Atonement

a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine

on Sunday, September 23, 2007

 at The First Parish in Lincoln

Click here to listen to this sermon

– Peter Biehl 

READINGS:

1.  Our first reading is from a draft written several years ago by Anne Lamott that led to her book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith; it was published in 2005:

I know the world has a floating finish line that we can never reach because it keeps changing, and we can lose our lives in pursuit of winning.  I also know that the world is rich in peace and mercy and beauty – that every time I call out for help, the phone rings, or the mail comes, and somehow I get enough of an answer to take the next right step.  The good news is that we’re loved, and part of the miracle is that our friends aren't all nuts on the same day, so someone is always more or less okay.

Some mornings I wake up and I instantly feel discouraged by the world and by my government and by my own worried mind.  It's like my brain has already been up for awhile, sitting on the bed waiting for me to wake up. It’s already had coffee, and has some serious concerns about how far behind we are already.  So I always pray, first thing upon awakening, very simple prayers like the one my son Sam prayed years ago when his head got caught in the slats of a chair:  “I need help with me,” he whispered.

The answer then, and now, is for us to stick close.  When I’m left to my own devices, I am on my own mind almost all the time.  But we're not left to our own devices.  People help us, and we help them.  I like this story from the Sufi tradition:  A holy woman sat outside the temple watching a tide of people pass, a river of need, the destitute and the wounded, the drunk and the lame and the outcast, and during her prayers, she cried out to God, “How can a loving creator see so much suffering, and not do something to help them?” And God said, “I did do something. I made you.”

2.  Our second reading is from the Torah – the third book of the bible, Leviticus, chapter 16, verses 29-30.  These are the verses which established Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.  Verse 30 is printed on the cover of your Order of Service, and the reason why there is a dash in place of the letter “o” in “L-rd” is that the people of Israel believed that God’s name is all consonants, no vowels, and is therefore unpronounceable:

“And it shall be a statute to you forever, that in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall afflict your souls, and you shall do no work, neither the native nor the stranger who sojourns among you; for on this day, atonement shall be made for you, to cleanse you; for all your sins you shall be clean before the L-rd.” 

When theologians are asked to define the word atonement, they often break it into three syllables –

            at-one-ment – because atonement means to be at one with yourself,

                        in your relations with other people,

            and in your relationship with God.

The genius of the mandate in Leviticus 16 – to set aside an annual Day of Atonement –

            is that it recognizes a basic truth about all of us: that in the course of any given year,

                        we will all make mistakes, a crop of small ones for sure, maybe even a real whopper.

In the musical play, Wicked, Glinda – who is supposed to be the Good Witch –

                        makes compromises just to fit in that her better self would never have made;

            she needs room to think, and for most of the play, she doesn’t get it.

We all need room to think, and that’s what Leviticus 16 means to give us –

            a day to look back at the past year and think about what we could have done differently,

                        a day to acknowledge our mistakes – and seek forgiveness.

The goal is reconciliation – to do whatever we can to make things right.

This, of course, is much easier said than done.

Making amends is hard and humbling work – we avoid it if we can –

                        not to mention that we sometimes hurt people without even knowing we did,

            and we wonder if trying to make things right will just open an old wound.

It’s so easy to pass on something you heard through the grapevine

            without knowing for sure whether it’s true – and then you learn, too late, that it’s not true –

                        so you wonder what to do – if I bring it up will I just make matters worse?

In Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement,

            a 13-year-old girl named Briony misinterprets something that she sees her older sister do.

When she tells her version of what she saw, people are hurt and lives are changed,

                        but even when Briony realizes her terrible mistake, she doesn’t recant her story,

            and she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone for what she did.

It’s a story about how hard it is to make things right, and how easy it is to run out of time.

Atonement is a key word for both Jews and Christians,

            but their understanding of how it works is very different.

If you are Jewish, you probably think of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement,

                        as the most important holy day of the year –

            Jews who don’t observe any other Jewish custom get themselves to a synagogue on this day.

It includes fasting and prayer and a collective confession of sin:

            we have done this, we have done that – we all fall short, we all need to be forgiven,

                        and we all seek atonement.

On Yom Kippur, you ask God to forgive you for your sins.

On the day before Yom Kippur, you ask the people you have hurt to forgive you.

God needs to know you’ve at least tried, so in Jewish faith and practice,

                                    atonement is about taking personal responsibility for our mistakes –

                        it means owning up to them, making amends if possible,

            and seeking forgiveness, both human and divine.

In other words, there’s some hard work to be done.

Many Christians, on the other hand, believe that the hard work has been done for them.

Classic Christian doctrine says that we are all sinners in need of God’s forgiveness,

                        and that Jesus’ death on the cross was payment in full –

            the scales are balanced, we are forgiven, God is satisfied.

The same doctrine also imagines that it was all part of God’s plan.

Many of us grew up with that doctrine – and may still hold to it –

            and if you do, I ask your forgiveness because I must confess that I don’t believe it.

I don’t believe it because it turns God into an ogre.

My faith is grounded in a God who is Love from start to finish,

                        a God who would never require the suffering and death of any human being

            in order to forgive me for my mistakes and make things right between us.

As our creator, God knows we’re not perfect – we’re all going to need some slack.

So the bottom line is that we are already forgiven.

Would God enjoy seeing us do a little better – you bet.

God believes in hope.

But divine forgiveness is an artesian well – it never runs out.

Is it still important to ask people we have hurt to forgive us?

Yes it is.

But I don’t think God’s forgiveness depends on it.

God knows that some days, the stuff we have to deal with is so hard

            that we just need someone else to do the rest of the work for us.

As Anne Lamott says, “we’re not left to our own devices,”

            and if we’re listening, we may hear someone say, “Put it there – I’ll take it.”

Atonement is often individual, but sometimes it’s collective –

            sometimes it even involves an entire nation.

Look at what happened in South Africa.

In the years right after apartheid was abolished, South Africa was a nation of raw wounds.

So many people had been beaten, imprisoned, tortured and killed.

The question after apartheid was: how can we come together as a nation and heal these wounds?

So Nelson Mandela’s government created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Members of the commission traveled from township to township to hold public hearings,                      and if you had done terrible things during apartheid,

            but were now willing to acknowledge what you did – to confess and tell the truth in public –

                        the commission could offer you amnesty: a national forgiveness.

That was the idea.

In 1993, the year before apartheid ended, a pretty young American woman with strawberry blonde hair

                        who was helping register black South Africans to vote

            was dragged from her car, beaten and stabbed to death by four young black men.

Her black friends in the crowd were yelling that she was a “comrade,” but it was too late.

Her name was Amy Biehl.

She was 26 years old, a Stanford student and a Fulbright scholar.

But to her killers, she was just another privileged white person, another symbol of their oppression.

After Amy’s death, her parents, who live in Palo Alto, California,

                                    read the journals she had kept about her work in South Africa,

                        and as a result, Linda and Peter Biehl not only learned more about their daughter,

            they learned what it was like for black people living under apartheid.

So they went to South Africa and created a foundation in Amy’s memory

            to provide housing, education, and employment for poor South Africans;

                        and then, four years after her death, the young men who killed her applied for amnesty.

So the Biehls went to their hearing in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Amy’s killers gave a full account of what they had done.

Imagine being her parents and listening to that.

Then the commission granted the young men amnesty, and Amy’s parents supported the decision.

Her father, Peter, spoke to the Commission that day:

                        “The most important vehicle of reconciliation,” he said, “is open and honest dialogue...

            we are here to reconcile a human life which was taken without an opportunity for dialogue.

When we are finished with this process, we must move forward with linked arms.”

He meant what he said: he and his wife befriended those young men.

Linda and Peter Biehl came to know them so well that the men called them “mother and father.”

We may regard what the Biehls did as extraordinary – and it was,

            but it came from a deep, good place within them that we all have – we just have to reach for it.

And, it’s not easy to do.

Last spring, two days after the shootings at Virginia Tech,

            32 makeshift headstones appeared on campus with the names of the students

                        and the professor who had been killed.

A day or two later, a 33^rd headstone was added. 

It was for the student who shot them all and then turned the gun on himself.

A note next to his headstone read, “I am sorry that you did not get the help you needed.”

This uncommon act got almost no media coverage.

But those compassionate words, “I am sorry that you did not get the help you needed,”

                        came from a deep, good place within the person who wrote them;

            it was as if she or he was saying, what could we have done differently, looking back?

At the end of the novel, Atonement, Briony, who set the story’s events in motion as a young girl,

            is now a celebrated novelist in her seventies,

                        looking back at the consequences of her actions.

She wonders whether you can ever rewrite the past – write a different ending.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, there was a column, written by a novelist, about exactly that.

He saw an analogy between the act of revising something you’ve written and Yom Kippur.

“On Yom Kippur,” he wrote,

                        each of us is asked to reread our manuscript of the past year and make revisions.”

We ask ourselves, “What could I have done differently?”

            and “What were the effects of my choices on others?”

“The best writers are usually the best revisers...  Revision gives you a chance to get things right.”

Sometimes it can’t be done.

There is an irrevocable nature to certain harms.

But, as Amy Biehl’s parents showed us, in that very situation, you do what you can.

Atonement is not for the weak of heart.

To look at who you are and make some revisions – that’s hard work.

Let’s see: what if I cut this out, add a little of that, soften this, toughen that up...

Like Glinda the Good Witch, we all one day a year to do that.

And for the things we can’t revise, God forgives us – and we can forgive each other.

Amen.

Notes:

Time Magazine has called Atonement one of the 100 greatest novels ever written.  The movie, starring Keira Knightley as Briony’s older sister, Cecilia, is already out in the U.K. but won’t come here until December.

The idea of Jesus’ death on the cross as a “ransom” paid to save us from our sins was first developed by Origen more than 200 years after the crucifixion.  The classic Christian doctrine of atonement came 1,000 years after the life of Jesus, in the works of St. Anselm. 

One of the strongest arguments for changing the Christian doctrine of atonement has come from a former Episcopal bishop, John Shelby Spong, in a book titled Christianity Must Change or Die.  Bishop Spong notes that if a human father had nailed his own son to a cross and left him there to die, he would be convicted of child abuse and sent to prison for life.

Amy Biehl’s father, Peter, died at age 59 several years ago; the quote from him, from remarks he made to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, are from an article by John Morlino in the San Francisco Chronicle, 4/29/97, p. E1.

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