Atonement and Forgiveness
Sermon by Steve Edington
October 1, 2006
Over the past couple of weeks, as part of the Food for Thought Thursdays program, a few of you - along with Lee Page and me - have been taking part in a series called "Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography." One of the things we'll be looking at this week are the turning points in our journeys of spirit and meaning. They could include those places and times where we realized we needed a change of direction if a particular path we were was on was no longer proving to be the right one.
One such turning point for me - esoteric as this may sound - was when I realized that the Christian doctrine or principle of the Atonement no longer made any sense to me. This was not simply an intellectual debate I was having with myself, however. It went way past that. It really had to do with certain things I'd emotionally and spiritually internalized and lived by at earlier stages in my life, and that had become no longer meaningful or believable for me.
What am I talking about here - the Atonement? The orthodox Christian doctrine of the Atonement holds that the primary reason Jesus was on earth was to atone for the sins of humanity by way of his crucifixition and death. The historical reason for his execution may well have been a political one having to do with the Romans fearing a popular uprising among the Jews whose land they controlled; but the greater, and theological, purpose was that in dying the excruciating death that he did, Jesus was taking upon himself the sins and the fallen nature of humanity itself. He was making the sacrifice, taking death upon himself, as act of atonement on our behalf, so that we did not have to do it; and thereby making us fit and worthy for the good graces and the love of God. By ourselves, and by our own efforts - so this doctrine holds - we are not worthy of God's love and acceptance. But by taking our unworthiness upon himself and suffering and dying on our behalf, Jesus has rendered us worthy to God anyway. That's the "Cliff Notes" version of the Doctrine of the Atonement.
Let me tell you, this is very powerful stuff when applied in certain ways. If you're sitting in a pew, say at a revival meeting, or even a regular church service in the one in which I was raised, and you're carrying a weight of guilt or misgivings over stuff you know you did wrong; and then you hear that God will forgive you for all of it if you'll just accept and believe what Jesus has already done for you - well, that'll get you off your feet and down to the altar in a hurry. You're still expected to make amends for your misdeeds when it comes to those you have wronged. You're not off the hook there. But now you can do so as one who - thanks to Jesus' act of Atonement - has been reconciled to God. This is why the cross is the central symbol of Christianity. It is to remind those of the faith of what Jesus did on their behalf.
One of the crises of faith I came to in my early adulthood occurred when I began to seriously think about all this. I'd seriously thought about it before, of course, but always from a stance of acceptance. But now I was thinking critically. Wait a minute here. Sure, perfect I'm not. Indeed, I know I've done things that have been harmful and hurtful to others, and for which I do need their forgiveness. Yes, there is a fallen side to my nature so that, on occasion, even when I know what is the right and good thing to do I still don't do it. There are times in my life when I actually can identify with St. Paul where he says "The good that I would I cannot do." Not all the time, but enough times to know that the guy was onto something.
But wait a minute. Even given all that, I see nothing in my misdeeds - as much as I regret them; and nothing in my essential nature - flawed as I know it is - that would warrant a poor and terribly misunderstood soul to have to die a horrible death on my behalf some 2000 years ago. At some point I realized that those dots no longer connected for me, and my path took a turning point that in time led me to this faith tradition of Unitarian Universalism. I say this, as I hope you know, not to denigrate the faith of others for whom those dots do connect. I just reached a point where they no longer did for me.
Interestingly enough, when I found my way to the UU neighborhood and home, I learned that one of the early architects of our faith went through the same struggle of mind and spirit as I had. That was comforting to learn. Clear back in 1803, or thereabouts, (he worked on it off and on for several years) the Rev. Hosea Ballou wrote what is now regarded as one of the founding documents of American Universalism and titled it "A Treatise on Atonement." Ballou was originally a New Hampshire Baptist country preacher. He was largely self-educated. His formal education went to the third grade. He who switched over to Universalism, right at the time that it was getting a good foot-hold in this country, after apparently mulling over some of the same thoughts I had about 170 years or so before I had them.
Ballou's "Treatise on Atonement" (again, the Cliff Notes version here) held that Jesus' mission on Earth was indeed to save us from our fallen and sinful selves, but not through an Act of Atonement by way of his death; but rather through his life and teachings that can call and guide us from our sometimes broken selves to a more wholistic and restored and reconciled-to-God state of living. Jesus' death was held up as an example of what it can sometimes mean to remain faithful to your principles, values, and calling, rather than as an act of atonement for the sins of humanity. Ballou's "Treatise..." served as the basis for Universalist Christianity throughout the 19th and into the mid 20th centuries. And I would also say that mainstream moderate-to-liberal Protestant Christianity today contains a good deal of what Ballou was saying over 200 years ago.
The care one needs to exercise, as I have come to learn, in throwing off and getting rid of a doctrine or dogma, is to not throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water (to use an overworked, but still quite apt, metaphor). The need for atonement, for making amends, for both seeking and offering forgiveness, and for seeking to live a more reconciled and at-peace-with-oneself kind of life - these are all still very real human needs. This is why, I believe, they are also common themes that appear in many of the world's religious traditions.
Today at sundown, in fact, marks the beginning of the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur. It also marks the culmination of a 10 day observance of the Jewish New Year beginning with Rosh Hashanah. The 10 days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, which mark the beginning of the Jewish New Year, have the approximately same level of significance and sacredness on the Jewish Calendar as do the seven days from Palm Sunday to Easter on the Christian Calendar. And "Yom Kippur", as many of you know I'm sure, means "Day of Atonement." There's that word again. It is a central theme in Judaism as well.
I am far less familiar with how the idea of atonement is dealt with in Judaism than I am in Christianity but here's what I do know: As a person of the Jewish faith approaches the Jewish New Year, it is important that they do so by first settling all of their offenses and misdeeds of the previous year with both God and their fellow human beings. With God, or Yahweh, the settling up - or atoning - is done by means of fasting on Yom Kippur and by observing certain rituals. However before you even get around to settling up with God, you are first supposed to settle up any debt of wrongdoing you've incurred with any of your fellow human beings first. In other words, you make amends with your fellow human beings - you seek their forgiveness in whatever ways you can, that is - and then God is ready to settle up with you. And there may be others of your faith who feel they need your forgiveness as well, so they seek atonement from you so they can then go to God for Divine Atonement.
While my theology balks a bit at the idea of a Supreme Being who dispenses Divine forgiveness, I still like the process here. You have to get right with any of your fellow human beings whom you've wronged in any way, so you can then get right with the Universe, or Life Itself, as it were. We all need to do that from time to time - Jewish or not; and nobody has to die a horribly bloody death with this type of approach.
Moving out from this, what does it mean, then, to seek forgiveness and offer apologies? I like to put apologies in two categories. We can keep it simple by calling them Category One and Category Two apologies. A Category One apology is one offered primarily for the sake of covering or saving one's behind. You see them in the political realm all the time - like in the mess U.S. Senator George Allen of Virginia has created for himself in his current campaign for re-election. He used a racial slur to refer to a young American man of Indian descent and he's been trying to work his way out of it ever since. These kinds of apologies often begin with the word "If." Whether its fair of me or not, whenever I hear an apology offered that begins with the word "if," I usually discount it before it's even spoken. "If my unfortunate choice of words brought offense to some..." Or "If my well intentioned actions caused pain for some...". All that nifty little construct does is take the responsibility off the person who is ostensibly making the apology, and actually places the onus of being offended or hurt on the very person or persons to whom the apology is supposedly being extended. With most apologies that begin with the word "if," there is no taking of responsibility for one's actions.
Then there's the Category Two apology, which is one that really does seek forgiveness and one that is offered in the spirit of atoning for a wrong committed. A Category Two apology, as I'm calling it, is one that is offered when we know we have betrayed some of the very principles and actions we're attempting to live by, or from the knowledge that we've done harm or brought a rupture to a relationship we value. This is usually a personal relationship; or it could be a larger relationship we feel we have with some aspect of humanity, with Life itself, or with that which we sense is greater than ourselves.
I don't know that I can say much more about Category Two apologies and atonements, other than to note that they are offered for the sake, and in the hope, of restoring a relationship. But seeking forgiveness and offering amends or atonements does not accomplish that on its own, as it only addresses one side of a broken relationship or injury. I may need to offer an apology, and try to make good on an injury I caused in order to be in a right relationship with myself. The person on the other side - from whom I'm seeking forgiveness - may or may not be in a position to extend it in a way that will bring about true reconciliation.
This gets me to the flip side of this matter of forgiveness and atonement that I'd like to speak to for the final part of my thoughts for this morning. Dr. Jack Kornfield, a clinical psychologist and a well respected and renowned teacher of Theravada Buddhism, has noted that "forgiveness means giving up all hope of a better past." I had to work on that one for awhile. At first reading it struck me as unduly cynical until I figured out what I at least think he meant by it. I think he means that forgiveness is about how much of, and in what way, you want to carry some of the more painful parts of your past with you. It is at least as much about what you need to do for yourself as it is for the person from whom you are seeking forgiveness.
In thinking on Dr. Kornfield's words I recalled something a former hostage had once said after his release. It was Father Lawrence Jenco. In the mid-1980s, while Director for Catholic Relief Services in Lebanon, Father Jenco was kidnapped and held hostage for 564 days in Beirut by a radical Shiite extremist group that was operating there at the time. One of his co-captors was Terry Andersen.
After his release he was interviewed and spoke about why, even though he could never forget the horrible ways in which he'd been treated, he still came to feel - although it took some time - the need to forgive his captors. He's some of what he said: "It may be because one guard would kneel on my pancreas with his full weight that I went through acute pancreatitis recently. And I have a 20% hearing loss [due to my treatment in captivity]. There are all kinds of pain we enter into in our lives. But I don't want to lug my pain on so that it becomes the focal point of my history."
Think on that one line: "I don't want to lug my pain on so that it becomes the focal point of my history". Father Jenco is saying that he came to the point - after, I'm sure, working his way through a tremendous amount of anger - to where he had to forgive his captors as a way of ridding himself of the psychic pain he was carrying from his days in captivity. He knew his physical maladies would be with him for the rest of his life - and he died of cancer about 10 years ago - but he couldn't carry the burden of hatred for what had been done to him for the rest of his life. He could not allow his hatred to define the remainder of his life.
"Forgiveness means giving up all hope of a better past." For Father Jenco, giving up that hope was necessary in order to free him up to truly live out the rest of his life. "My history," as he put it, "is much more than 564 days in Lebanon." For Father Jenco, offering forgiveness was his way of reclaiming, and reaffirming the history or the story of his whole life.
I realize that not everyone who had been grievously and painfully wronged - or sinned against, to use the more traditional language - can get to the place that Father Jenco did. Adult survivors of early childhood abuse, be it physical, emotional, or sexual, find it very difficult, for all kinds of understandable reasons, to get to that point. I'm certainly not going to stand here and say that everyone who has been terribly hurt has to, or should, follow Father Jenco's path and example. But I do offer him and his ordeal and his ability to reconcile himself to it, as an example of just how powerful the act of forgiveness can be for the person offering it if he or she can come to that point.
I'll close with this: Religious communities, whatever their orientation and however liberal or conservative they may be, are also human communities. As such, they contain within then the best that is in men and women and children; as well as our human foibles, shortcomings, and failings. These are the lives we bring to a community like this one, seeking greater wholeness, seeking greater levels of relationship, and sometimes seeking the forgiveness and the reconciliation needed to get to those levels. We live our lives by coming into, and then occasionally falling out of, right relationships with ourselves, with others, with life, and with that which transcends our lives. We live our lives by coming into, and then having to be called back into, the circle of life and love itself. Let us each do our best to keep that circle whole and growing in the life we are continually creating here.
Stephen D. Edington
October 1, 2006
