on lent and sacrifice (or towards a new understanding of atonement--part I)
I have made it my goal this Lenten season not to give up anything, but to take up something.
The season started auspiciously enough, with me telling a bunch of hungry college students at Southern Polytechnic State University what, exactly, Ash Wednesday is all about. I resisted the imposition of ashes, for the very reason that I wanted the students to understand that as much as Lent is lauded for the willing, disciplined sacrifice of mortal vices (chocolate, caffeine, facebook) the sacrifice itself is not the end, rather that the desire for that "thing" is redirected to Christ, and the looming celebration of his crucifixion and death.
As such, I felt compelled to warn these folks against finding moral security in the suspension of things that are otherwise bad habits, or worst, trivial things. Lent is, at its core, about remembering.
I am finding precious little time to read these days. Between the new addition to the Lyon household and a church web host that suddenly went down, there is very little time for casual reading, even when the thing you decide to take up is reading a book.
Phyllis Cole-Dai and James Murray are two unlikely co-authors who decided to spend the Lent of 1999 on the streets of Columbus, Ohio. The ensuing memoir of the journey, The Emptiness of Our Hands-A Lent Lived on the Streets, has been nagging, following, and haunting me as we hurtle toward Holy Week.
There is much worth writing about in this volume, but you would really best be served to simply read it yourself. You can buy it from Amazon, or let me know and I'll be glad to pass it on to you after Easter. In the interest of having something blog-worthy here, however, I would like to suggest that the book reflects a subtle shift in our understanding of atonement, namely, a rejection of substitutionary atonement for something else--something better.
Substitutionary atonement is the stuff of Lent--Christ taking our place. The evangelical metaphors linger like fog over a spring lake--the courtroom drama where we, the condemned sinner, are sentenced to death, only to see a long-haired Savior dash into the courtroom to take our place, or perhaps the grittier, post-Passion of the Christ perspective that focuses on the carnage of Calvary, with the tacit implication that it should have been us.
This isn't in the book, but it's worth stating that this kind of thinking isn't new, nor is it necessarily Christian. Every ancient culture practiced some manner of sacrifice to the gods. (I'm risking going off course here, so for now I'd suggest you see Rob Bell's The Gods Aren't Angry) The revolutionary thing about the relationship between Yahweh and Israel is that Yahweh is telling the Hebrews "I don't relate to you like all the other gods." (The sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 alone tells us this--notice Abraham never asks how to bind up his son or how to carry out the sacrifice--Abraham's father Terah from Ur undoubtedly carried out sacrifices to the gods of Canaan, possibly even Abraham's brothers and sisters)
A couple of years ago Jen and I were on a cruise with my parents when we chose to take a shore excursion in Cozumel to the Coba Mayan Ruins. I decided to make the climb up the Nohoch Mol pyramid tower. I took the picture above standing directly behind the "sacrifice stone" where the bodies of animals and even humans were laid to be ritually sacrificed to appease the gods. I noticed how the majestic pyramid was perfectly aligned with the smaller pyramid that peeks out above the trees a mile away, directly in line with the sacrificial stone.
I couldn't help but be overwhelmed by what had happened there--the loss of life--innocent ones, at that--all to placate imaginary gods. And instantly I thought about the cross. It was May then, and we had just come out of Easter. I thought that what I had been told all those years--that, to carry the metaphor, it was as if Jesus had taken our place on that sacrificial altar--well, if that was the case than God was neither loving nor merciful. No one, mortal or immortal, could leverage such vengeance on their child. The metaphor breaks down. It doesn't work.
If, then, Yahweh is not a vengeful God whose thirst is only quenched by the spilling of blood, even that of his own child, then how do we talk about the cross? Why "sacrifice" anything?
I'm still working through a good bit of this and plan on posting part 2 on atonement later this week, but what I have gleaned from my Lenten reading The Emptiness of Our Hands is a far better model for Lent--empathy and remembrance.
This is not a season to self-flagellate and hope to "make up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions". It is a time to reflect on the reality of perfect Love, fully revealed in Jesus, entering into the world. And we killed it. When it didn't do what we thought it should do, love who we thought it should love, overthrow who we thought it should overthrow, we nailed it on a tree and mocked it as a sham.
The efforts of Phyllis Cole-Dai and James Murray were to identify with the homeless community of Columbus and to be present with them. To not linger on thoughts of other things, or even how it would later sound on paper or in a book, but to simply be present.
Christ begs us during Lent to be fully present--
to the suffering of the cross and to the suffering in our midst
to the joy of Easter morn and the joy of friend and neighbor
to remember how we nailed Love on a tree and how we're still driving nails of greed and self-satisfaction
to the otherness of Christ and to the other-ness of others
