Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on October 13, 2024. Based on Hebrews 4:12-16.
This summer, I listened to an audiobook called, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, by Rabbi Alan Lew. In it, he describes the Days of Awe, a season of the Jewish year that centers on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The Jewish calendar is a little bit strange in that the first day of the first month is in the spring, but the “head of the year” or Rosh Hashanah occurs in the fall, on the first day of the seventh month. This year, it fell on the evening of October 2. This is the first Day of Awe, one of the high holy days. They sound the shofar, or ram’s horn, and there are special services all day long.
Rosh Hashanah also begins the Days of Repentance. The time is always right to do what is right, which is to repent of your sins against God and neighbor. The Days of Repentance, or teshuvah, are the first ten days of the month of Tishrei and are a particularly auspicious time for repentance. In a sense, this ten-day period is like Lent in our tradition or Ramadan in the Muslim tradition. It’s a time when you specifically focus on making yourself right with God in preparation for Yom Kippur.
The tenth of Tishrei is the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, the highest of holy days in both ancient and modern Judaism. In ancient Israel, from the days of the Tabernacle to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., this was the day when the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies. He would make special sacrifices on behalf of the people, and another on behalf of himself. This was also the day when they did the scapegoat ritual. The high priest would present two goats and cast lots. One goat would be sacrificed to the Lord as a purification offering, while the other goat was set aside. Then the high priest would take incense into the Holy of Holies, make more sacrifices, and ultimately make atonement for all the people. He would present the live goat and lay all of the people’s sins on it, then set it free in the wilderness. In this way, the people would be made pure and clean in God’s eyes.
After the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews needed to reimagine Yom Kippur along with the rest of the Temple sacrificial system. In modern Jewish thought, the gates of heaven open on Rosh Hashanah. They stay open while the people repent and seek renewal. There is a special closeness between God and humanity, but then on Yom Kippur, the gates of heaven close again until the next year. So that has become a special day of fasting and worship to set oneself apart for God.
I should point out that this shouldn’t be taken too literally. It’s a bit like saying that the Holy Spirit comes on Pentecost—the Holy Spirit is always present, but we have a special awareness of that presence on Pentecost. Similarly, the gates of heaven are always opening and always closing, and God is always close to us, but Jews celebrate a special awareness of that closeness during the Days of Awe.
It’s really a beautiful vision of God’s relationship with humanity, and I highly recommend the book. But in the nearly two millennia that Jews have been developing that theology and tradition, we have developed a different understanding of atonement centered on Christ.
The author of Hebrews was steeped in both Jewish thought and Platonic philosophy. In Platonism, the things we see on earth are temporary, imperfect versions of what exists in heaven as permanent and perfect. Take this circle for example:
You would say that it is a “perfect” circle, but you would be wrong. If you zoomed way in, you would see that the outline is jagged. The outline of a true circle has zero width, but this one has a width of a couple millimeters. Still, if you look at this circle, you can imagine what a true circle, a perfect circle, would be like.
In the same way, the Jews built first the Tabernacle, then Solomon’s Temple, then the Second Temple as temporary, imperfect replicas of the heavenly temple. If that weren’t their goal, the Torah wouldn’t have page after page of mind-numbing details on how to construct the Tabernacle. These holy structures were imperfect, but they taught the ancient Israelites what the true heavenly temple is like.
Unfortunately, even the imperfect temple was destroyed, so we don’t have it as a reference. But we do know some broad outlines. There is an outer gathering area, and then an inner place where God dwells. And just as the ancient Jewish temples had high priests, we too have a high priest: Christ, who can enter the Holy of Holies in God’s presence any time he likes. Like the tabernacle and temples, the old high priests were temporary and imperfect—they were sinners just like us, and so they could not enter God’s presence without first purifying themselves. But Christ is perfect, and so he need not make any more sacrifices to purify himself. He can enter God’s presence at any time to purify God’s people—us.
The kingdom of heaven has come near! Through Christ, God’s eternal kingdom is always close at hand. So, we need to be continuously working to purify ourselves and prepare ourselves for entering God’s presence. We need to always be working on our repentance.
Again, let me turn to the Jewish practice of the Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The rabbinic tradition has a lot of variation in it—the joke is that if you ask ten rabbis their opinions, you’ll get eleven answers. But basically, they see repentance as having five main elements: recognition of one’s sins, remorse, desisting from sin, restitution where possible, and confession.
Recognizing your sins is the first and most important step. Like Alcoholics Anonymous, admitting you have a problem is the first step towards resolving it. Recognition is an intellectual realization that leads to remorse, which is a deep emotion that mirrors the hurt that your actions or inaction have caused. Desisting from sin is an action: it is not sufficient to know that you have sinned, you have to stop doing it.
Restitution is an essential part of healing, and is therefore step 8 of AA’s 12 steps. This is where the rubber meets the road. Through Christ, our sins are forgiven—our sins against God. But God cannot forgive on behalf of the person we have wronged.
Imagine that my kids, Sam and Jesse, are fighting and hurt each other, and in the process, they break my TV. As their father, I can forgive them for breaking the TV. As their father, I can forgive Sam for hurting Jesse and Jesse for hurting Sam. What I can’t do is forgive Sam on behalf of Jesse or forgive Jesse on behalf of Sam. They need to do that themselves. They need to apologize to each other and heal their relationship. In the same way, our heavenly Father can forgive any sin we commit against him, and forgive us for hurting one another, but cannot directly heal our relationship and forgive on behalf of the person we have hurt. We have to work towards that reconciliation. Only after we have tried our best to resolve whatever hurt we caused can we truly feel worthy of God’s forgiveness.
A couple of weeks ago, in Sacred Paths, we talked about confession of sins. Sacred Paths is the campus ministry co-sponsored by this church, Christ Episcopal, and CrossRoads. It’s quite an ecumenical group, but strangely, many of the students are or were Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes seven sacraments, including the sacrament of reconciliation, commonly called confession. In preparation for confession, you are supposed to reflect on what has happened since your last confession, typically using the Ten Commandments as your guide. Then you go in and tell the priest your sins and discuss how you plan to resist temptation and desist from sinning. It is essential that you have a truly contrite heart and truly intend to turn away from sin, and that you make a thorough confession, holding nothing back. Then the priest offers you forgiveness and perhaps penance. The priest cannot himself forgive sins, but is God’s voice. As in that famous poem Melba read at the opening of the service last week, Christ now has no mouth but ours.
There is a real psychological and sociological value in hearing someone say to you, “I hear what you did, and God forgives you.” This is a powerful moment that unfortunately the Reformation purged from our tradition. We instead approach God directly and confess our sins, and trust in what we have been taught about forgiveness and reconciliation through Christ.
We don’t have the same kind of personal, private confession as Catholics, but we do have corporate, public confession. Every week, a critical part of our worship service is centered on confession. First, we hear the call: a reminder that we may be bold to approach the throne of grace and lay down all our sins. Next, we pray together, acknowledging our sins. Finally, we are reminded that through Christ, we are forgiven.
But what sins do we acknowledge? Jeff assembles our liturgy each week and draws a prayer of confession from one of his various resources. There is a chance that he will include something that you personally did, something that you need to confess. It is more likely, however, that most of what you confess in that prayer are sins that you don’t recognize in your own life. So why confess them at all?
Let’s return to the scapegoat ritual. The high priest lays all the sins of all the people on the scapegoat and sets it free in the wilderness. In that way, the people as a whole are reconciled to God and made clean. There is a strong sense in the ritual that we are all bound together. Each of us is tainted by the sinfulness of the community and indeed by the sinfulness of all humanity.
Here’s a part of what we prayed last week: “We confess that we have defaced your creation and poisoned our environment through our consumerist behavior and for personal gain.” OK, one of the great sins of modern commerce is the prevalence of single-use plastics. We are rapidly consuming our reserves of petroleum, and using it for such ridiculous things as putting peeled oranges in small, plastic containers. So, as a spiritual practice, perhaps you take reusable shopping bags to Kroger or Walmart. In fact, in some states, and at Aldi, you are required to take your own bags. But I defy you to enter a grocery store, even Aldi, buy food for the week, and leave without single-use plastics. I don’t think it can be done. Whether you are buying meat, produce, cereal, or dairy products, single-use plastics are unavoidable.
So even though I don’t personally make plastic and I don’t have any choice about using it, I am part of a society that is turning petroleum into disposable junk. This is just one of a thousand ways that we all participate in sinful systems.
And sometimes, the sinful systems persist long after the original sins were committed. For example, there are hardly any women in electrical and computer engineering. Right now, I think 10% of the faculty in my department are female, and about that same percentage of students. Why? Well, there was a time, decades ago, that women were simply not allowed to study electrical or computer engineering. There are no formal restrictions anymore—indeed, there are programs to encourage female participation—but the inequity persists for reasons that have become embedded in our culture. Similar factors result in racial and ethnic inequities.
So each Sunday, we pray for forgiveness for our participation in these sinful systems. We may not personally commit any of the sins in the prayer of confession, but we are part of a society that is built upon a sinful foundation.
We pray and confess our sins to God boldly, knowing that God forgives them. But what about restitution? What about the people who have been harmed by our actions, our inaction, or our participation in a sinful society? Many of the Old Testament prophets tell us what to do. They teach us that God doesn’t care about our sacrifices or our confessions unless we have changed hearts that change our society. As Amos famously said, “Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
We were made in God’s image. At heart, we are pure and good. Yet we are a part of a broken world, a world shaped by the sinful desires and actions of generations past and present. Our calling, then, is to seek reconciliation and healing, to fix what we can. That is the work of a lifetime, of a thousand or a billion lifetimes. It is a task that we can never complete. But that doesn’t absolve us from our responsibility to get started. I cannot eliminate all of the prejudice and bias in the world, but I can help a few people and maybe change a few hearts and minds.
I know that all of you look around the world and see the problems. Inequities in society due to race, gender, class, age, and wealth. Violence in our community, nation, and around the world. Natural devastation amplified by poverty. Environmental calamities caused by human greed and our desire for convenience. On and on it goes. We can’t fix it all. But we can do something.
So my challenge to you all is this: Identify some sin in our society that you can do something about, and get to work. Maybe you’re already doing all that you can, through GRACE or the Russell House or the Mission or Phelps Connections for Seniors or whatever. But maybe there’s something more that God is calling you to do. And maybe there’s something that others in this church are also called to do, working alongside of you. Let’s help each other as we strive to channel the righteousness that flows from heaven and cleanses our world, washing away our individual sins and those of our broken systems. Amen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download