Sacramental Living

As we approach Passion Sunday, the mystery that believers hold so dear — that Jesus was the Messiah who was crucified, died, and now lives — has me thinking about its many dimensions. The code of holiness that is recorded in the book of Leviticus is not simply law. We, as contemporary believers, must wrestle with this text rather than simply saying, “That’s nice . . . glad we aren’t under the law anymore . . . so this really doesn’t carry meaning for us.â€?

While the instructions in Leviticus may be law in a formal sense, what is actually portrayed is a gracious offer of forgiveness from God. Listen to God’s promise throughout this text: “Your sins will be forgiven!� (Leviticus 16.6-16). We are created by a God who freely grants forgiveness to the believer in and through sacrifice. God is freely at work in the sacrifice and is freely accepting the sacrifice as a means of grace. The sacrifice is sacramental in that it is a tangible means in and through which God acts in a saving way to forgive. We do not attempt to appease an angry God. Rather, the object of this purification is sin; it is never God. Remember, “Your sins will be forgiven!� And the reality of Christ is that the sacrifice has now been offered by God himself in Jesus of Nazareth. The one who promises forgiveness is so gracious that he even provides the sacrifice. We then are offered the chance to engage with this forgiveness by offering our lives as a living sacrifice.

Notice that within this ancient ritual sin is not simply to be understood in individual terms. Sin is a reality that has a corporate dimension. The goat (and so Christ) is not a substitute, but a symbolic vehicle for recognizing that God has forgiven our sins. So often we claim Christ’s atonement for “me:â€? “I was saved . . . Christ died for meâ€? and so on. Yet what if we–Christ’s Church–fully realized the vast nature of sin? Can we believe that sacrifice has been made on behalf of our sins of abortion, war, racism, genocide, oppression, and neglect of the poor? Can we join in such confession? We must. For where there is this confession there is : “All your sins are forgiven.â€?

Pastoring in the south, I run into all sorts of interesting notions about the Church.  I’m a son of the south, so I’m allowed to deconstruct (I think).  One interesting phrase I heard of late was, “postmodern isn’t Biblical.”  Now, after the initial shock of that statement not even computing with me, I began to sift through the mountain of self-assured misunderstanding that amounts to such a statement.

I think that only a Biblical foundationalist could adhere to this idea.  The foundationalist after all will embrace the dead faith of the living far easier than the living faith of the dead.  The foundationalist will scrutinize scripture for the plain sense of the Word, but will instead strip the complexity of scripture in a synchronistic approach.  A view of life (and faith) that accounts for “both/and” could certainly be proof-texted to death by the foundationalist.

Yet, I find our spiritual ancestors embraced:

• a creating God who occasionally condoned evil;
• a vengeful God who was also a loving God;
• a fully divine God and a fully human God;
• a Church that embraces diversity within unity (a reflection of the Triune God, by the way);
• and a gospel that speaks through a certain people and yet to and through the world.

Amazingly, I discover these things in Scripture.  In fact, a cannonical-narrative view of scripture (which is holistic, healthy, mysterious, tangible, knowable, and livable all at once) yields postmodernism.  And — like the good postmodern I am — I acknowledge and embrace the fact that our world is populated with a mix of different learning styles that cover the spectrum of modernism to postmodernism.  It even appears that each learning style is helpful to the Church in America as we try to discover who God wants us to be right now and tomorrow.

I can think of no world view more Biblical than postmodernism.

Incidentally, I’m reading Beyond Foundationalism right now, so who knows how I would lay out this apologia in a few weeks.

The Gospel of John will rock your world, if you’ll let it! This text paints the cross as a scandal that cannot be endured. And yet in this scandal we discover Christ’s glory: the revelation of God’s ethic and standard of what it means to be a disciple. It’s a hard pill for me to swallow. Why does Jesus disown himself to the point of death? Why would any who follow this God be called to disown themselves just the same?

The Holy Spirit functions in the life of the Church by always pointing to the Son. The Son, throughout scripture, is continually pointing to the Father. (“Father” is simply who this God is in relation to the Son in the Gospel of John. God has many names and characters, this is the one used here). And notice what John – ever the thoughtful observer – is showing us (in John 8:50): the Father is always drawing attention to the Son through the Spirit. We have a beautiful picture of the Divine Identity always disowning self and drawing attention to the “other.â€? The Father does not seek the Father’s glory. The Son does not seek the Son’s glory. The Spirit does not seek the Spirit’s glory. Each is continually seeking the glory of the other. In John’s first letter, he eloquently evidences this cyclical pattern of life within the Triune God: “There are three that testify: the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood, and these Three are Oneâ€? (1 John 5.7-8).

The scandal of the cross can only be accepted as an action of the Triune God. It is an action of self-denial in preference for others to which every believer is called. God’s love for the “other� within God’s own life flows outward to us. We in turn must disown ourselves and love the “other.� This might be loving our neighbor, not so much as we love ourselves, but as we would rather love ourselves. In an individualistic, selfish American society such a way of life will indeed be scandalous.