In
my hometown of Waynesboro, Va there is a parking lot at the end of
the downtown area we called the Advance Lot because an early
generation Advance Autoparts store once stood there but was levelled
along with a few other old buildings to facilitate parking. When I
was a teen on Friday and Saturday nights we would cruise Main Street
from the north end of town starting at the McDonald's parking lot
sometimes taking a detour through the Hardee's parking lot to see who
was hanging out there and then on down through town to the Advance
Lot where we'd cruise through and turn around to go back to Mickey
D's and do it all over again. The Advance Lot was a happening place
usually not in a good way. It could be a rough place with more than
a handful of drunk or stoned teens and in such situations fights
would break out. There were also those who, drunk or not, just liked
to act tough and pick a fight. The Preppies and jocks hung out up at
McDonald's. I had friends in both places.
One
evening a classmate and occasional friend of mine, Billy, shot and
unfortunately killed his best-friend, David, also a classmate and
friend of mine. David was under the influence of a substance and
waving a gun very dangerously about and probably would have done some
shooting. David came from a good family who loved him, but he was
troubled. Billy was a solid man. Few people have the wherewithal to
do what he had to do that night. The city soon closed the Advance
parking lot on weekend nights.
One
could ask how such tragedies could be prevented. The police did make
routine passes through the Advance lot but it wasn't enough to keep
trouble from happening. What was needed were adults who would just
go and hang out with the kids down there. The Advance parking lot
would have been one of those "outside the camp" kind of
places that would have been a great place for the churches to have
been involved but they weren't and that leads me to ask why.
Well,
it was the mid-80's just a few years prior to when that very popular
and mass-marketed youth movement popularized by the slogan "What
Would Jesus Do?" came to the fore. Churches obviously weren't
thinking that or they would have been down there. Television
preachers were beginning to fall in one scandal after another. The
Health and Wealth Movement and Robert Schuller's Positive Thinking or
rather magical thinking in a Crystal Cathedral was sweeping through
the church making motivational speaking the modus operandi of
aspiring pulpiteers. Jerry Falwell was had organized his Moral
Majority. Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting
Network and the 700 Club, was telling Christians how to invest their
money in the newly evolving free market all the while pretending to
be a prophet and running for President of the United States. That
was Mainstream Christianity in North America on the cusp of the
mega-church movement which would make Christianity in North America a
very big media business and political machine.
But
what about the Mainline church? Well, the 80's was the last heyday
of the Mainline church. The over 65's who largely populate the
Mainline today were in their late 30's and 40's. That was you folks
and you were bringing your kids to church all the while believing
things were good in the church. There were still plenty of bodies
around and the youngest of the Baby-Boomers were practising that
interesting phenomenon of dropping their kids off at the church for
Sunday School while they went somewhere to read the paper. The
Mainline was still continuing on as a backbone institution of
morality and charitable support in the community - soup kitchens,
clothes closets, supporting missionaries, we were doing it all. We
were there for those that wanted to be good citizens, for them to
come and participate in our programs. The emphasis was that they had
to come to us.
Turning
back to Advance parking lot, it didn't matter whether you were
Mainstream or Mainline, Advance parking lot where things might get
rough was one place church-folk were not going to be. The
expectation was that those who hung out at Advance should get
themselves together, clean up their acts, become good people, and
come to church. The Advance parking lot was an "outside the
camp" kind of place, a place of outcasts whom good religious
people like us assumed God wanted nothing to do with unless they
cleaned themselves up and came back in.
We
might have looked to the Old Testament for that line of thinking and
certainly not very closely. In the Old Testament, outside the camp
was the place where sin and death and all things shameful were
banished to. Leprous people, them that looked like the living dead,
had to live outside the camp. The carcasses of sacrificed animals
were destroyed outside the camp. And as we read from Leviticus, on
the Day of Atonement the scapegoat upon whom the high priest had
whispered the people's sins was led outside the camp and released to
be destroyed by demons. Outside the camp was certainly not a place
where one would expect to find God. Rather, inside the camp at the
Temple was where God could be found safely tucked behind heavy veils
so that his holiness would not shine through and cause mass
destruction to the unholy.
Yet
if we take a closer look into the world of Leviticus, it wasn't that
God was perpetually mad at his people for their sins and that they
had to sacrifice something to appease him and ward off his wrath and
get him to show favour as some misunderstand the nature of those
sacrifices. It was that God wanted to live among his people and with
these sacrifices he provided a means for the camp to be cleaned of
sin and death so that should it come into contact with him all and be
destroyed. God is a consuming fire.
The
sacrifices of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, were not about
appeasing God. They were about cleaning things up so that God could
continue to abide in the camp and the camp not be destroyed by
contact with him. The cleansing happened by things being touched
with life that had passed through death. Leviticus 17:11 says: "For
the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to
make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that
makes atonement for one's life." The priest did not kill an
animal to appease God's anger. Rather, on the Day of Atonement he
killed the animals, a bull and a goat, and took the blood which was
life that had passed through death and sprinkled it on the priests
who were representative of the people and then all over the temple
culminating with the Mercy Seat or lid of the Ark of the Covenant
where God sat. The end result was that both the people and the
temple were cleansed of iniquity by means of life that had passed
through death and God and the temple and the people were in essence
united (at-oned) in this life that had passed through death. Then,
with a second goat the High Priest scapegoated the sins of the people
away to destruction. Thus, on the Day of Atonement God and the
people were united and sin was utterly taken away from the people.
Applying
this to Jesus and his death, his death was not in any way a sacrifice
to avert the Father's wrath and gain his favour for us. Rather, it
was so that we might be united with God in Jesus through his life
that has passed through death. The Holy Spirit bonds us to Jesus and
his resurrected life so that we may share his relationship with God
the Father. Like the bull and the first goat on the Day of Atonement
Jesus died to union us to God through his life which has passed
through death and like the second goat he is the Scapegoat who bore
away sin and death unto death once and for all. God the Son took on
sinful human being at Jesus conception and living faithfully as a man
bore it away unto death once and for all. There is no more veil on
the temple. Humanity now has unhindered access to God and we are the
temple.
Something
of importance that we must note and take to heart here, Jesus'
atoning work happened outside the camp. The temple, the priesthood,
the sacrifices all the sacred things God had given his people for
dealing with sin so that he could dwell in their midst had simply
become the tools of religion used by the reprehensibly "good"
to keep a nation in line and a certain element of the people wealthy
namely clergy, lawyers, and politicians if you want your joke of the
day.
Thus,
the writer of Hebrews challenges us saying: "Therefore let us go
to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured." That
verse, Hebrews 13:13, in my estimation is among the most loaded in
the New Testament. Outside the camp to shameful places of human
beings in their brokenness is where we are summonsed to go if we want
to join with our Lord Jesus Christ to share in his redeeming and
reconciling work. There's many a church-growth guru today who says
if a congregation wants to endure these anti-church days then we must
think "outside the box". I rather say that we need to stop
worrying about our continuing existence (that's in Jesus' hands) and
start thinking "outside the camp". We need to go to those
we think are outside the camp and show them unconditional brotherly
love, show them hospitality. We need to visit them in their prisons
because we're prisoners too. We all live bound by lies we believe
about ourselves and others. We need to go outside the camp and not
only model healthy marriages but also be mentors to and support
younger peoples in their marriages. We need to renounce our love of
money for if there is one area in which we look like the world it is
our materialism and consumerism and how we also equate success with
wealth. We need to go outside the camp and live faithfully which
means dedicating ourselves to live according to the values imposed
upon us by the cross. This is worship that is acceptable to God.
Friends, let us think outside the camp. Amen.
