September 20, 2026
• Rev. Mindie Moore
Sacred Rhythms Week 2: Yom Kippur
Leviticus 16
This is the second week of our series learning about the Jewish High Holidays so that we can discover our own spiritual rhythms. Last week we began our series by talking about Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and we really explored the role that rituals and rhythms play in our lives.
This week is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. And this is a much more somber holiday. Elizabeth, who shared with us about Rosh Hashana last week, told me that this is a complete shift in focus. It’s a time of fasting and repentance; a time of gathering with community to acknowledge where one has missed the mark in the past year; a time of ritually getting right with God. It’s a time to offer up sin to God, knowing that God will take that sin from those who repent.
There’s a personal and a very communal piece to this holiday. There’s gathering together for services, but there’s also the invitation to really deeply, individually reflect on one’s life. And I think that is a good reminder for us today as we talk about repentance, atonement, forgiveness—it's not one of the other. These things exist in both personal and collective ways. (SLIDE: Repentance is both personal and communal). Both are deeply important for our spiritual lives. This is true in the Jewish observances of Yom Kippur and it’s true in the ways we in the Christian faith experience grace and forgiveness through our relationship with Jesus.
And I guess I want to acknowledge right off the top that talking about sin, especially personal sin, can be a deeply uncomfortable thing to do. So often in the Church, we have heard narratives around sin that lead us to places of shame, guilt, or unworthiness. I can remember as a teenager, growing up in a very specific type of evangelical environment, we were sort of STEEPED in the shame of our sin. We were constantly reminded of how sinful we were, of how sinful we COULD be...it was almost like the more guilty we felt, the more powerful God’s forgiveness would be. But then there was also this weird element of secrecy towards the whole thing—like I didn’t want people to KNOW I had anything to repent of, because then what would they think?!
That handling of how we talked about sin and repentance and forgiveness has made me a bit resistant to hearing other pastors talk about these topics, and sometimes has made me a little bit hesitant to talk about these things as YOUR pastor. It’s NOT a huge focus in my preaching. Because I’m sure I’m not the only one who has had some baggage around these things; who has felt the shame, guilt, and unworthiness that can be part of this conversation.
So I want you to know I’m aware of the complexity of this conversation. And what I really hope we can do today is find a different, I would even say better, way to talk about these things. To be able to have a conversation that lets us be honest about the real state of our lives and our world AND lets us encounter the healing grace of Jesus. To hold our personal and collective sin, not with any kind of shame or embarrassment, but with the deep confidence that when we DO miss the mark, when we do things that are out of alignment with who God is, that God is still with us. That God’s grace is ABUNDANT and ever-present. And that our God has been creating rhythms for God’s people to experience grace and forgiveness and the removal of sin for literally thousands of years.
We are back in Leviticus this week, just like I promised you we would be last Sunday. And it feels extra Leviticus coded that we are talking about something as granular and strange and specific as the methods for atonement through sacrifice. As the video said, this is pretty weird for our context. The idea of animal sacrifice might make us squirm, there’s a reason I gave you a content warning before the video. And the image of someone sprinkling that animal’s blood around a room for “purification” feels incredibly counterintuitive and kind of gross even.
Obviously, none of this is something we would ever expect to see in our modern church worship experiences. BUT back then, this was an understood and deeply sacred practice. And it was a regular rhythm. People would bring their atonement offerings to the tabernacle, the place of worship, to provide a temporary cleansing of that person’s sin. It was understood that everyone sinned regularly, so this was a practice that would be done again and again.
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which is outlined in the Scripture we read today, was a yearly ritual to address all other unconfessed sin and to cleanse the tabernacle. That’s what made it so sacred, and that same sentiment of Jews addressing their unconfessed sins and really sitting with the somberness of what it means to repent is why it remains so sacred in the Jewish faith.
What’s tricky about the Christian faith today is that we don’t have ONE unified theory or practice of atonement. There’s not just one doctrine that we all follow. There are a lot of different beliefs about how God forgives sin and why Jesus died and let me tell you, people get very passionate about them...this person included! I once made my Disciple Bible Study do a whole extra week detour from the planned curriculum so that we could learn about six different atonement theories!
What we believe about sin and atonement and grace MATTERS. What we believe about these things has a HUGE influence on what we believe about the nature of God and how God works. If you want a deeper dive into all of this, I did a sermon called “Did Jesus Have to Die?” back in September of 2023 (Did Jesus Have to Die? - Midtown | St. Luke's UMC | St. Luke's UMC) and you can find the link to it once this manuscript gets posted with the sermon recording on our Midtown page. We don’t have time to go into all of it today, but I’ll just say...if you’re someone who has ONLY been presented with Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory, which says that Jesus died on the cross to take God’s wrath in our place...I just want you to know that there are more ways to understand atonement beyond that one view. And they’re worth checking out. So there’s your homework for this week...get curious about atonement!
But here’s the bottom line: whatever atonement theory resonates most with you, no matter what you think about the whole thing, one truth that I see run through ALL of them is that (SLIDE) forgiveness came with a cost to God.
In his book, “The Cost of Discipleship”, Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about what he calls cheap grace vs. Costly grace. And he explores the tension that YES, God gives grace freely and abundantly. AND it holds weight. I’ll share a bit of what he says:
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.
Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner.
What I take from this is that grace is something we should let ourselves receive with open arms...and we also should understand just how valuable that thing we’re receiving is.
And this is one of the reasons that the rhythms of lament, confession, receiving grace and forgiveness...those rhythms shape our lives. They aren’t cheap and flimsy things; they are real practices that draw us closer to the transforming love of Jesus. And these practices help us be in relationship with the God who loves us and wants us to live in alignment with the things that God cares about.
Our need for personal forgiveness and grace is not a defect that just a couple of us unfortunately have. It’s a universal reality that we live in as we’re held in God’s grace. And as we experience this grace, we also experience the chance to be made more and more like Jesus and to know that our sins are forgiven; that God takes that sin from us and holds it with love and healing and the hope that someday whatever brokenness we encounter will be healed forever.
This hope goes beyond what happens with just us. This is a hope we get to experience in community too.
If we look deeper into what’s outlined in Leviticus 16, we see that this is something that involves the whole community in one way or another. Their leader, Moses, gives his brother Aaron the instruction to do these atonement rituals in the tabernacle, the place where the community gathers to worship. It’s not a secret that these things are being done. Instead, it’s a collective acknowledgement that we ALL need forgiveness.
And that is an exceptionally powerful practice. To say this is where we as people have lost our way. These are the places where we’ve gotten it wrong. To be honest and brave enough to confess that God would want us to be moving in a different direction...and then make commitments to do things differently.
Many people throughout history have talked about this communal need for forgiveness. Martin Luther King Jr. Once said that communities often act in ways that are more immoral than the individuals within that community. There’s all kinds of psychological research on this—things like group think, bystander apathy. It’s easy to be swayed by what’s happening around us. And sometimes that takes us to places that are counter to what God would want for us.
AND...if it’s in community that sometimes we can harm, I absolutely believe that it’s in community that we can repent and be forgiven and work for healing.
In 2020, when George Floyd was murdered, we had a communal moment of reckoning with the systemic racism that exists in our country. I was serving as the Pastor of Adult Discipleship at St. Luke’s at the time, and we were trying to figure out how to respond to that collective moment of lament and repentance as a church. As you know, it was in the beginning of the pandemic so it wasn’t like we could just do a worship service or gather everyone in a room to pray.
So our team decided to try a virtual class. I had read Austin Channing Brown’s EXCELLENT book, (SLIDE) “I’m Still Here” (a book I highly encourage you to read if you have not yet), and thought it was really helpful for white people trying to understand the complexities of racism in America. We offered this class as a four-week Zoom, and I was hoping that maybe 25 or 50 people would sign up. 50 actually felt like it would be wild and require a few extra breakout group leaders, but we could make it work.
Friends, THREE HUNDRED PEOPLE signed up for this Zoom book group. THREE HUNDRED! Six years later and I still can hardly believe that happened. I went from needing a few extra breakout room leaders to needing a whole fleet of them! And it was incredible. Because we had three hundred people, showing up together during one of the most isolating periods I think most of us had ever experienced, saying “we want to come together, collectively, and name what’s wrong, explore our role in what’s wrong...and then become empowered to make it better.”
Now, we didn’t solve racism, no. But something really holy happened over that month of meeting together. I still hear people talk about how the things they discussed in their groups and how the words that they read in that book changed the way that they view the systems in our country, the way they could see and push back against racism in the institutions they are part of, even the ways they might be perpetuating racism in their own daily interactions. For four weeks, we created a sacred rhythm of meeting together to create a space for collective repentance...and from that, to create an onramp to collective healing and action.
Sacred rhythms of repentance give us space to regularly recalibrate our souls; to come back to relationship with God when we may have lost our way; to be drawn back into God’s righteousness and goodness.
And maybe you’ve spent this whole sermon thinking, ok, I can get on board with regularly confessing sin and being made right with God. But why the animals? Why all the ritual? Do we actually need that stuff to experience forgiveness?
And I suppose...no. None of these things are magic and God’s forgiveness and grace are not dependent on them. BUT...they ARE tools. And I think anytime we have a tangible way to be connected to the one who loves us and heals us and forgives us and delights in us, those are tools worth engaging with.
In just a moment, we’re going to invite you to do two things during our last song:
To spend some time in personal prayer and confession right where you are. To experience the power of connecting with our God who forgives.
And to visit one of the stations up front and take a red ribbon from the cross. To, as a community, engage in repentance and lament, and to know that God always meets us in those places and always invites us to something better.
This moment is just the beginning of how you can use this ribbon in cultivating a spiritual rhythm of repentance this week.
As we get ready for this moment, I want to share with you an image that our Senior Pastor Rob took while he was in Europe with the St. Luke’s choir this summer (SLIDE). This is an image of empty, hollowed out 10 Commandments from the Duhany Street synagogue in Budapest. This synagogue sits on the site of what was once the Jewish ghetto established by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It’s seen a lot of things, a lot of collective harm has been done just outside of these walls.
There are monuments outside that bear witness to the 400,000 Hungarian Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. And there’s this—the hollowed out Ten Commandments. A lasting reminder of how evil can grow, and the need for collective lament and repentance, and for the regularly bringing ourselves back into alignment with who God is.
Let’s pray as we prepare to have our own experiences of repentance, lament, and forgiveness.