Atonement



Beginning at sundown today and continuing until an hour after sundown
on Monday, the Jewish world will observe the most important Holy Day
of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur.  Yom Kippur means "Day of
Atonement," and one Jewish friend described it to me as "like the 40
days of Christian Lent compressed into one day."  Today thus provides
a fit occasion to consider atonement, and I want to look at it in
Jewish, Christian and Universalist contexts.

There are two things that need saying at the outset.  One is
linguistic.  I used to sit in the pews and listen to preachers tell me
that the word atonement broke down as at-one-ment, and I never
believed them.  I thought this was entirely too cutesy to be true.
But then I got the Oxford English Dictionary and -- watch out -- sure
enough, there was an old English word, "onement" whose use is attested
as early as the Twefth Century, one of the first instances of the
marriage of Latin suffix to an Anglo-Saxon root, which basically meant
"unity," and atonement was constructed by merely adding "at" to it.
So when we "atone" for a wrong, we are "at one."

The second thing we need to do is say something about the dangers of
appropriation.  Most of us are not from a Jewish background and this
church as a whole is not Jewish, though I hope it to be congenial to
those of Jewish background who wish to join with us.  When we hold up
one element of any religious system, we need to keep in mind that that
element in the lived practice of the religion is a part of an
integrated whole, and that it does some violence to the system to view
it in isolation.  UUs have been accused with some justification of
taking a "Chinese Menu" approach to religion -- one from Column "A"
and two from Column "B."  So in examining the concept of atonement on
the holiest occasion of the Jewish calendar, I don?t want to give the
impression that I am trying to be Jewish or claim this holiday for
ourselves; rather, in the spirit of last week?s sermon, I am trying to
explore some of the deep wells of the spirit as it has historically
been handed down to us.  What I want to do this morning is to trace
this concept of atonement through three perspectives, Jewish, Orthodox
Christian and Universalist, and then try to show how the concept in
these religious traditions affects the way we think about justice and
forgiveness whether we consider ourselves adherents of these faiths or
not.

Observance of Yom Kippur is commanded by God in the 23rd chapter of
Leviticus where the tenth day of the seventh month -- for reasons
which need not concern us here, the Jewish calendar begins at the
seventh month -- is set aside as a day of atonement.  "It shall be a
holy convocation for you; you shall deny yourselves (or fast) and
present the Lord?s offering by fire, and you shall do no work during
that entire day; for it is a day of atonement, to make atonement on
your behalf before the Lord your God."

One Rabbi explains this holiday by referring to the "books" in which
God inscribes all our names.  "On Yom Kippur, the judgment entered in
these books is sealed.  This day is essentially, your last appeal,
your last chance to change the judgment, to demonstrate your
repentance and make amends."  He goes on to say that the day "atones
only for sins between man and God, not for sins agains another
person."  If you want to atone for sins against another person
committed during the year, you must seek reconciliation before Yom
Kippur.  On the other hand, the same Jewish friend to whom I referred
earlier noted that dealing with the sins against God was easy, as he
conceived of a God overflowing in forgiveness.  He spends most of the
day thinking about the wrongs he has committed against his fellow
humans.

The Yom Kippur service which takes place on the first evening of the
holiday is called the Kol Nidre or "All Vows", after a prayer which
opens the service which begins with those words.  Here is an English
translation:





All vows and oaths, all promises and obligations, all renunciations
and responses, that we make from this Yom Kippur to the next, we
cancel.  May we be free of them all, may we be released from them all,
may they all be null and void, may they be of no effect.  May these
vows not be vows, may these oaths not be oaths, may these responses
not be responses.





This is a curious formulation.  As I understand it, the promises
referred to are promise made to God such as, "Oh God, if you let me
pass this math test, I?ll go to synagogue every Shabatt for the year."
Experience has shown that we never keep our side of these bargains, so
the Kol Nidre prayer says that they won?t be effective anyway.

The service also includes a confession of the sins of the community,
which is inserted into the Shemoneh Esrei (Amidah) prayer.  All sins
are confessed in the plural (we have done this, we have done that),
emphasizing communal responsibility for sins.  There's also a
catch-all confession:  "Forgive us the breach of positive commands and
negative commands, whether or not they involve an act, whether or not
they are known to us."

An important part of the Biblical description of Yom Kippur was
sacrifice.  In Chapter 29 of the book of Numbers, animal sacrifices
appropriate to various holidays are specified.  For the day of
atonement, it is commanded:

"29:8 You shall offer a burnt offering to the LORD, a pleasing odor:
one young bull, one ram, seven male lambs a year old.  They shall be
without blemish.  9 Their grain offering shall be of choice flour
mixed with oil, three-tenths of an ephah for the bull, two-tenths for
the one ram, 10 one-tenth for each of the seven lambs; 11 with one
male goat for a sin offering, in addition to the sin offering of
atonement, and the regular burnt offering and its grain offering, and
their drink offerings."





Now obviously our Jewish neighbors are no longer offering bulls or
rams, but the idea of sacrifice is observed through the practice of
not working and of refraining from food, drink and sexual activity for
the full duration.

I want to focus on that male goat for the sin offering a moment.  The
practice of animal sacrifice was common among all religions of the
ancient near east, and a sacrifice of atonement in the Biblical age
was accomplished vicariously by the sacrificial offering of a
"scapegoat".  In the Jewish ritual, the priest put his hands on the
head of the goat and thus transferred to it the collective guilt of
the people.  The goat was then taken to a high cliff and thrown off.

This discussion of sacrifice brings us to the story of Abraham and
Isaac which we read today, surely one of the most heart-rending
stories ever told.  Here is Abraham, who had to wait until age 100 for
God to fulfill his promise to give him a son by Sarah and thus make
any kind of meaning of the previous promises God had made to make of
him a great nation.  Now this same God is asking him to take this son
out and sacrifice him on the altar.  After he has bound Isaac on the
altar and is raising his knife, he angle stays his hand and a ram is
found to substitute for the progenitor of the Jewsih nation.

Jon Levenson of Harvard has found in this compelling story a
suggestion that the ancient Jews, like other Near Eastern peoples,
practiced human child sacrifices at one time, though there were many
ways in which the child could be redeemed and animals be substituted
for the first-born, and that at a later time this practice ceased and
at a still later time it was vigorously denied that it had ever
existed.  Levenson sees the miraculous last-minute redemption of the
first-born child to be a theme which occurs throughout the Old
Testament and is continued in the story of Jesus.

Let?s put that thought on hold for a minute, and move on to orthodox
Christianity.  Who would you say is the founder of the religion we
know as Christianity?  The off-the-cuff answer to that is Jesus of
Nazareth, but a lot of people would say that it was not Jesus but St.
Paul, for it was Paul who first enunciated the central claim of
orthodox Christianity that Jesus?  death on the cross served as an
atonement for the sins of humanity.  Jesus himself, as reflected in
the canonical Gospels and other preserved sayings, never made this
claim even though he clearly foresaw his own death.  Therefore Paul is
often regarded as the true founder of Christianity.

Now let me point out that this claim has a dangerous edge to it.  If
we say that "Christ died for our sins" is the central claim of
Christianity, and if we don?t choose to believe that assertion, we are
defining ourselves out of Christianity.  UUs are often asked whether
we are Christian or not, and the answer to that question is not
simple.  Certainly both Unitarianism and Universalism historically
came out of Christianity, but whether we as a denomination or
individuals are Christian now depends on whose definition we use.  If
we want to claim the label Christian for ourselves, we should be
careful not to use a definition which is too narrow for us to fit
within.

At any rate, I want to focus not on all of Christianity, but to
fast-forward about 1600 years to Calvinism, the particular brand of
Western, Protestant Christianity which came to these shores.  The
doctrine of atonement was central to Calvinism:  the fall of humanity
which occurred in the Garden of Eden meant that humans ever after had
an inherently sinful nature.  Because of this, the whole race would be
damned.  In order to redeem the race, no sacrifice would be large
enough except God?s own son.  Thus the theme of the sacrifice of the
first-born son repeats itself.

This was the theological background against which the early
Universalists preached.  Universalism in this country existed in
several pockets -- one in South Carolina, -- but the founding of its
ongoing history as a movement is generally credited to John Murray,
who started the first church at Gloucester in 1779, a church which is
still open.  But the most important figure in the early history of
Universalism was not Murray but Hosea Ballou, and Ballou?s most
important book was his Treatise On Atonement, published in 1805, of
which an excerpt was read this morning.  It is hard to overstate the
impact of this book as a forceful and closely reasoned rebuttal to the
Calvinism of its day.  It was also hard for this modern reader to
grasp all the subtleties of the arguments, and in the discussion that
follows I am greatly indebted to historians Charles A Howe and Ernest
Cassara.

Ballou defines sin as an act at variance with that dictated by the
best human understanding of what is morally good.  He does not
personify sin, nor does he attribute it to personified spirits such as
devils or demons.  The most imprtant thing about sin, Ballou urges is
that it is finite, not infinite.  If sin were infinite, then finite
man would have thwarted the will of an infinite God, and thus God
would not be omnipotent.

Ballou then goes on to consider and knock down erroneous theories of
atonement, and in the process he disputes the doctrine of the Trinity,
for he shows that it is illogical:  orthodox doctrine holds that
Father, Son and Holy Ghost all existed from the beginning of time, and
the Son is the mediator between the Godhead and humanity.  Ballou
contends "that if the Mediator be the son of God, then he is Son of
himself, and is his own father; that he is no more the son of God than
God is his son!  To say of two persons exactly of the same age that
one of them is the real son of the other is to confound good sense."
Thus Ballou in addition to being a Universalist was also doctrinally
in sympathy with Unitarians, though Unitarianism was much broader than
a simple denial of the Trinity.

Having disposed of the orthodox doctrine of atonement, Ballou goes on
to develop his own theory, noting that "atonement signifies
reconciliation, or satisfaction, which is the same thing.  It is a
being unreconciled to truth and justice which needs reconciliation."
He then goes back to the root of the Cavinist doctrine of original
sin, the Garden of Eden story, and asks, "Is God the unreconciled or
dissatisfied party, or is man?"  While the orthodox answer is that it
was God who was so angered by Adam?s sin as to require the atonement
by the Son, Ballou asserts that it was Adam who was unreconciled
because he believed God to be his enemy because if his disobedience.
God in the Genesis account is not unreconciled to Adam:  "God?s
calling Adam, in the cool of the day, asking him where he was,
clothing him with garments of skins, and promising that the seed of
the woman should bruise the serpent?s head, are beautiful
representations of the parental love and fatherly care of the
Creator...  To say that God loved man any less after the transgression
than before, denies his unchangeability, but to say that man was
wanting in his love to God, places him in his real character.  As God
was not the unreconciled party, no atonement was necessary for his
reconciliation."  Rather atonement was necessary "to renew man?s love
for his creator."

This Ballou concludes that "the atonement by Christ was the effect and
not the cause of God?s love to man...  The contrary belief that the
great Jehovah was offended by 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."  In other words, as Howe put it, "rather than coming to
appease God?s anger, Christ came to the world to demonstrate the power
of the law of love through which men and women can turn away from sin
and be reconciled to God."

Love.  There?s that word, so overused and so debased in our time that
it?s sometimes hard to remember that in addition to its tawdry and
superficial meanings it also stands for just about everything worth
living or dying for.  Every Sunday we say as we light the chalice that
the doctrine of this church, the only doctrine of this church, is
love.  Ballou?s God loves us all too much to damn us to hell or to
require the death of his son as atonement.  Remember the words he
wrote, "there is nothing in the heaven above, nor in the earth
beneath, that can do away with sin, but love; and we have reason to be
eternally thankful that love is stronger than death, that many waters
cannot quench it nor the floods drown it, that it hath the power to
remove the moral maladies of mankind and to make us free from the law
of sin and death."

What are we to make of this?  What use can this be in our lives?  I
submit to you that, although most of may not describe ourselves as
believing Jews, Christians or even Universalists in Ballou?s terms, we
still carry templates for these attitudes in our hearts.
Specifically, when we consider our own wrongs against others or
other?s wrongs against us, we are influenced by the models of
sacrifice and love which have come down to us from the ancient soties
and theological debates.  I have been looking into models of what is
called restorative justice in the criminal system, which are a set of
ideas being developed by the Mennonites and worked into programs in
the juvenile courts.  The idea is the get an offender and the victim
of an offense to sit down together and work out what atonement for the
offense means in that particular content.  It is a refreshing
alternative to the dominant if not ubiquitous value in the current
penal scene, retribution.  But it takes a brave victim to agree to the
process, because in truth it will require more than a little
compassion on his or her part.

It is much easier to demand a sacrifice in the name of atonement.  We
demand a human sacrifice when we insist that those who kill must be
themselves put to death.  We also are demanding a sacrifice when we
feel that a punishment for an offense is too light, that the offender
didn?t suffer enough.

Let me leave the politically charged world of criminal justice and
tell you a story from my own experience as a hospital chaplain three
years ago.  I was responsible for the Intensive Care Unit in this
hospital, and one afternoon I was told that there was some hostility
in the wating room.  In the ICU was a man in his mid-50's, who had
been admitted about a week before with a stroke.  But his condition
had deteriorated, an unstoppable hemorrhage had spread from his
brainstem and he now lay in a coma with almost no brain activity, kept
breathing by a respirator while we waited for the Neurologist to come
and authorize the withdrawal of the apparatus.

In the waiting room were three different sets of relatives:  his third
wife and her adult children, his second wife and natural daughter, and
his teen-aged son by the first marriage.  The breakup of the first two
marriages had lefty a lot of bitterness in its wake, and ancient
grudges and hostilities were being dredged up in the waiting room, so
much so that hosptial security had to be called and one of the adult
stepchidlren actually was asked to leave the hospital for making
threats.

The neurologist happened to be a concertina-playing buddy of mine, and
when he arrived he determined that as a former lawyer I was the best
one to deal with this hostility (they don?t teach conflict reoslution
skills in med school).  Thus deputized, I arranged a plan for each of
the different warring factions to go into the room with the dying man
separately and say their good-byes before the breathing apparatus was
disconnected.  The first to go in was the teenage son of the first
marriage, who had not actually seen his father in seven of eight
years.

The boy was in about 10 minutes and came out just as the third and
second wives were trading barbs across the hall.  They both stopped
when they saw his face -- stained with tears, red, and utterly
grief-stricken.  There was something in that face that broke through
the hostility, instantly.  Maybe it was the realization that the man
in there was dying and that each of them had loved him in her own way.
Whatever happened, within five minutes the two women were hugging and
exchanging phone numbers, promising to get together.  I thought to
myself, if ever there was a moment of grace, this is it.

This was an atonement, and in a way sacrifice figure in, because it
only happened when the man they wer fighting over had left them.  But
I prefer to say that this atonement happened through love:  a
realization throguh seeing the grief on the boy?s face, that the love
they had for the dying man was greater than whatever offenses had
happeened between them in the past.

I?d like to give the same reading to the binding of Isaac.  Many
rabbis say that the point of the this story is Abraham?s loyalty to
God, and one can?t help but be impressed by that.  But I think the
larger point of the story is that God loved Abraham and Isaac too much
to let Abraham go through with it.  Testing Abraham?s loyalty was OK
up to a point, but then love took over, and affected an atonement, an
at-one-ment which enabled the boy to escape death and ensured the
fulfillment of God?s promise to Abraham.

Atonement is a huge subject, we?ve merely scratched the surface here
and this will not be my last word on it.  But what I?d like to leave
you with this morning are two thoughts:  (1) that the fundamental
power of reconciliation, of at-one-ment, involves love and often love
directed at the hardest people to love, those who have done us wrong
or those to whom we have done wrong.  And (2) that if sacrifice enters
in to the process, it should be the sacrifice of our own pride, which
is often what stands most forcefully in the way of reconciliation.





Amen.