L.D. 25, Hebrews 10:1-18 "Knowing What's Real" Scott Hoezee

This morning's focus on music reminds us that music is a powerful force. These days young people can now download and store up to 1,000 songs on devices like iPods. A lot of kids today say they love iPods because they can store hundreds of their favorite songs. Typically we reserve the word "favorite" for just one or two things. If I ask you what your favorite pizza topping is, I wouldn't expect you to give me a catalog of dozens of meats, vegetables, and cheeses. I'd expect you to say just "pepperoni" or "pineapple." Yet with music we don't deem it odd to have multiple favorites. Music has that kind of appeal.

The technology of the iPod is striking for also the marvelous quality of the sound. Not so long ago if you were going to wear stereo headphones, you'd have to don one of those really big, earmuff-like devices--the kind of headgear that made you look like Michael Dukakis atop a tank! But today you need do no more than place into your ear tiny plugs hardly larger than a Q-Tip. Yet the sound you get out of that Q-Tip is hugely sharper than what came out of even those outsized headphones years ago.

When he was a boy, C.S. Lewis loved to listen to records played on his family's gramophone. By today's digital standards, the sound that came from old gramophones was very bad. Indeed, Lewis says that the recording of a symphony orchestra was reduced to little more than a single sound pulse. You could not pick out the sounds of any individual instruments but heard only the basic melody coming through. Years later Lewis had the chance to attend a live orchestra concert and he was actually disappointed that he could no longer hear that single pulse of sound! He could now pick out cellos and violins, flutes and oboes, each clearly contributing to the music. It was ridiculous of course. Lewis had become so accustomed to a bad copy that he could not at first appreciate the real thing.

Something of that same dynamic is going on in Hebrews 10, and when we combine this passage with the Catechism's overview of sacraments, we may come to see a wonderful aspect of the mystery of faith. Hebrews 10 reminds us that once upon a time, God's people addressed their problem with sin through a very concrete, very graphic, very bloody act.

As required by God's Law, they'd come to worship with a critter in tow. Maybe it was a dove nestled in the crook of your arm, maybe it was a goat you were tugging along at the end of a rope. You took this living thing to "church," but you would not bring it back home once the worship service was over. Because to show the seriousness of sin and the cost of having that sin forgiven, the bird's neck would have to be wrung, the animal's jugular would have to be slit. And so the Temple was always filled with the aroma of burning flesh even as the floors ran red with blood. This was worship in a slaughterhouse.

But Hebrews claims something quite surprising. Here and elsewhere in this book the author says that all of that literal slashing, bleeding, and burning had all along been a metaphor, a copy of an original but not the original thing itself. Those undeniably physical rituals had, as it turns out, been just the shadow of the real thing yet to come. Jesus ended up being the final sacrifice and now, as people who believe in this Jesus as Lord, we get connected to his sacrifice through pieces of bread and sips of wine as well as through the baptismal washing we get not in a bath of blood but through just the sprinkling of water.

So now we say that the sacraments, involving no more than nice clean water, fresh hunks of bread, and tidy cups of wine, these are more real, more substantial, more in touch with the true sacrifice that saves us than all those animal and avian sacrifices that went before. But that is most striking indeed. As C.S. Lewis said, from all outward appearances, you'd guess it would be the other way around.

Think of it this way: suppose that you were sitting just outside a ballpark playing a Nintendo video game version of baseball. Then suppose a real baseball player walks by. He's still in his uniform with grass stains on his pants, dirt still stuck to his cleats, sweat running down his back from all the running around he had done during a just-completed baseball game. Wouldn't it be rather startling if you held up your GameBoy and said to this ball player, "This is real baseball, man. What you do is just the metaphor that sets up my very real game right here in the palm of my hand."

Well, surely this would be a startling thing to say. And surely it would represent a pretty big mistake. It's the video game that is the metaphor, the imitation and simulation, of the genuine article. The real thing is the game actually played on a grassy field with wooden Louiseville Slugger bats. How could something less substantial be the real thing?

So here: Imagine walking into a temple holding in your hand a cube of bread and a little shot glass of wine. Imagine coming up to the altar area and smelling the blood, seeing the smoke rise from some burning carcass. Then imagine claiming that you were holding in your hand the reality of which that actual sacrifice on the altar was but the shadow and metaphor. It is all-but certain such a claim would provoke disbelief if not outright ridicule.

Of course, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross was itself every bit as real, graphic, and bloody an event as anything that ever took place in the temples of ancient Israel. Yet we now claim that our participation in that event, our getting caught up in the saving power of that reality on Golgotha, comes in something as simple as water in a baptism font, bread and wine on a communion table. But that seems less real than what they once did in worship.

Yet here is the mystery of faith: Jesus did for us what we could never have done for ourselves no matter how many sacrifices we made. By the grace of God, the vivid (but finally terrible) sacrifices of animals came to an end. In fact, all of our human strivings and efforts have now come to an end. When we come to the Lord's table as we did last Sunday morning, the grace comes not because of what we brought along with us to church that day. The grace comes because of what we receive from the hand of our Savior, who doles out bread and wine to connect us to his flesh and his blood.

In our Reformed tradition we once had a practice of what was known as "close communion" and so of "guarding the table." There was great concern that pastors and elders needed to prevent the holy table from getting contaminated and so they made it a closed affair restricted not only to true believers but, more narrowly still, to just members of a specific congregation at that. This was even the number one stumbling block when the CRC first had pastors serve as military chaplains in World Wars I & II. How could a Christian Reformed pastor serve communion to soldiers when those soldiers would not all be CRC boys from the same congregation? After all, even within established congregations, the members did not dare to take communion unless they had observed a rigorous week of preparation ahead of time. Only then could you come to church the next Sunday with your repentance in hand and so be able to come, without hindrance, to the table.

But although there were good motives behind all that, we need to be careful applying the word "closed" to the Lord's table. We need to be careful about making our coming to the sacrament all about what we bring forward instead of what we receive by grace alone. As Augustine wrote 1,500 years ago already, a sacrament cannot be contaminated because its holiness doesn't come from the minister, the elders, or any one of us. The holiness of the sacrament comes from Christ alone. It does not depend on us.

None of us comes to the sacrament because we have deemed ourselves "ready," much less because, like the Pharisee in the temple, we have judged ourselves to be righteous all on our own. Instead we come to receive. But the very fact that we come to receive and not give demonstrates that everything we needed was accomplished long ago by a sacrifice the likes of which we could never have done ourselves. All that's left now is to receive what Jesus gives us from a salvation he has already accomplished.

And so here is the true wonder of it all: We believe that the sacraments today are the real thing that tie us in with the ultimate reality of Christ's work. We began today thinking about music, and this service has had so much lovely music in it. But what all our worship aspires to--the music, the preaching, the sacraments--what everything aims at is not merely to create a spot of inspiration here on this earth. Our worship services are not like the closing ceremonies at the Olympics where millions of dollars are spent to create a spectacle that is a one-time event designed to entertain for a little while but when it's over, it means nothing lasting. That's not what we do here in worship.

Worship aims higher. The music here is never meant to satisfy us for the moment but then leave us alone. Every song we sing, every anthem we hear, is meant to whet our appetites for the glory to come. To people accustomed to animal sacrifices, our now using water, bread, and wine as the symbols of our forgiveness in Christ looks to be less vivid, itself a shadow instead of the real thing. But by faith we see in and through the sacraments that larger reality in which we participate. Worship and the sacraments are real because behind them is the final reality of Christ Jesus and him crucified.

We are always connected to something grander, more real. Music in worship is for now the tuning of our instruments. Music in worship familiarizes us with the melodies of salvation so that when one day the kingdom fully comes, we will be in good voice, we will recognize the old familiar truths, and we will be well-rehearsed to sing them out forever.

It is, to yet again invoke C.S. Lewis, a matter of transposition. The musicians with us this morning know what it means to transpose music from one medium to another. It is possible to take Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and transpose it so that a single pianist can play the tune. And that's generally the direction that transposition moves: you transpose downward, from the complex to the more simple, from the full-blown symphony orchestra with scores of musicians and different kinds of instruments down to the single piano keyboard and the single set of hands of the pianist.

But suppose you grew up knowing only the piano. Suppose you heard every classical work of Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven ever and only on piano. But then suppose that the day came when you discovered, to your delight and shock, that there was so much more. Suppose you heard Beethoven's Fifth played by a full-blown orchestra. Well, you would, of course, recognize the melody instantly but you would discover it had deepened, that it was finally so much grander and more beautiful than you ever imagined.

That's what the reality of Jesus is. That's what the reality of God's kingdom will be. For now we have bread and wine, pipe organs and handbells, our own small voices and the hymns we sing. What we dare never forget is that all of this is just the transposed version of what is yet to come in God's kingdom. Even the very best we can muster for now is just Beethoven's Fifth on the piano. The full orchestral version is still to come.

But if we do our worship well and to God's glory, then when we experience the real thing, we will recognize the tune in a heartbeat having familiarized ourselves with it through a lifetime of worship. And then we will know for certain that through simple bread and ordinary wine, through the songs we've sung and the liturgies we have crafted, we were all along in touch with something so much more substantial and real. And so when we arrive in that far country of God's own making, we will recognize it, revel in it, and know for sure that at long last we have come home to that place toward which we had been traveling all along. Hallelujah, and Praise God! Amen.