"Yom Kippur — Salvation and Atonement"

Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder, October 5, 2003

OPENING WORDS

We meet together to celebrate who we are, to share the insights which give meaning and hope to our lives, to learn from the wisdom of others, that their truths may contribute to our understanding. We meet, we share, we learn; we celebrate our coming together.

MEDITATION

Some Wishes for You

I wish for you a troubled heart at times
As woes of world and friend come close beside And keep you sleepless.
I wish for you the thrill of knowing
Who you are,
Where you stand,
And why.
Especially why.
Not prosperity, but dreams I wish for you;
Not riches, but a sense of your own worth I wish
For you.
Not even long life, however proud we'd be to have it so.
But life that is crammed with living,

Hour by hour.
And love I wish for you;
May you give it frequently.
I wish for you solitude in the midst of company,
And a mind full of company within your quiet times.
Full todays I wish for you, and full tomorrows.

Charles S. Stevens, Jr.
The Gift of the Ordinary, 1985

READING

God and Man Have a Task in Common

Evil is not only a threat, it is also a challenge. Neither the recognition of the peril nor faith in the redemptive power of God is sufficient to solve the tragic predicament of the world. We cannot stem the tide of evil by taking refuge in temples, by fervently imploring the restrained omnipotence of God.

The mitsvah, the humble single act of serving God, of helping man, of cleansing the self, is our way of dealing with the problem. We do not know how to solve the problem of evil, but we are not exempt from dealing with evils.....

.....At the end of days, evil will be conquered by the One; in historic times, evils must be conquered one by one.

Jewish tradition, though conscious of the perils and pitfalls of existence, is a constant reminder of the grand and everlasting opportunities to do the good. We are taught to love life in this world because of the possibilities of charity and sanctity, because of the many ways open to us in which to serve the Lord. "More precious, therefore, than all of life in the world to come is a single hour of life on earth-an hour of repentance and good deed.

Abraham Joshua Heschel
God in Search of Man

SERMON

“At the ritual of the Day of Atonement the High Priest would cast lots upon two goats; one lot for the Lord and other lot for sin [Azazel].  The purpose of this ritual of the goat on which the lot fell for sin was to atone for the evil.  The High Priest would lay both hands upon the head of the goat, ‘and confess over him all of the iniquities for the children of Israel, all their transgressions, all their sins.’  While the purpose of the goat upon which the lot fell for the Lord was to atone for the Holy, ‘to make atonement for the holy place, because of the uncleannesses of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions, even all their sins; and so shall he do for the tent of meeting, that dwells with them in the midst of their uncleannesses.’ On the most sacred day of the year the supreme task was to atone for the Holy.  It preceded the sacrifice, the purpose of which was to atone for the sins.”

This ritual was the way Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was celebrated in ancient Israel.  It was and is the most sacred day of the year in the Jewish calendar.  It is a day of fasting and prayers that last the entire day.  It is for synagogues what Easter is for churches; one of the few occasions that everyone shows up for no matter how fallen from the faith they may be.  Obviously no one sacrifices goats anymore.  Interestingly though this practice is where we get the concept of a “scapegoat” that vicariously takes on the sins of a person or community and then is symbolically killed or sent away.  The parallels to Christianity are fairly clear.  This was no accident of course since the early Christians were themselves Jews familiar with the practices and scriptures associated with Yom Kippur.  They figured if transferring a community’s sins onto a goat, and then killing it, was sufficient for washing away their guilt for one year, then transferring sins to the son of God, and having him sacrificed, does washes away sin for everyone everywhere and always.  In order to cope with the Romans killing their messiah, the Christians borrowed from the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, in a very creative and meaningful way, to develop their own understanding of how their guy died.  It is a view, germane in some periods and more explicit in others, which has sustained Christianity for centuries.

In the interest of full disclosure though, I must admit that I never really liked this pat of Christianity much when I was a boy.  I grew up in a fairly liberal Church, but I distinctly remember the Sunday when a guest minister came to speak in our pulpit.  He decided to explore some of the themes that we usually didn’t talk much about in our rural United Church of Christ congregation.  He went on and on about how all people are sinners and there is nothing any of us can do about it.  Then he trotted out that famous St. Paul slogan that I have seen and heard a million times since, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  There is an unbridgeable existential gulf of alienation that exists between the divine presence and the human condition.  Nothing can bridge it except faith in Jesus.  But this grace is passive.  No one can make it happen, it just happens as a gift of God.

Well I remember leaving Church that morning and walking back to the car thinking, “Yeah well, that might be true for you buddy, but not me.  I am going to heaven.”  Now that I think of it, maybe I was a teenager when this happened.  That is a good teenager response.  Kids are the toughest to preach to because they always ask the most difficult questions.  But ever since, I have never really liked this wallowing in our own iniquity and sin unable to help ourselves and patiently waiting for God to lend a hand.  Frankly it has always seemed a little masochistic to me.  Of course that is not an argument against this idea; it’s just a statement of a personal preference.  

Because there is so much overlap between the repentance and salvation themes of Yom Kippur and Lutheran Protestant Christianity, sometimes I feel the same discomfort about Yom Kippur.  It is a holiday that urges us to atone for not following all of the rules of the Torah, for sinning against God, your neighbor, and yourself.  But I always wonder: Is this world really fallen?  Is there a better one than this waiting for me?  Can I bring about my own salvation?  Is it an active or passive process?  Or is it even necessary?  What is it exactly that I need to be saved from in the first place?

The ancient Greeks, specifically Plato, believed that this physical place is a bad place.  They believed that the realm of forms or ideas is perfect, but the world of physical reality is broken and imperfect.  I can imagine a perfect triangle in my mind, one where all the sides are exactly equal and the corners come to a perfect point.  However, it is impossible for me to draw the perfect triangle on a piece of paper.  I cannot build a triangle that is exactly perfect as the one in my mind.  Perfection is an ideal that all other triangles are measured to, but none can ever achieve.  Therefore the physical world is inferior to the world of ideas.

Christianity on the other hand, believed the opposite.  In the first chapter of Genesis God creates the world and declares creation to be good.  Later God gives humanity dominion over the earth and all other creatures that occupy it.  The understanding obviously is that the world and everything in it is a reward not a punishment.  The world itself is a fundamentally good place; it’s the people in it that mess everything up.

Jews of course also read the Old Testament account of creation, but it is not the only creation story in Judaism.  In esoteric or mystical Judaism, known as Kabbalah, there is an additional creation myth.  In this story God is more impersonal than in Genesis.  God decides to create the world by having its energy pervade the entire universe.  God pours its essence into the physical world sort of like how one might pour steel into a mold at a steel mill.  Unfortunately God is not much of a structural engineer, and the walls of the vessel break.  The result is that there is a big explosion, the vessel, which in this case is the physical world, breaks and shards of it go flying everywhere.  But not only is the physical world broken, but so is God.  Sparks of the divine fly everywhere and are encapsulated in these shards of the physical world.  Thus the physical world is a messy combination of matter and the divine spark, both of which are fragmented and yearn to be made hole.

This is an interesting story.  The world is not fallen as a result of sin, but rather fragmented, isolated, and compartmentalized.  And yet it is not separate from God, because there is hidden in these shards little sparks that can be found.  Mystical Judaism then is an attempt to understand the world not as fallen, but fragmented.  The goal of life then is to help in the repair of the world, the tikkun alam in Hebrew, by trying to piece the fragments together.  I like this way of looking at things.  It should be noted that “wholeness” and “holiness” share the same root.  The Holy is that which is whole.  In fact, the world “religion” comes from the Latin “religre” which means “to bind back” or “to bind together.”  Religion then can be understood as the activity of binding things together.  Some would no doubt say the binding of each individual soul to God.  But it is much more than that.  It is binding people to each other in a spiritual community.  It is binding the haves to the have-nots.  It is an activity of binding ignorance to understanding, compassion and wisdom, hurting to healing.  Tikkun alam, the gathering of the divine fragments, is a religious activity.

But how do we do this?  It is one thing to say that the world is fragmented and it is our job to gather the pieces together into one whole and holy unity.  It is another thing all together to actually do it.  How do we work for the repair of the world?  If we live in a humpty dumpty world, how do we get it all put back together again?  In Judaism, the answer is mitzvah.  Mitzvah is a term that is not easily translated into too many other languages, mostly because it has a number of diverse meanings.  If we were to put on our Luther glasses for the moment, we might translate mitzvah as “obeying the sacred commandments of the Torah or Old Testament.”  For Protestants, “the law” takes on rather negative connotations because it is impossible to follow all of those rules, and so they just further demonstrate how all of us are fallen sinners.  Cue the music and begin the self-flagellation.  The Jews have a slightly more optimistic view of this though.  Of course it is impossible to follow all of the rules in the Bible.  But mitzvah also means doing good things for others, being ethical and compassionate to others, to “serve God with joy.”  It is believed that being a good person and doing good deeds for others, even if they are not explicitly spelled out somewhere, is mitzvah.  Mitzvah is the ethical component of religion.

It is through these sometimes small and simple acts of kindness and compassion that the world is brought back together and made whole.  As Abraham Joshua Heschel writes in today’s reading the Jewish answer to evil is not some grandiose metaphysical answer for everything.  No one can stop evil itself only evils, one act of compassion at a time, one person at a time.  Heschel writes this, “The world is in need of redemption, but the redemption must not be expected to happen as an act of sheer grace.  Man’s task is to make the world worthy of redemption.  His faith and his works are preparations for the ultimate redemption.”  Mitzvah is an active form of salvation is a fragmented world longing to be made whole.  Note however that salvation is not entirely active; if it were I would be able to will myself into an enlightened state twenty-four hours a day.  But waiting around tarrying for the spirit will not help the world.  It requires some action.

Every individual act of compassion is a mitzvah.  Every time we live out in our day-today lives the religious values we profess to hold, we are helping to repair the fragmented world.  Let me give you an example.  I have been rather hard on the Christians this morning, so I want to make up for it (this is the “Day of Atonement”) by telling a story about my friend Damien.  My friend Damien is probably my best friend in the entire world.  I say this because I think it is an important fact to bear in mind since I am about to tell an embarrassing story about him.  Actually all of my best stories about Damien are embarrassing to him!  Damien and I have been friends literally since the fifth grade, and remained so throughout high school and to this very day.  Shortly after we graduated from high school, we had the world on a string.  We were basking in the glow of graduation and our open houses the week before.  Damien gotten a used car from his parents earlier in the year, and we decided that since it was early in our summer vacation that we would drive down to Toledo, about an hour away, to hang out in the big city, see a movie, and generally do nothing in particular just because we could!  

One important element you should know about Damien, and he will admit this himself, is that he is not very handy with cars.  I am not either, but Damien is notorious.  It seems that his car was having some radiator problems, and every time he would turn the car off it would steam and sputter and make all kinds of noise.  So on this glorious summer day we are driving down the interstate highway to Ohio when the engine’s temperature light comes on.  I was in the passenger seat and did not notice this myself.  Apparently Damien thought this light was just a general suggestion, sort of an FYI about the state of the engine.  He did not realize that this was a serious problem until the car began to stall out at about 50 miles per hour on a three-lane highway.  Fortunately we were able to coast over to the shoulder unhurt.  But this car was going nowhere.  

So there we were, stranded in the days long before cell phones.  Our parents knew where we were going, but would not expect us home for hours.  We were not in a familiar part of town, and had no idea where the nearest garage was.  We just kept looking at each other not sure whether to laugh or cry.  After what seemed like forever, a minivan pulled out of the whizzing traffic and came to our aid.  As it turned out it was a husband and wife who were Christian missionaries and had a minivan full of evangelical material.  I don’t think I have ever been so grateful to anyone so much in my life.  They took us to the next exit where there was a repair shop with a tow truck.  My Dad came down and rescued us, and accessed the very extensive damage to Damien’s engine.  

I remember for months afterwards I would drive down the road in my own car waiting to see someone pulled over in need of assistance.  Once I saw a car off to the side of the road and the man walking around in a field.  I stopped to help, to somehow return the karmic favor to the universe.  It turned out the guys was a farmer who wanted to take a closer look at how the crops were growing.  I was a little disappointed.

What those minivan missionaries did was a mitzvah, a small act of compassion and kindness that is in keeping with their religious values.  They did not try to convert us or anything like that, but the power of their actions was contagious.  They evangelized through example.  My friends, the divine spark is everywhere.  The goal of salvation is to live a full and authentic existence.  It is not merely to praise God and stroke his ego or sit in rapt in meditative concentration while the world goes to hell.  One cannot meditate and then act like a jerk to your kids or the people at work.  We must strive to live lives that are integrated, to have all of the parts in harmony, to try to have them be consistent and coherent.  That is how we repair the world.  That is the lesson that Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is trying to teach us.  It is a day that proclaims a God that is not an angry schoolteacher demanding perfection from everyone.  Rather it is a God that gives out a lot of “A”s for effort.  I think whether or not we believe in any God at all, it is important to do the work to try and repair the world.  May redemption come to us one act of compassion at a time.  Amen Blessed Be.

Recommended Books:
Armstrong, Karen. The History of God
Heschel, Abraham Joshua.  God in Search of Man; a Philosophy of Judaism

CLOSING WORDS

We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight. Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are, and, renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown.