The New and Living Way

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Hebrews 10:16-25

Charles Wesley wrote a hymn in the late 1700’s that became quite popular during the American Civil War.  Its first line is “And am I born to die?”  That was quite a pertinent question back then.  Wars abounded.  Plagues.  Sicknesses for which there were no cures.  You could die at sea on the way to that new land where you were hoping to make a new start or get killed by the inhabitants once you got there.  Kicked by a horse.  Attacked by a wild boar.  Childbirth.  Life expectancy then was around 30 yrs.  Life was short and Death (capital D) abounded.  Wesley wrote:

And am I born to die? To lay this body down?
And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown

A land of deepest shade. Unpierced by human thought.
The dreary regions of the dead, where all things are forgot?

Soon as from earth I go, what will become of me?
Eternal happiness or woe must then my portion be;

Waked by the trumpet's sound, I from my grave shall rise,
And see the Judge with glory crowned, and see the flaming skies,

 

Well, one doesn’t need to be in the midst of a war or a plague to wonder if the sum total of your life is simply death.  The question should hit us every now and then but we tend to be occupied with other questions.   When we are young, we ponder and dream of what we will do with our lives.  The middle years make us wonder if we’re really doing anything useful because we’re beginning to realize how fast the years go.  The elder years hit and we look back wondering what part in the grand scheme of things we played?  Did we make a difference?  All along the way we are confronted by the harsh reality of the death of friends and family.  One doesn’t have to look too far to garner the awareness that life in all its wonder and goodness has a monstrous beast lurking about that cannot be tamed - the futility of death.  One must either wear the rose-coloured glasses of denial or gird up with the hope of resurrection that God gives us in Christ Jesus.  If we don’t, we will perish in the despair of Wesley’s pointed question – Am I born to die?

Well, are we?  Are we just born to die?  The answer to that question is an emphatic “NO!”  Death was not what God created us for.  We are fearfully and wonderfully made as the Psalmist says, fearfully and wonderfully made to praise and to bring praise to our awesome God who loves his creation with a love we cannot begin to comprehend.  We can appreciate the beauty of a flower, smell hope wafting from the mud in Spring, understand the wonders of a Black Hole, feel delight watching a baby smile, cure diseases, play, and feel joy.

Yet, something is dreadfully wrong in God’s very good creation.  With the same hands that can build little rovers that explore the surface of Mars, we build weapons of mass destruction.  We can write wonderful works of literature but also the propaganda that leads to genocide.  That’s how we to tend treat people different from us.  Do I really need to go into how we lie to, hide from, blame, manipulate, betray, and disappoint those we love the most.  I believe it was the fifth century theologian Augustine who was the first to say that the line between good and evil runs through the middle of everyone.  So, therefore, there’s no use in calling another person or their actions evil until we’ve sorted through ourselves and our own actions and miraculously found ourselves guiltless and without shame.  Guiltless and without shame doesn’t describe anybody I know much less myself.

This dreadful wrongness in God’s good creation is the insidiously deceptive Power which we in our language call Sin.  It is a disease affecting everyone, a disease that leads to Death.  Like addicts we are powerless over it.  We are both its victims and culpable of it.  It is a disease that affects the mind.  It blinds us to seeing, perceiving, and knowing the way things are supposed to be in a world where humans are to live in the image of God.  It turns us inward with a compulsion to serve our own wants and needs.  It makes us want to be our own gods and to serve false gods in sick efforts of self-preservation.  It subtly makes Good seem Evil and Evil seem Good and with even more perversion it can turn the Good we do into Evil and make doing Evil the means to doing the Good.

What does God do about this perversion of his very good Creation?  Well, it was God’s plan all along that at the right time God the Son would become the man, Jesus of Nazareth, and crown God’s good creation with his very self.  Also in this plan was God’s pouring the Holy Spirit upon all humanity and upon his creation perfecting it so that what Isaiah prophesied long ago would be true, that “the Earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9).  But, with God’s good creation infected with the disease of Sin and powerless against it, God’s crowning and perfecting of his creation with the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit had to take the horrific form of crucifixion and death. For now, the power of God’s glory and love is seen, perceived, and known by us by the death on the cross of Jesus, the incarnate Son of God and Lord of all creation.  

If we can say that anyone was born to die, it was Jesus.  In this act of incomprehensible love God took upon himself our Sin diseased nature by which we are all victimized in order to heal us of it.  He took upon himself His own judgement of condemnation against us for our culpability in Sin and suffered the sentence of the most publicly humiliating form of criminal execution humanity has ever devised in order deliver us from our deserved condemnation and sentence of death.  

How perverted!  How twisted!  How wrong!  We humans in our blindness took the one who was God’s crowning and perfecting of us and crowned him with a crown of thorns, and enthroned him on a cross, and mocked him, and spit on him.  We judged it preposterous and blasphemous that he claimed to be the Son of God come to deliver us.  We, in the blindness of our Sin may say, “No, it wasn’t me.  I wasn’t there.”  But, as Jesus taught, whatever we have done to harm even the least of us, we have done to him.  We are liars if we say we have not hurt, harmed, and broken the trust of others, especially those closest to us whom we say we love the most.

Well, we will have to wait for Easter for the full details of this story but by his death Jesus opened a new and living way to God.  It was on this day that Sin and Death were condemned and sentenced to death.  This is why we call it Good.  The great mystery of this tragic event is that God the Son become human as Jesus of Nazareth somehow experienced death himself, death on the cross.  God the Father and God the Holy Spirit somehow suffered the death of God the Son.  These are things too big for this small mind to comprehend.  It is enough to say that God the Trinity knows in his very self what it is to die.

In the wake of the horrific event of our crucifying Jesus what needs to be said is that through the death of Jesus, the Christ, God the Son, God the Trinity has established in our hearts a new covenant, a new way to live in response to him, a new and living way of coming to him.  The result of our Death going into God is that the life of God, the Holy Spirit is now poured upon us.    

God is flooding us with his very life and being and thereby recreating us to bear forth the living image of Christ Jesus and his self-giving love that he modeled on the Cross.  He calls us to live according to the Way of the Cross.  If there is a sense in which we are born to die, it is that we have been born anew to live the cross-formed life of denying ourselves and laying down our lives for others in the war against Sin, Death, and Evil; a war that Jesus has already won.  In this new life we do not simply live as good people who live according to higher standards of morality and altruism.  We rather live forth from the new life of faith, hope, and unconditional love that we find God has gifted to us, life filled with God’s continual presence with us bearing our old life away and transforming us with Jesus’ life.  Jesus' once and for all death has made it possible for us to be a part of God's life-giving, dignity-restoring work of healing this broken, hurting and indeed, dying world.  We call this day Good because by Jesus’ death, God gives us life.  Let us gratefully live it for him.  Amen.

 

Born to Die - Good Friday

Hebrews 10:16-25
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Charles Wesley wrote a hymn in the late 1700’s that became quite popular during the American Civil War.  It’s first line is “Am I born to die?”  That is quite a pertinent question if you are a young person not even twenty years of age and having to go fight a war that you likely will not return from.   You don’t understand the reasons for the war but you are convinced that if you do not fight you will lose your future and your children’s future.  You join up.  You spend your days walking, starving, wet, freezing in the winter, roasting in the summer, surrounded by the stench of too many humans in one place, and always fearing.  Then you come to battle and the barbarity, the screaming, the manic fear, the noise, and farms and entire cities ablaze.  Having not yet really lived and being surrounded by Death (capital D) you sing the question of despair:

And am I born to die? To lay this body down?

And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown

A land of deepest shade. Unpierced by human thought.

The dreary regions of the dead, where all things are forgot? 

Soon as from earth I go, what will become of me?

Eternal happiness or woe must then my portion be;

Waked by the trumpet's sound, I from my grave shall rise,

And see the Judge with glory crowned, and see the flaming skies,

Well, one doesn’t need to be in the midst of a war to wonder if the sum total of one’s life is simply death.  When we are younger we ponder and dream of what we will do with our lives.  The middle years make us wonder if we’re really doing anything useful because we’re beginning to realize how fast the years go.  The elder years hit and we look back wondering what part in the grand scheme of things we played?  Did we make a difference? 

All along the way we are confronted by the harsh reality of the death of friends and family.  One doesn’t have to look too far to garner the awareness that life in all its wonder and goodness has a monstrous beast lurking about that cannot be tamed - the futility of death.  One must either wear the rose-coloured glasses of denial or gird up with the hope that God gives us in Christ Jesus or we will perish in Wesley’s pointed question – Am I born to die?

Am I born to die?  The answer to that question is an emphatic “NO!”  Death was not what God created us for.  We are fearfully and wonderfully made as the Psalmist says, fearfully and wonderfully made to praise and to bring praise to our awesome God who loves his creation with a love we cannot begin to comprehend.  We can appreciate the beauty of a flower, smell hope wafting from the mud of Spring, understand the wonders of a Black Hole, feel delight watching a baby smile, cure diseases, play, and feel joy.

Yet, something is dreadfully wrong in God’s very good creation.  With the same hands that will build little vehicles that explore the surface of Mars, we assemble weapons of mass destruction.  We can write wonderful works of literature but also the propaganda that leads to genocide.  That’s how we treat people different from us.  Do I really need to go into how we lie to, hide from, blame, manipulate, and disappoint those we love the most.  I believe it was the fifth century theologian Augustine who was the first to say that the line between good and evil runs through the middle of everyone.

This dreadful wrongness in God’s good creation is the insidiously deceptive Power which we in our language call Sin.  It is a disease affecting everyone, a disease that leads to Death.  We are powerless over it.  We are both its victims and culpable of it.  It is a disease that affects the mind.  It blinds us to seeing, perceiving, and knowing.  It turns us inward with a compulsion to serve our own wants and needs.  It makes us want to be our own gods and to serve false gods in sick efforts of self-preservation.  It subtly makes Good seem Evil and Evil seem Good and with even more perversion it can turn the Good we that do into Evil and make doing Evil the means to doing the Good.

What does God do about this perversion of his very good Creation?  Well, it was God’s plan all along that at the right time God the Son would become the man, Jesus of Nazareth, and crown God’s good creation with his very self.  Also in this plan was God’s pouring the Holy Spirit upon all humanity and upon his creation perfecting it so that what Isaiah prophesied long ago would be true, “the Earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9).  But, with God’s good creation infected with the disease of Sin and powerless against it, God’s crowning and perfecting of his creation with the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit had to take the horrific form of crucifixion and death. For now the power of God’s glory and love is seen, perceived, and known by us by the death on the cross of  Jesus, the incarnate Son of God and Lord of all creation. 

If we can say that anyone was born to die, it was Jesus.  In this act of incomprehensible love God took upon himself our Sin diseased nature by which we are all victimized in order to heal us of it.  He took upon himself His own judgement of condemnation against us for our culpability in Sin and suffered the sentence of the most publically humiliating form of criminal execution humanity has ever devised in order deliver us from our deserved condemnation and sentence of death. 

How perverted!  How twisted!  How wrong!  We humans in our blindness took the one who was God’s crowning and perfecting of us and crowned him with a crown of thorns, and enthroned him on a cross, and mocked him, and spit on him.  We judged it preposterous and blasphemous that he claimed to be the Son of God come to deliver us.  We, in the blindness of our Sin may say, “No, it wasn’t me.  I wasn’t there.”  But, as Jesus taught, whatever we have done to harm even the least of us, we have done to him.  We are liars if we say we have not hurt, harmed, and broken the trust of others especially those closest to us whom we say we love the most.

Well, we will have to wait for Easter for the full details of this story but by his death Jesus opened a new and living way to God.  It was on this day that Sin and Death were condemned and sentenced to death.  This is why we call it Good.  The great mystery of this tragic event is that God the Son become human as Jesus of Nazareth somehow experienced death himself when Jesus died on the cross.  God the Father and God the Holy Spirit somehow suffered the death of God the Son.  These are things too big for this small mind to comprehend.  It is enough to say that God the Trinity knows in his very self what it is to die.

In the wake of the horrific event of our crucifying Jesus what needs to be said is that through the death of Jesus, the Christ, God the Son, God the Trinity has established in our hearts a new covenant, a new way to live in response to him, a new and living way of coming to him.  The result of our Death going into God was that the life of God, the Holy Spirit will be poured upon us.  We will have to wait for Pentecost for that part of the story. 

But to spoil the plot a little, God is flooding us with his very life and being recreating us to bear forth the living image of Christ Jesus and his self-giving love that he modeled on the Cross.  He calls us to live according to the Way of the Cross.  If there is a sense in which we are born to die, it is that we have been born anew to live the cross-formed life of denying ourselves and laying down our lives for others in the war against Sin, Death, and Evil; a war that Jesus has already won.  In this new life we do not simply live as good people who live according to higher standards of morality and altruism.  No, rather it is that as we live forth from the new life of faith, hope, and unconditional love that we find God's continual presence with us bearing our old life away and transforming us with Jesus life.  Jesus' once and for all death has made it possible for us to be a part of God's life-giving, person-restoring work as we listen to Jesus with ears made alive by the Holy Spirit whom he has poured into us making us able to trust him and to follow. 

As I started out with a hymn, I will finish up with one.  This is The Way of the Cross Leads Home written in the more hopeful year of 1906 when missionary fervour was sweeping the North American Church by Jessie Hunter Brown Pounds who was the daughter of a pioneer Disciples of Christ preacher in Ohio.

I must needs go home by the way of the cross,

There’s no other way but this;

I shall ne’er get sight of the gates of light,

If the way of the cross I miss.

The way of the cross leads home,

The way of the cross leads home,

It is sweet to know as I onward go,

The way of the cross leads home.

I must needs go on in the blood sprinkled way,

The path that the Saviour trod,

If I ever climb to the heights sublime,

Where the soul is at home with God.

Then I bid farewell to the way of the world,

To walk in it never more;

For the Lord says, “Come,” and I seek my home,

Where He waits at the open door.

The New and Living Way

Hebrews 10:16-25

Why is this day called Good when we are remembering such horrible things that happened?  Well, it was on this day that a new and living way was opened to God.  It was on this day that death itself was put to death.  This is why we call it Good. We cannot understand how this is, but we do know its after effect – we have become participants in the divine nature as Peter writes in his 2^nd epistle 1:4.  This means that the Holy Spirit is present with us and at work in us making us to be more like Jesus in our character and actions proving the love of God the Father.  The wrath of God that humanity deserved to have poured upon us has in God’s great love become God pouring himself out upon humanity to heal us.  I can’t explain how this happened so that we can understand what happened when death and God met when Jesus the incarnate Son of God died on the cross.  But we do have an analogy from nature to help us visualize it – the black hole. 

At the heart of every galaxy in the universe that is of any size is a supper-massive black hole.  Black holes form when stars burnout their fuel and collapse to become neutron stars and then some of these collapse even further until gravity just becomes so powerful that not even light can escape this thing that looks like a perfectly spherical black hole.  On every black hole is a point of no return known as the event horizon.  Things get weird at this point.

If you were falling into a black hole, the closer you get to the event horizon space and time (spacetime) will begin to warp.  For you, you wouldn’t notice this warping.  It would seem like, “blip, I’m gone”.  It would be all over in less than an instant.  But for someone watching you fall into the black hole, it gets spooky.  Space warps.  Seeing you fall feet-first we watch you begin to stretch feet-first.  Your feet and legs begin to elongate as your head stays the same.  The distance between your subatomic particles begins to expand as gravity pulls them apart until you finally disintegrate into basic particles; like a balloon expanding until it pops.

All the while you would start to orbit around the black hole ever faster approaching the speed of light and this causes time to warp.  For us watching, the closer you get to the speed of light the slower time appears to go and the effect of this is that we would never see you or your particles pass the event horizon and go on into the black hole.  If we could talk to you, the sound of your voice would be slower and deeper.  It would take years to nearly forever for a mere sound to come to us while you would experience yourself talking normally. 

Once in the black hole, who knows?  Like death we have no idea what goes on in there.  But amazingly, as you can see in this doctored up picture spewing forth from the black whole is a jet stream of matter that shoots across the galaxy seeding it with the stuff that stars need to come into life and for planets to form.  Without black holes our universe would not exist, life would not exist.  Though black holes seem like the death of everything they make new life possible.

 Thinking about the Christian faith in these terms, the great mystery of the Christian faith is that God the Son who became human as Jesus of Nazareth has somehow experienced death himself when Jesus died on the “black hole” of the cross.  God the Father and God the Holy Spirit somehow suffered the death of God the Son.  These are things too big for this small mind to comprehend.  Thinking pastorally, it is helpful to know that God the Trinity knows in his very self what it is to die and even to loose a child to death.  But, death is not the end.  Let us not forget that resurrection was forth-coming for God the Son because death could not hold him.  The result of death encountering God in the super massive black hole of the cross was that the life of God expressed itself in the resurrection of Jesus, God the Son still incarnate but now in resurrected flesh.  He has gone through death and come out the other side.  Moreover, the Holy Spirit spews the life of Jesus’ resurrected humanity forth upon us and into us like the matter stream that inexplicably jets forth from black holes and seeds galaxies with the stuff of which stars and planets and everything else are made. But for now, this Holy Spirit stream of new life in Christ brings forth his life in us until Jesus comes again to make all things new.

John gave us a very graphic image of this when that Roman soldier pierced Jesus’ side and water and blood began to spew forth upon him.  This is what is happening to humanity and all of the creation now since God the Son has died and risen.  We are being flooded with the life of God and are being recreated to bear forth the living image of Christ Jesus and his self-giving love.  God the Trinity has written upon our hearts a new covenant, a new and living way of coming to him and of living in response to him.

The way of this new life isn’t for us to simply pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and simply be good people who live according to higher standards of morality and altruism.  No, rather it is that we live forth from the new life of faith, hope, and unconditional love that we find in God's continual presence with us bearing our old life away into the black hole of the cross and transforming us with Jesus’ resurrected life.  Jesus' once and for all death has made it possible for us to be a part of God's now and forever life-giving, person-restoring work as we listen to Jesus with ears made alive by the Holy Spirit whom he has poured into us making us able to trust and to follow him. 

Unlike death is for us, Jesus' death had a purpose.  It was a purposeful death.  But, we still have the capacity to void his death of its purpose.  When we let go of our hope and cease trying to discern and follow his guidance in the acts of love and good that the Trinity wants us to do with the new life he has given to us we make Jesus' death meaningless.  When we turn our backs on each other and let hate, unforgiveness, and disunity into our communities of faith we make his death to be in vain.  When we cease to encourage and love one another and rather gossip and lie and ignore one another, we have done nothing less than crucified our Jesus once again.  Friends, for Jesus’ sake live your new life before the Triune God of grace in the new and living way, the way that is steeped in prayer, worshipping and rejoicing always, studying and meditating upon the Scriptures, turning from selfish ambitions and narcissistic tendencies to love everyone unconditionally no matter who or what they are.  Jesus, God the Son become a man and died in order to write a new and living way of being in relationship with God and one another onto our hearts.  Yet, God raised him and through him all things are being made new according to his image.  Such is the new and living way he has given us.  This is reality.  Live accordingly.  Amen.

Yom Kippur and Good Friday

Text: Hebrews 10:16-25
Audio Recording

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 Jesus died our deserved penalty of death for our sins to appease the Father’s wrath.  If you take a plunge into the Book of Leviticus and look at what was done 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 towards a god to beg presumably for one’s life.

Yom Kippur was a very solemn day.  Everyone spent the day prayerfully reflecting on their walk according to the Covenant.  They fasted.  No one worked.  They knew the Lord God lived in the Temple and that their sins and the resulting stain of sin which we call iniquity (shame, guilt, regret, broken relationships) could drive him away.   Therefore, the temple needed to be cleansed from its contact with iniquity and the people’s iniquity was removed far from them.  Yom Kippur 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 draws forth and cleanse us from our sin.  

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, those who stood representationally for the whole people and who dealt directly with matters in the temple.  Their own sin dirtied hands and lives and the iniquity they incurred for dealing with the sins of the people stained the temple, God’s abode, and themselves.  He would slaughter, or the word is better translated as holocaust, the bull.  He would then take a bowl of the blood 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.  The lid of the Ark was called the Mercy Seat and it was there that they believed God sat enthroned on earth.  The High Priest would fill the room with the smoke of the incense, which represents the prayers of the people, so that he would not directly see God.  The he would dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times on the Mercy Seat.  Then he would take one of the goats that was chosen by lot from the two, as it represented the iniquity of the people, and return to the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Mercy Seat with it as well in the same way with its blood.  On the way also sprinkled some of this 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.

There is something significant happening here with respect to the blood that we can’t miss.  Leviticus 17:11-12 says something that troubles me for I like my steaks very rare: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life. Therefore, I have said to the people of Israel, ‘No person among you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger who sojourns among you eat blood’.”  The blood of the bull and the goat represents life that has passed through death and as such it has the power to cleanse what it contacts from iniquity 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 one the Mercy Seat.  Thus the people and God are united in this life that has 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 still have on 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 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 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 from another. It is not a “legal” transaction where someone apologizes or not for a wrong done to someone else and the someone else decides not to punish them for it.  The Hebrew word, nasa, (the Space Shuttle would be a good metaphor here) means to bear, to pick up and carry.  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 in love for their paralytic friend whom others would have called cursed by God for some concealed sin picked him up and carried him to Jesus.  That act of love and fellowship of 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 unto 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 does Jesus death draw out sins 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’s 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 or propitiation.  We are in union with the Trinity atoned by the Jesus’ life-giving blood, his life that has passed through death.  Moreover, he has scapegoated our sins away unto 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.