The Lamb of God and MLK

The Lamb of God and MLK
John 1:29-42

John the Baptist claims Jesus is the Lamb of God. What are we to make of this claim?

We have a problem. Lambs don’t seem like much to Americans. Brute strength, power, competitiveness, being number 1, Making America Great Again – these are our obsessions. The Los Angeles Rams not Lambs!

We are not in the mood for lambs. Sign of weakness. Even worse, a sign of vulnerability. Why would we want a symbol of a lamb on the altar of sacrifice? American Christianity, in its evangelical nationalist form, has no room for a lamb. America the strong and mighty! America bully of the world! America most powerful military in history. What will the American Empire do when it meets its version of the Mongols?

Even the manliest male among us hears “Lamb of God” and thinks of the cross. The metaphor stills has punch. An early painting of the crucifixion depicts a stone hill and a wood-stick cross, and there’s a huge lamb nailed on the crossbar.

Lamb of God! Talk about deconstructing all our illusions of power and superiority. David Butrrick said, “Look, if God will hand over an only Child, then see, behind the hard hurt surface of life, there’s not a Holy Terror, but Love. Love so amazing, so Divine, so intense it will give itself for us!”

Perhaps you recall the words of Julian of Norwich, in the 14th century Revelations of Divine Love, when she was asked the purpose of all her visions: “Love was his purpose.”

And T. S. Eliot:

Love is the unfamiliar name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
That human power cannot remove.

We now inhabit an age of violence answering violence with more violence. My Anabaptist mentor, Will Campbell concluded “We just can’t quite trust the power of the Gospel message.” There just must be something we can add, some gimmick, some technique, some strategy..” And now Christians think they need more powerful symbols, a more powerful military, troops in our streets, more law enforcement, more security, more authority.

I really believe we now have to depend only on the Gospel and if it is not enough, then let it not be enough. Our witness is faithfulness. But I fear too many of my fellow Christians now see this as folly, foolishness, weakness. The Greek word for folly is MORIA. I mourn those who find the gospel MORIA, woke, wimpy, and too soft.

America looks more like ancient Athens every day: Cluttered with false gods. Mammon (market fundamentalists), military power, and government authoritarianism.

Cornel West, in Democracy Matters argues our democracy is endangered by “three, dominating, antidemocratic dogmas: free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism.”

West warns, “On the domestic front, this dogma expands police power, augments the prison-industrial complex, and legitimates unchecked male power (and violence) at home and in the workplace. It views crime as a monstrous enemy to crush (targeting poor people and immigrants) rather than as an ugly behavior to change.”

For a theological moment: Augustine in The City of God even argues that the reason the Roman Empire has fallen on hard times is due to their worship of corrupt gods. He assumed rightly that there is a direct correlation between the worship of God, the character of our lives, and politics. According to Augustine, Rome fell because the people of Rome became corrupt by emulating the corruption of their gods. Needless to say, Augustine’s account of idolatry was not well received by the Romans. (Hauerwas, Stanley. Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian (p. 80). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition).

Today’s faithful preachers are not well received because Americans are addicted to their idols. They show up at church on Sunday, but during the week they are packing their cherished idols. They are like Rachel who “stole her father’s household gods” (Genesis 31:19).

See the images. Lamb in a bush! Lamb on a cross! Then Lamb on the throne! But we are captive now to idols of power and might, militarism, and all kinds of bullying. Rare is the prophet’s voice: “Not by power nor by might, but by my Word.”

Before John said that he said some unnerving words, words that angered many in his Jewish audience. “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” Has it always been true that people are angered when the preacher speaks a truth they wish not to hear or accept? When Elijah condemned Jezebel and Ahab, Jezebel had a temper tantrum and swore she would kill Elijah that day. When Amos told the king that he couldn’t live outside the will of God, the king’s priest, in anger, threw Amos out of the country and told him he could not preach any longer in the “king’s temple.” When Jesus told the congregation at Nazareth that God loved foreigners, they tried to throw him off a cliff to his death. When Paul told the truth they beat him and tried to kill him. Can we face that we don’t much like hard truth? Like the mythical boy in the Joe Jackson saga, we cry, “Say it ain’t so, preacher!”

 

This is Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday and Martin was one of God’s truth-telling, suffering servants. One of God’s lambs. Martin faced the terrors of racism and led the Civil Rights Movement. He was not wanted in his own hometown. So, bombed in Montgomery; jailed in Birmingham, Albany, and St. Augustine; stoned in Chicago; invited out of town in Cleveland; and unwanted in Atlanta.

We should celebrate the progress we have made without the presumption that we are somehow finished with race issues. Today, King’s movement is threatened by people who are not willing to face the truth. Instead of making more progress in issues of race, we are fighting over words. Theologian Cornel West says that we are fighting over the word “wokeness” instead of improving race relations. We accuse others of racism rather than working with one another. There are growing voices among African American scholars that our approach to race relations is not working. We generate more anger instead of more understanding. We generate more division rather than more democracy. Our presumptions, our attempts to do good, can go sideways. Some people presume that racism is finished in America. Others presume their job is to call out every slight, every word, every action that may suggest racism and so the word “racist” is never far from their lips. We are a presumption-laden people.

Presumption – that is the source of all self-righteousness. And many Jews were filled with presumption. They knew their ancestry and they didn’t need ancestor.com They knew they were the children of Abraham. The Jews knew they had been entrusted with the oracles of God – the Law – the Prophets – the Bible. They knew were Israelites, “and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.”

But all this had gone to their heads and their hearts were far from God. They had become a militant people believing that violence would save them. What’s that got to do with us?

Is there a universal lesson here? Can God raise up children of Abraham from rocks in the wilderness? Does this apply to liberal Democrats? Does it apply to evangelicals who believe that America is God’s nation, that America was founded as a Christian nation? Our presumptions that we know what the Bible says, our presumptions that we are God’s favored people, our presumptions that we know more and better than other people of other faiths, our presumption that we don’t need a “lamb of God,” our presumption that we don’t really need a suffering servant Jesus because we are doing fine and dandy on our own, is just that – a simmering pot full of presumptions.

Our worst presumption is that we don’t need Jesus the Lamb of God. We’re doing ok on our own. Too many Christians demand that Jesus be the “Lion of Judah.” Their Jesus is a stern Jesus – condemning, judging, putting people in their place, and telling people what to do.

Jesus refuses to be used as the model for an aggressive nationalism. He refused the offer to be king in 30 A.D. and he refuses it now except as the suffering servant. The lamb is the sacrifice on the altar in the holy of holies.

Lambs are not symbols of power, but Jesus is the lamb of God. We are not at all sure that we are on the same page with Jesus: “I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.” Lambs live a precarious existence. Herod almost finished Jesus before he was three years old. His own friends and family and Nazareth almost killed him after his first sermon.

We can’t blame anyone for the reluctance to follow the Lamb. We will be judged for how often we have made following Jesus easier than it is supposed to be. Maybe we should stop telling people that it is easy, stop inviting people to church under false pretenses of how much fun it will be.

Behold the Lamb of God! Are we ready for that? The lamb on the altar for the world? Are we ready for that? The lamb as the Passover sign? Are we ready for that? The lamb as the symbol of freedom from slavery? Are we ready for that? Two men, offered the Lamb of God, followed him. Andrew and his brother Simon – the one Jesus named Peter – the rock on which the church was built. If we are willing to be lambs, we may be wounded for our nation’s transgressions, bruised for America’s iniquities, and asked to carry the burdens of all people – black and white, red and yellow, immigrants, the poor may be on our shoulders.

Today, let us begin! Let us give up our presumptions, repent of our self-righteousness, and follow the Lamb and be lambs in a world of wolves.