Epiphany 2A, January 19, 2014; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Merciful and generous God, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

We’ve been hearing readings from the Gospel of Matthew over the last eight weeks. We will return to Matthew next week. But this week it is as if the Lectionary announces, “We interrupt our serial reading of the Gospel of Matthew to bring you this Good News from the Gospel of John. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. John the Baptist has testified to it.”  But what on earth does that mean? You know, that’s a question that I get asked. “What does ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ mean?” And like a good pastoral listener, my response is, “What do you think?” Part of me is truly interested in what the questioner thinks. And part of me is dodging the question.

We sing or say those words in the Agnus Dei as the bread and wine of our Eucharist are portioned out so that they can be shared. It’s a deeply spiritual moment for me and for many others when our hearts and bodies are being prepared to receive and to be transformed. Those words in that liturgical moment date back to the late 7th century, and seem to have been put into the service as a reactionary protest to a canon law at the time that forbade depicting Christ in the form of a lamb. The same council¹ also declared that alleluias would not be said during Lent, and affirmed the right of married men to become priests. The Bishop of Rome agreed to eschew the alleluias, but married priests were rejected and Christ as lamb was affirmed.Going back further, in the mid-second century, Justin Martyr wrote about Jesus: “the pascha was the Christ who was afterwards sacrificed…as the blood of the Passover saved us who were in Egypt, so also the blood of Christ will deliver from death those who have believed.” This probably founds familiar to you in terms of a traditional sacrificial theology: that believers were saved by the blood of Christ. And perhaps you recall the ancestor of this idea from the Passover story that a lamb was to be slaughtered and its blood wiped on the doorframes of the Hebrew people so that God would pass by or hover over their houses and not kill their first born sons. So the blood of the lamb was both a sign of identification and a promise of protection. We know that the practice by the time of the Second Temple was that observant Jews were obligated to bring a lamb for sacrifice at Passover, and that only those who were obligated to sacrifice were permitted to share in the meal. We also know that faithful people who were too poor to offer a lamb had an alternative. A poor person’s offering was a dove. The Holy Spirit was like a poor person’s offering.When I imagine the writer of the Gospel of John, at the end of the first century, telling the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, and giving the background of what led up to the crucifixion, I can see that John the Evangelist had a much stronger feeling about the ritual sacrificial aspect of Jesus’ death than the other three evangelists (Mark, Matthew and Luke) did. For example, John the Evangelist changed the timing of the crucifixion, departing from the chronology reported by the other gospels, with regard to the Feast of Passover, so that the last supper was not a Passover Seder but just a regular dinner, and the crucifixion happened on the day before the Feast of Passover when the lambs were sacrificed.

It seems clear to me that John the Evangelist was addressing people who were still devoted to following the teachings of John the Baptist and others who were following the teachings of Jesus – and he wanted them to join together, so he emphasized in his narrative how much John the Baptist loved and admired Jesus. In each of the four Gospel stories, the baptismal inauguration of Jesus’ ministry gets grander. From Jesus having a personal experience of the voice of God, to the gathered community experiencing the voice of God, to John’s public testimony to the community, the story grows in scale and in details in the intervening years between the earliest Gospel of Mark and the latest Gospel of John, in which John the Baptist didn’t mind at all that his followers left him to follow Jesus.

What’s not clear to me is whether John the Baptist or John the Evangelist was making the title of Lamb of God. Lamb of God is not a title in the Hebrew Bible or in the other Gospels. Paul refers to Christ as the paschal lamb in 1 Corinthians, and 1 Peter refers to the blood of Christ, like a lamb. And then there’s the Book of Revelation with many references to the lamb: the lamb that was slaughtered, and the lamb from which flow the four rivers of paradise. I think that what we’ve got is early evidence of a developing idea about the capital punishment of Jesus being joined with the idea of salvation coming through blood sacrifice. The problem with this idea is that it has been death-dealing in the history of Christianity, rather than life-giving.

I’m wondering if we can make the L in Lamb lowercase, and back away from the title Lamb of God since our earliest or oldest copies of scripture don’t have capital/lowercase distinctions or punctuation or even spaces between words. Capitalizing the L in Lamb is an editorial choice with theological motivations. So I want to suggest that we make and affirm a different choice. Judaism has moved far beyond blood sacrifice, and it’s beyond time for Christians to do the same. If we lower the case of the L in lamb, then Jesus is the lamb of God, the sheep in the fold of the good shepherd.

What difference does this make? I always think of the difference it makes when my friend and colleague, Mark Bozzuti-Jones, with his great baritone voice and Jamaican accent adds “of God” to a person’s given name as a greeting. Jeffrey of God! David of God! Lucy of God! I always like the sound of it, and I especially like that my name rhymes with Lamb. “Pam of God,” he will exclaim whenever he sees me. What he means to convey is that we are all lambs of God — sheep in the fold of the Good Shepherd. And what takes away the sin of the world, what lifts the burden of oppression, slavery, violence, injustice and other distortions, is the regular reminder of just who and whose we are –- lambs of God. And for lambs who follow Jesus, he is the Good Shepherd.

And so when the bread and wine of Eucharist are offered with the words: behold who you are, and the people respond, may we become what we see – what we are affirming is our identity as lambs of God – as members of God’s flock. We are acknowledging our hunger and thirst for nourishment. We are anticipating taking in nourishment so that we can nourish others in Jesus’ name. We receive the bread so that we can become the bread for the world. That in fact might be an answer to Jesus’ question, “what are you looking for?”
What are you looking for? Translated differently, the question also means, what are you searching for, pursuing, striving for, wanting? The disciples’ response is also small and large. They want to know where Jesus is staying. Where are you staying? It can mean where are you lodging, where do you remain; it can also mean where is the substance of your being? Where are you nourished, loved, where do you love? Where do you come alive? Where do you remain alive?

And Jesus’ answer is, “Come and see.” “Come and see” is a refrain that echoes in John’s Gospel. Jesus says it first. Then his followers say it to others – Philip says it to Nathaniel; the woman at the well says it to the people in the city. And this is not just any invitation. This is an invitation that will change lives.

I’m fond of an old Hasidic understanding of scripture that every word is true for every person at every time. So I’m hoping by now that you can imagine that this passage has something to do with you, wherever you are on your spiritual journey. Here is Jesus asking what you are searching for, what you are striving for, what you are wishing for, what you are wanting. Here you are responding that you wonder about where Jesus stays – where Jesus remains. Here is Jesus inviting you to come and see. Com and see the abundant love of God.

And I’m hoping that you can dram that this passage has everything to do with you as a lamb in the flock of God. Here, in this dream of God, you are a lamb asking another what she is searching for, what he is seeking, what she is wishing for, what he is wanting. Here she is responding that she wonders about where Jesus stays. Here he is responding that he wants to find out where Jesus remains alive – although he might not ever use those words. She might be wondering where there is water for the thirsty and food for those who hunger, where there is freedom for those who are oppressed, and healing for those who suffer, where there is shelter and clothing for those who lack those basic necessities. Here you are the lamb inviting people to “come and see.” Here you are inviting people to come experience the abundant love of God – because you are the body of Christ now and, according to John, you cannot follow Jesus without inviting others.

Now this is not so easy for Episcopalians to invite hungry, thirsty, or otherwise needy people to church. But accepting an invitation from Jesus is unlike accepting any other invitation. It would not go over very well, for example, if you were invited to an elegant meal and on your own initiative you invited a few other hungry people to come with you. But that is exactly what Jesus wants us to do: invite a few other hungry people to come with you.

Perhaps you are shy. But I know if you found a great dentist or a good restaurant, you would tell people about it, wouldn’t you? Perhaps you are concerned about offending someone, taking about religion. And truth be told, I don’t think people are hungry for religion, per se. But I know that there is plenty of hunger out there and there is nothing offensive about one hungry person showing another hungry person where some bread is. There is nothing offensive about acknowledging out loud your own need for experience with the Holy One, the Ground of all Being, and inviting another to come and see where you find spiritual sustenance. You know, it’s not the blood of Christ that saves us, it’s the Love of Christ that identifies and protects us. It’s Love that takes away the sin of the world. It’s the Love of Christ that is more powerful than death. Please accept the invitation. Please extend the invitation. Come and see.

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