about her own suffering but to bear it like Christ might. She discovered this childhood experience and tried to put it behind her. She soon realized that in her marriage she had allowed herself to put her own needs to the side making her husband's needs take precedence with a similar context of the expectations of her religion. In Parker's book, Proverbs of Ashes, she says, “If God is imagined as a fatherly torturer, earthly parents are also justified perhaps even required, to teach through violence. Children are instructed to understand their submission to pain as a form of love,”

Parker and her co-author Rita Nakashima Brock write about the violent image of a suffering Christ as a role model in Christianity that allows people to suffer abuse, oppression, and pain in silence. As Christian theologians, their feminist perspective of how these expectations of suffering in silence have been placed on women for centuries break a silence that has existed in the church and in society.

Rebecca Parker was a part of a group of heretical Methodist women who decided that they were not going to be silent on this issue any longer. They wrote a contemporary feminist critique of the doctrine of atonement. Hosea Ballou, many years earlier, had argued for the logical inconsistency of a loving God requiring brutal punishment as a payment to him for sin. These women took this argument another direction pointing out this own experiences with how the doctrine places humanity in a position to expect sacritic, and sometimes bloody, violent sacrifice as a divine requirement for forgiveness. That the ancient role of the “suffering servant” places people into a role of expecting and accepting oppression. These martyr roles are often the ones taken on by women in abusive marriages or relationships of even in their jobs.

When Parker went to her grandmother to explain the paper and to warn her that Rebecca would be asked to leave the church because of it, her grandmother was astonished. She said, “We did away with the doctrine of atonement a long time ago. A loving God doesn't need a bloody sacrifice to forgive us.”

Unitarian Universalists and many liberal Christians left this doctrine behind long ago. As UU's we embrace the use of reason and our own life experiences as a basis to understand what we believe about life. But the question of salvation while no longer an issue foremost of us about whether we go to heaven or hell, becomes a question of what saves us in life? We all experience pain and sorrow in life. What helps us to bear the pain and suffering that life often offers? Where do we find that grace that allows us to move toward our own healing?

UU's might not use the Gospels to seek religious authority. However, recently, some of you have told me that you have been reading the Bible to see what you've missed out on. Several members of the young adult group have shared with me that they are searching in the Bible for what was so awful that caused many of us to reject it.

I was recently privileged to hear Thomas Moore, author of Care of the soul, who comes from a Catholic tradition speak about how he uses the biblical tradition to broaden his outlook instead of using it to narrow his horizons about religion. He says that he reads the Gospels “without the cautionary voice of authority or tradition telling me what they mean.” He uses his scholarship, his reason, and his knowledge of the human spirit to inform him as he peruses the Gospels. He sees them as a profound source of insight into basic human problems such as pain and suffering. Moore reads the New Testament looking for the teachings of Jesus, not what happened historically. Moore reminds us that if we really look at Jesus, we see a surprising and remarkably open personality who teaches others about the deeper meanings of life.

There are many stories in the gospels that show this remarkable person. They show a person who was open to simple pleasures like sharing a meal with others. A person who was not quick to judge others, but instead a person who was open to what people had to offer.

There's the story in Luke about the woman who had a “bad reputation” in town. When Jesus has dinner at a Pharisee's home, the women follows Jesus into the house carrying an alabaster jar. The Pharisee shows by his face that he judges this woman as a person with ill repute. The woman kneels down before Jesus and she begins to cry, her tears falling on Jesus' feet. Then she washes his feet with oil. Jesus sees the Pharisee's judgment and says this to him:

“'Simon, I want to tell you something...Do you see this woman? When I came into your house, you didn't offer me water for my feet, but she hasn't stopped kissing my feet since I arrived. You didn't offer me oil for my head, but she has poured oil on my feet.'”

“I'm telling you, because she has so much love, her many acts of wickedness are forgiven. Whoever has found forgiveness for something small doesn't love as much.”

“Then Jesus, told the woman, 'Your bad behavior is forgiven.'”

Jesus, instead of being judgmental and telling her to repent her sins, gently speaks to the woman offering her forgiveness for her behavior. He speaks about how much she has to offer. He doesn't speak about the sin, but about the love. He doesn't ask her to sacrifice herself to others, but recognizes how great is her gift of love.

Moore says that often people miss the important picture of Jesus in the gospels. The picture of a man whose main teaching is about love. His teaching is very simple- God loves us, and we should love our neighbors as ourselves. We should start with love for ourselves which is probably the hardest part.

I think the biggest challenge that we humans have is to love ourselves. But it is something that Jesus taught. If God can love us, whatever God represents to us- universal energy, nature, the love that we receive from those that love us- if we can feel the love of the universe, then we might be able to love ourselves. If we can love ourselves, then perhaps we can feel the love others send us and love them in return.

However, I understand that loving yourself and others is a huge undertaking for many who don't feel they trust the concept of love.

Some of you might have seen the movie, “Precious”. This movie is very difficult to watch. It's about an African American teenage girl whose name is ironically “Precious”, who grows up with abusive parents. These parents treat like a slave. There is no evident in her life as both parents use her for their own needs. Her father rapes her. Her mother treats her like a servant. The movie is heart-breaking as you see how painful this girl's life is. We can see that Precious has lost hope and has little love for herself. How can she when she has never shown any love?

In the critical moment in the movie when she breaks down and screams out her pain and her outrage, she tearfully admits that she has no use for “love” because all that “love” did for her was abuse her. She says she has never experienced anything that feels like love. Once she has her baby, she realizes that she cannot take her child back into this abusive home and she is now homeless. She cries out her frustration to her teacher.

The teacher who has befriended Precious offers her the little hope she can see. She says “You have the love of your baby. Your baby loves you, Precious, and I love you.” She offers Precious she only love she can demonstrate to her. Then you see this girl, now woman, kind of get it. She can begin to understand that can be respected, maybe even loved by this teacher. And that her baby needs her and that is a form of love, perhaps. In the last scene of the movie, she walks away carrying the baby like a treasure, something that is truly “precious”, holding him with the love that she has never received but which she wants so much for herself and her baby. She is beginning to feel that maybe she is loveable, that she is “precious”. This is salvation for her.

I think the message that Jesus wanted us to understand is that love, acceptance, understanding is available to us all if we start with loving ourselves and then offer that love to others. This is our saving grace.

Now some of you have told me that they can't relate to the word “love”. That their experience is that they can't trust love. Our Universalist heritage tells us that we are loved by God. Now that is hard for many because many don't believe in an anthropomorphic God. Who is loving us if we're loved? And how can we trust that love when our human experiences of love are so flawed?

I believe that the universe offers us unconditional caring, a kind of nourishment. If we are aware of the very air that we breathe as life-giving, perhaps we can begin to feel like we're cared for. This can feel like love if we can feel the fullness of what we are offered. We are given breath for life, the fruit of the trees for our hunger, water for our thirst, and other creatures to be with us in our loneliness. We are given the beauty of this earth for our home. All of these things feel to me like unconditional love.
Now that doesn't mean that the universe doesn't also mean destruction and death, aging and suffering. It gives us those things as well. But in the unconditional concern for the beings of the earth, we are given our human faculties of reason and emotion to do with what we will. We can appreciate and cherish life, or we can live unaware of its gifts.

So let's look at a different word. Agape. This is the word for love that is used in the Greek New Testament to speak of God's love for humanity. In 1st John, Jesus says, “”Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love,”

Here he is talking about the kind of love that the universe offers. Not necessarily emotional love, or sentimental love, but what we can offer each other as humans in community with one another. I think of it as “intentional love,” Love that doesn't come just because we happen to be related to one another or because we're attracted to someone. Love that we develop as a spiritual practice when we are in relation to one another.

I see this form of love around here a lot. Now we don't call it love, we might call it friendship. Or we might call it respect.

This is how I experience it around here. Someone calls me and tells me that so and so is sick and would I call them and make sure they're okay. Or we're having a discussion group and during check in someone mentions that they're having a difficult time. Afterwards, I notice that a couple of people have stayed after to sit with this person. Or after church when I see groups of you going out to lunch together. Now you might be going to complain about the sermon, but I also think you're going to enjoy each other.

Someone tells of a new grandchild during Joys and Concerns and they are surrounded with people who want to see pictures after the service. People all come together to prepare for a dinner or a fund-raiser and I see groups laughing and talking as they work. I go to lunch at Panera Bread and the people around the table who don't even know each other yet, try hard to listen to each other with respect and interest. Or there is a memorial service for a parent of a member and so many show up even though they didn't know the parent.

The list goes on and on.

So, is that love? Or is it respect? Is it a spiritual practice? And how is it related to salvation?

It represents hope for so many of us. The Good Friday pain and suffering that we each carry around is real. We all experience it. Some more than others. So, what saves us from that? I think it's the possibility of love and respect, first for ourselves, then the love that comes from others, and from the very universe that gives us life. This is our salvation. It is our Easter.

Our reading today echoes our Unitarian Universalist openness to religious doctrine. “We're not sure what happened”, it says, speaking about our ambivalence about Easter. But it goes on to say that “we know there is also a growing sense of grace and through the living of whatever sorrow and grief we feel, there is also a growing sense of grace and gratitude, or joy and thankfulness, in the mysterious and abiding astonishment of human being.”

That joy and thankfulness comes in a large part when we recognize that we are loved, we are accepted and cared for. That the universe, despite evidence of its indifference, provides us with nourishment, with an abundance of grace through its natural gifts to us. The gifts of love for ourselves, and love we share with others.

Let us pray together an Easter prayer:

We call upon the God love called by many names.

We may call this God respect when we see those around us listen to us carefully.

We may call it acceptance when we are surprised at how openly people sometimes welcome us.

Or we might call it human-ness when people who are also hurting stand beside us in our pain.

But call it what you will, God or the Universe, offers us unconditional acceptance for all of who we are, our strengths and our flaws, all of our whole selves held in the arms of this love.

In the darkness of our Good Fridays, let us remember to roll back the stone from the tombs of our own solitude, and welcome in the light of love and caring that saves us.

So may it be and Amen.