When they finished eating, Jesus asked Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”

Simon replied, “Yes, Lord, you know I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.”   16 Jesus asked a second time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

Simon replied, “Yes, Lord, you know I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Take care of my sheep.”   17 He asked a third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

Peter was sad that Jesus asked him a third time, “Do you love me?” He replied, “Lord, you know everything; you know I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.   18 I assure you that when you were younger you tied your own belt and walked around wherever you wanted. When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands and another will tie your belt and lead you where you don’t want to go.”   19 He said this to show the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. After saying this, Jesus said to Peter, “Follow me.” (Common English Bible)

Mayday 2022

You could see the chef standing with his food, neatly lined up on trays and in ramekins, casually dressed in jeans, pullover, and ballcap, with a mask on to protect his customers. It’s a job he took up almost on an impulse for the sake of his kids. But it’s not at his kids’ favorite restaurant, it’s at their elementary school. His customers are the students. And he’s not a professionally trained chef, but a monstrously sized, recently retired NFL lineman.

Jared Veldheer’s career ended ingloriously—he tested positive for a banned substance and retired—and he needed something completely different, not at all related to football, to dedicate himself to. When the kitchen manager at his kids’ school stepped down just weeks before the start of the school year, he took the $15/hour positionafter playing professional football for tens of millions of dollars.

Like most pro athletes, Veldheer was unaccustomed to doing the bare minimum—competing at so high a level means you must demand excellence of yourself—and he did his best to introduce the children to new foods, like Korean bulgogi and Indian tikka masala while keeping the cost of lunch as accessible as possible at $3.50 a student.

It was a profound shift to go from the bright Sunday stadium lights to the duller fluorescent cafeteria weekday lights, but such is also often the case for professional athletes—after dedicating themselves so singularly to their craft for decades, suddenly in their thirties they find those careers ended and a new purpose required. Many go into coaching; others may go into commentary. And Jared Veldheer went into feeding our children.

I empathize with athletes having to answer that “what next?” question in their thirties, because after preparing myself for ministry pretty much since I was eighteen, fully half of my life ago, I am now in the position of looking at doing something significantly different with my life, at least for the foreseeable future. And you as a congregation are looking at perhaps a different future now.

And maybe, just maybe, the subtext of this story of Jesus and Peter is that…that is all okay.

The context of this famous story matters greatly—Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loves Him and to feed His sheep, and that number is not just pulled out of a hat. It mirrors the three times that Peter denied Jesus just days prior. Each affirmation of love, each “feed my sheep,” is meant to match up to, and overcome, an “I don’t know him.”

And because of that, even more than Peter’s commissioning of Jesus in Matthew 16, I believe this represents the turning point for Peter. Up to this point—which is to say for pretty much the entirety of the Gospels—the male followers of Jesus have been failures of discipleship. They send away children, bicker amongst themselves, and fail in the miracles that Jesus empowers them to perform. Then, come the Passion, one betrays Jesus, another denies Him, and the other ten vanish into the ether while the female followers remain as witnesses. Then when the tomb is discovered empty, the male followers dismiss the women’s accounts as idle fairytales. All in all, they prove disappointing.

That begins to change here. Peter is ultimately wounded that Jesus seems to doubt Peter’s love of Him, and while certainly understandable, it surely must betray a lack of self-awareness on Peter’s part after everything I just said concerning the male disciples’ failures and shortcomings.

But the Peter of Acts is not the Peter of the Gospels. The Peter of Acts is a preacher who reaches thousands, who performs miracles with great success, and who shepherds the embryonic church through its first three tumultuous decades.

Peter, as so many of us who have been saved and shepherded by Jesus, is transformed. A fisherman has become a shepherd. A disciple has become the first pope. But even more fundamentally, a child of God becomes a saint of God.

Valley has a lovely All Saints Day worship tradition, and I am very sad that I will not be here come the last Sunday in October or first Sunday in November for the remembrances of Joan Noland and Hattie Belle Lester, each of whose funerals I was humbled to officiate. But I do hope today that we can imagine together the transformation from sheep being fed by shepherds to saints—the shepherds who feed the next generation of sheep. We are fed as sheep so that we in turn can feed others as shepherds. Our being fed was always meant to beget our transformation in Christ.

And so while church can be familiar to us, a place to feel at home, it was never meant to be a place to keep us in stasis, the same always and forever. We are dynamic creations of a dynamic God, called by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount to perfect ourselves just as God in heaven is perfect.

Peter, especially in the Gospels, was not perfect. But Jesus does not call upon Peter to feed His sheep based on perfection. Jesus calls upon Peter based on Peter’s ability and willingness to perfect himself—not to be perfect, but to perfect.

In other words, what if we stopped thinking of perfect as a state of being and started thinking of it as a verb, as a state of doing?

Call it peer pressure, or trying to keep up with the Joneses, or whatever you wish, but I can see the pressure to be perfect, at least outwardly, if not inwardly. To appear put together to whomever you come across even if inside you’re a mess, or to seem like you’ve got the answers or it all figured out when inside you haven’t a clue, those pressures are real, especially in a context that expects a certain standard, a certain degree of success. And consequently, if you feel like you aren’t meeting that standard—even if you really are!—it can feel just devastating.

What if, instead of trying to project and broadcast perfection, we worked on perfecting ourselves, and each other?

More than anything else, I think, this is what I would wish for you as our paths soon part—that we are able to perfect ourselves each along our own soon-diverging paths, but that especially you would not feel the need to project or broadcast perfection to your next minister, but instead partner with them so that they can perfect you, and you them.

Or, to put it in John 21, you can each feed each other.

I do hope with all my being that I have been able to feed you in some form or fashion during my time with you—even if my particular Scriptural or homiletical diet was not always to your liking. But most of all, I hope that I offered to you a diet of deeper understanding of God’s Word such that you felt even a little bit more secure in feeding yourselves. We are Disciples of Christ after all, noncreedal to our core and trusting in each believer’s ability to study the Word of God, and I hope that I have given you something to strengthen your own study of God’s Word.

Because when Jesus says to feed His sheep, we are called not just to feed but to teach how then go feed others. It is the difference between a parent feeding their child directly and teaching their child how to eat. We are called to do both, because the former meets the immediate need when we are at our most helpless and vulnerable, and the latter cultivates sustainability and longevity. So we feed while also teaching. We nourish while also enriching. We nurture while also building up. Put another way, we feed the children in the school cafeteria…but not just by meeting their nutritional needs, but by expanding their horizons, honoring them as entire people and not merely mouths to feed, and in so doing communicate to them that they are worthy of our very best.

We do what a retired NFL lineman disgraced into retirement by a positive drug test chose to do. Jared Veldheer could afford to do so without thought to the monetary reward. We might not be so fortunate, and it is important to say that on Mayday. I did not set it up this way intentionally, but my first sermon with you fell on Labor Day weekend, and my final message falls on another day celebrating the dignity of well-compensated work in Mayday. An integral, indispensable aspect of the dignity that work is meant to provide is that it should be rewarded accordingly. And the spiritual reward of feeding the sheep, of empowering them to transform from sheep to shepherd to saint, to go out and feed others, is beyond measure.

Feeding one another begets transformation. If we want to see ourselves made into new creations in Christ, if we want to see the church grow into a new way of being, if we want to see a world that is more loving and equal, more concerned with matters of justice and peace than matters of selfishness and showboating, that begins with the three-word commissioning of Peter by Jesus: Feed. My. Sheep.

More than anything else, Valley, that is my hope for you going forward, because from those three words comes everything, just like from the four words “Let there be light” in Genesis 1 came all of creation.

It is uncommonly rare that so few words contain so much. And yet these do. Power to inspire, to imagine, to perfect beauty from ashes, life from dirt and wind, and blooms from the parched desert. Their sheer creative power stands against the power of other words to destroy and destruct.

And in response to that destructive power that had sentenced Him to the cross just days earlier while His foremost disciple abandoned and then denied Him, Jesus has three words: Feed. My. Sheep.

Do you love me, asks the Lord.

We can protest all we want that the Lord knows that we love Him, but the true test of whether we do, and whether we will, is boiled down into some very short sentences that nevertheless communicate multitudes: worship God, follow Christ, and feed the sheep.

Valley Christian Church, I give you back to God. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

May 1, 2022

Therefore, brothers and sisters, be eager to confirm your call and election. Do this and you will never ever be lost.   11 In this way you will receive a rich welcome into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.

12 So I’ll keep reminding you about these things, although you already know them and stand secure in the truth you have.   13 I think it’s right that I keep stirring up your memory, as long as I’m alive.  (Common English Bible)

Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day 2022

A flickering eternal flame acts as a widely understood symbol of memory and remembrance. One such flame stands guard over the grave of John F. Kennedy, the last US president to be assassinated. His assassination was one of those events that my parents’ generation remembers where they were when they learned the news. Another eternal flame keeps vigil over the grave of Elvis Presley not too far northwest of us at Graceland. In my hometown of Kansas City, steam is used to create a flame from the 265-foot Liberty Tower that is part of the National World War I Memorial and Museum. Remembering, memorial, memory, we root ourselves through memory to these spots in our lives.

And here, in Alabama, in 1836, the Muscogee/Creek nation, when they were expelled from these lands by federal troops and forcibly sent to Oklahoma, they took with them an eternal flame that became the dedication point of the lands in Oklahoma that now bear the Muscogee name.

Just this month, over 185 years later, a homecoming that has been a decade in the making was finally experienced as members of the Muscogee nation organized a homecoming—the translation of their term is literally, “we have come back” in nearby Oxford, Alabama in partnership with the city. They hope that this is the start of a deeper and stronger cultural Muscogee presence in the land that had been their home.

Because wherever you are on this planet orbiting the sun at high speed, home is everything. And memory of that home is deep and abiding. Just imagine your own home, or whatever home you have lived in the longest, or that you lived in during your most formative years. Your memories of it are apt to be strong, and unlikely to go anywhere soon.

I say that on a day, April 24, that remembers the genocide that took my family’s homeland from them, that forced them to ransom everything and leaved murdered loved ones behind in the dust to flee first to Russia, then after the Bolsheviks took over, across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to the United States, as well as to Lebanon and Syria. Armenians remember today because it began the genocide as Armenian community leaders began to be rounded up, incarcerated, and summarily executed. Just over a week later, my great-great uncle Mardiros, his son Mourad, and my great-great grandfather Sarkis would all be dead. A year later, my great-great grandmothers Mariam and Altoon both died. And a year after her, Mardiros’s widow Yester and brother-in-law Bedros would die as well. And the place that had been my family’s home for…I don’t even know how long…was gone to us forever. The rest of my family had to flee or die. It was that simple.

My family landed here in 1919, but just five years later, partly in reaction to the influx of Armenian Genocide refugees, the United States banned Armenians—among several other nationalities—from immigrating to the United States for the next thirty years. And so even a place that became home by necessity over the span of generations communicated very clearly that it did not want to be home to my people. I have been asked here at Valley why I am so “obsessed” with my ethnic identity when the reality is that if I did not carry the stories of my ancestors nobody else would because the place in which we would do so was forcibly taken from us in a way that it has not for you unless you are also descended from survivors of genocide or chattel slavery. Memory is what we have left.

So, again I say: home is everything. And what we choose to remember of home is deep and abiding.

For most of you, Valley has been your spiritual home for many years, and I want to spend my penultimate sermon with you as your minister talking about what we can choose to remember of our time together: memories and lessons learned, highs and lows, special occasions and day-to-day labor. All of it is on the table.

For our time together is about to become a memory, and how we treat our memories is a profound expression of our values. What we choose to remember, what we choose to forget, all of it is like what we choose to spend money on or how we spend our time. We reveal our priorities in what we, individually and communally, devote our memorials and monuments to.

We celebrated the Resurrection of the Lord one week ago, on Easter Sunday. We choose to remember that as an expression of our values. We choose to remember our Lord every Sunday at the table, where He explicitly commands us to remember Him, as an expression of our values. Every December in worship, we remember Christmas. Every Lent, we remember the temptation in the wilderness. Our order of worship and our church calendar are, in no small part, acts of memory, of remembering the life and public ministry of our Lord.

We choose to remember that. We do not have to do so. Look around, nobody is forcing us to be here. We are here by choice, participating in the remembrance of God in Christ by choice.

And in those almost two years of us doing so together, there are many things I hope we will each choose to remember: that when covid unleashed itself upon humanity, we saw through together what I pray will have been the worst and deadliest days. From behind computer screens and masks we worshiped in safety the author of life as a rebuke to the wrath of death’s own pestilence. Thank God we have been successful. Some of you have contracted covid, some of you have had friends or relatives die from it. But among our number, none have been hospitalized and none have died. I said from the beginning that our goal was to commit to nobody missing, nobody claimed by the grave. And like the Risen Christ of Easter Sunday, we have so far been victorious.

I cannot tell you how much that means to me, but doubly so on a day I and my people set aside to honor the ancestors we lost to the killing deserts. Death authors many a human tragedy and calamity, very often with humanity holding the writing pen, but once death has had its say, we respond. And I hope that the faithfulness that we have shown in our response to covid is neither forgotten nor jettisoned after I am gone.

If you disagree, you will have to forgive me such wishes, but I believe them to be entirely Biblical. It is why I chose this passage from 2 Peter 1, in which the writer says that they may not be present for much longer, but that they still stir up the memory of the faithful community so that the brethren, for their sake. And it meant a lot to me when I first read those words because that expresses a lot of my relationship with the church—stirring up memory so that the truth might be honored. Or in less poetic terms, I sometimes show my love for the church by poking it with a stick.

The writer of 2 Peter pokes with a stick for a purely noble reason, that the church might remember the singular power of truth. Truth, too, is something we can choose to remember, or to forget. In a time in which disinformation and misinformation, convenient euphemisms for lies and false witness, reign over our minds, truth has been driven from the public square like a refugee from genocide—beaten and hunted, wretched and desperate.

And yet Jesus famously teaches in John 8 that this hounded and mistreated truth is what we must know, and what will set us free.

Memory, if it retains truth, is a powerful gift from God. And it is my hope that we can share in the depth of that truth as we remember our time together—of church milestones and anniversaries shared, of sisters in Christ buried, of new additions and expansions to our lovely campus, but also of hopes and dreams that have gone unfulfilled.

I hope that will be an important exercise going forward during the upcoming interim period, because I want Valley to respect the memory of what we said we wanted to do together: to reimagine evangelism, reconnect with the community around us, and reengage with younger generations for whom we as Disciples of Christ have something important to offer.

Because even if that is not what we got to do together—and even if it is not what everyone in fact wanted to do together—those hopes still lived, and they may live still. The pandemic surely played a part in scotching those hopes, but I hope and pray that after I am gone, you will ask yourselves about those hopes…whether they still live, if so then how deeply, and what that might mean for this, your spiritual home.

Valley has been my spiritual home too for this season, and my final hopes for you will have to wait until next Sunday, for my very last sermon. But for now, I will say that I do hope that you will each, as it were, continue poking each other with sticks to remind one another of the truths we share, the truths we hold dear. A home that is built on truth is a home built upon rock. The home that is built on half-truths, or worse, misinformation or disinformation, is the home built upon sand, that will ultimately wash away with the tides. Remember that.

And remember that home stretches beyond today, or tomorrow, or the next. Home stretches across centuries. It is why I remember where my family came from, and why. I remember who we left behind, and what we had to leave behind in order to live. So too, I imagine, have the Muscogee peoples who at long last saw Alabama again after 185 years, if only to say, “I have come back.” Because when it is home you are talking about, being able to return to it is vital to our humanity.

Home is everything. But it is not only physical. It is spiritual, ethereal, living in multiple planes of existence, in ways both rooted here, in earth and dirt, but also in our minds, in our memories. Valley as a spiritual home for me, and Carrie and Sadie, will soon be one of those memories. And so memory, too, is everything.

Memory is everything. And know that whatever else may come, and whatever else has, in what I choose to remember, I will choose to remember well these days of when your pastor was me.

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

April 24, 2022, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day

Very early in the morning on the first day of the week, the women went to the tomb, bringing the fragrant spices they had prepared. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in, they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 They didn’t know what to make of this. Suddenly, two men were standing beside them in gleaming bright clothing. 5 The women were frightened and bowed their faces toward the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6 He isn’t here, but has been raised. Remember what he told you while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Human One must be handed over to sinners, be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” 8 Then they remembered his words. 9 When they returned from the tomb, they reported all these things to the eleven and all the others. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles. 11 Their words struck the apostles as nonsense, and they didn’t believe the women. 12 But Peter ran to the tomb. When he bent over to look inside, he saw only the linen cloth. Then he returned home, wondering what had happened. (Common English Bible)

Easter Sunday 2022

Amid the beautifully craggy vistas of northern New Mexico, just 240 students make up the Mesa Vista school district—not just a middle or high school, but the entire district. High schools that small in New Mexico typically play sports in the smallest division, 1A, but the Mesa Vista girls’ basketball team, the Lady Trojans, play in 2A. Until this past Christmas, they did so coached by a father-and-son basketball duo, Leonard Torrez Sr. and Jr., who were determined to reverse the misfortune of just a three-victory season the previous year.

But on Christmas morning, both Torrezes, Sr. and Jr., were rushed to the hospital by ambulance with covid-19. Less than three weeks later, on January 12 of this year, they died on the same day, just hours apart, two of the nearly one million Americans who have died from covid in the past twenty-six months.

Why begin an Easter message with death and dying? Because that is how Easter itself had begun. The female disciples of Jesus go to His tomb fully expecting to find a body—the burial had to be wrapped up before the sabbath had commenced at sundown, and so it was a very hasty job. The women were returning to the tomb to finish the work of burying the body of their teacher.

But on that first day of the week, there was no body to be found. A world of new life had begun.

The Torrezes, Leonard Sr. and Leonard Jr., remain dead, buried in in the reddish earth of New Mexico. But their students, the Lady Trojans, had to continue. Jesse Boies, the school’s cross country coach, a close friend of Leonard Jr., and the father of one of the players on the Lady Trojans, stepped in to become their head coach, a job that was as much about performing bereavement ministry for grief-stricken teenagers as it was about x’s and o’s on a basketball court.

I cannot even imagine what the first practice back in January must have been like. But then there came another, and then another, and then the games themselves. And something remarkable happened. The Lady Trojans kept winning, all the way en route to a ten-seed in the statewide playoffs where, in true March Madness fashion, they knocked off the favored seven seed before eventually losing to the high school that won the entire tournament.

But before they could have ever savored that experience, there had been the first day back after losing their coaches. Like the female disciples of Jesus at the tomb, they had to begin the work of adjusting to a new world, a new reality that would never be the same, before they could rebirth their season together.

And so it is with all resurrection. There is one day in which it begins. Call it the first day of the week rule. Because there will always be a first day after a loss or a death. It begins the journey, either to rebirth or to retrench further into death. Which of those journeys we take, well, that is up to us.

One of the best pieces of preaching advice I’ve ever received came from my college chaplain at Lewis & Clark College in Portland; after he preached a Christmas worship service he told me that he didn’t try to cram everything he knew about Christmas into a sermon like an ill-conceived greatest hits album. He told me that he tried to take one aspect of the story or the experience of Christmas and just really hone in on that one aspect. It enabled him to do some deep dives into beloved Bible stories while keeping them relatively fresh on a year-in, year-out basis and also minimizing the pressure to create a big Best Of-style sermon every time.

I’ve tried to honor that spirit in how I preach Christmas and Easter. It would be impossible for me to tell you everything I know and feel about Easter today, so I shouldn’t bother trying. But as we are about to embark on our own journeys separating in a few short weeks as I step down as your minister, I want to talk about this first day of the week rule in anticipation of our paths diverging. Because even while there will be hope of new life in that, there is also loss. There is also mourning and grieving. And it is easy to forget that this was the initial mood of Easter Sunday.

I do not say that to bring down the mood—quite the opposite. I say it to highlight just how profound a shift the Resurrection of the Lord represents. The disciples—first the women and then the men—go from trying to navigate a world completely bereft of Jesus of Nazareth to navigating a world in which Jesus of Nazareth has risen from the dead, the grave has been defeated, divine love has triumphed over evil, and God has ransomed us from sin.

That first day of the week in a world without Christ has become the first day of the week in a world made new by Christ. As far back as creation itself, when in the first day the earth was without form and void and God said, “let there be light,” the first day of the week changes everything. However deep your faith, imagine wrapping your head and heart around that dramatic shift in real time.

Mark’s Gospel is clear: the women couldn’t. They said nothing to anyone initially because terror, fear, and amazement had seized them. So unsatisfactory was that ending that two endings were later appending to Mark’s Gospel to try to walk that back.

But I get it. We all should. Because it is in Luke’s Gospel too—when the female disciples return from the empty tomb and report everything they saw and heard, the male disciples deem their story an idle story—a fairytale. They fundamentally did not believe the women; only Peter gets up and goes to the tomb to share in the amazement. Thomas gets slapped with the moniker of Doubting Thomas, but all the other male disciples were doubters on Easter Sunday. On the first day of the new week, the new world, the new reality, mourning and grieving still reigned to the point of dismissing the Good News out of hand.

But at some point over the course of the day, over the course of the week, that begins to chance. Step by step, bit by bit, soul by soul, the followers of Jesus step out from a place of loss and sorrow into a place of resurrection and redemption.

Which is how it so very often is for us. Dramatic life moments take place—a man named Cleopas walks the road to Emmaus, a man named Paul walks the road to Damascus, a high school girls’ basketball team loses both their coaches on the same day to covid—but what do we choose to do the first day after those dramatic moments? How do we rise to meet those moments? How do we choose to respond to those moments?

In those choices, I believe that we reveal our truest selves. We may not intend to—especially if we do not intend to—which is precisely why Christianity must be a daily work. The grave was conquered and we were ransomed today, but what we do with that freedom, every day, we are showing our truest selves. We are deciding whether we are going to be good Christians, and faithful Jesus followers, or not.

So on this first day of the new week, of a new existence brought about by the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified and buried but is now risen, how will you choose to respond?

For today, in the empty tomb and the rolled-away stone, God has made God’s response to the crucifixion known.

Today, God has responded to death with life.

Today, God has responded to suffering with resurrection.

Today, God has responded to injustice with justice.

Today, God has responded to sin with restoration.

Today, God has responded to oppression with liberation.

God has made God’s response to the crucifixion known.

But how will you respond to God, and how will you make your response known?

Presented with the idle tale of a discarded shroud and a missing body, how will you respond, and how will you make your response known?

Not just today, on Easter Sunday, but on every day you will be faced with that question, and that choice. Your life is a lived response to the question, “What will I do as a result of the Good News that the Messiah, the Son of the living God, has resurrected from the dead?”

Whatever fear the female disciples must have initially felt and experienced, they overcame that fear to share what they had seen. Whatever fear the Mesa Vista Lady Trojans must have initially felt and experienced after losing both their coaches on the same day, they processed and remained a team together. The chaos that surrounded them—that emotional, spiritual, palpable loss of stability—mirrors the chaos out of which God creates light and dark on the first day of creation.

From creation to resurrection, our journeys began with a first day. A first day to adjust to a new normal, to behold what had been lost and what could still be gained, and to find a way forward when you might not even know in what direction forward lies. That was the first day. Chaos and glory, unknowingness and potential, discovery and risk all swirling around you like the wind.

And then like the wind, the Holy Spirit shows you that way forward.

Today, this Easter Sunday, is the first day of the week, of the Easter church season, of the rest of your lives.

How will you respond, and how will you choose to make known, like glory amid chaos, that not only does our Savior live, but that He reigns?

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

April 17, 2022

On Easter Sunday, Valley Christian Church holds a special outdoor Easter worship at 8:30 am prior to the traditional 10:30 am Sunday worship. For this Easter, instead of a homily or full-blown additional sermon, I chose to do something a bit different, and I composed and delivered this guided prayer on the sights, sounds, and scents of the morning. I hope you find it meaningful. My full Easter sermon will be posted here on Wednesday, April 20.

Something I frequently teach about Holy Week is that we have the benefit of knowing how the story ends. Jesus told the Twelve beforehand about His eventual resurrection, but not all of them believed Him immediately, and there is no indication in the Gospels that Jesus told the rest of His followers. They had to experience Passiontide in real time, in each agonizing second, all the way up to today, when the tomb is discovered empty and the words “He is risen” are finally uttered.

To try to plant ourselves there, if only for a moment, I want to guide you in a prayer rooted in the supplies that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus first bring on the evening of Good Friday, and which Mary Magdalene, Salome, and the other female followers of Jesus bring on the morning of Easter Sunday: the perfumes, ointments, and spices with which to honor the body of Christ.

Because of the impending sundown signaling the beginning of the Sabbath, the work of Joseph and Nicodemus was almost surely done in haste, necessitating the work of the women at sunup on the first day of the week after the Sabbath. The women come bearing these lotions and perfumes, and I think of the soaps and lotions and scents I use every day myself because one of the ways in which we respect our bodies is that—and I know this may sound basic or obvious—we do not put on our bodies things that we do not like, whose smells are not pleasing to us. We want to present ourselves well, to one another and to God for the sake of our personal pride and dignity.

So I want to begin this guided prayer by inviting you to imagine—close your eyes if you like, if that would help—the scent of your own favorite perfume, or cologne, or lotion, or whatever it may be that you apply to your body as a sign of your respect and regard for your own body. Begin with that scent. Imagine bringing it, as the female disciples of Jesus did, as a reverential offering for our Lord.

Try to hear the crunching of gravel or dirt beneath their feet as they walk to His tomb. Their sandals, without our modern technology, are almost certainly not as comfortable, forgiving, or supportive. They probably felt every bump in the road—not only physically, but spiritually.

Now try to feel the body’s response to its nerves, the nervousness of going to the tomb to pay respects to your fallen Savior and anoint His body one last time before the body begins to decompensate. Are there goosebumps, rushing heart rates, a quickening pace? Or are you drawing your steps out, one after the other, in anticipation of what might await you at the tomb?

What does honor and pride mean to you? How do you take pride in your appearance, and how do you give honor not only to your body but to those around you? For whom is that honor intended? In the scents you choose, the colors you array on yourself, as part of that same Body of Christ.

Mary, Salome, and the female disciples come to the tomb prepared to dress and anoint the body of the Lord, to honor Him by finishing the task to which Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had set themselves. The honoring of the Body of Christ was a work in progress, incomplete and unfulfilled.

So it is with us today. We as the Body of Christ remain a work in progress, incomplete and unfulfilled, but today, on Easter Sunday, the Resurrection of the Lord, we can choose to honor God and one another with our offerings of presence, care, and attention, as Mary, Salome, and the others did. As the male disciples would go on to as well. In affirming the humanity of the Risen Christ, may we affirm one another’s humanity, made in the image of the one true God, buried in the likeness of His death at our baptism, and lifted from the waters of rebirth in the likeness of His resurrection.

For Christ the Lord is indeed risen today. Amen.

The love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: one died for the sake of all; therefore, all died. 15 He died for the sake of all so that those who are alive should live not for themselves but for the one who died for them and was raised.

16 So then, from this point on we won’t recognize people by human standards. Even though we used to know Christ by human standards, that isn’t how we know him now. 17 So then, if anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation. The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived!

18 All of these new things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and who gave us the ministry of reconciliation. 19 In other words, God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people’s sins against them. He has trusted us with this message of reconciliation.

20 So we are ambassadors who represent Christ. God is negotiating with you through us. We beg you as Christ’s representatives, “Be reconciled to God!” 21 God caused the one who didn’t know sin to be sin for our sake so that through him we could become the righteousness of God. (Common English Bible)

“Cross Words: Our Language of Atonement,” Week Six

I remember hastily pulling out a dresser drawer, laying down the biggest hardback coffee table book I could find, and setting my laptop computer atop it. I adjusted the lamp behind me to try to project the optimal amount of light, and it ended up looking like I had given myself a halo (which I swear was not my intent!). It was all in service of the first-ever, and highest-stakes, sermon over Zoom I had ever given. While I had earlier in the pandemic preached a sermon for online consumption, it had been prerecorded and so I could ask for a redo or a mulligan if I really screwed up. But this was going to be live. And it was going to be my audition to become your minister. And I remember asking myself why I had agreed to preach on sin and forgiveness for this audition.

My introduction to most of you took place in the middle of a sermon series that your interim minister, Rev. Edd Spencer, was delivering on the Lord’s Prayer, and as a series preacher myself I did not want to interrupt the flow of that. So I said, sure, I’ll preach a Lord’s Prayer sermon, no problem, sounds great! Then I looked at the calendar of where my candidate Sunday fell in that series and saw that I had landed the line about forgiving and being forgiven for sins. And it’s always a winning strategy to introduce yourself to a new congregation by preaching about sin!

But now as we start this final stretch of our last four Sundays together, I think it is poetically appropriate for us to returning to the topic of forgiveness as almost a sort of book end of our almost two years together. It remains as important as it ever was, on the cross and today. I hope we can courageously tackle this topic once more together.

Today, Palm Sunday, is the final installment of our Lenten sermon series, and as with last year’s “We Were There” series, it was meant build up to our newly-releaseed Holy Week devotional. This year both the series and devotional come from you as Lola Kiser and I asked you share with us words that you associate with the crucifixion. We took those “cross words” and split them between the devotional and this series, and so each Sunday I will be preaching on one of the cross words that you chose—with my own thrown in for good measure along the way. Because the words of this series come from you, I hope that you have felt a real connection to, and investment in, this series.

The fancy term for the question of what precisely was achieved on the cross is “atonement theory,” and each cross word in this series represents one particular strand of that theory. We began the series three weeks ago with a word that was likely already familiar to you all, “substitution,” for another word which mirrors it—sacrifice—was submitted by several of you as well. Then we moved on to the word “atonement” itself, which went to the heart of the entire series, and then “ransom” and “victory.” Last week’s cross word that one of you submitted was “redemption,” and today’s word, the final one in the series, is “forgiveness.”

I saved forgiveness for the end because forgiveness is rooted in the context of relationship, and so gives the crucifixion not only a past, but a future. Whenever a relationship is harmed, whenever covenant has been broken, forgiveness is put on the table as a source of repair of that breach. Sometimes, forgiveness is, by itself, enough to repair the breach. Other times, more is required, such as the making of amends or restitution. And still other times, the breach may be irreparable, at least in the present time and plane of existence. Which is what makes the cross so very necessary.

First, the Roman Empire refused to acknowledge not simply Jesus’s divinity, but God’s divinity. God was not their god, they had their own pantheon of deities (most of them stolen from the Greeks and subsequently renamed). So from the Roman perspective, there is no risk in rupturing their relationship to God by crucifying God’s Son because there is no relationship to destroy in the first place. If you will not even acknowledge a being’s existence, the care you have for offending that being is always going to be nil.

But just because you refuse to acknowledge the existence of the target of your offense does not prevent the target from being offended. On the contrary, it doubles down on the offense, because it tells whoever you are offending that they are fundamentally unworthy of your regard. God was seen as fundamentally unworthy of Rome’s regard, and it had no problem handing down a death sentence for God’s Son.

So, the need for forgiveness here is maximal, because not only has right relationship been breached in a violent and profoundly painful manner, but the relationship itself is denied. And it is so important to be clear about those multiple layers of culpability on Rome’s part, not only to underscore the depth of the need for forgiveness, but to underscore that this is Rome’s death sentence, with Rome’s method of execution. Not Israel’s. Blaming Israel for the crucifixion has led to centuries of antisemitism which we, in turn, need to ask forgiveness for.

In the face of these multiple layers of imperial culpability, God offers forgiveness in the most lifegiving way possible: God gives the Son right back to us. Even after what we did. Or, precisely because what we did emphasized our need for the Son, and for the Son’s work of—to use Paul’s words from here in 2 Corinthians 5—of reconciling the world to Himself and through Himself.

Reconciliation is an increasingly in-vogue word in our quarters of American Christianity as a term for attempting to address, if not necessarily right, massive and historic wrongs. Reconciliation is the restoration to right relationship from a state of estrangement or having been deeply harmed, and we as a church and a nation are frankly nowhere near that state of being yet. And that is because reconciliation—and the forgiveness it entails—requires a full accounting of what was done, of the harm that was inflicted and continues to be inflicted. If we simply pretend the harm never took place, if we try to move on without actually doing the repair work, it is like expecting cars piled up at a wreck to be able to continue driving down the road when you have done nothing to remove the obstruction that is blocking their path. The progress depends upon the repair work, and the repair work depends on acknowledging that there is something broken and in need of repair to begin with.

But we also are not being Christ-like. Christ, Paul says, reconciles the world to Himself, through Himself. But when we deny and minimize the full scope and scale of harm done, of the ways in which we benefit from harm done, of ways in which we continue to do harm, there is no reconciliation to be had because we are not first acknowledging our need to repent and seek forgiveness.

Say what you may about Paul—and there is much that can be said—in his letters he does not attempt to sugarcoat his own sinfulness, and his own past attempts to harm his neighbors. He freely confesses his guilt, and Acts of the Apostles documents the initial distrust towards him, indicating that even in the earliest versions of the church, forgiveness was not something to offer up willy-nilly. It allows Paul to be able to speak genuinely here about the reconciling work of Jesus Christ, work that he has personally experienced. And Paul’s resulting impact on the church, to this day, remains profound.

What if we were to own our need for forgiveness as authentically as Paul owns his? What if we owned our need for forgiveness not only for the things we have done but the things that we have purposefully left undone because we benefit from having left them undone? Because that, too, stands in the way of real reconciliation. That, too, stands in the way of deep forgiveness. Consider Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan: it was not only about the Samaritan did for the traveler who had beaten and robbed in tending to the traveler's wounds and arranging shelter for him. It was about what the two religious leaders who passed by on the other side of the road chose to leave undone. Even though they were not the ones who had beaten and robbed the traveler, the parable strongly communicates their need for forgiveness for what they had left undone.

Over the course of the next three or so weeks, you and I together will have opportunities to consider such questions for ourselves, of what we have done and left undone in our time together. And I don’t just mean hindsight quarterbacking the past two years, I mean brave and courageous soul-searching that can be challenging and even frightening, but also potentially life-changing.

For it was meant to not only give new life but change life that God decided to reconcile us by giving Christ back to us. In doing so, God modeled the deepest forgiveness, a forgiveness that brought not only new life but right relationship and, through that right relationship, our salvation.

Through forgiveness, we are saved. And so I would repeat the words I said to many of you at our congregational meeting last August with Regional Minister John Mobley: for any moments when I made known God’s grace and love for you, I am beyond grateful and humbled. For any moments when I was an obstacle to God’s grace and love for you, I ask you to forgive me. I will strive to do the same for you.

May God forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. And in so doing, may God save us.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

April 10, 2022

Just as through one human being sin came into the world, and death came through sin, so death has come to everyone, since everyone has sinned. 13 Although sin was in the world, since there was no Law, it wasn’t taken into account until the Law came. 14 But death ruled from Adam until Moses, even over those who didn’t sin in the same way Adam did—Adam was a type of the one who was coming.

15 But the free gift of Christ isn’t like Adam’s failure. If many people died through what one person did wrong, God’s grace is multiplied even more for many people with the gift—of the one person Jesus Christ—that comes through grace. 16 The gift isn’t like the consequences of one person’s sin. The judgment that came from one person’s sin led to punishment, but the free gift that came out of many failures led to the verdict of acquittal. 17 If death ruled because of one person’s failure, those who receive the multiplied grace and the gift of righteousness will even more certainly rule in life through the one person Jesus Christ.

18 So now the righteous requirements necessary for life are met for everyone through the righteous act of one person, just as judgment fell on everyone through the failure of one person. 19 Many people were made righteous through the obedience of one person, just as many people were made sinners through the disobedience of one person. (Common English Bible)

“Cross Words: Our Language of Atonement,” Week Five

I have spent a lot of time over the past month-plus since Russia invaded Ukraine thinking about whether there is any redemption at all for a leader who beats up on a neighbor like that—whether in Europe, or in the Near East where Saudi Arabia has for years been meting out similar treatment to Yemen, or in Africa, where Tigray has faced similarly violent endangerment, or anywhere else, including my ancestors’ homeland in Armenia after Azerbaijan’s attack a year and a half ago.

And I don’t know what level of redemption is possible. Certainly it isn’t without any remorse and any attempts at repair. The human suffering, the loss of life, livelihood, and home on that scale…it puts someone outside the category of principled and moral.

And in wrestling with this question, of what—if any—redemption awaits such a person, I turned to the moral voice of someone who has been a friend of my parents for some time, whose name you may know from the mid-90s movie Dead Man Walking based on her life and work: Sister Helen Prejean. She writes of serving as the spiritual advisor of inmates on death row, and one of her many tasks is to lead them to really reckon with and come to grips with the enormity of their crimes.

By the day of their appointed deaths, literally everything else has been taken from these inmates: their freedom, their autonomy, their dignity. And that is by design; our penal system is meant to, well, punish. The inmates often compound this by stripping away at their own humanity by subscribing to racism, homophobia, and all manner of prejudices. And all that is left for them to give away, aside from maybe a few assorted sundry possessions and effects, are their lives.

And they do. Sister Helen conveys how each of the men she writes about use their last words to ask for forgiveness for what they did, or to say that they hoped their deaths would bring relief to their victim’s family.

Cheap words, perhaps, but if you are out of chances and all that you have left to give away is your life, and you declare that doing so should be in the service of bringing relief to the people who you have most hurt, there is something profound about that. I don’t know if that is redemption either—whether it is or not I think is God’s affair. But I do see the desire for it, belated as it is.

This is the next-to-last installment of our Lenten sermon series, and as with last year’s “We Were There” series, it was meant build up to our newly-releaseed Holy Week devotional. This year both the series and devotional come from you as Lola Kiser and I asked you share with us words that you associate with the crucifixion. We took those “cross words” and split them between the devotional and this series, and so each Sunday I will be preaching on one of the cross words that you chose—with my own thrown in for good measure along the way. Because the words of this series come from you, I hope that you experience a real connection to, and investment in, this sermon series.

The fancy term for the question of what precisely was achieved on the cross is “atonement theory,” and each cross word in this series represents one particular strand of that theory. We began the series three weeks ago with a word that was likely already familiar to you all, “substitution,” for another word which mirrors it—sacrifice—was submitted by several of you as well. Then we moved on to the word “atonement” itself, which went to the heart of the entire series, and then “ransom” and “victory.” And today’s cross word that one of you submitted is “redemption.”

Redemption is a funny word because it inherently connotes imperfection, mistakenness, even evil. Redemption is the response to imperfection. Just as there is no reaction without action, no exhale without an inhale, there is no redemption without sin. If you are perfect, then you have no need for redemption, and we can all go home, can’t we?

But we aren’t, and we do, and so here we are on Sunday morning, searching for what we cannot find on our own, and hoping to build that which cannot be manufactured or artificially engineered.

Humanity’s need for redemption is as old as humanity itself, which is why Paul chooses to frame this passage in Romans 5 the way he does. The thirty-second version is that Paul sees Jesus, as the Son of God, serving as God’s do-over after God’s first Son, Adam, tried to take from God that which should have belonged only to God: the knowledge of good and evil. Adam doing that was like Caesar crossing the Rubicon, it was a point of no return, as evinced by Adam’s immediate sin in basically blaming Eve for the entire affair and even blaming God for giving him Eve to begin with.

In this, Adam proves to be a titanic disappointment to God as God’s first Son, for he fundamentally fails at what Paul treats as a vital component to living a faithful life: obedience to God. God tells Adam not to eat from this one tree, and Adam does so. Contrast this with the image of Christ that Paul serves up in Philippians 2, which we unpacked in this series just a few weeks ago, in which Christ is not merely lauded for His obedience to the point of death on a cross, but that this obedience leads to Christ’s acclamation before God as the name above all names.

For Paul, Adam and Christ, each Sons of God, offer a case study of dueling opposites around the question of obedience to God’s will: many were made righteous as the result of one Son’s obedience, while many were made sinners as the result of the other’s disobedience. And I want to make this abundantly clear, because Paul’s perspective on the Law gets taken as a justification for Christian antisemitism: the Law does not result in sinfulness, and here, Paul in fact says that the Law steps in to highlight Adam’s failure and our own sinfulness. The Law in its righteousness convicts us precisely because it should—we do not live up to God’s Law, just as the inmates to whom Sister Helen ministered didn’t measure up to our laws. Redemption seeks to repair that relational fracture.

So this is not, and should never be about, the Tanakh, or running roughshod over it. This is about whether there is redemption after disregard for God’s will, and if so, what that redemption might look like. It is about the restoration of covenant, of right relationship, between us and our creator, which we will get into even more next week, but for now we simply need a starting point.

The starting point that has been in vogue for some decades now is what is called a Sinner’s Prayer, which takes many forms, but its essence boils down to praying, “Jesus, I’m a terrible person and deserve death, I accept you into my heart as my personal Lord and Savior.”

I’ve never been a big fan of this. It may start out from the place of extreme humility of the tax collector in Jesus’s parable, who stands off to the side in the temple and bows his head in humbleness while the religious leader stands center stage and thanks God for not making him like the terrible tax collector over there. But when we begin to accept the notion that God sees us as terrible—not that we have done terrible things, but that God sees us as worthless without God, then what is the point of saving such terrible and worthless creations to begin with? We’ve talked about this before, that if we really are so wretched beyond belief and comprehension, then Jesus is a fool to die to ransom us or to set us free. Better to write us off like Adam, cast us out east of Eden on our own.

So no, that’s not it either. And Jesus is not merely our personal golden ticket to heaven, that is such a profound disservice to the One who went to the Cross for us. Just as Jesus must not be written off for a fool for dying for us, he must not be shut up for a sacrificial lamb, who has nothing to say or do except die for us.

Instead, Jesus represents God’s second attempt at perfection. And lets talk a moment about that word, perfection. In Genesis 1, God makes everything, light and dark, sea and sky, sun, moon, and stars, all the plants and animals, and at the end of each day says, “It was good.” Not adequate, or average, or so-so. Good. Imagine if God was saying “perfect.” “You are perfect” to the light and dark, “you are perfect” to the sea and sky, “you are perfect” to the sun, moon, stars, plants and animals. And then God makes Adam out of dust and wind and tells this man, “You are perfect.”

Yet Adam chose not to be. Adam was the first attempt at perfection, and God, through Adam, failed. That is a big thing to say, especially from the pulpit, that God experienced failure. But God did. In fact, throughout the Bible, God does. God feels failure so acutely in the Noah saga that God sends the flood as a giant reset button on creation. God’s first nine plagues fail to free the Israelites from bondage; in fact, Pharaoh’s heart is only hardened further. Only after ten plagues is the liberation of the Israelites secured.

The God of the Bible is not the God of the self-help section of our bookshelves. There is more to God’s experience than success; there is failure. There is death. As we talked about last week, in the message on victory, there is defeat.

All of which are the necessary ingredients for redemption, precisely because, again, perfection and redemption are mutually exclusive. If you are perfect, you have not been redeemed. You have not needed to be redeemed.

Accepting your need for redemption does not mean that God sees you as a terrible, worthless, good-for-nothing creation. Quite the opposite: God sees you as worth redeeming, as worth the price of redemption to begin with. Even if God has experienced failure before, God does not want to experience it with you. God wants to succeed with you, alongside you, so that you flourish as the child of God you were always meant to be.

And in so doing, may you not only come to know and experience divine redemption, but, like Christ, may you become a face of it for others.

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

April 3, 2022

Therefore, once you have your minds ready for action and you are thinking clearly, place your hope completely on the grace that will be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed. 14 Don’t be conformed to your former desires, those that shaped you when you were ignorant. But, as obedient children, 15 you must be holy in every aspect of your lives, just as the one who called you is holy. 16 It is written, You will be holy, because I am holy.  17 Since you call upon a Father who judges all people according to their actions without favoritism, you should conduct yourselves with reverence during the time of your dwelling in a strange land. 18 Live in this way, knowing that you were not liberated by perishable things like silver or gold from the empty lifestyle you inherited from your ancestors. 19 Instead, you were liberated by the precious blood of Christ, like that of a flawless, spotless lamb. 20 Christ was chosen before the creation of the world, but was only revealed at the end of time. This was done for you, 21 who through Christ are faithful to the God who raised him from the dead and gave him glory. So now, your faith and hope should rest in God. (Common English Bible)

“Cross Words: Our Language of Atonement,” Week Four

One way in which I am definitely a curmudgeonly old man is that I am really, really bad at keeping up with popular music, like so bad that I find myself thinking, "Is Raffi from my childhood still making new stuff?" but when a musician does manage to make their way through my blinders, I tend to really enjoy them. Dua Lipa is one such artist—not only is her music quality, but she herself consistently comes across as a solid, grounded, and thoughtful person genuinely devoted to using her celebrity to make the world a better place.

And a couple months ago she went on Stephen Colbert’s late night talk show. And I am so grateful to be parenting in the age of DVR, because I am too tired to ever be up late enough to watch anyone’s talk show. But this clip made the rounds because Colbert offered Dua Lipa the chance to ask him anything—instead of him holding the power over the agenda as the interviewer—and she chose to ask him about his faith and how it informs his comedy. Colbert is a devout Christian, and he answered in an incredibly profound way that even for me, as an ordained pastor, took several repeat viewings of the clip to fully process. But this is the part I wanted to share with you:

There’s funny and there’s sad, and there’s funny about being sad. In the same way, that sadness is like a little emotional death, but not a defeat if you can find a way to laugh about it, because that laughter keeps you from having fear of it…So if there is some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it is that no matter what happens, you are never defeated and you must understand and see this in the light of eternity and find some way to love and laugh with each other.

And though your ears may or may not hear it initially, that quote is the Christus Victor —the Victorious Christ—branch of atonement on the cross through and through.

This is a new sermon series for the church season of Lent, and as with last year’s “We Were There” series, it is meant to build up to our Holy Week devotional. This year, though, both the series and devotional come from you as Lola Kiser and I asked you share with us single words that you associate with the crucifixion. We took those “cross words” and split them between the devotional and this series, and so each Sunday I will be preaching on one of the cross words that you chose—with my own thrown in for good measure along the way. Because the words of this series come from you, I hope that you experience a real connection to, and investment in, this sermon series.

The fancy term for the question of what precisely was achieved on the cross is “atonement theory,” and each cross word in this series represents one particular strand of that theory. We began the series three weeks ago with a word that was likely already familiar to you all, “substitution,” for another word which mirrors it—sacrifice—was submitted by several of you as well. Then we moved on to the word “atonement” itself, which went to the heart of the entire series, and then “ransom,” which I had submitted. And today’s cross word is a great one from so many perspectives: victory.

Victory is something we sing of often, not only during the season of Easter, although we certainly do that too with famous and beloved hymns like “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” and “He Lives.” But we sing of it elsewhere too, in “Victory in Jesus” and “Because He Lives,” and more. Christ’s resurrection as a victory is interwoven into our tradition of song and music going back centuries. It should be familiar to many of us if for no other reason than that.

Yet I needed to lay the groundwork of the first three messages, on substitution, moral influence, and ransom before arriving at victory because of the relationship of those first three to the belief in the resurrection as a victory, and in Christ as a victor. Just as substitution owes its popularity to a book by a historical bishop—Anselm of Canterbury—so does Christus Victor owe at least some of its modern popularity to a book by a more contemporary bishop—Gustaf Aulen of the Church of Sweden. Aulen summed up the first three answers we have talked about so far—substitution, moral influence, and ransom—before moving on to Christ as a victor over death and evil.

Aulen takes what I described last week, of Jesus acting as a ransom to the devil that was never meant to be paid and thus liberating us from evil through theological sleight of hand, and updates it to suit his sensibilities, namely that Aulen sees no acceptable way to make Jesus into a ransom or freedom price without the whole thing becoming transactional rather than liberatory.

I’m simplifying here, but the objection—and it’s a reasonable one—is that once Jesus becomes a price, whether paid to God as a substitution or to the devil as a ransom, our salvation on the cross becomes a monetary or legal transaction rather than an act of divine freedom. Victory on the cross and in the resurrection cannot merely be transactional because economic and legal transactions are part of why people suffer to begin with. Which we know to be true, just look at how many people suffer under medical debts, credit card or payday loan debts, student debts, and more. So, if this sort of economic or legal transactional model contributes to people’s suffering, it cannot then be the source of their salvation. Christ must eclipse or overcome that model in favor of another.

The victorious Christ is a Jesus who is not a price to be paid at all, but a triumphant Savior through and through. He is not a price to be paid to either God or the devil, but rather makes possible our own salvation entirely on His own.

That is a long way around of arriving at our Scripture passage today, from 1 Peter, but I hope it makes so much more sense considering everything I just said. This is one of my favorite passages from either epistle attributed (likely incorrectly) to Peter, because it lays out so succinctly the stakes for the crucifixion and resurrection: if we call upon a God who judges all peoples according to their actions, we must conduct ourselves well. Yet so very often we do not. Our actions, both individually and collectively, actively contribute to the harm of others. We stand convicted for those actions.

Why? Why should a loving God convict us at all? Because when we forget that it was God who saved us, and who saves us still, we will almost always attribute our salvation to someone or something else. It could be silver and gold, as Peter names, it could be the empty lifestyles that gold and silver can buy us and that Peter similarly cites, it could be a Caesar, a politician or candidate for office, it could be our own selves. When we forget that salvation is offered up by God, and by God alone, bad things almost always tend to happen next.

When our faith and hope rests not in God but in, say, our interpretation of God—notice the difference there, because we have such a habit of trying to make God in our image rather than the other way around—when our faith and hope does not rest in God, we have not been fully set free by the silver or gold or Caesars or empty lifestyles. We remain in need of liberation. And God, through Christ, every day offers us that freedom.

But that offer of freedom must have something behind it—we need to have faith that God is indeed capable of freeing us from ourselves. The crucifixion is that something. The resurrection is that something. Even when executed on a cross, God is not permanently banished. God is beaten, bruised, bloodied, brought down and dying, but God is not defeated. God experiences death, God experiences defeat, but God refuses to remain dead, and God refuses to remain defeated.

Defeat is not a word we like in American English. Defeat does not jibe with our self-image as a great superpower, and especially as the predominant religious faith within a great superpower. But that too would come from the empty lifestyle Peter condemns. That aversion comes more from us being Americans than us being Christians. Christ experienced defeat and emerged victorious, yet still we have an aversion to defeat, as though it is impossible for victory to ever follow.

Maybe, just maybe, we need to be freed from that as well. That’s the beauty of this paradox—that to be set free from our aversion to defeat, we maybe have to experience it. We have to experience those moments of sadness and defeat that Stephen Colbert refers to as little emotional deaths.

And would it be so bad if we did? I am, by the by, preaching as much to myself and my own aversion to failure as I am to any one of you by this point. That aversion runs deep in me, contributing fullness rather than emptiness to my lifestyle.

Because an aversion to failure is not the same thing as striving for success. Striving for success means being willing, eager even, to leave your comfort zone even if you do not like it. But trying not to fail is all about the comfort zone. It contributes to an empty lifestyle rather than frees us from it. The aversion gives you nothing, equips you with nothing for when the sadness, when the defeat, when the emotional pain inevitably comes.

And when—not if, but when—it does, may you be held in the promise of a God who experienced death and tasted defeat, but then rose victoriously, as only that God could.

God went ahead of you not only into defeat, but into victory. When the women discover the empty tomb, the angels say that He is not there—that you will not find Him amid defeat. He has gone ahead of you to Galilee, to victory. There you will find Him. There may you find yourself as well.

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

March 27, 2022

James and John, Zebedee’s sons, came to Jesus and said, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

36 “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.

37 They said, “Allow one of us to sit on your right and the other on your left when you enter your glory.”

38 Jesus replied, “You don’t know what you’re asking! Can you drink the cup I drink or receive the baptism I receive?”

39 “We can,” they answered.

Jesus said, “You will drink the cup I drink and receive the baptism I receive, 40 but to sit at my right or left hand isn’t mine to give. It belongs to those for whom it has been prepared.”

41 Now when the other ten disciples heard about this, they became angry with James and John. 42 Jesus called them over and said, “You know that the ones who are considered the rulers by the Gentiles show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around. 43 But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant. 44 Whoever wants to be first among you will be the slave of all, 45 for the Human One didn’t come to be served but rather to serve and to give his life to liberate many people.” (Common English Bible)

“Cross Words: Our Language of Atonement,” Week Three

Most of us, I think, have that one movie, play, or story that so scared the dickens out of us as children that we remember it even as adults. One of my friends was saying recently that for her, it was the film Jaws, and that it is still on her mind whenever she goes to the beach. For me, it is a short story by the famous writer O. Henry, which was turned into a play, and funnily enough is set right here in Alabama.

The gist of the short story is that two ne’er-do-wells kidnap the ten-year-old child of a local captain of industry, intending to hold the child for ransom. But the boy is so obsequious with his constant chatter, attempted pranks, and demands to play that the captors are eventually so worn down that instead of demanding ransom from the boy’s father (whom the boy is frankly fine to be rid of on account of the father’s unrelenting strictness), the captors end up paying the boy’s father to take the boy back. That is the ransom that ends up getting paid—from the captors to the father instead of the other way around.

I do not know what on earth about that play made me so frightened as a kid, but it 100% terrified me. I also do not know if O. Henry had intended this or not—the way that Charles Dickens clearly did in A Tale of Two Cities —but there is another branch of atonement theory in this story: ransom, or more specifically, ransom used as a method of trickery.

This is a new sermon series for the church season of Lent, and as with last year’s “We Were There” series, it is meant to build up to our Holy Week devotional. This year, though, both the series and devotional come from you as Lola Kiser and I asked you share with us single words that you associate with the crucifixion. We took those “cross words” and split them between the devotional and this series, and so each Sunday I will be preaching on one of the cross words that you chose—with my own thrown in for good measure along the way. Because the words of this series come from you, I hope that you experience a real connection to, and investment in, this sermon series.

The fancy term for the question of what precisely was achieved on the cross is “atonement theory,” and each cross word in this series represents one particular strand of that theory. We began the series two weeks ago with a word that was likely already familiar to you all, “substitution,” for another word which mirrors it—sacrifice—was submitted by several of you as well. Last week we moved to a word that was submitted and goes to the very heart of this entire series: atonement. And now today we arrive at the word “ransom.”

You may ask, “why ransom?” in the context of the cross, and fair enough, it is not something we much talk about. But in the very early days of the church, this was one belief around the crucifixion that emerged and stuck around for some time before eventually being supplanted, at least in the west, by substitutionary atonement.

And that makes sense—both ransom and substitution entail Jesus functioning as a proxy or price for our own sinfulness. Where they differ is to whom that price is meant to be paid. Substitution treats the crucifixion as a transaction between God and humanity, with Jesus as the sacrifice. Ransom introduces another character into the transaction: the Adversary, Satan.

Essentially—and I am oversimplifying—because we as humans are sinful and Satan, not God, is responsible for authoring sin, we are slaves to Satan by dint of being, in Paul’s words, slaves to sin. And we have to be set free from that bondage to evil. Jesus represents the ransom that God is prepared to pay to free us, like hostages from a captor, except—and this is the part I love—God has absolutely zero intention of actually letting Satan take receipt of the ransom. Instead of remaining dead—in a state that represents, again to borrow from Paul, the wages of sin—Jesus resurrects and permanently escapes the clutches of the devil. So by triumphing over the wages of sin, Jesus also triumphs over the author of sin by tricking the devil into thinking that He—Jesus—is God’s ransom to be paid when God had no intention of ever making a pact with the devil.

We see the Scriptural roots of this particular atonement theory on display in this passage of Mark 10, which ends with Jesus referring to Himself a ransom for many, or in the Greek, a lutron , which was really a freedom price—a sum that would set free a slave from bondage. Jesus is saying that He is not meant to be served, but to serve—to take the function of a servant or even a slave, and in so doing, liberate others who are in bondage by ransoming them, by acting as their freedom price. Essentially, Jesus says that He will be the price that is paid for our freedom and liberation. Except that unlike in substitution, where that price is paid in full and paid to God, this price is a ransom to Satan that Satan was never going to benefit from.

And maybe the thought of God and Jesus operating in bad faith, even if it is with the devil, strikes you poorly, and I would understand why. A deceitful God is not God to be loved. Respected, maybe, and feared, certainly, but not loved. But lend an ear again to what Jesus is saying to James and John when they come across just really, *really* badly. Like, anyone here who has raised or taught young kids knows that when they come to you and lead off with, “will you do anything I ask?” the answer is just an automatic no, it doesn’t matter what comes afterward. Here, though, James and John presume to dictate terms of who will set at Christ’s right and left in paradise, and Jesus essentially responds by saying, you don’t know what you’re asking for.

There are a lot of moments when I think that if God really wanted to punish us, God would answer our prayers, because we don’t always, or even often, know what to ask for when we go to God with a request. Not everything we ask of God is good just because it is God to whom those requests are made. Even if we are virtuous in so many other areas, we are continually in need of being set free from our limited understanding of who God is and who God can be.

So God confounds our expectations, especially if they are expectations like those of James and John, which are really more about themselves and their own selfishness than about God. God comes to earth not as a conqueror or a man of power, but as a newborn baby. God is born not to royalty or nobility, but to an unmarried teenager and her day laborer fiancé. God addresses the world not on horseback with a sword in hand, but upon a donkey and with a shepherd’s crook. Who is to say that such a God would even be interested in human-affirmed hierarchies to benefit flawed men like James and John? It was, and is, our own expectations of God from which God sees that we desperately need to be set free.

And then God-as-flesh does one more act—in furthering the abdication of divinity, God permits to be executed on a cross because the only thing more awe-inspiring than saving yourself from the cross at the crowd’s request is to resurrect when you are already dead and buried.

And who puts these narrow-minded, limiting expectations in our heads? Not God, surely. In whose interests would it be for us to constrain what God is down to our own earthly notions of hierarchy and exploitation? Who could tempt us to break the commandment that we shall not make God in our own graven image, and who would want to tempt us so? Who, if not the original tempter and adversary?

So if God, in incarnating, dying and resurrecting, confounds our expectations, may it also be a confounding of the evil one who tempts us with such expectations. In the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, we can be set free from both our expectations that box God in and the author of such expectations.

And at this point, I should probably come clean and, in the penitential spirit of Lent, confess that “ransom” was the cross word that I contributed to the mix. I threw it in there because I fundamentally believe that our natural state as God’s creations and as God’s children is a state of liberation from evil and freedom from sin. Eternal life without liberation is eternal life in a state of subjugation or bondage, and that is not paradise. Eternal life includes life that is lived freely. And if it means a bit of divine trickery to achieve, so be it.

For as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7, you were bought for a price. And maybe, just maybe, God already knew that your ransom would never belong to the tempter who took you hostage. For you did not, and do not, have to belong to that tempter after all.

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

March 20, 2022