Recently a woman I have worked with in Christian publishing for more than 25 years died, and I went to her funeral. I always knew this friend was never quite comfortable with the lines many of the authors she worked with drew around biblical faith. But I didn’t know until the funeral how far outside those lines she had wandered. There were numerous things about the funeral that were troublesome and even alarming to me—no Scripture was read as part of the service, and the hope of resurrection was never mentioned, to name only two.
But it was one statement the pastor made in particular that caused me to gasp. Looking back, I wish I had stood up and walked out when she said it. But I didn’t want to dishonor my friend, and I didn’t want to play into the expectations of this church by proving myself to be an intolerant, old-fashioned Bible-thumper. Or maybe I was just more concerned about how I would appear than I was concerned about how my Savior had been insulted. In my reticence to make a scene, I sat there as the Treasure of my life was diminished and as his greatest work was mocked—not somewhere out in the world, but in the sanctuary of a church.
The pastor was telling the story of a time my friend was at choir rehearsal, and they were singing an anthem prior to Easter that must have pointed to Christ taking the sin of mankind upon himself at the cross and therefore the wrath of God for sin upon himself. According to the pastor, my friend questioned whether or not they really believed this as a church. And when it was decided they did not, the anthem was set aside. Then the pastor said with a laugh and a sense of pride, “I’m not one of those atonement gals.”
It still makes me gasp—to belittle something so precious, to so casually dismiss the central and defining work of Christ—that Jesus paid the penalty for his people’s sins by dying in their place as their substitute.
I didn’t walk out that day, and maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do anyway. But I’m here to say today that I am most definitely an “atonement gal.” Christ’s offering himself in my place is not just a theological belief that I hold; it is the foundation of my hope, and the song I will gladly, gratefully, and boldly sing into eternity.