DELIVERANCE
January I4, 1996
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Isaiah 53:1-7
John 1:29-34

“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"
-~John 1:29b (RSV}

“T waited patiently for the Lord:
He inclined to me and heard my cry
He drew me up from the desolate pit,
out of a miry bog..."
[Psalm 40:2]

One of my favorite Garrison Keilor stories is about the Sunday
morning Clarence Bunsen wasn't in church.

"Arlene went, but the mister stayed home, because he wasn't very
thankful. He got up that morning and stepped on a screw and tried to
levitate off it and strained his back. His back didn't go out but it felt
weak. He didn't want to slip in the bathtub, so he took a bath instead of
a shower, and felt like an old vet at the Vet's Hospital, and climbing out,
he slipped and strained his back again, another part. While he was combing
his hair, a clump came out, from the bunch he's been combing across the top
in hopes it would take hold. He came down to the kitchen feeling that life
has turned against him.

“Arlene said, 'Have a cup of coffee, that'll perk you up,' and
usually that's all a Norwegian needs. Norwegians have often been revived
by this method, including some whose EKG showed a flat line - a sip of
coffee on their lips and the pen jumped. Clarence felt like coffee
wouldn't make much difference.

“He didn't tell Arlene that he'd talked to daughter Barbara on the
phone Wednesday night... he had a premonition that the real reason she was
coming home... was to make an important announcement of her divorce."
{Leaving Home, p. 160}

Clarence Bunsen's world is not very secure on Sunday morning. Tn
fact, it's crumbling. He's getting older and is suddenly, painfully aware
of it. Blernal youth, vigor, robustness, indestructiveness, are gone
iven coffee isn't going to help. Anc now, the relationship, which insures
something of his own immorlality, or at least his continuity, is in danger.
His daughter’s marriage is dissolving.

This is more than simply a bad morning. With a deft storyteller's
touch, Keilor is talking about the Pit. We hold it at bay by carefully
structured lives, by investing ourselves in relationships, professional
ventures, personal travel and social activity, and sometimes in an interval
or when one of the structures crumbles, or our body begins to fail us, or a
clump of hair comes out, or a precious and permanent relationship is no
longer permanent, but dissolves in front of our eyes, a divorce, a break, a
death -— there it is, the Pit.

John Dunne, a scholar/priest at Notre Dame has focused on the topic
and says that sooner or later everybody asks, "Since I must die, how shall
i satisfy my desire to live?" Father Dunne “noticed that the question
comes in a new way to people in around the fourth decade of their life.
Young people have probably been close to someone who died... they will have
seen eighteen thousand violent deaths on television before they reach
college age... but ritualized television death makes the reality easier to
evade.

Dr. Martin Marty tells about it in a remarkable spiritual memoir, A
Cry of Absence. "Father Dunne reports that somewhere around age twenty-
nine or thirty, profound people pass to a new state of awareness. They
appropriate the horizon that death creates... They have begun their new
move toward autumn. Doors close, options narrow. They move from observing
death at a distance to reckoning with its possibility at clase hand.” [p.
55, 57, 58}

One of those wonderful New Yorker cartoons this week shows a middle-
aged man in a white shirt and tie, answering the door to confront the grim
reaper, with his long black robe, scythe in hand. The man says, “Couldn't
I do a couple hundred hours of community service instead?"

That's what's going on with Clarence Bunsen and, I believe that's
what the Pit - the miry bog of Psalm 40 - is about.

"They move from observing death at a distance to reckoning with its
possibility at close hand."

It leads to some pretty silly and sometimes very destructive human
behavior:

It is behind an almost obsessive commitment to youthfulness in our
culture, with billions of dollars invested in oils, creams, ointments,
elixirs, spas, not to mention exercise equipment, and all the accouterments
of our obsession. And while good health and fighting the clock and
calendar are admirable activities, there is a sense in which it can and
often does become unhealthy and dishonest. After all, is discovering the

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way Lo prevent a man's hair from turning gray really one of the scientific
breakthroughs of the past 2,000 years? Some of it is silly. And some is
destructive, as, for instance, when we try to puarantee our security, our
permanence, by building a kingdom professionally, financially, sexually,
larger to assure us thai we are not transient, that we will live forever.
Tt ds dangerous when a nation begins to think like that, i.e. that our
fulure is guaranteed by military strength - even as the purchase of that
strength is eroding the precious core of the nation ~ in poor education,
poor health care, poor law enforcement, poor housing.

John saw Jesus one day and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes
away the sin of the world...'

The other dimension of the Pit — from which we need deliverance — is
guilt... Sin., our oldest word for it, is the state of separation
between God and ourselves - theologically: the state of alienation from
our neighbors — sociologically: the state of separation from our own best
selves and our awareness of it, our guilt - spiritually.

We have, it would seem, a universal capacity for guilt. We can feel
guilty over silly inconsequentials: we can suffer from neurotic euilt; we
can be made to feel guilty by parents, by our children, by authority
figures, by ministers... I was reading the wonderful article in The New
York Times Magazine this morning about the new style of museum exhibiting,
featuring our own Museum of National History and the clever observation of
Michael Spock, the new Vice President of Public Programs, that when a
museum goer sees a display case containing thirty Eskimo fish hooks and
finally walks away, what the viewer feels is guilt... There must be
something wrong with him for not finding thirty fish hooks interesting!

Freud and friends know that guilt is real and what the
Judeo/Christian tradition has always maintained is that there is a
theological dimension to it; that it is a spiritual trap, and no matter how
it is expressed, the resolution is ultimately spiritual. It may also be
that there is a connection between our fear af death and our experience of
guilt.

St. Paul pointed to it when he wrote, “The wages of sin is death."
He might also have written that the wages of death is sin. Pride, self-
centeredness, the absolute refusal to live within the limits of our
humanity, our mortality, the desire - as old as Adam and Eve - to be God,
to be eternal, infinite, is at the heart of what we mean by sin.

You see, the real trouble with us is that we know we will not live
forever. Clarence sits in the bathtub with his bad back and knows it's not
going to-get any better, that he's not going to be young again. The
trouble with us is that we know there is something out of sync, at the
heart of things.

British theologian, J. S. Whale, put it eloquently:
“That human beings need to be reconciled to something: that there is

a tragic disharmony in the human situation that cries to heaven itself for
adjustment — this is the conviction to which the literature of the world

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hears witness. Oedipus and King Lear are haunted hy the same shadow."
{Christian Doctrine, p. 74}

Sv, of course, is Clarence Bunsen, and so are we.

The Bible knows that about the human situation. There is probably
nolhing about our religion which we understand less, or are less interested
in, than the sacrificial system of ancient Judaism. But, in faet, il was
designed to deal with the basic human dilemma of guilt and the fear of
death.

We assume that the O]d Testament legal system, in the Book of
Leviticus, for instance, contains the rules and regulations and procedures
for correct sacrifices of doves, oxen, goats, lambs, because God is just
and when people are bad, somebody has to be punished. We think it's a
penal system based on retribution. When wrong is done the scales of
justice are tipped and someone must pay in order to put them back in
balance. An eye for an eye... but God will accept a substitute... That's
what we think and it's a gross oversimplification... It's not what the
ancient religion meant. So let's put aside our aesthetic objections for a
moment and take a look.

Rather, the whole system is based on the understanding that human
reconciliation, healing of the soul, happens only when God provides a way
for it to happen. The life of the animal, in the sacrificial system,
represents God's life. In the act of sacrifice, God is taking
responsibility for the healing. God is paying the price.

We know the psychological truth of that, by the way. We know that
when there is a break in a relationship, the person who has made the break,
the guilty party, can feel regret, make restitution, promise never to do it
again, spend a lifetime in remorse and guilt, without effecting healing.
Healing happens, we know, only when the one offended somehow bears the
pain, the responsibility, and extends forgiveness. Healing happens only as
the injured party somehow voluntarily assumes responsibility. Perhaps
that's why the experience is so rare.

Ordinarily we wait, smoldering in self-righteous indignation when we
are wronged, violated, betrayed. “I don't know if I can ever forgive," one
Says. Or, “I can forgive but not forget," which means "I prefer not to
forgive. I'm enjoying this too much."

The genius of Israel's religion was that it understocd this about
God. God is not an arrogant potentate whose good graces have to be earned
and whose sense of justice had to be appeased by punishment of the
offender, or at least a suitable substitute. Israel understood that God
assumes the responsibility, the pain, the suffering, to make the
relationship whole again. God is the way out of the Pit - the miry bog of
guilt and fear.

In Walter Brueggemann's memorable phrase, Israel sees God as not

Simply an angry judge. The judge remembers to be a parent. God is a
father in wistfulness, a mother in yearning.

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And se one day at the beginuing of the story, a strange Inet
insightful man, 4a prophet actually, secs Jesus of Nazareth and Says,
“Beliodd, the Lamb of God." And what he is saying is that the creator of
the human race is also the Jover: the judge is also the parent: the
resolution to the guilt we experience, the answer Lo the fear we fee] is
heve, in this man, the Lamb of Goad.

And so, in the January doldrums, we are led by Scripture to a
profound encounter with the basic claims of our faith. This faith of ours
is not simply a pleasant moralistic system. This Gospel is a promise that.
the one who created us has acted to save us: that in loving and serving
and following God's son - the Lamb of God - we can live as free men and
women: free from guilt, free from despair, free from fear. For once you
are right with God and know il, the Pit is not a threat.

"Behold the Lamb" he said. And I could not help but reflect, as I
thought about preaching this sermon on this Sunday, after baptizing several
babies, having read the lovely words of the ancient prophet:

"He will feed his flock like a shepherd
he will gather the lambs in his arms,
he will carry them in his bosom

and gently lead those that are with
young."

That is, of course, what we believe is happening as we baptize these
children and we make that affirmation publically and regularly because it
reminds us that the promise is to us too. "Behold the Lambs."

"Clarence Bunsen rehearsed what he would say when his daughter told
him the bad news of the death of the Marriage... ‘Well kids, that's your
decision. [I can't say that I approve, but I certainly can sympathize.
Arlene and I have been together for forty years but there have been
times...' Then she told him. She said, ‘We have an announcement. We're
going to have a baby in April.'

"He almost said, ‘Well kids, that's your decision. I certainly can
sympathize. Arlene I have been together for forty years but there have
been times...‘ and then the happy news dawned on him and tears came to his
eyes and he had to blow his nose.”

Saved from despair, by a child. Pulled up out of the Pit by the
baby. “Behold the Lamb of God."

And so, it was a moment like that —- with all the reality of the human
dilemma, all the broad sense of human yearning for healing and hope stuck
in his throat, all the weight of human mortality which rests on the
shoulders of every man and woman who thinks - that John saw Jesus and said
something so important, so big and profound that finally you and I have to
stop pushing and pulling at it, investigating, analyzing and explaining -
and simply say it in wonder, and awe and love — with hin.

"Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."
Amen.

a

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