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"L" Stands for Limited Atonement
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 3, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Leviticus 16, selected verses Romans 5:1-11
"It's not the feeling of anything I've ever done which I might get away from," says Celia to her psychiatrist in T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party, "or of anything in me I could get rid of-but of emptiness, of failure towards someone or something outside of myself, and I feel I must-atone-is that the word?" So we come to the third sermon in our series on T.U.L.I.P. "L" stands for limited atonement: not what we must do, but what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. According to Ben Lacy Rose, in his series on the same, "The doctrine of the Atonement declares that, by the Cross, God accomplished exactly what [God] intended, namely: the salvation of [God's] people, the forgiveness of their sins." Limited atonement goes on to declare that not all people are God's people, but only the ones God chooses. Having addressed the mystery of God's election last Sunday, I will bracket the "limited" aspect of this doctrine and turn our attention to the meaning of the atonement for the lives you and I have been given by God to live. Like Eliot's character on her psychiatrist's couch, we first must ask whether the word atonement is the right word anymore. For though we may be accustomed to hearing the word atonement in relation to words about Jesus dying on the cross for our salvation, we are not quite sure what it means and even less convinced that it matters. Atonement may have come up at T. S. Eliot's cocktail party, but it seldom comes up at our own. Yet more than just a word out of vogue, I wonder whether its absence from our vocabulary is a sign that we have allowed this culture of subjective spirituality and deconstructed truth to gloss over one of the deepest needs of the human heart: the need to be forgiven by the Someone, capital "S", outside of our selves whom we live forgetting. Or is it, in fact, the other way around: have we been, for centuries, hoodwinked by the church into believing that there was something wrong with us and in need of forgiveness, when it was all just a matter of perception and definition? I am O.K., and so are you! Eliot's point is, though we may no longer have the vocabulary, we feel ourselves not to be O.K…feel, at the end of the day, when we have emptied the shelves of psychological and spiritual self-help manuals, that we must do business with Someone outside of our selves, must atone-is that the word? The doctrine of atonement presumes that we were made for Someone, capital "S," outside our selves; that our hearts are restless until we live in relationship to God; that we spend our days and nights running from God, distancing our selves from God [hence the emptiness and sense of failure]; and that we are both unwilling and unable to stop running. In fact, we absolutely glorify the race, buy books on how to run the race better, give our selves awards for having run the race best. Though here the theologians' take on this doctrine divides. For some hold our running has made God so angry that atonement must be made, God must be appeased, a price must be paid to get us back into favor. Since we cannot begin to pay the price, the atoning sacrifice is the death of God's Son. But others believe that the problem is not with that Someone outside ourselves, but the problem is with ourselves; believe God knows us better than we know ourselves, believe the love of God is so broad and deep and high that God persists in coming after us, even if it involves the death of the One sent to repair the relationship, the death of God's Son. We are the ones whose affections are bought at a great cost to the heart of God. All of which brings us to the story of our salvation, the story of a relationship broken and restored, told between the foreboding black covers of the Bible. If we were wondering whether or not the word addressed to our human condition is atonement, we would do well to open the book that tells of the help we have sought in all the wrong places! "It is from the sacrificial system of ancient Israel," writes the Scottish theologian Donald Baillie, "that we have inherited the whole terminology of atonement, expiation, propitiation, reconciliation." In ancient Israel, such words referred to the "complicated and controversial" subject of sacrifice. Sin-offerings and guilt-offerings they were called, sacrifices prescribed for the purpose of paying for or canceling ceremonial offenses. Says Baillie, it was not "the great and willful moral offences…that were in question, but the ritual offences which might be committed either unwittingly or through carelessness and without any very evil intent." As for the remission of "great and deliberate sins of dishonesty, violence and the like, there was no such provision. God might indeed in some cases be induced to be merciful, but that would be something exceptional, on which nobody could count." In general, offenders had simply to pay the consequences for their sin here and now, there being no life after death. Therefore, punishment could be misfortune visited upon the next generation or a war lost or a people exiled. Then at the beginning in the eighth century B.C., almost as if to warn the Israelites of their impending exile, the prophets herald a major shift in the meaning and practice of atonement. Not ritual offences but moral offences were what mattered to God, they roared: "injustice, dishonesty, bribery, perjury, oppression, violence, cruelty. These are the real sins, and so long as these go on, even if they keep on the safe side of the law, as they can so easily do under respectable disguises, God cares not at all for the most correct and profuse offerings and sacrifices." In fact, God hates them and will not accept them. What God will accept, in the words we used to call ourselves to worship, is a contrite heart: repentance, a turning around. "Let the wicked forsake their ways, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return unto the Lord and God will have mercy upon them, and to our God for God will abundantly pardon." In other words, just turn around and come home to the God who has awaited your return for years. Eventually, they did return, but here is the curious thing and the clue about our human nature. You would expect, given such good news from the prophets, that the Israelites would have scuttled the sacrificial system in favor of God's mercy proclaimed. Rather, when the Israelites returned from exile, the sacrificial system returned with a vengeance, with offerings designated not only for ceremonial offences, but now with "full and regular provision for the sacrificial expiation of all the sins of the people." Why? We cannot know for sure, but I found Baillie's guess as good as Eliot's. "It may very well be," he speculates, "as time went on the problem of sin and forgiveness and the need of expiation became more acute to the devout mind: because continuing national calamity seemed to speak of the divine displeasure; because with a deepening sense of the meaning of sin people felt they were never able to make a perfect repentance and were slipping back into sin every day." A feeling, in other words of failure toward Someone outside of themselves for which they felt they must-atone-is that the word? You can imagine, then, when Jesus came proclaiming not only that sins were forgiven, but that the lost sheep did not even have to repent to be found, the prodigal son did not even have to apologize to be welcomed home, the man born blind need not look any farther than Christ's own eyes to be healed: you can imagine how absurd this word was, and still is, to individuals and institutions whose whole existence presumes the human ability to-atone: is that the word? Though we have yet to arrive the heart of the word's most radical meaning. Come to find out, in the end and according to scripture, our experience of emptiness and failure, which even our best deeds cannot seem to erase--this human condition of ours--has finally to do not with our living but with our dying. For at the hour of our death, when our running has come to an end and we are about to fly forgotten into eternal oblivion, here we are met by the One we have run from all our life, the One who alone is able to atone for, to forgive our life lived without him. He has traveled into the far country of our human condition to reveal in his living, but supremely in his dying, the God who is at one with us eternally. Here atonement becomes one thing: the sacrifice of God's Son on the cross such that nothing, not even the death, can separate us from God's love. The problem is that we can neither get our heads around how this works or, if we do, then like the ancient Israelites, we still would rather do it ourselves. Look at the history of the Christian church and the whole system of indulgences that burgeoned until Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door. Watch, in our own day, how people who are religious flock to congregations where repentance requires that they do these things and forgiveness is given under limited conditions. Or watch our secular society seeking any and every promise of self-help, falling prey to any technique that promises them the means to make all things right. T.S. Eliot's Celia had done the latter, had sought out a psychiatrist to assuage her guilt. But this is T.S. Eliot, after all, and Celia's psychiatrist turns out, in the end, to be her priest. Reilly begins by telling her that the condition she describes is curable. "But," he says, "the form a treatment must be your own choice:/I cannot choose for you. If that is what you wish,/I can reconcile you to the human condition…[to]…the morning that separates/And with the evening that brings together/For casual talk before the fire/Two people who know they do not understand each other,/Breeding children whom they do not understand/And who will never understand them." "Is that the best life?" she asks. "It is a good life," he replies, "…In a world of lunacy/ Violence, stupidity, greed…it is a good life." "I know I ought to be able to accept that," she replies, "But I feel it would be a kind of surrender--/No, not a surrender-more like a betrayal." "There is another way," says Reilly, "if you have the courage./The first I could describe in familiar terms/Because you have seen it, as we all have seen it,/Illustrated, more or less, in lives of those about us./The second is unknown, and so requires faith--/The kind of faith that issues from despair./The destination cannot be described;/You will know very little until you get there;/You will journey blind. But the way leads towards possession/Of what you have sought for in the wrong place." The way leads, I promise you, toward the One who has sought you in every place. The way leads toward the One in whose eternal love and mercy you have been found forever. Atonement-is that the word? It is the Word-made-flesh. Thanks be to God. |