Sermons

“Cross Pollination – Your Days Are Scrolls”

Psalm 27; Isaiah 1:11-20 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – March 8, 2020

Cross Pollination Lenten Sermon Series #2

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might open our hearts to the wisdom you are sending us through our neighbors.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

“Your days are scrolls: write on them only what you want remembered.”  For our second conversation in this Lenten “Cross Pollination” series, Walter Rorie-Baety and I had the privilege of meeting with Rabbi Devorah Marcus, leader of Temple Emanu-El in Del Cerro.  She began our dialogue with this line from 11^th century Jewish poet, Bachya ibn Pakuda: “Your days are scrolls: write on them only what you want remembered.”  The quote gives you a sense of how seriously Judaism takes sin and our personal responsibility for it.  Put another way: if you know you shouldn’t do it, if you don’t want anyone to know you did it, if this isn’t how you want to be remembered – don’t do it.

Of course, that only helps if you haven’t already done it.  In our conversation with Rabbi Marcus, we discovered that Jewish tradition has an elaborate system set up to deal with the fact that more often than we’d care to admit, we’ve already done it.  For this, she had another quote, one that she says she likes to use to set the tone for the Jewish High Holy Days.  The origin was unclear, but the quote goes something like this: “For those who sin and think, ‘I will repent at Yom Kippur,’ the Day of Atonement does not atone.”  It seems sincerity is something Jewish tradition takes quite seriously too.

So let’s back up just a minute to make sure we’re all on the same page.  If Lent is an annual season when Christians focus on repentance from sin, then the closest counterpart in Judaism is Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement.  Yom Kippur falls in September or October every year, on the 10^thday of the Jewish month of Tishrei.  You may have also heard of Rosh Hashanah, one of three or four Jewish “new year’s days”, which begins the month of Tishrei.  So Yom Kippur is ten days after Rosh Hashanah.  Rabbi Marcus told us that Rosh Hashanah is seen by some as the “last chance” to start repenting, to be ready for Yom Kippur.  And you do probably need at least ten days, because repentance in Jewish tradition is a four-step process, and the first two need to happen before you arrive at the Temple for the Day of Atonement.

Here are the four steps as Rabbi Marcus explained them to us.  The first step is to take full responsibility for your sins.  There are always extenuating circumstances, and you may have only had bad options to choose from, but you always have choices.  So the first step is to own your choices, your actions, your behavior and to truly take personal responsibility for them.  It’s easy to see why this has to be the first step, because how can you repent of a sin you aren’t fully admitting you committed?  But it’s also easy to see how hard it sometimes is to get through even just step one.  We’re really good at finding excuses, aren’t we?  But in repentance, excuses are not the point.  Extenuating circumstances are not the point; the point is what we did in response to those circumstances and whether it aligns with the righteousness of God or not.

Once you have accepted responsibility, the second step is to seek forgiveness from the person or persons you hurt.  And again, the sincerity of the apology is the point here.  If you didn’t thoroughly complete step one, step two won’t work.  Jewish tradition requires that you make a sincere apology and ask for forgiveness up to three times.  If you receive forgiveness the first time you ask, you move on to step three.  If you don’t, you ask again, and then again.  And here’s an interesting point:  if you’ve asked sincerely for forgiveness three times, and the person refuses to forgive you, you are free to move on, and the other person then becomes the one who is sinning, by withholding forgiveness.

Once you have sought and hopefully received forgiveness from the injured party, you are clear to seek forgiveness from God, step three.  This is where the Day of Atonement comes in, and we’ll get into the details of that in a moment.  But step four underlines the seriousness of all of this.  Step four is never doing the sinful thing again.  If you seek forgiveness for a particular sin, and then do it again, Rabbi Marcus explained, the forgiveness you sought is rescinded.  If a similar situation arises, and you make a better choice, you are demonstrating your right to the mercy you received.  But if you make the same bad decision again, you are showing that you did not truly repent, and the forgiveness disappears.  There’s a reason the Day of Atonement happens every year, and I’m guessing this is part of the reason why.

So let’s get into the details of step three now, as explained by Rabbi Marcus, from the context of her Reform Jewish synagogue.  All of what I’ve said thus far emphasizes the personal responsibility we have for sin, but as you’ll see, Judaism has an equally strong focus on the communal nature of sin, which is illustrated in how the rituals of Yom Kippur are carried out.  The Day of Atonement begins, as all Jewish days and holidays do, at sunset.  Fasting is part of this celebration, so you would eat dinner before the sun goes down and then head to temple for the evening service.

You would come back in the morning for the next service, and then there would be educational seminars and various other activities for a few hours.  At 4 o’clock the afternoon service would begin, followed immediately by a memorial service and then the evening service, which closes out Yom Kippur.  And remember, you’re fasting this entire time.  Rabbi Marcus mentioned something about the effect of the fasting that I’d never heard connected to fasting before: the idea that the hunger and exhaustion, from the long day of prayer and study, wear down your defenses and make you more able to admit to your sins.  I had never thought about fasting that way before, but it made sense to me.

What happens during these services?  Rabbi Marcus focused on two parts.  The very first service starts with a prayer song called the “Kol Nidrei” which literally means “All Vows”.  It is based on the Jewish belief that every word we say is a binding contract, and that we’ve likely said a bunch of things in the past year that we didn’t follow through on.  So the Kol Nidrei asks God for forgiveness and release from all the vows we made that we’ve failed to keep.  It covers both the vows we’ve already made and those we will make and fail to keep in the future, because you know how we are, and so does God.  You can start to see how seriously Judaism takes ethical action here, because the Kol Nidrei assumes that we’ve sinned both consciously and unconsciously, that there are plenty of sins we’ve committed without even realizing it and others that we quickly forgot about.  The song aims to confess even that ignorance and ask forgiveness for all of it, deliberate and mistaken.

The second major part of the Yom Kippur services is called the “Vidui”, which means “confession”.  This happens at least twice during the day, and involves the rabbi reading an alphabetical list of sins, a shorter list first and later a longer list, while all the participants literally beat their chests as a sign of their complicity with the sins being named.  Some of the sins are more specific, and some are broader.  There are the traditional lists, but also some updated lists whose specifics are more relevant to modern times.

There is a reason these lists of sins are read in the services and confessed communally.  In Jewish tradition, the assumption is that any given person is either guilty of the sin themselves or guilt of tolerating it in others.  Part of what is being confessed is collective responsibility for the sins of the world.  If the sin is still happening – and Rabbi Marcus noted that no sin has ever been removed from the list for lack of existence – then the community is partly responsible for not having stopped it yet. The weight of that responsibility is particularly heavy for sins committed by fellow Jews, but it extends to the whole world.  In this way, the rituals of confession and repentance are a clear call to active, ethical involvement in the world and righteous response to injustice.

Is it reasonable to expect the Jews of the world to have eradicated our sin?  Of course not, but that doesn’t mean they are going to stop trying.  That sense of personal responsibility, shared across a community, is the center of Jewish ethics.  And it’s also at the center of their covenant with God.  A member of the community came into Rabbi Marcus’s office as we were finishing up.  I was asking about which readings they might suggest we use today.  This woman suggested Psalm 27, particularly because of verse four, where the psalmist talks about longing to live in the house of the Lord.  “We know we’re a mess; we know we keep screwing up, but we’re trying and we want to be with you.”  That’s what this is all about, she said.  Rabbi Marcus suggested the first two chapters of Isaiah, because they speak to God’s frustration with our frequent hypocrisy, when we pretend to be religious, but refuse to clean up our behavior.  The clear message I got from this dialogue is that repentance from sin must be sincere above all things.  If we don’t mean it, it’s literally meaningless.  And we’re fooling ourselves if we think God can’t tell the difference.

In closing, I want to clarify something else about the community at Temple Emanu-El.  I asked Rabbi Marcus about how all this heavy talk of sin lingers the rest of the year.  She mentioned that there are two prayers in the Jewish daily prayers about forgiveness and atonement.  But she also noted that the regular Shabbat services do not include prayers of confession at all.  Shabbat is special; it is reserved as a celebration of God’s blessing, a time of gratitude for their connection with God.  In truth, Reform Judaism doesn’t talk about sin much at all, except during Yom Kippur.  It isn’t the weight this exploration may have made it seem.  Most of the year is focused on recognizing God’s blessings and sharing them, much like we try to do here at Vista La Mesa.  But the Yom Kippur services are also the ones that are most highly attended.  People know that we need to confess our sins.  They weigh upon us, the individual ones and the collective ones.  We need a place to sincerely sort through all that and seek God’s mercy and strength for righteous response to injustice.

I believe that we could learn a lot from the Jewish approach to sin, both about how to process it within our own hearts and how to confess it communally in ways that lead us into more effective action for justice in our world.  “Our days are scrolls; let us write upon them only what we want remembered.”  Amen.