I.

As many of you know, when I was a boy I spent many summers in Ocean Grove. Ocean Grove was a Methodist Camp Meeting site, and the town was tightly controlled by a group of strict Methodists. Every Sunday we went to church in the Great Auditorium, and very often we would sing one of those classic pietistic hymns about being "washed in the blood" of Jesus. In fact, there were days when, if you took the hymns literally, worship in Ocean Grove would have been rated R: too much blood and violence.

These were not hymns we sang back home in my dad’s Presbyterian churches. Most were not even in the classic 1955 Hymnbook. I remember asking him once what all the emphasis on blood was about; I don’t remember his answer. There was enough else going on in Ocean Grove that he couldn’t relate to so I just put this on my list of "things they do here that we don’t do." We don’t sing gory hymns about Jesus’ blood, except maybe a couple on Maundy Thursday.

For some Christians Jesus’ blood is the center and core of what Christianity is all about. The idea of Christ dying for us and our being saved from God’s wrath by his atoning blood, is something that I’m sure many of us would assume to be basic to Christianity generally.

But I must confess that this imagery never did anything for me. I never understood the "washed in the blood" school of hymnody; and as I grew up and became a minister, I was usually somewhat embarrassed and apologetic with this emphasis on Jesus’ gruesome suffering and his blood somehow shielding us from a violent and judgmental deity.

It reminds me of when I went to Europe in 1977, and I visited a lot of cathedrals. It seemed like so much of medieval religious art was obsessed with Jesus’ and the saints’ bloody suffering. Everywhere you looked were these incredibly graphic crucifixes. And the piety seemed deeply self-hating and self-punishing, as if you couldn’t love Jesus without hating yourself and everyone else. The guilt was palpable. And the mood was very gloomy and painfully oppressive.

When faced with this kind of religion, I have to ask, "What kind of god are we talking about here?" What kind of god would demand the shedding of blood to satisfy his jealous rage, and who would callously send his own son to a cruel and excruciating death. What kind of god would demand torture: torture of his son, torture of yourself, torture of others, torture of the whole creation? This is not the behavior we would expect from the gracious, loving, forgiving Parent Jesus taught about.

So, when a passage like this one comes up, with Paul saying, "Now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God," I have to stop and figure out just what he’s talking about. Because this god sounds an awful lot like an Ocean Grove strict Methodist, and that can’t be right.

II.

When we examine some of the things Jesus did say about God, we find rather a different picture. Look at the three famous parables in Luke 15, the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son, stories most of you probably know.

Does the father of the Prodigal Son require someone’s execution before accepting the wayward boy back? No. Does the Good Shepherd have to kill a sheep in order to receive back the one that was lost? No. Does the woman have to give up a coin in order to find the lost one? No.

In these cases from Luke’s gospel, which come down to us as the parables par excellence about God’s deepest nature, no sacrificial death is required before God deigns to receive the one that was lost.

But in these texts, we also have great celebration at the restoration of the lost. The celebration goes beyond anything that makes economic sense to us, as with the woman who lost a coin: she throws a party that must have cost her many times the value of the tiny coin she had lost. The forgiving father sacrifices the best calf for the feast celebrating his son’s return. These stories of restoration are also stories of celebration and celebration means a banquet and a banquet means eating and eating means... well, killing something.

I am reminded again of how cut-off we modern people are from natural, real life. We practically think food comes in cans, boxes, or neatly wrapped in plastic. The truth is, just about everything we eat was once alive and someone had to kill it so we could eat it. I can’t overstate this.

For ancient people this was obvious; and they felt it very deeply. For us to eat, for us to survive, we have to do violence to God’s creation. It was impossible for them to forget as easily as we do that what appeared on their plates at dinner was only yesterday a living thing with a name and a personality.

Even the very act of slaughtering animals for food was a religious ritual. This is what sacrifices were. You were saved by the blood of the animal quite literally: you were saved from starvation because it gave you its life.

And you prayed over this offering, and gave a portion back to God or God’s priests, as a way to make it up to God that you have found it necessary to violate the creation in this way. The Earth and the animals do not belong to us: they belong to God and you only take for yourself what is God’s with the greatest circumspection and care. That is the way ancient people thought.

So in these three parables, we see that the celebration of the restoration of the lost means a further intensifying of our involvement in the cycles of life and death on the Earth. In getting back the life one that was lost, we offer in sacrifice the life of another in celebration.

There is a balance. There is an exchange. There is a very complex relationship between life and death, being lost and being found, giving and taking.

III.

But listen: we are the ones who were lost but are now found. We are the ones who had wandered off and are now restored. We are the ones who squandered our inheritance and are received back by the forgiving Father.

How does God celebrate that homecoming? God throws a party! God proclaims a banquet! God brings out the best lamb from the flock and arranges that we share together in his life. And who after all is this Lamb of God? And how do we share together in his life?

For this he gives us this particular meal: this bread which is a communion in his Body, and this cup, which is a communion in his blood. Wheat and grapes. There is a sense then in which the life of these plants is given for us so that we can celebrate God’s saving presence made real in our own lives.

Something like this is going on when Paul writes "we have been justified by his blood." In the cup we share in the Lord’s Supper, we are connecting in our own souls to the story of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. When Paul writes, "Christ died for us," perhaps he means Christ gave himself as the meal celebrating our restoration. The Lord’s Supper is the banquet that God throws, celebrating our restoration to God.

IV.

When I lived in Martinsville we had a brook flowing behind our neighborhood. I used to take a walk down there nearly every day. Often I had my son with me in the stroller; later he walked or rode his bike. One time I remember going down there, standing on the little bridge, and meditating again on the flowing water.

I remembered that in high school we were taught about "Caesar’s last breath." The theory is that in every breath we take there is at least a molecule or atom or two that was part of Caesar’s last breath, when he was murdered in Rome. The point of that illustration is to show what a tight, recycling system we live in. Every breath or drink we take connects us to every other breath ever taken. That’s how small and pervasive are these particles which make up the Earth. They are always being shuffled and recycled.

So, take the water in that little brook. According to this theory, there were atoms and molecules flowing under me as I stood on the bridge that once had to be literally in the body of Jesus. Talk about transubstantiation! Some of the actual atoms or molecules in the water that makes up the wine or grape juice we share in the Lord’s Supper, really were in the water that flowed from Jesus’ side or was in his shed blood on the cross, or his sweat at Gethsemane.

This means that in the most literal, physical, scientific sense, the Earth itself is God’s body, for there must now be, after two-thousand years, traces of Jesus’ literal flesh and blood everywhere. In the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, in the cells that comprise our bodies... the Incarnation means that God is there, here, within us, and around us.

In the Sacrament all we do is draw our attention to this small piece of creation, this bread and this wine, and point out how this is a communion in God’s body and blood. And the truth is that it is all quite literally God’s body and blood. Not just this consecrated bread and wine, but pizza crusts and Coke, Ritz crackers and Poland Spring water, Wonderbread and Hi-C, tortilla chips and 2 percent milk... it’s all God’s body and blood.

It’s all sacred. It’s all holy. The whole Earth is "washed in the blood of Jesus" every day! The whole Earth is the body of Christ all the time!

V.

This is how we are justified by his blood: when we taste and see the bread and the cup in the Sacrament, we are participating, not just spiritually and symbolically but now also literally, in God’s saving presence on the Earth. We are literally participating in the life of all life. We literally share the same matter with everything else that lives and has ever lived.

"For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation." We have been reconciled. Paul talks about it as an accomplished fact. We have been reconnected. More precisely, we have been re-informed of our connectedness and integration with God and creation.

Reconciliation is, as those of us who work with checking accounts know, making it balance. On my Quicken program I click on the little button that says "reconcile" and I am ready to make my account, what I think I have, balance with what is real. It is the way I ensure that my thoughts and perceptions about how much money I have actually have some basis in truth.

Reconciliation means restoring the truth to our experience and our consciousness. It is revealing the most basic truth of all: our oneness with God, with creation, with each other, and with our true selves in Jesus Christ. In Christ, because of his shed blood giving his life for us on the cross and to us in the resurrection, we are one. We are all connected. We are all blessed. We are all united in God’s saving love.

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