"Did Jesus Have to Die?"

Romans 5:1-11

Third Sunday of Lent + March 27, 2011

Reverend Dr. David C. Brown
Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ
400 Glenwood Drive, Chattanooga, TN 37404

What in God’s name is wrong with you!? What in God’s name is wrong with the world!? Why in God’s name can’t you do the right thing!? Tough questions and most of us have asked ourselves those questions many times in our lives. Of course, if you believe with that pop philosopher of the 1920’s that in every day and every way you and the world are getting better and better, then this sermon is not for you. As a matter of fact, Christianity is not for you, so I should ask: “What in God’s name are you doing here in this church!?” Maybe it’s just an old habit. Maybe someone wanted you to come with them. Maybe you like to sing the hymns and hear the music. Maybe you like to see your friends who attend here. Maybe you’re here because . . . well, you fill in the rest.

But maybe, just maybe, there’s a deeper reason. Maybe you wouldn’t put it in traditional religious terms but you have a strange sense that everything is not right with you, that everything is not right with the world. You wonder how you could be a better person, not just for yourself but for other people. I think you would be less than human if you didn’t feel that way from time to time. But how does faith in God, the death of Jesus, and all the rest of it have to do with your life . . . and mine?

Maybe the problem is the way many of us were taught about God when we were children. Listen to the story that Marcus Borg, one of the great New Testament scholars of our time, tells about the God he met as a child: (Marcus Borg, “The God We Never Knew,” Harper San Francisco, 1997)

“My own story of how I met God the first time begins in a Lutheran Church in a small town in northeastern North Dakota in the 1940s. There I received a way of thinking about God that for a long time shaped what I thought being a Christian meant.

God and church were important in my town of 1,400 people. Most of us were Lutherans or Catholics. A few belonged to Episcopal, Baptist and Federated congregations. But I can’t recall knowing anybody who wasn’t a member of a church. In this sense, the small-town world of my childhood was still the world of Christendom: everybody was Christian.

My earliest memories of God are associated with Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. It was a white wood-frame building, with the sanctuary on the main floor and Sunday School rooms in the basement, where church suppers were also held. We attended every Sunday, and my parents were among the lay pillars of the congregation. My siblings, already in high school when I was a preschooler, sang in the choir.

Many of my early memories of God are connected with the music of our worship services. Each Sunday, we sang “Holy, Holy, Holy” as the opening hymn. Its verses created a vivid sense of two realities, God in heaven and us on earth…

I don’t remember being taught very much about God in Sunday School, though God was the presupposition of everything we learned. We memorized Bible verses because they were the Word of God. We learned the Ten Commandments because they were the law of God. We heard about the people of ancient Israel because of their covenant with God and about Jesus because he was the Son of God. Everything revolved around God.

Central to the story of how I met God for the first time is my earliest visual image of God, which goes back to preschool days. When I thought of God, I thought of Pastor Thorson, the pastor of our church. He had gray hair (rather wavy, as I recall). He wore a simple black robe (our branch of Lutheranism rejected clergy ornamentation such as stoles and vestments). I remember him as a big man; I was thus startled about a year ago when I saw an old photo of him with our family. He was in fact a relatively small man, shorter than my mother and sisters.

But he was my earliest visualization of God. When I prayed I visualized Pastor Thorson’s face. I knew, of course, that he wasn’t God; even as a preschooler, I would have said, “No,” if someone had asked me if he were. But when I thought about God or prayed to God, I “saw” Pastor Thorson.

My visual image of God as Pastor Thorson provided the central ingredient for the “supernatural theism” of my childhood . . . I thought of God as a “person,” just as Pastor Thorson was a person. To be sure, God was a remarkable kind of person. Unlike us, God was spirit and not flesh and was all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful. Nevertheless, God was a “person,” and to me that meant that God was a being separate from the world. Pastor Thorson, of course, was also male, though this didn’t seem significant at the time. But it added to the picture: for me as a child, God was a male-like celestial being “out there” – the familiar “old man in the sky . . .”

Pastor Thorson shaped my childhood image of God in yet another way. He was a finger-shaker. I am not speaking metaphorically but literally: he actually shook his finger at us as he preached. Sometimes he even shook his finger while pronouncing the forgiveness of sins:

“Almighty God, our heavenly Father, hath had mercy upon us, and hath given His only Son to die for us, and for His sake forgiveth us all our sins.”

Those words, accompanied by a chastising finger, carried a message: Although told we were forgiven, we knew it was a close call.

The memory of my childhood image of God as a finger-shaker intrigued me. I wondered how many other people received an image of God as a finger-shaker, metaphorically if not literally.”

I have an idea the sort of God Marcus Borg first met in his childhood is one that you and I have heard about, too. Whether we still believe in that God or not, many of our friends and neighbors still do. God is not our friend and maybe even our enemy. How in the world did that happen and what can we do about it?

The traditional answer that Christian faith gives is that we can’t do anything at all about it. According to this view, the first human beings God created, Adam and Eve, made a fateful choice to disobey God and ever since that time God is our mortal enemy. As the first McGuffey’s reader puts it: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” According to this traditional view, Jesus had to die in order to save us from our sins and reconcile us to God.

But here’s the problem: most of us here this morning don’t believe there ever was an Adam and Eve living in a world created by God in six days about four thousand years ago. But even if we do believe this, why did Jesus have to die? The answer, traditionally, is that Jesus took the punishment coming to us. Sometimes preachers tell the story of how a medieval prince, the son of the king, had a whipping boy. When the prince did something deserving punishment, the whipping boy was whipped in his place. Seeing the whipping boy suffer for him would so move the prince that he would never do it again.

Don’t be too quick to dismiss this as some ancient nonsense. Perhaps Jesus had to die so that you and I would recognize just how wrong the human race is. Jesus’ death is a powerful reminder of the countless deaths and destruction we, the damned human race as Mark Twain called us, have caused and continue to cause. Maybe, just maybe, Jesus had to die so that you and I would be so ashamed of ourselves that we would ask God to forgive us and help us stop living that way.

There is another way that Christians have used to explain why Jesus had to die. Some folks say that you and I and all the rest of humanity are under the control of the Devil. We have been kidnapped by Satan and Jesus’ death is the ransom that had to be paid so we could be free. How and why this happened is not very clear but I do believe that there is something true in this. Wouldn’t you agree with me that evil is very real in ourselves, in other people, in the world itself? Maybe, like Flip Wilson’s Geraldine, we don’t say to ourselves, “The Devil made me do it,” but we do know that evil is alive and well in our world. Maybe Jesus had to die so that you and I would take evil seriously. Jesus’ death on the cross might make us so sick and tired of evil that we would want to be free of it.

But, perhaps, as modern liberal Christians we still have difficulty believing that Jesus had to die to reconcile us with God or ransom us from evil. For us there is a third option. Jesus had to die so that we would recognize what life, real life, is all about. Jesus’ death, far more than the deaths of other innocent people in history – Socrates, Joan of Arc, Gandhi – does not leave us in despair, but in a strange way we do not fully understand empowers us to be the people we should be. In his death, we discover our true life and find the power to live in a different, better, more loving, more forgiving way. We live because he died.

Anyway, that’s the Christian faith: Jesus’ death reconciles us to God, to the world, and to ourselves. Whether you believe it, as the comic said, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” But it could be your story, too. Let me close with another person’s story.

The scene is a great cathedral in Paris. An old bishop, much beloved by his people, is retiring and he speaks to his people for the last time. “I want to tell you a story” he says. “It took place many years ago here in Paris on a Good Friday. Three students from the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, were walking through the streets. As they passed by a church, they saw people coming out after attending the Good Friday mass. The three students shook their heads in astonishment and amusement. How in the modern world could such superstition still exist? One of the students was particularly outspoken in his disdain. ‘How can people still believe this nonsense!?’ The other two students smiled and nudged one another. “You can say that to us but we bet you don’t dare go in the church and tell it to the priest!” “I certainly do,” said the student and went into the church where he found the priest just inside the door.

“Father,” said the student. “I’ve simply got to tell you that all this religion business is pure nonsense. How can modern, intelligent men and women believe such things?” And on and on he went. When he stopped, the priest gently smiled at him and said, “My son, I appreciate your honesty. Thank you for sharing your feelings with me. Now I wonder if you would do something for me. Would you go down to the front of the church, look up at the crucifix, and say “Jesus Christ died for me and I don’t give a damn.” After all, as you say, this is all so much superstition. You know nothing will happen to you. Would you do this for me?” “Of course,” said the student. He went down to the front of the church, looked up at Christ on the cross, and said, “Jesus Christ died for me and I don’t give a damn.”

He came back to the priest and said, “See I did it.” “Yes, you did, my son,” said the priest, “but just to gratify an old man, would you be willing to go and do it again?” “All right,” said the student. Again he went to the front of the church, looked up at Christ, and said, “Jesus Christ died for me and I don’t give a damn.” He quickly came back to the priest and said, “Now are you satisfied?” “No, my son,” said the priest, “Won’t you go back and deny him a third time?”

At this point in his story, the old Bishop paused and said, “I couldn’t do it.”

And maybe you and I can’t say it either. Jesus Christ died for us and we do give a damn. Thank God.

Amen.