September 20, 2026
• Rev. Dr. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
September 20, 2026
Holy Rhythms
“Yom Kippur: Rhythm of Atonement”
Leviticus 16 (paraphrase)
That’s a dramatic way to experience scripture, isn’t it? While still in the wilderness following the Exodus, Moses commanded the people to carry out this annual rhythm of confession, repentance, and forgiveness. Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement.
Even now, the largest worship service of the year for Jews will be this evening,
Kol Nidre, which means “all vows.” It specifically refers to a prayer said at the beginning of the service, but more broadly it refers to the name of the service that starts Yom Kippur.
It is an interesting contrast to Christianity. Our largest services of the year are Christmas Eve and Easter, representing joy and triumph. But for Jews, the most attended service is one that recognizes our corporate need for forgiveness, that we are each broken, incomplete people in need of God’s mercy and aid.
My friend, Brett Krichiver, senior rabbi at Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, said he used to think the High Holy Days should begin in reverse order. They should start with Yom Kippur, repentance, in order to celebrate the new year, Rosh Hashanah, and the promise of new beginning. Get repentance out of the way so you can start fresh. But he came to understand that God got it right, that upon entering a new year the first thing one must do is confess and recognize what we need to have removed in order for a new year not to look just like the old ones. If we want things to be different, we have to see what needs to be different.
So as we observed last week, Rosh Hashanah began the High Holy Days with the sound of the shofar, the ram’s horn, that is like a spiritual wake-up call. Today, Yom Kippur, we recognize that the first thing God wants us to wake up and see is what needs to be removed from us, and the key emphasis of Yom Kippur is the role of the entire community in confession and forgiveness.
Now, I recognize that Yom Kippur is not as popular for a lot of Christians, and most of our society, as it is for Jews. Many people shy away from services focused on confession and repentance. A focus on sin stirs feelings of shame and guilt and unworthiness.
How many of you came from churches that so filled you with shame and guilt that if you never heard the word sin again you believe you would be the better for it?
But just because something is in the past doesn’t mean it stays in the past. And we all have a past. We have mistakes, regrets, sins that without confessing and releasing, can still hold power over the present.
But still, what is the reason for this corporate confession as the ancient Jews practiced? Why involve the whole community? After all Catholics have a private confessional. They even put screens between the confessor and the priest. We Protestants don’t bother with building closets, we just have time in prayer when we quietly confess whatever bothers us and leave it at that, which, of course, stands in contrast to the advice of the New Testament, “confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” (James 5:16)
Why? What’s the reason for confession being a community experience?
Theologian Reinhold Neibuhr helps answer that question because of his unique thoughts about sin. Neibuhr believed that the outward actions of sin, the typical things we call sin, are the result of something deeper inside of us. He believed in the concept of original sin, the condition that plagues all of humanity but not just because we are alienated from God, but also because we are alienated from ourselves. Niebuhr saw original sin as a person’s fear of being alone and vulnerable in the world, a fear that can lead us to worship the gods of the community: nationalism, money, fitting in, pleasure. These become our idols. To make up for our inner insecurity we take on the idols of the world around us. When we confess, we acknowledge that the world’s idols are never enough.
This is the power of a holy rhythm like Yom Kippur. As a community we acknowledge with each other that we don’t have it altogether. We alone are not the answers to our problems. We contribute to the problems. Instead of making ourselves out to be great, we understand there are things we need to have removed from us. And so, once a year, we make this acknowledgement of our true condition and then watch as the priest confesses over the scapegoat, transferring our sins upon that animal, and then sends the goat away from us. Our insecurity, our pride, our need to be in control, our use of power to get our way, all of this is taken away. And we realize that’s what we need. We need God’s help to take this away from us.
This is why Christians would later speak of Jesus as the divine scapegoat. The one sent by God who takes away the sin of the world, just like the ancient scapegoat, He takes our sin and removes it.
As you think about that visual demonstration we saw during the scripture reading, the goat being led away from us, and consider that this is what Jesus wants to do for us, it invites us to ask, “What do I want removed from me today? What would I like God to take away? What are things that have gotten in the way of my relationships? My peace of mind? My ability to live closer to others?”
Over time a tradition developed in keeping of Yom Kippur of tying a red ribbon to the head of the goat symbolizing the sins of the people. What is the red ribbon God would say, “Let me take that away for you?” That is part of the reason for Yom Kippur.
But there is another reason.
And frankly it is one we Christians need to reclaim, and that is the role of corporate confession, asking God to take away the sins of the community.
As Roberta Bondi says, “Sin makes us close our eyes deliberately to others’ needs and desires….” (p27 In Ordinary Time) Our individual sin always has community consequence. This is why sin cannot be left as just an individual matter, as if all that counts is each person getting right with God. The community must get right as well.
There are community sins that must be confessed and removed. There are things in the community that we need to have taken away from us. And once a year, Yom Kippur was an annual ritual to recognize what has happened to us as a people that is out of line with God?
I think this is something Christians have lost. We personalize sin and salvation. We make it a matter of personal responsibility, and perhaps sub consciously we remove ourselves from a sense of corporate responsibility. It can lead us to say things like “the church is no place for politics.” Now, let me quickly say I believe the church is no place for partisan politics, but that’s different. Remember, the
root word for politics is polis which means city. Ideally politics is about our responsibility to the community, to the welfare of others.
As Alexandra Hudson points out in her book, Soul of Civility, the opposite of polis is the word is idiotes, someone who refuses to be engaged in the welfare of others. Idiotes is where we get the word idiot. A holy rhythm like Yom Kippur helps us not be idiots!
We do capture this in our communion liturgy. In our Book of Worship, notice that we don’t say, “I have sinned…” no listen to our liturgy:
“We confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart. We have failed to be obedient…We have not done your will…we have broken your law…we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves…we have not heard the cry of the needy.”
As a community we recognize that before we can receive forgiveness together we must acknowledge there is a way God means for us to live and we have not lived up to that.
Go back to Reinhold Niebuhr who in his book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, wrote: "In every human group there is less [capacity for] reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals who compose the group.”
Or as Martin Luther King, Jr paraphrased in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “groups are more immoral than individuals.”
The point suggested is that groups can manifest sin in ways individuals do not. We have each experienced that reality haven’t we? We have seen what can happen when a group takes on its own personality and a dispirited number of individuals can quickly become a mob riot?
In 1866 the Klu Klux Klan was formed as a social club in Pulaski, TN, but it soon transformed itself into a vigilante group dedicated to redeeming the south and restoring a vision of America as a white man’s country. (James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, p4) Indeed, groups are more immoral than individuals.
So we gather corporately to acknowledge our need for repentance as a community. Only by doing this can we become the beloved community.
This has been an area where we as a country have made improvements and have stalled. President Reagan officially apologized for the wrongs committed against Japanese Americans in World War II. Congress apologized for a coup in 1893 that threw out the Hawaiian royal family in order to secure business interests in the lucrative sugar trade. President Clinton apologized the Tuskegee Experiment allowing black men to suffer for the sake of medical study.
Yet we’ve never had a formal apology for mistreatment of gay people in America. And we’ve never had a presidential apology for slavery. No doubt money has something to do with that. Such an apology would open the way for claims of reparations. Yet much of the modern wealth of American comes from over 100 years of free labor.
No, corporate confession is never comfortable or easy, yet once a year the Jews of old would gather to hear the confessions of the community invoked on a goat and they would watch be taken from them.
When the High Priest prayed over the head of that goat the sins of the community, I don’t believe he whispered. I don’t believe he simply thought his confessional thoughts. I believe he spoke them outloud and loud. I believe he made sure that everyone heard. I believe he confessed the ways they had failed to live by Torah law. I believe he said things like, “Lord, we confess that we have not lived in holiness. We have not been faithful in our relationships. We have taken advantage of our neighbor. We have not been generous in our living. We confess how we have not welcomed fully the stranger and alien among us as you commanded us to love them as if they were native-born. We confess that we have not cared for the poor and shared our blessings with them as you would have, that we have become comfortable in a society of have’s and have-nots…”
And then they would watch as this scapegoat was led away, removing their corporate sins from them.
And I can’t imagine anyone going up to the High Priest after the ceremony and saying, “I don’t like what you said. I disagree. I have other facts that say you are wrong. We must live as we do in order for our lives to prosper and our community to be strong. So just stick to what God says about blessing people. Isn’t that what the High Priest is for?”
No, I imagine these people took it on the chin knowing that they were hearing God’s word proclaimed, a vision of how God means for them to live together, and that there were things in their midst that didn’t line up. And so they accepted this ritual, because a community that doesn’t acknowledge its faults will always be a faulty community. And so, once a year they gathered for this annual service of responsibility to confess their corporate sins and realize God wants to take that from them.
What do you believe God wants to take from us as a society? What does God want to remove from us so that we look more like the community God intends?
Closing…