I hope to publish my next segment on Wesleyan essentials tomorrow. For now, I wrote this for my weekly mailing to my church family and thought some of you might enjoy this short reflection.
There are certain experiences of small town pastors that are like a rite of passage.
I have heard pastors sit around and talk about helping ranchers to deliver a calf. Small town pastors have the joy and duty to minister to people where they are. While pastors are often associated with a white collar way of life, especially as Methodist pastors are often required to get a master's degree, they are doing a poor job if they maintain white collar sensibilities. Especially when they are serving alongside many blue collar folks.
It was a big deal for my family to start keeping chickens more than a year ago. I hadn't been raised to care for anything other than dogs. Chickens are still easy, but not quite so easy. And there comes a time with chickens when they need to be done with this life.
So today the Rickmans took a couple of our chickens to the house of some friends who were butchering some meat chickens, and I learned to butcher chickens. I would be lying if I said I was unaffected. The biggest thing I had ever killed before today was a mouse.
It made me reflect upon the intimacy of blood atonement in the ancient Hebrew faith. For months or years, it was expected that a Hebrew household would raise livestock for the express purpose of taking it to the Temple, where he who raised it, fed it, protected it, would then place his hand on its head and then slaughter it in the presence of the Lord through his priests. Even when formalized, death is a messy, smelly, and somewhat ignoble phenomenon.
It must be a very powerful and intimate experience to sacrifice a creature for one’s sin. I think this is lost on many Christians, especially the more urbane ones, today.
I think it is easy for us Christians today who approach the blood of Christ more esoterically can quite easily lose the intimacy of his blood sacrifice. While Christians do not need the blood of animals for our covenant, we have the blood of Christ. It was shed more intimately and powerfully than any animal ever could. In our genteel, detached, and synthetic lives, we need to take special efforts to make the blood of Christ real to us, lest it become an empty symbol of love. Having shed a good deal of blood today, and really not fully understanding what I did, I know I need to meditate on these things more. I'm not traumatized, but I am affected. I hope I learn to be even more affected by the blood my Savior shed for me on the cross.
For many people you are striking a common chord. My experiences that were somewhat similar to yours were hunting game for food (doves, deer). The blood and getting messy in field dressing, butchering, and so on, were necessary to make the experience really "real," made the experience what it was: so much different from the "clean," de-humanized killing of virtual people in video games that urbanized kids and adults play now.