Sacrificial Lambs

Unitarian Universalist Church of Delaware County - Sermons

What are we, as Unitarian Universalists, to make of the Easter story? This most mystical, miraculous event – the resurrection of Jesus from the dead – that forms the basis for belief for billions of Christians around the globe? Easter compels us to confront so many of our own competing, and often conflicting, principles and values. As UU’s we value the rational and the scientific, so the left side of our brain tells us “This couldn’t have happened this way. No one can come back from the dead.” And yet the first of our six sources calls us to consider, “experiences of transforming mystery and wonder.” So, there’s a part of us that must remain open to the idea that something – something powerful and sustaining and possibly even beyond belief – happened. Something so powerful and sustaining that we still tell the story more than 2,000 years later. Many of us are torn between two other poles as well. On the one hand some of us may have been injured by the teachings of a Christian church and arrived here on the doorstep of Unitarian Universalism battered, beaten and broken, and thus rejecting anything that even hints at Christianity. But Unitarian Universalism is a radically inclusive faith, a faith so inclusive that we are called to welcome those who consider themselves Christian to share in the good news of this faith, our faith. I believe that we are radically inclusive to the point where we can welcome those who believe in the salvific power of the cross, those who believe that Jesus was the Son of God who died for our sins. And, so, we must make room for the “Trinitarian Unitarians” among us and celebrate with them this most holy of holidays. There was a time when Unitarian Universalists sought to simply ignore Easter. But we know now that we must strive to look at the Easter story and ask ourselves what we can take from it, to drill down on it and find meaning in it. Instead of simply rejecting it out of hand, we are called to ask ourselves what we can glean from this abiding mystery.

One way we can do that, with our post-modern sensibilities, is to contextualize it. To view it within the context of where and when it happened, and then to look at our own lives to see where it might be relevant to us today. So, let’s consider where, why and how Jesus’s death and resurrection occurred. Jesus, we know, was a Jew living in Judah, the southern part of what would become Israel, at a time of Roman occupation. We know that, despite the occupation, Jewish custom, law and tradition still ran deep among the people of the occupied lands. This was the law of Abraham. The law of Moses. The law of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. And deeply embedded in this culture was the concept and the practice of making offerings, of sacrifice. The Jewish word for this is “Karabanot.” The primary purpose of Karabanot was “to bring a person closer to God.”[1] Another important aspect of sacrifice under Jewish law and practice was the element of substitution. The idea is that the thing being offered or sacrificed is a substitute for the person making the offering, and the things that are done to the offering are things that should have been done to the person making the offering. The offering is in some sense punished in place of the offeror.[2]

While the primary function of sacrifice was to bring people closer to God, Karabanot also served what’s called an “expiatory” function as well. Making a sacrifice to God was a way to be relieved of sin, a way to ask and receive God’s forgiveness for the sins they had committed. While it’s not exactly the same as Karabanot, scapegoating was another practice intended to have a similar effect. In ancient Jewish tradition, a community would symbolically place its sins on the back of an animal – often a goat – and the people would either send the animal off into the wilderness or ritually sacrificed. Either way, the effect was the same: the people were freed from their sins.

So, all this is the backdrop for Jesus’s death. And while it was the Romans and not the Jews who put Jesus to death, and his killing was more politically motivated than religiously so, it is easy to see how the followers of Jesus – who were all Jews themselves – would come to characterize Jesus’s death as a form of Karabanot or offering. And from there it’s only a small step to get to the concept that Jesus was a “sacrificial lamb” or even a scapegoat. It is also then pretty easy to see how, over time, this idea of Jesus as Karabanot or sacrifice led to the Christian doctrine of “substitutionary atonement.” That doctrine tells us that “Christ died for our sins” and that through his death those who believe in him are saved.

The idea of animal sacrifices, of Karabanot, of scapegoats and sacrificial lambs offends our modern sensibilities, and well it should. Beyond the issues of animal cruelty, which are significant, we Unitarian Universalists are all about accountability. The idea that we could hand off our so-called sins – those times when we’ve failed to live up to our best selves and our highest ideals – to someone or something else, to actually put them on another’s back, instead of taking responsibility for them ourselves, is anathema to who we proclaim to be.

And here’s where we Unitarian Universalists might actually find an entry point to the real story of Easter. Ironically, it’s in the resurrection itself. Because, remember, Good Friday is all about Jesus’s death. Easter is all about his return. What if, instead of seeing Jesus’s death as a form of substitutionary atonement, instead of saying that Christ died for our sins, we saw his resurrection not as a victory over death, but as a return to responsibility?

Here’s the image I want to offer you: Let’s imagine that we’re all members of a small community – a village, we’ll say. And the village elders bring the scape goat into the town square and instruct us to place our burdens on its back. “Come,” they say. “Be relieved of all your sins.” And so, we all do that, and then the elders lead the goat out into the wilderness and leave it there to be consumed by wolves. All of we villagers have a great feast and celebration, because our slate has been wiped clean. But then, three days later, we hear something. It’s sort of a weak, bleating sound, and it’s coming from the town square. Curious, we come out of our houses and make our way to the center of the village. There, standing beside the well, is the goat. It looks a little worse for wear, but it’s still carrying all the burdens we placed upon it.

What if the resurrection wasn’t some kind of sign that Jesus was actually God incarnate, someone who could by his nature defeat death itself. What if, instead, this attempt at substitutionary atonement was a failure? That God raised Jesus from the dead as a messenger, to say – “Hey, you’ve got to deal with your own stuff, people. You can’t just pawn it off on others. Stop the scapegoating and the sacrificing and take some responsibility for your life and how you live it!”

And that message, if we can call it an Easter message, is particularly important today. We are living in a perilous time, particularly here in America where we seem to be backsliding into the ancient practice of scapegoating and sacrifice. As Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders are targeted with violence and blamed for the Coronavirus. As we watch and re-watch George Floyd’s death at the hands of Derek Chauvin, who, like an ancient Roman soldier nailing Christ to the cross, knelt on Floyd’s neck with the full weight and fury of the State, and we wonder how many people of color must be sacrificed on the altar of white supremacy culture. As people who are simply shopping for groceries or working in an office are unwittingly led to the slaughter as sacrificial lambs for the sake of the gun lobby and the sacrosanct Second Amendment.

I know that this may not be the Easter sermon you came to hear. Easter is meant to be a celebration of everlasting life, or at least the return of life, of the birth of birds and bunnies, and the blooming of daffodils and tulips. But what if, all this time, we’ve been missing the point? What if the true message of Easter is that for all life to thrive we’ve got to stop sacrificing the most vulnerable among us. That we cannot escape our own responsibility for the sins of our ancestors and the sins of our time. That we are called in our shared humanity, in our interdependent web, to accountability with and for each other. That we are called to celebrate all life, including the life of this planet as it awakens once again beneath our feet, as worthy of value, dignity and worth. That not a single life should ever be sacrificed in the name of our collective sins.

Now wouldn’t that be a holiday to celebrate.

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[1] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/sacrifices-and-offerings-karbanot

[2] Ibid.