About Beasts and False Prophets

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Revelation 13

Just a few days ago our denomination, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, released the following statement by means of social media responding to the rather strange relationship between politics and religion that’s exhibiting these days.  We said: “In response to claims made by the President of the United States of America and his administration, the Presbyterian Church in Canada reaffirms its rejection of the sinful use and misuse of the church’s scriptures, language, symbols, and theology to condone or justify violence, killing, and the shame and inhumanity of war.  The PCC also rejects anything that destroys life and diminishes our ability to fight hunger, poverty and disease, and to seek justice in the world.” 

If you have been doing nothing besides binge watching baking shoes the last little bit and have to ask why such a statement was made or had to be made, well here’s just a bit of what’s been going on. The relationship between the American President and the American Vice-President (who is a Catholic) and Pope Leo XIV has begun to resemble the relationship that the ancient king of Israel, Ahab and his wife, Jezebel had with the prophet Elijah.  Elijah kept holding them to account for their idolatry, immorality, and abuse of power until they finally sought to kill him and he had to flee.  I’m not saying that the American President, Vice-President, or the Pentagon have put a hit out on the Pope, but in response to the Pope’s critique of Israel and the US attacking Iran the three have definitely told the Pope to stick to religion and stay out of politics, on the one hand, and to bring his theology in line with the administration’s war policy, on the other, with an implied “or else” attached to it.  All the while, the current administration has no problem invoking the faith of American Evangelicalism to serve their own political interests.  This is a far cry from the relationship that Ronald Reagan had with Pope John Paul II.  Those two actually teamed up to help with the freeing of Poland and hastening the end of the Cold War.

Then there’s the bizarre stuff.  The American President in the middle of the night posted a picture of himself wearing a white robe and flowing red stole. He had healing orbs of light in his hands and was healing a man while surrounded by distraught looking people who were praying to….  This AI-generated picture proved quite offensive to even his Christian nationalist supporters because he looked a little too much like Jesus.  The President took the post down and tried to excuse it by saying he thought it made him look like a doctor.  He soon replaced it with another late-night AI-generated picture of Jesus embracing him.  In the caption he called his opponents a child sacrificing cult and said that he is God’s Trump card against them.  Strange stuff.  Oh, and I forgot to mention the threat he made to completely annihilate Iranian/Persian civilization if they didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by 8:00PM ET on Tuesday, April 7.  

I was glad to see a few days ago that the Presbyterian Church in Canada released its brief statement on these matters.  When the national leader and ruling party of the world’s largest economy and strongest military coopts a faith system and uses it as a means to obtain and consolidate political power and then tries to say God is on his/their side to excuse the misuse of that power in ways that affect global security and the global economy, well the church world-over should rightfully address it.  This unholy relationship between political power and religious faith is, I believe, exactly what the 13^th chapter of the Book of Revelation addresses.  

The Book of Revelation is not a roadmap to the end of time.  It’s the Apostle John’s Holy Spirit inspired attempt to explain to the churches of Western Turkey in the 90’s AD in apocalyptic coded language why they were being persecuted and to assure them that in the end, whenever that may be (God only knows), Jesus will reign victorious.  It needs to be said that there was no official Roman edict to round up Christians at that time.  Persecution happened because Christians, as did the Jews, worshipped only the God of Israel and this made them “different”.  They would not worship or feast the Roman gods like everybody else did throughout the Roman Empire.  When trade guilds and civic activities revolved around such feasting, that could cost you your job and make you a target for thuggery.  Christian fellowship was uniquely open to and inclusive of all peoples regardless of ethnicity, race, and social status and thus it threatened to destabilize the social order of Greco-Roman society.  Finally, the Christian claim that Jesus was Lord and Saviour and Son of God, titles which were all validated by his resurrection from the dead, was treated as treasonous because these were titles reserved for the emperors.  

These claims about Jesus conflicted to varying degrees of severity with the Roman Imperial cult which was the state religion that people of the empire were required to participate in.  In its most benign form people came to the imperial temples to burn incense and offer prayers on behalf of the empire and the emperor and to offer worship to dead emperors who had ascended to Olympus as lesser gods.  But, at least two maybe three of the emperors of the first century demanded to be worshipped as a living god.  These were Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.  Are you ready for some bizarre stuff?

Caligula became emperor at age 20 in 37 AD and was an absolute menace for four years.  This was during the first decade of the church when it was primarily seen as a Jerusalem-based sect of Judaism.  Caligula was sick.  He behaved like he was extravagantly rich and he just liked to be cruel to people.  He wore masks of the gods and pretended to be them in public.  He made the Senate behave subservient to him and humiliated them by making them worship him in public.  He even pretended that his horse was his chief advisor to make the point that he didn’t see anyone in the Senate capable or worthy of doing that.  He was known for standing naked in water and making young boys swim between his legs.  Christianity wasn’t really a thing yet, but he had it in for the Jews because they wouldn’t worship him so much so that he ordered a brass statue of himself be erected in the Jewish Temple.  This caused a non-violent revolt among peasant Jews but fortunately, the Praetorian Guard and a number of senators assassinated Caligula before the statue could be built.  The Christian claims of Jesus being Lord would have only made things worse in their relationship with Jews because it would lead to more Roman mistreatment of the Jews which led to Jewish persecution of the early church.  It was about this time that the Apostle Paul was making his name as a persecutor of the church.

Nero became Emperor at age 17 and reigned from 54-68 AD.  He was a violent man with a love for Greek theatre.  He liked acting on stage and playing his lyre and singing for the public and competing in athletic games.  Early in his reign, he was very popular with the common people and had a gift for knowing what would make them like him.  He liked to wear clever disguises and go party with the common folk and get into fist fights.  He had his “interfering” mother and his two wives murdered.  He gifted the head of his first wife to his second whom he later killed in a violent outburst with a kick to the stomach while she was pregnant.  Her death fed his insanity for he had one of his young male slaves who bore a resemblance to her castrated and he married him.  His popularity faded after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD which he likely had started in the area of the shops so that he could rebuild the area in the style of Greek architecture including a massive golden mansion for himself.  He blamed the fire of the Christians in Rome who were growing ever more popular in the city and ordered they be put to death.  Peter and likely Paul died as a result.  He died by suicide and after his death, three impostors arose creating the myth that he had risen from the dead.  He is the first Beast that our reading refers to.

Domitian became emperor in 81 AD and reigned for 15 years.  Prior to his reign there was a Jewish revolt in 70 AD in which Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed.  Mt. Etna erupted in 79 AD destroying four Roman cities.  There were earthquakes and darkened skies and the moon turned orange; all that end of the world stuff.  Domitian was the Roman emperor at the time the Revelation started to circulate.  He was a strong, authoritarian micromanager remembered for being a cruel, paranoid bully with a sadistic bent.  Like Caligula, he liked to humiliate the Senators and have them worship him in public.  He wanted to make Rome great again and liked to build, build, build.  He also wrote a book on the subject of hair care.  He died by assassination.  It is not clear who orchestrated it but it was for sure that everyone wanted him gone.  

Domitian knew that emphasizing his own divine status would help unify the empire.  So, he pushed the expansion of the Imperial Cult throughout the empire by building temples which resulted in Christians being persecuted.  He made no edict requiring the persecution of Christians.  It was patriotism, one could say, that led to persecution.  He had a very large Imperial Temple built in Ephesus in honor of his family line, the Flavians.  A very elderly Apostle John was arrested there and imprisoned on the island of Patmos as a consequence of not participating in all the patriotic fervor.  

Fearing a repeat of what happened under Nero, John compiled the Revelation from prison and sent it seven times over to the seven churches of Western Turkey to explain why they were facing persecution.  Chapters 12 and 13 explain that it is Satan who has given authority to the insane emperors who demand to be worshipped as gods.  It is Satan who has raised up the false faith that causes people to worship these emperors.  John encourages his brothers and sisters in Christ to patiently endure by remaining faithful to Jesus Christ.  Worship him alone.

In the fourth century that unholy marriage between imperial power and religious power began to hide under a Christian umbrella when Christianity became "the" religion of the Empire.  Since, emperors, kings, and priests and presidents and preachers have declared that God is on the side of our nation and Western culture.  It has resulted in much war, poverty, abuse of women and children, and genocide of indigenous cultures.  It has a strong foothold among American Evangelicals at present.  People waking up from it is the primary reason why the Church has declined in Western culture.  There have been men over the centuries who have risen up with inexplicable power who have sought to be emperor over the world claiming Almighty God is on their side.  They have become something the world has had to momentarily patiently endure.  Faithful Christians have suffered for not following them but it is important that the church catholic take its stand when the beasts obviously rear their heads as the Pope has been doing and the PCC did earlier this week.  Amen.

 

About Armageddon

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Isaiah 2:2-4; Revelation 16:12-16, 19:11-21

We are six weeks now into this undeclared war that the United States and Israel have teamed up to wage against Iran.  We don’t have a lot of time for me to rant on politics this morning, so I’ll save that for next week.  Though there has not been an official statement released by the Presbyterian Church in Canada, I suspect that we as a denomination would stand, as do I, in total agreement with Pope Leo XIV and his calls for a return to diplomacy amidst an observation that this warring madness in no way resembles the way of peace that we are challenged with by our Lord Jesus Christ.  Peace does not come by means of strength because there is nothing to keep the strong from just taking what they want from those weaker than themselves…and that they do. 

Since the beginning of this undeclared war, I have heard a few news commentators and seen more than few remarks on social media outlets wondering if or straight out positing that we are in the midst of World War III and headed towards Armageddon, that last great battle between good and evil when Jesus returns to establish the Kingdom of God, a global Christian theocracy.  To speak to those thoughts, World War III…well, I think economics will soon determine how what Prime Minister Carney calls the “middle powers” get involved.  I am thus far surprised that the rest of the world has not responded to Israel and the United States in like manner to how it responded when Russia invaded Ukraine, with sanctions and freezing the personal assets of key government officials and the oligarchs.  But I guess nothing is fair in war and divorce. 

As far as Armageddon, well, I wish we had a few hours to do this one justice, but this being a Communion Sunday we don’t.  First, I’ll give you some background.  There is a Populist movement in the Church in the United States and mostly among the Evangelicals.  It weaves American Christian nationalism and Zionism and a fascination with End-Times Bible prophecy in the context of the Nuclear Age into a tapestry that is quite scary and…it’s likely the largest voting block in America.  They believe America is God’s chosen nation to carry out his will on Earth, the New Israel one might say.  They believe that the Modern State of Israel is the restoration of biblical Israel that they believe was prophesied in the Bible.  For them, this was a sign that the end is near.  They believe the Jewish people need to be in full control of the land of Israel so that they can rebuild the Temple so that Jesus can return.  Thus, there is no questioning on their part with regard to how the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what White Colonials did and still do to Native Americans.  They are expecting an Anti-Christ to arise and cause great economic suffering in the world and a dreadful persecution of Christians that will end with the Rapture of true Christians.  Finally, a great World War will erupt where all the armies on earth will gather to do battle at Armageddon which they believe to be the Jezreel Valley in Northern Israel…and then Jesus will return and defeat the Anti-Christ and his armies and lock up Satan and his minions and Glory Hallelujah there will be a thousand years of unopposed Christian rule on earth.

Well, in order for the tapestry to work you’ve got to read the Bible very literally and in particular, a mega-mess of very weird and very vague biblical prophecies which leave a lot to the imagination.  But, the Revelation was not meant to be read literally.  It was written to late 1^st Century Christians at a time of persecution in an attempt to explain to them why they were being persecuted and to give them hope.  One of the vehicles the Romans Emperors used to unify such a large bit of real estate full of many different peoples and religions was to make them worship the Emperor/Rome.  Historians call it the Imperial Cult.  The Romans built temples all over the empire where the people were to go and worship the emperor and pray for him or even to him as a god.  There was a priesthood that looked after this.  Our reading mentions a beast and a false prophet.  This was John’s way of talking about the Emperor and the Imperial Cult.  One of the reasons for which the early Christians were persecuted was refusal to participate in the Imperial Cult.  I’ll say more on this next week.

Back to the text, if one is going to read this text literally, then one must say that when Armageddon goes down Jesus is going to show up on the battlefield on a white horse and start hacking people to pieces with a double-edged sword which he wields from his mouth.  I got a problem with that.  I think that what John is giving image to here is that all those who have been deluded into following the Beast and the False Prophet and their cult of followers will be brought to account by the truth of the Word of Jesus Christ.  This wouldn’t be the only place in the Bible that the Word of God is called a two-edged sword.  

If I were to take this a step further and apply this image to today’s world, I would and will take my lumps for saying that whenever there is a national leader claiming to rule by the authority of God coupled with a religious movement backing him up as if he were a messiah, that there is Anti-Christ.  That’s the Beast and the False Prophet.  Jesus will bring them to account.  And it might just be the voice of the Pope that God is using to do that.  The irony of it all is that there are many in that group who have often claimed that the Pope and Roman Catholicism are Anti-Christ which might have something to do with why there wasn’t a Good Friday Mass at the Pentagon this past Holy Week.

About Armageddon, the proper Hebrew pronunciation of that is Har Mogeddon, which in Hebrew means the Mountain of Mageddon.  This does not refer to the Jezreel Valley in which sits the ancient city of Megiddo.  Megiddo is not a mountain.  In Isaiah there is reference to Har Magedd being the dwelling place of God; thus Jerusalem on Mount Zion.  That being the case, I am inclined to interpret the Battle of Harmoged, if I dare call it that, in light of the Isaiah 2 passage and the image of the nations streaming to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of God, to learn the way of peace.  Jesus will settle the disputes between the nations and, “They will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.  Nation will not take up the sword against nation, and they will never again train for war.”

Harmageddon is anytime throughout history, and this is not the first time, that those political leaders who claim to be enacting the will of God and their cultish followers get confronted by and held accountable to the Truth, the Life, and the Way, Jesus Christ, who walked the way of peace by walking the way of the Cross.  His power is found in our weakness, in humility, in compassion, in serving for when we are weak, he is strong.  Unfortunately, it is a true cosmic battle of apocalyptic proportions for us humans to learn that.  Amen.

 

Witnesses

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Acts 10:34-44

It is no secret that the most convincing evidence in a trial by jury is eyewitness testimony.  There’s the belief that for the prosecution to win, they need only put the victim on the stand to tell what happened and provided the defence cannot find a way to discredit the witness (and they will try), victory is a given especially if there are corroborating witnesses.

Well, that works on TV, but in reality, it has been shown beyond reasonable doubt by study after study that eyewitness testimony is the most unreliable evidence that can be submitted in a court of law.  Even and especially if it’s the victim giving the testimony.  75% of all exonerations by DNA cases involved people who were convicted on false eyewitness testimony.  Most notable among these exonerations was a man named Ronald Cotton who was convicted of sexual assault on the eyewitness testimony of the victim who picked him out of a line-up.  He was sentenced to life in prison.  Ten years in, some DNA evidence was found and the true perpetrator was identified and he confessed. Cotton went free but the victim remains convinced against all evidence it was still Cotton who assaulted her.

Human memory is an odd animal.  We remember images, feelings, smells, etc.  These are what could be called raw data.  But the story with which we tie the data together into a “memory” is actually a creation of the imagination.  Brain scientists have found that when people recount a memory, the part of the brain that lights up on the brain scan is the part we use to create fictional stories.  Our memory of something that happened to us that we think is as factual as a history book is actually a story that we make up and… that story gets rewritten every time we set out to remember it.  And…, every time we rewrite the memory, we mysteriously alter the raw data so that the raw data fits the memory according to the way we want to remember it, not according to what actually happened.   Studies in memory have shown time and again that the further in time we get from an event, the less likely what we remember is really what happened.  This is because we can and will alter the details of the raw data according to the story we want to remember.  This is why when something happens at work that might wind up going to Human Resources for one of those special reviews, we are told to write it down as soon as possible after the incident. 

It gets worse.  We can be motivated in how we shape our memories.  If a memory is of something that we did that we’re not proud of, we will instinctively - not on purpose - change and narrate the details of the memory to paint ourselves in the best light so that we can live with ourselves.  If the memory involves something that someone did to us for which we would like to seek revenge, we will remember what happened in a way that makes that person look their worst.  And even worse, we can create very vivid memories of things that never happened; memories that are so vivid that we will never be convinced it never happened.  When it comes to memory a person can believe something to be absolutely true, when in fact they made it all up to serve their own purposes.  Human memory and thus eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.  

Now you can guess where I might be going with this since here in our reading Peter says that he and the other disciples were “witnesses” to all that happened with Jesus.  They witnessed his ministry in Judea and Jerusalem, his being hanged on a tree (wait a minute, I thought it was a cross), and that God raised him from the dead and that God had chosen Peter and the other ten disciples to see Jesus alive (that seems a bit cliquish, don’t you think? But to their credit the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that over 500 men and women at the same time saw Jesus after his resurrection.  In fact, Peter goes on to say, Jesus was so bodily alive that they even ate and drank with him.  Given that human eyewitness testimony is so notoriously unreliable, how can anything Peter has to say here about being a witness, especially to Jesus’ post-resurrection, be taken not just as true but as reliable?  

I don’t know if this will make sense, but just because someone believes their own testimony to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help me God does not therefore entail that their testimony is reliable.  Peter, as do I, believes it absolutely true that Jesus was raised from the dead.  So did the other ten witnesses, the other ten disciples.  Their joint testimony can be and quite often is dismissed as the fabrication of a cadre of revolutionaries who see religious belief as a powerful way to get people to join your quest to take over the world.  Hence, the interesting relationship between authoritarian regimes and the religious nationalists that back them.  So, how do we know their testimony is true and reliable?  Well, let me ramble some stuff off.

First, we have to give some credit that they all saw him together rather than having their own individual moments.  People try to say that they were just having an experience of grief induced mass hallucination.  But that would be the only time ever something like that has happened.  Yes, it quite often happens that in the wake of the death of a loved one, individuals will see the deceased, maybe even talk with them.  But, a whole group of people having the same experience, indeed multiple shared experiences including meals over the next forty days?  That mass hallucinations don’t happen is what leads people to say Jesus never died in the first place.  But, there is no way anyone could have survived what the Romans put Jesus and others like him through before they crucified him.  Moreover, Pilate confirmed with the executioners that Jesus was dead before allowing Joseph of Arimathea to take his body several hours after he died.  And that Joseph of Arimathea, a powerful Pharisee serving on the council that had the Romans crucify Jesus would allow himself to be remembered by name as the one who personally looked after Jesus’ burial  in his own tomb says more for reliability than anything else.

About those eleven eyewitnesses, their testimony has persisted for almost 2,000 years.  Religious movements, political movements, even empires don’t last that long.  They especially don’t last that long under adversity.  Why did these eleven and especially the early Christians of the first three centuries who did not see Jesus post-resurrection continue to witness to him often under severe persecution?  Peter and the others stuck to the story.  They never recanted nor did they seek to use their role to grow rich.  They just did what Jesus told them to do: go into all the world making disciples.  If they were lying, they certainly would have recanted in the face of death.  Peter was crucified upside down in Rome.  Andrew was crucified on an x-shaped cross in Patras, Greece.  James, son of Zebedee, was the first martyr.  He was beheaded by Herod Agrippa II in Jerusalem starting a persecution that caused the church to spread out from Jerusalem.  Phillip was either stoned or crucified in Hierapolis in Turkey.  Nathaniel was skinned alive in Armenia.  Thomas went to India where he was impaled by soldiers.  Matthew was killed by sword or spear in either Ethiopia or Persia.  James son of Alphaeus was stoned in Jerusalem.  Thaddeus was axed to death in either Persia or Syria.  Simon the Zealot was either sawn in half in Persia or crucified in Britain.  John was the only one to see old age but he spent a good deal of time in exile on the island of Patmos.  Facing persecution and horribly painful deaths why would they further a fabrication and why would anyone listen to them and become followers of Jesus?  The obvious reason, I think, is they knew it was true and reliable.  But how?  

The answer to that.  Well, it isn’t a matter of simple rational belief so that  we do what we can to convince someone to rationally accept that God raised Jesus from the dead and thus validated everything about him.  Although, in my humble opinion, the evidence to that fact is as credible if not surpassing in credibility to the details of the lives of any historical figure from that time.  It is also not simply a matter of accepting Jesus’ teachings nor with coming to grips with how his death was for us and for our healing.  It is certainly not a matter of scaring the Hell out of people, literally, “Believe this stuff about Jesus or you’re going to Hell”.  

The proof of it all is what happens when Jesus is proclaimed.  Our text says, “While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came down on all those who heard the message.”  Where Jesus is proclaimed as living, witnessed to, lived according to, the Holy Spirit shows up.  Healing happens whether it be emotional, physical, or relational.  People are “touched” by him.  They sense his presence.  His peace.  The Presence of God is what makes the message of Jesus true and reliable.

Jesus is alive and that means there is reason to have hope in this very messed world.  Be his witnesses.  Live like you have hope.  Amen.

 

More Than a Sacrifice

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Hebrews 10:11-25

To understand Good Friday and the meaning of Jesus’ death we have to take a dive into the sacrificial system of ancient Israel and find our meaning for it there.  Otherwise, we are left with Medieval Christianity’s over use of the metaphor of penal substitution, that we deserve the legal penalty of death for our sins but Jesus died in our place and appeased God the Father’s wrath earning us an acquittal.  If you take a plunge into the Book of Leviticus and look at what was going on the Day of Atonement, the day that Ancient Israel dealt with its sin, you will find something there that is markedly different than a sacrifice to appease God’s wrath or what is known as a sacrifice of propitiation meaning going to a god to gain favour.  

The Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur was a very solemn day.  Everyone spent the day prayerfully reflecting on their walk with God and each other according to the Covenant.  They fasted.  No one worked.  It was the day that the Temple, the Lord’s dwelling place, and the people were cleansed of iniquity.  Iniquity basically means stain, the stain of sin.  We feel it as the stain of shame, guilt, regret, betrayal, denial; the stuff that persists in broken relationships.  It’s like if one person in a relationship has done something they wish to hide from the other, that person and that relationship is stained.  Things become different and not in a good way.  The ancient Israelites believed that iniquity, this stain was transferable to anything a stained person came in contact with and in the end, everybody is stained.  It’s like if one person in a relationship stains a relationship it changes the way that person and the couple interact with other people.  

The stain could even be brought into the temple into God’s presence by means of the priests who dealt with the people’s sins on a daily basis.  It’s like germs.  Everything the priests touched in the Temple became stained with the unseen but obvious stain of iniquity.  They believed that if the iniquity of the people became too great God would not be able to continue among them and would vacate the Temple or just go nuclear so to speak.  Therefore, the temple and the people needed to be cleansed from its contact with iniquity and the people’s iniquity was removed far from them.  

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was the day they did this in the way that God told them to do it.  The sacrifices on Yom Kippur were sacrifices of expiation through which the LORD God drew forth, cleansed, and healed the people from their sin and its stain.  It’s like if you take a warm moist tea bag and put it on an infected wound, it will draw out the infection.  On the Day of Atonement, the Israelites were not trying to appease God’s anger and stop God from getting them.  None of the sacrifices in ancient Israel were for that purpose.  God gave them this Day as the means of extracting, of expiating, of drawing out the infection of sin and its stain to cleanse and heal them of it.

On the Day of Atonement, the High Priest would take a bull and two goats from the people for this purpose.  The bull was for expiating the iniquity of the priesthood, as they stood as representative of the whole people in dealing directly with matters in the temple.  Their own sin-stained hands and lives and the iniquity they incurred from dealing with the sins of the people stained the temple, God’s abode, and themselves.  The High Priest would slaughter the bull by slitting its throat. He would catch some of the blood in a bowl and then take it and some incense and go into the Holy of Holies, the room at the back of the Temple where the Ark of the Covenant was which was God’s throne on Earth.  The lid of the Ark was called the Mercy Seat and it was there that they believed God sat enthroned on earth.  In the Holy of Holies, the High Priest would light the incense and fill the room with smoke.  This represented the prayers of the people and made it so that he could not directly see God.  Then he would dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times on the Mercy Seat.  

Then he would choose one of the two goats by lot.  It represented the iniquity of the people.  He slaughtered it in like manner as the bull and returned to the Holy of Holies to sprinkle the Mercy Seat with it as well.  But on the way to the Holy of Holies, he also sprinkled some of this goat’s blood around the rest of the temple to cleanse it.  When he came back out, he then took blood from both the bull and the goat and sprinkled each seven times upon horns of the altar upon which sacrifices were made and cleansed it of iniquity.

For this all to make sense, we need to know something about what the ancient Israelites believed about blood.  Leviticus 17:11 says, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood.”  The blood of the slaughtered bull and the goat represented life that had passed through death (Yes, just as Jesus has passed through death) and having passed through death it was free of sin.  Being life that was free of sin, they believed it had the power to cleanse iniquity from whatever it came in contact with; and one more thing – it unites God and the people.  

The High Priest who stood in representation of the people gets this blood, this life that has passed through death, on his hand and sprinkles it onto God sitting on the Mercy Seat.  Thus, through contact with the blood – this life that has passed through death – the high priest, the people, and God are united.  The relational bond between God and the people that had been stained with iniquity was cleansed and healed with this life that had passed through death.  That’s what Atonement is (At-One-Ment).  

I hope you see the foreshadowing here of Jesus and his death and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit to us.  By his death and resurrection Jesus’ human life passed through death and is given to us through the work of the Holy Spirit.  When you hear all those metaphors about being washed in the blood of Jesus and so forth this is what it means.  We are united to God by the Holy Spirit who gives us Jesus’ life which has passed through death.

We still have one more goat to go.  The High Priest then took the second goat and placed both his hands upon its head and whispered the sins of the people into its ear.  Then somebody simply led the goat out into the wilderness and set it free so that it could be utterly destroyed by whatever befell it.  You have heard of the term scapegoat, when some innocent party takes the blame for somebody or usually somebodies else.  This goat bears away the sins of the people to where these sins may be destroyed in death.  

There is something significant we must note here as well.  The Hebrew word for forgiveness does not mean a simple release of guilt. It is not a “legal” transaction where someone apologizes (or not) for a wrong done to someone else and that someone else decides not to punish them for it.  The Hebrew word for forgiving is nasa.  It means to bear, to pick up and carry.  The Space Shuttle would be a good metaphor here.  If you remember the story of the four men who carried a paralytic to Jesus to be healed and how they had to tear through the roof of the house to get him to Jesus because of the crowd outside.  The Bible says that when Jesus saw their faith or rather their faithfulness towards their friend he said to the man “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  These men for love of their paralytic friend whom others would have called cursed by God for some concealed sin and refused to touch him, they picked him up and carried him to Jesus who declared him forgiven.  That act of love and their friendship with someone everyone would have called cursed is what forgiveness is.  

Jesus, the Son of God become human, does the same thing for us as the Scapegoat goat did for Israel on Yom Kippur.  He innocently shares our fallen humanity with us and bears it away into death removing it from us.   This bearing away of our sin is what forgiveness is and it is cleansing.  Just as you would put a tea bag on an infected wound to draw out the infection, so Jesus’ death draws out sin’s infection from humanity so God can heal it with the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Looking at our reading from Hebrews Jesus has opened once and for all a new and living way to God.  He has permanently cleansed the living temple of humanity and God the Holy Spirit now dwells in us and works to heal us from the inside out.  God has written his covenant upon our hearts.  And so as Paul writes in our passage from Hebrews: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.  Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.  And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.”

God has expiated our sin and iniquity by Jesus’ blood, his life that has passed through death.  There is no longer any need for any sacrifice of expiation and certainly not propitiation.  We are in union with the Trinity atoned by Jesus’ life-giving blood, his life that has passed through death.  Moreover, he has scapegoated our sins away into death where they are utterly destroyed.  The Trinity no longer counts anything against us.  There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.  Amen.