August 29, 2010 — Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Outcast” — Vicar Fremer
Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download. (Right Click)
“Outside the camp.”
It is a curious phrase at the end of verse 11 of our text today. What does it mean?
The Epistle of Hebrews is directed (big surprise) to Hebrews. The author, who remains anonymous, sent this sermon in letter form to scattered Jewish Christians throughout the known world. The author of Hebrews is not careless with his words. While all the Epistles are quite articulate, the Epistle to the Hebrews stands out as quite well-crafted and literary. To the Hebrews that this letter is directed to, this phrase had a particular meaning. That meaning was steeped in their history and their way of life. It was a meaning wrapped up in the very core of their identity.
Put simply, to be “outside the camp” meant exile. If you were outside the camp, you were an outcast. This goes back to the days when the Hebrews were wandering in the wilderness after Yahweh freed them from Egypt. The people of God were inside the camp. They had a tent, most of them probably had friends and family. They were visibly established in their community. The Hebrews were a community first. They thought in terms of the family and the nation as well as the individual. If one is forced out of this community, that individual leaves their whole life behind. Family, friends, bloodline, all of it is cut off. Being outside the camp is to be severed from the Hebrew community, with no prospects of work with one’s countrymen, and no possibility of taking a Hebrew wife or husband.
Being outside the camp was also dangerous. Think about it. If you are a nomadic people wandering through strange lands, you want to keep close to your fellows. You want to stake out a perimeter and keep it guarded, to keep you safe from bandits or from beasts.
Outside the camp is where the predators are, where hostile peoples roamed. Outside the camp was lawlessness and peril.
There is a final aspect to this concept. Outside the camp is where the unclean things are. Human waste, defiled animals, corpses, lepers, Gentiles, these are outside the camp. To be outside the camp is to be cut off not only from your community, but from God Himself. It is to be unclean.
Sometimes we have a hard time understanding this, at least, I do. God’s everywhere, right? How can anyone be cut off from Him? True, God is omnipresent. There is not a part of this universe that is outside Him. However, those outside the camp are not cut off from God completely. They are cut off from His gracious, saving work.
In the Hebrew understanding, God worked through the Israelite community. God saved the Israelite community, and the only way to obtain forgiveness of sins was to become part of this community through circumcision, to take on their worship, their laws, their scriptures. To be severed from that community is to be severed from salvation. It is to be severed from the means through which God works to save the Hebrews, namely, the sacrificial system and the community itself.Does this mean that the Hebrews were saved by ceremonies? No. Just like us, the Hebrews were saved by Christ’s death and the cross and His resurrection. So why the sacrifices? The author of Hebrews deals with this earlier in his letter, in chapter ten verse 1:
“For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.”
The Hebrew sacrifices were signposts, pointing to the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. The commandments, the sacrifices, all of it pointed to the coming Messiah.
It is much different with us. We of America understand the idea of community, but often, for us, the emphasis shifts from the community to the individual. This idea is all over, you can’t escape it. We applaud the strong individual who stands up and becomes his own person, often despite the community. The phrase “status quo” has a disparaging taste in our modern parlance, does it not? The status quo, the establishment, the “Man,” if you will, is something to be fought and overcome, something to set yourself against.
Make no mistake, this can be a good thing, but this individualized mindset has had some unhealthy consequences. How often has our flesh whispered to us: “You don’t need to go to church, you believe in Jesus.” How often have we spurned the help or counsel of others to do it yourself? How often do we balk at the idea that we need someone to save us?
The flesh will do this. Our enemy the devil is a relentless worker, he seeks new tools every day, and he has found a potent tool in our self-glorification. He works, every second of every day, even right now, to convince us that we don’t need any help, that we should do it on our own. After all, we’re grownups now, right? What do grownups do? They take care of themselves, they don’t go running to Daddy God to fix all their problems. What are you Christians after all, a bunch of babies?
This, frankly, is wrong. Our Lord’s way of working does not change, only the means have changed. For the Hebrews, He worked through sacrifices and the communal laws, which looked forward to His future work. When God became flesh in Christ Jesus and died on the cross to sanctify the people with His blood, He was the final sacrifice. No more sacrifices are necessary. His divine blood has washed away our sins in the sight of God. So the same, ceremonial observance isn’t necessary to make us clean. We still wash our hands and bathe for the sake of hygiene, but it doesn’t alter God’s disposition towards us.
Christ did that. We don’t need to refrain from some nice, juicy, barely-cooked bacon to remain God’s children. Our Baptism has made us God’s children, not our abstinence from certain foods.
A Hebrew of the old times would go to extreme lengths to remain in His community. We, however, all too often, cut ourselves off from that community. We’re tempted, time and again, to forsake it, believing we’re strong enough to go it alone, that we can just believe in Jesus and we don’t need church.
Too many Christians see church as an obligation. It is something we do to be a “good person,” all the while wishing we were somewhere else. But church is not something we do for God. Our God does not need our worship, nor does our God need our prayers. Our God established the church as a way to communicate His wonderful love to us.
How does this communication happen? As I said before, our God works the same way, only the things that He works through change. For the Hebrews, our Lord worked through circumcision and sacrifice. For us, He works through His Divine Word, present in a way we can see, taste, and touch. Last week we had a Baptism. God’s Word, united with water, rescued a baby from her sin-sickened flesh. Soon we will come to the Supper, where we will receive God’s Word in wafers and wine. Earlier, Pastor Lassman stood before you, visible to your eyes, and spoke God’s Word to you, saying, “I forgive you all your sins.” That is why we go to church, my friends. It is not a place where we do for God; it is a place where God gives us what He has promised to: Saving grace, life, and salvation.
When we raise our voices in song, all we’re doing is responding to what God has already done for us. Earlier in our text, the writer of the Hebrews describes a number of “sacrifices pleasing to God.” These good works are the same.
They are our response to the good things Christ has poured over us. Just as songs come from our lips in worship, so also does right living come from us as we receive God’s Word in an earthy, tangible way.
The writer of the Hebrews reminds us that this will not always be easy, in fact, that it rarely will. He says in verse thirteen: “Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured.” The writer uses the phrase differently now. He reminds us that as Christians, we are set apart from the world by Christ’s work in us. We are outcasts from this world, and bear the same reproach from the world that Christ did. We must endure the many painful things that devil, world, and flesh will throw at us. As outcasts, we will be maligned. As outcasts, we will be misunderstood. We will be thought freaks, weirdos, religious nuts, delusional, idiotic, and every other form of scorn under the sun. As outcasts, we will suffer disaster and despair.
But, outcasts from the world though we be, I remind you, brothers and sisters, that we have the one true treasure! In this church, we receive Christ Himself through the Scriptures. We receive Him through water, we receive Him through wine and wafer. We receive His forgiveness, His love, His assurance, and His comfort. It may seem like small comfort as we stare into the teeth of the roaring lion, the devil, that seeks to devour us, but the final victory is Christ’s. It is Christ’s, and we are His children. Simply put, my friends, we win.
We win, because He won first.
Amen.
