Sermon Tone Analysis

How can we, as modern Christians, “eat it in haste”?

In other words, how might we keep a sense of urgency about our worship and ministry?

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What is your testimony?

What should you be offering up a sacrifice of thanksgiving for?

Broken People and Broken Communities

Broken People and Broken Communities

Someone tagged me in a meme on Facebook the other day because anytime anyone sees a Jesus-related meme on the internet, they feel the need to share it with me because I’m a pastor.

It was a picture of the last supper and it said, “Jesus’ most impressive miracle was that he had 12 close friends when he was in his 30’s.”

It was both funny and sad.

It’s an example of how hard and how broken human relationships are that as adults, we just don’t expect to have many close, healthy relationships.

And it’s interesting that the meme showed the Last Supper, because even one of Jesus’ 12 good friends was about to turn him in to the very men who wanted to kill him.

Keeping up any sort of healthy relationship is really hard.

They take time and commitment and purpose.

Sometimes we have to choose which relationships we have the time and energy to nurture at a given time and which we don’t have time for.

Sometimes, we have to end relationships that are hurting us or other people we love.

Sometimes, we do everything right and the other party does something hurtful.

We are broken.

Our communities are broken.

Our relationships are so very broken.

And often we even see this sad, violent brokenness in the narratives of scripture.

The Bible is full of tragically broken relationships.

A Violent Text

This evening’s text from Exodus is certainly not without violence.

Many people struggle with the Old Testament because of the violence in some of the narratives.

Some people use the violence in the Old Testament to justify the idea of reacting violently toward enemies.

But what we see in the Old Testament is not a God who loves violence.

What we see is broken people who love violence and who misinterpret God.

One sensitive midrash (the Jewish interpretive storytelling tradition) turns another similar problem—the drowning of Pharaoh’s army—into a teaching moment.

In the midrash, as the waters crush the Egyptian soldiers at the parting of the Red Sea, the angels in heaven begin rejoicing in the destruction of Israel’s tormentors.

God chastises them, saying, “Are you to sing while my children are destroyed?”

Even the evildoers of Egypt were human, and God will not tolerate the celebration of human suffering, no matter how deserving the sufferers.

For this reason, at our Passover seders, we remove one drop of wine from our glass as we name the ten plagues, reducing our joy in acknowledgment that our freedom was won at the cost of great suffering of others.

It was a costly liberation that freed the Israelites from the chains of Egyptian oppression, and on this Maundy Thursday we are reminded of the terrible price Jesus paid for our own deliverance as well.

Even so, the violent imagery of atonement theology is hard for many congregations to enter.

It is therefore all too tempting to tone down the blood, to reduce the Easter story to the existential level, presenting Jesus as a wise teacher who became so politically subversive that he was silenced quickly amid a raucous crowd that jammed the city for the holiday.

That story, we can buy into.

Our loving God does not rejoice at the deaths of the firstborn of Egypt, even though the Pharoah of Egypt had ordered the deaths of all male Hebrew babies not so many decades ago.

The people of Israel do not sing and celebrate as the Egyptian army is crushed by the waters, even as they realize that as the moment their freedom is sealed.

They celebrate later, taking the time to sit in awe of the powerful tragedy of how they escaped.

The people are told to eat as much as they like, but not to take off their shoes.

They should be packed and ready to move.

The Hebrew people realized - at least for a little while - just how very costly their salvation was from Egypt was.

The Egyptians’ brutality toward the Hebrews did not make these deaths any less tragic.

The awful things Pharoah ordered did not mean he was some faceless bad guy who simply got “what he deserved”.

Nobody “deserves” death and violence any more than another.

Salvation for Israel was costly.

The Passover Lamb

Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year C, Volume 2 Theological Perspective

As we reread, we may admit to inner turmoil over the violent tenor of the story.

Modern Christians often struggle with ancient Israel’s portrayals of God as a jealous and angry purveyor of violent justice and brutal retribution.

As depicted in the story of the Passover, God is a bit bloodthirsty for our twenty-first-century tastes.

And if we share once-enslaved Israel’s gratitude for their safe passage, we cannot help but wonder about the utter destruction of Egypt’s armies—many of whom were likely oppressed slaves themselves, forced into Egypt’s defense.

The challenge in this reading—and other violent biblical texts—is to resist standing in too modern a remove from the text and its violence.

We too live in a violent age, and we share complicity in the tangled web of connection that leads to violence and oppression.

Our reading of this and every blood-soaked biblical text may be best performed in a humble spirit of sorrow and penitence.

How much more costly was our salvation, sealed for us by the blood of Christ?

God protects God’s people.

God protects God’s people

God protects God’s people.

If the blood of a lamb protects the people of God from death, how much more will the Lamb of God conquer death on behalf of God’s people (e.g., Rev. 21:3–4, 20:13–14)?

The Lamb of God

Someone tagged me in a meme on Facebook the other day.

It was a picture of the last supper and it said, “Jesus’ most impressive miracle was that he had 12 close friends when he was in his 30’s.”

If the blood of a lamb protects the people of God from death, how much more will the Lamb of God conquer death on behalf of God’s people (e.g., Rev. 21:3–4, 20:13–14)?

We do not rejoice at the death of Jesus, but rather we sit for these days just before Easter remembering the great price of our salvation.

Like Israel, we hold off the celebration for these days and dwell with the tragic cost of our salvation before we can rejoice.

During the passover, the blood of a lamb protects the people from death.

Today, we celebrate Communion acknowledging that the Lamb of God not only protects us from but conquers death once and for all.

Although Christ’s death is the once-for-all atoning sacrifice for sin, one might ask, what are the markers of the church today that should protect us from wrath, analogous to the blood on the lintels?

Paul calls for his hearers to imitate Christ by offering their bodies “as a living sacrifice,” that is, by being transformed and following the will of God (Rom.

12:1–2).

Being freed from judgment by Christ’s sacrifice, the church has been made free to distinguish itself in this way.

We do not rejoice at the death of Jesus, but rather we sit for these days just before Easter remembering the great price of our salvation.

During the passover, the blood of a lamb protected the people from physical death.

Today, we celebrate Communion acknowledging that the Lamb of God conquers death once and for all.

And we mark not our doorways, but our lives.

Just as the Hebrew slaves painted their doorways with the blood of the Passover Lamb, we must mark ourselves by transformation of our lives and wills and spirits.

Here, in the Last Supper, Jesus gives us the first step to that transformation.

Believers today might ask themselves, Are we prepared to move with God when we receive the command?

Are we free to follow God?

Or are we weighed down by our possessions and by responsibilities of dubious importance?

The festival effectively celebrates things that humans generally find stressful: transience, flight, the absence of possessions.

It is a most surprising foundation for a festival.

For all that, Passover finds clear analogies in the message of Jesus.

Then Jesus knelt before them with a pail of water.

“You must love one another,” Jesus commanded (“maundy,” from Latin mandatum, commandment), as he tenderly dried the dirty water from their feet.

In this one startling turn, an unexpected door scraped open, revealing an exodus reinterpreted by Jesus that made sense only in a brokenhearted future.

The word “maundy” comes from the Latin word for “commandment”.

Maundy Thursday is the day on which we remember the Last Supper, but more importantly Jesus’ commandment to love one another.

Just as the Israelites were set apart and protected by God’s love for them - symbolized by the sacrificial lamb, we are set apart and protected by God’s love for us as seen in the sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God.

Jesus then calls us to go out and love one another as a sign of that love.

People will know that we belong to Jesus because we show sacrificial love just as he did.

The patina of thousands of years of ritual and the retelling of the old, old story can lull believers into regarding Holy Week with passive awe, as an iconic work of art, instead of the electric, world-turning force that it is.

Go forth

The Passover framework reminds us that what is at stake at Easter is not just a beautiful liturgy or a time of joy, but the very crux of life and death itself.

Liberation is the point.

Christ wants to roll away the stone upon our chests.

What is suffocating and killing us?

What imprisons us?

What do we need to be freed from?

Is it the death grip of a culture that perpetuates at every turn a soul-destroying acquisitiveness?