The Machine Stops

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March 13th, 2016
The Cross: The Machine Stops
Mark

Good morning. Thank you for being here — being part of this community — — whether that’s for today only or for many, many years. It’s good to have you here. Just by being in a place of worship — each one of us in making an action, taking a stand against the norm — against the status quo. Only about 1:5 Americans say they attend a place of worship on a regular basis. You are in the minority.

And you know what? That’s no small thing — to do something out of the ordinary. Some action that is different. I wasn’t in town Friday night and I wasn’t at the protest outside the UIC pavilion. But I want to say thank you to all who did go — who stood up and peacefully and determinedly declared they are against the demonization of a people group — whether those people are Muslim or Mexican. They are against racism and crimes of torture.

Standing up and naming something — isn’t an action many of us do. Even more out of step than going to church is going to protest at a political rally. Even less than the 1:5 of us. That is a minority. I’m grateful for those here that were down there — peacefully standing up.

***

By way of review: For the past several weeks we’ve been looking at different ways people throughout the ages have understood what happens on the cross — this moment when Jesus gathers the sins of the world, bears them on himself, conquers the force of evil, liberates people from their sin, heals us of our iniquities and restores us to fellowship to God, to ourselves to others.

That’s a lot! We’ve been asking the question just how does the cross do that? How does that work? How does the cross manage to accomplish that? The cross was identified with weakness — the people on it weren’t powerful they were weak — victims. So how is a victim..anything more than a victim?

For almost 2,000 believers have seen the cross as the solution to the constellation of human problems. And in each age the human problem has had different language, imagery, worries of their particular time.

In the first — 5th centuries there was a deep emphasis that God had become what we are to make us who God is. The recapitulation model. Jesus was the second Adam. Jesus sets the reset button on the humanity. This is incarnational — where the world is divinized by Jesus’ presence. This is a view that the Eastern Orthodox church still retains.

We looked at the rise of the feudal system and the legal structures of the medieval ages 1100- til today — and how the penal substitution model dominated the reflection of the cross. It’s so wildly popular that this is the only view most of us in this room had of the cross. Briefly, this is the understanding that God the father was holding our sin against us and was enraged by our sin and was going to vent that wrath toward us. But Jesus, the son steps in and say, NO DAD, don’t hold it against them, hold it against me instead. So God turns the blast of his anger from us to the Son. We are spared. God has saved us… from God.

I know this view — I’ve understood this view — but for the last 10 +years, it’s been hard for me to defend this understanding. Which is why I started reading, meditating on the cross regularly. Because if you believe in Jesus as the son of Man. You have to believe this cross — this position — suspended in air, arms extended is the posture of God to the world.

I got to a point where I couldn’t reconcile wrath to this posture. I couldn’t see empire, or militarism, or wrath. This wasn’t the violence of God — this was our violence on display.

Again, a different age, the human problems take on a different light.

No doubt that’s part of it — but I think there are some serious implications when we make violence an inherent and necessary quality of the Trinity. It’s not that God doesn’t have anger toward sin — the system and the individual commissions — that’s clear and evident — but throughout the bible sin never trumped God’s love (sorry about the word choice), you don’t see God straining to love past the sin. God consistently makes the first move to love us. To rescue us.

Which is the model we look at today.

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We’re going to look at a text in Colossians chapter 2 in a few minutes. But first I want to tell you about a remarkable short story I read a few weeks ago — a science fiction tale by E.M Forrester. British novelist who wrote Howard’s End and Room with a View. Both made into films? It’s called The Machine Stops.

It was published in 1909 — and it describes a world in civilization has moved below the Earth. People live in a honeycomb of rooms inside a vast subterranean machine that caters to every human need. When they want food, food arrives. When they want to sleep, a murphy bed — emerges from the wall. They rarely emerge from the confines of their rooms because they don’t actually need to ever do so. No one minds that they live unground — it’s predictable. The air is piped in. The lighting is artificial. The only contact one has with another is mediated.

We’re told the main character has thousands of friends — though she never actually sees them in the flesh. They appear to her on a screen in her room. She summons them though a button on the screen.

He writes this in 1909.

Here’s the thing — the inhabitants of this world believe they live this way by choice, having long since developed an aversion both to the surface of the earth and to the direct experience of light, air, people. The only exception is one dissident, who thinks only of escape, and who manages to find his way to the surface of the earth. And goes back to try to rescue them. To make them see: there is another world.

***
 Jesus has come to rescue us from powers we don’t even see. We are held captive by a matrix so powerful and so complete that it is like the hum of a machine that becomes unnoticeable.

Colossians 2:13–15

13 And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses,14 erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.

Read:
 When you were dead in your sins — you are I are lifeless in our acquiescence to the world. We are like the people in Forester’s story — so deep in a system and a way of thinking that we think we’ve chosen this prison.

Made us alive with Christ — like Christ, we share in his life

He forgave us all of our sins…and he did it by –- erasing the record against us. Whatever rap sheet we had, whatever we had been accused of is erased. God canceled the charge of indebtedness. The indictment

God ended the reign of evil — he took away their weapons. And God shamed them exposing evil and wickedness for what they are. In the dark room of the world, God turned on a light. Exposed them. He took their power away. Triumphed over the forces of evil

Many of us have likely read the Chronicles of Narnia — and the book the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. One of the characters, a kind of brattish kid called Edmund easts some Turkish delight candy and thereby eternally indebts himself to the White Which.

According to some “deep magic before the dawn of time” the witch now owns Edmund for betraying his siblings and she has the right to execute him. Aslan, the lion who is a character stand-in for Jesus in C.S. Lewis’ tale makes a side deal with the Witch Edmund will go free if Aslan agrees to pay the price instead. And that’s what happens — Aslan is willingly tied and is slaughtered on to the stone table so that Edmund can live.

C. S. Lewis was writing the Ransom Captive theory of atonement. And it has a long 1,000 year history in the church. This model says we have been captive ever since the garden. The same one who held out the apple to Eve continues to hold a long laundry list against every one of us since.

It’s not God who accuses us of our sins — it’s Satan. The accuser. The one who has opposed God and everything aligned with God from the very beginning. It’s Satan, the great accuser, Peter writes who goes around like a roaring lion seeking to devour. It’s Satan who accuses Job the servant of God in the book of Job; It’s Satan who Jeshua, the priest of the Lord in the book of Zechariah. It’s Satan who keeps us bound and who demands that we pay and pay and pay.

Mark 10:45

For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’

But now the price has been paid. We’ve been ransomed from the power of the Evil One. — As we heard in Mark’s gospel: The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

I Cor. 7:23, as Paul writes it: You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. You were bought with a price — do not return to slavery.

Christus Victor is another name for this understanding — — Christ is victorious. And in an age dominated by cosmic warfare the certainty that Jesus was the ultimate victor meant everything.

Because what they knew was that there was a great battle ongoing between the forces and good and the forces of evil. It all hung in the balance.

“We wrestle not with flesh and blood but against rulers and authorities; against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the high places.” Ephesians 6:12

Jesus dies on the cross not to get God off our back but to get Satan off our back.

Let me repeat that: Jesus died to get Satan off our back.

And in paying the ransom, many of the Eastern icon will display Jesus descending into hell — that’s what that black chasm is at his feet, and if you could see it close, you’d see these ancient torture devices and the primitive weapons used to maim and kill people — Jesus walks on them. He grabs the hands of Adam, Eve stand-ins for all the rest and he leads them to freedom.

“O come, o come Immanuel and ransom captive Israel. Who groans in lonely exile here, until the son of man appear.”