If you would, grab a seat. So glad to see you here this morning. I know you could be in a lot of places including your bed right now and we're really glad you've chosen to spend your Sunday with us worshiping the Lord, being together with his people. We trust that the Lord has something for every person who walks in the door of our church on a Sunday morning. That no matter where you are or your circumstances that God has brought you here for a reason. And so we're glad to welcome you.

My name is Jeff Bradford. I'm a senior pastor here and want to welcome you personally. If we've not met, I'd love to have an opportunity to meet you.

We are in the book of Hebrews and finishing the book of Hebrews out over the next two months. So if you want to find the passage on which the sermon's based, we're going to be in Hebrews 13. And it's our practice to read God's word out loud together. That's in your bulletin. It's in your pew bibles which are brand new. If you find those in front of you, that's on page ten seventy. Those were donated by a member of our church and we're glad to have those for our congregation to be able to use during worship. So we're going to be at Hebrews 13 verses nine through 16 and again 20 through 21. So if you join your voices with mine.

Don't be led astray by various kinds of strange teachings for it is good for the heart to be established by grace and not by food regulations since those who observe them have not benefited. We have an altar from which those who worship at the tabernacle do not have a right to eat. For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the most holy place by the high priest as a sin offering are burned outside the camp. Therefore, Jesus also suffered outside the gate that he may sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp bearing his disgrace for we do not have an enduring city here. Instead we seek the one to come. Therefore, through him, let us continually offer up to God a sacrifice of praise. That is the fruit of lips that confess his name. Don't neglect to do what is good and to share for God is pleased with such sacrifices. Now may the God of peace who brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the everlasting covenant equip you with everything good to do his will, working in us what is pleasing in his sight through Jesus Christ to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. The grass withers and the flowers fade but the word of our God stands forever. — Hebrews 13:9-16, 20-21

One of the deepest fears of modern life is to be excluded or to be left out, to be not a part. And I wish I could tell those of you who are in middle school and high school today, I know there are plenty of you in our church, I wish I could tell you that ends at some point and it doesn't. We have different metrics for this as adults. We have things like how much money you make and where your kids go to school, what kind of vacations you take. But it's all still the same thing. Who's in, who's out, who's included? Who's not? We have fear of being on the wrong side of our social group, the people in our office, friends. Social media makes this even harder where we compare looking online other people's curated highlight reels of their life with our everyday messy boring life. And it just makes us feel left out. Anybody feel left out? Okay. Maybe two of you are honest here this morning.

So you may think that this is uniquely our era, but the writer of Hebrews is talking to, writing to, addressing a group of people who are being told not to be left out of the in group. And it's kind of a strange context for us but I'll make it really simple for you. Remember that Christianity began not as a new religion but as a part of Judaism, part of being Jewish. And so one of the things that happened early on in the church is the question, what do we do with all these people who weren't Jewish? Do they have to act Jewish? Do they have to eat all the things that are on the food walls? Can they have shrimp and crabs or not? Do they need to be kosher? Do they need to dress like us, talk like us, look like us in order to be one of us? And that was really, this is why it's describing about the strange and diverse teachings that have to do with food, that's what that's referring to. There were some who were saying to the early Christians, this is what you have to do to be a Christian. This is how you know you're on the inside of the camp. You're the in group. You're with us. If you don't do those things you're not part of this group.

Now let's talk about the camp.

Now when we think about camping we think of a place that's got a little number on a wooden plaque and it's got a fire ring and it's got a picnic table. That's not what ancient people thought of as camping. This is what they thought of as camping—a Bedouin tent from way back in the nineteen fifties in Israel. I want you to picture this: the history of Israel is permanent camping. Camping all the time. We like camping is fun, coming home is even better. Camping all the time? Not so fun.

A camp was the only place in the wilderness when the people of God were in the wilderness for years and years and years—it was the only place of safety. You don't let your kids go play outside the camp. The camp is where all the tents are close together, where there's safety from robbers, safety from wild animals, and safety from exposure to the elements. They're camping in the desert. So the camp was the safe place. To be outside the camp was dangerous.

This was the history of Israel, permanent camping. Think about how we use that metaphor for camping today. To be in the camp means safety, belonging, identity. To be outside of the camp means shame, rejection, isolation. So every culture has people who are insiders and outsiders. For those of you in middle and high school, think about this: What did it take to be part of the in group? You know who are the in kids at your school. You know who are the most popular and most well liked and you know when somebody's outside of that. What did it take to be part of that group? How did you know you were part?

Every camp has something to offer—a way of talking, a way of acting, a way of dressing. That's how camps work. On the inside people are affirmed, on the outside people are excluded based on whether they have the things. Even there's a version of the camp which I think is really funny. Have you ever noticed that all people who are like, "I don't want to be part of any camp" have their own camp? Let me give you an example. For a while goth culture was kind of the big "we're not part of any camp." Now what's fascinating to me about goth culture is they all look the same. It was all black, black everything, punk kind of look. And it's like, but we all look exactly the same if we're all rebelling against it. There's a type of being an out group that says we don't want to be part of that—that's its own in group.

This morning, as we look at this passage, we're going to see two remarkable things, and they're hard. I'm just going to give you a warning: this is a difficult sermon. Because what we find is we have a savior who endures scandal as he goes outside the camp. That's where Jesus goes. He's outside the camp and he calls us to do the same thing. Those who follow him are to be a scandalous people who go outside the camp and live outside of the camp. That's where we're going this morning.

The Scandal of a Savior Outside the Camp

Now I know that if you are in Wake County schools, you know what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur mean—a day off. That's what that means in Wake County's public school system. But I want to tell you what those mean in the Bible.

Rosh Hashanah was the beginning of the year, the calendar year, and it was in the fall. Every year at Rosh Hashanah, the priest would come out and blow the shofar, this big horn made up of an animal's horn, and it would begin the calendar year in the fall with ten days dedicated to thinking about God. You think about your relationship with God. It's a time of reflection and repentance. And it led them to Yom Kippur, which means the day of atonement. This is all in Leviticus chapter 16.

In Leviticus 16, this is what's described: After ten days of reflection and repentance, this is what happened. The high priest would go that time of year and that time of year only into the holiest place of the temple. He'd sacrifice a bull for his own sins and he'd sacrifice a goat for the sins of the people. Then he would appear at the tent of meeting and he'd have another goat. So there are two goats that I want to focus on today with you from Leviticus chapter 16.

The first one I want to talk about is the scapegoat. The high priest would bring this goat out to the tent of meeting and he would take his hands and symbolically lay the sins of all the people on the scapegoat. Now we use the word scapegoat in politics and sports when we talk about somebody who's done something really bad and we want to blame them. But originally the word scapegoat in Hebrew means the taking away goat.

And the taking away goat, priests would take the sins of the people, lay them on the goat and then they would drive the goat out of the village, out of the tent village. They want that goat as far away from them as possible. They don't want that goat coming back. That's a loaded goat. They don't want that goat coming back in with the sins of people showing up at your tent. So it became the job actually over time of a Gentile. They'd get a Gentile non-Jewish person whose job it was—this is kind of sad—to take that goat way out in the desert, push it off a cliff. Nobody wants that goat coming back. That's the scapegoat. That's the taking away goat.

There's a moment in the TV show Breaking Bad where this kid, Jesse Pinkman, he's in his twenties. He's had a history of drugs and he's been a really troubled kid. He's caused his parents lots and lots of pain and they've told him he can't come back to the house. But he shows up back at the house and he says I'm gonna do better. I'm gonna try better. I wanna come home. So they let him back in for that evening. Just so happens that the cleaning lady comes through the house that day and she finds a joint, a marijuana cigarette hidden in the house. And she comes and brings it to the parents and the parents turn to Jesse and say you did this. And out of the corner of his eye Jesse sees his little brother. Now his little brother is in middle school and his little brother is the perfect kid. Little brother has done everything right, has all the good grades, has been the obedient kid—you know that kind, the good kid? And Jesse sees his little brother and his little brother at the corner of his eyes is like, because it's his little brother's drugs. And in that moment Jesse does something remarkable. He takes the blame. He becomes the scapegoat. And what happens is what you would think would happen, the parents get really mad, here we go again Jesse get out. And they kick him out of the house and the one who's innocent is sent away and the guilty one remains at home. That's what the scapegoat does. The scapegoat is the taking away goat. Taking away the offense. And the goat is sent out, pushed off.

But there's another goat in Leviticus 16 and both of these goats are referred to in this passage. It's the goat of sacrifice. Now this goat was sacrificed in the way you think of—throat slit, blood poured out, the blood taken and sprinkled against the altar, the horns of the altar in the holiest place. Why? To satisfy divine wrath for sin. To take the punishment for sin. It was killed to pay for the sins of the people.

Now to be honest, if we could take a vote of which goat you like better, most modern people are like, we get and we like the taking away goat. Not so sure about why we need a goat of sacrifice. So let me give you an illustration. Used to be on Friday night, people like me back in the day would go on a Friday night to a place called Blockbuster Video. Nothing streamed over my TV at all. So you'd go on a Friday night and you'd go to the video store, and you'd wander around the video store and because we didn't have a cell phone for the first part of this, it was a quest. So I'm wandering around Blockbuster Video and here's how it worked. They had these little boxes with the pictures of the movies on them. And if they had a plastic case behind that, that plastic case actually held the VHS tape that we would take home and stick in our VCR and watch it that night. So you'd look around for the ones with the plastic cases behind them. Now you also played this other game where you're looking around to watch if somebody's gonna put something back because you might be able to get something better that way. And there was a lot of guesswork in this before cell phones of like how do I know if I got a good one, is Susan gonna like this one, I don't know. So anyway, there's a lot of guesswork around this but here's what always happened in the Bradford household. I don't know if there's other people, but it always came around to the two day rental period, Sunday, and we wake up Monday and realize we forgot to return it on Sunday. So then you'd have to go back to Blockbuster and not just turn in the tape. They didn't just want the tape back, you had to pay the penalty. And they wouldn't rent to you again. If you don't pay that penalty, the fine for the overdue VHS tape, you don't get to rent anymore. And here's why. You have incurred the wrath of Blockbuster. You are under a guilt sentence of Blockbuster and you must pay that fine to propitiate the wrath of Blockbuster. And if you don't pay the fine, it's fine but you can't rent again.

Now I want to use that for an example because this is what that second goat, the goat of sacrifice does. It pays off the fine, the offense. There is something that needs to be satisfied that is outstanding with God in our sin.

The Two Goats and Full Atonement

I know you don't use this word propitiate, but we propitiate all the time. We pay late fees. We say I'll make it up to you when we do something wrong. We try to do better. Those are all ways of paying, settling the offense.

In theology terms, what happens in Leviticus 16 is that there is a taking away goat that expiates—takes away the sin of the people—and there's a goat of sacrifice, the blockbuster goat that pays for the wrath, that satisfies wrath. So here's the funny thing. Many people today, we want a Christianity that's got a taking away. We don't want one that has a paying for the wrath. We don't understand that. We want a Jesse Pinkman. We don't want a blockbuster. Does that make sense?

But if someone killed a family member of yours, somebody you love dearly, and the governor of North Carolina just gave that person a pardon, how would you feel about that? You'd be okay with that? Just taking away the offense. Nobody would be okay with that. We call it unfair. There's a real wrong that's been done. There's something that needs to be satisfied with regard to a debt that needs to be paid. Something's really wrong. It's a real offense.

These two things together represent what is a full atonement of sin—the removal of God's wrath, the settling of the debt, and the taking away. And of course both goats are fulfilled by the goat, the greatest of all time. They're fulfilled by Jesus.

Jesus is both sacrifice for sin, paying the debt. We read this in Hebrews 9:

He's appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. He's the sin offering. — Hebrews 9

Verse 20 says:

Through the blood of the eternal covenant he wipes this away, makes payment. — Hebrews 9:20

And he's the taking away goat. So in this passage it says Jesus suffered outside the gate, and that literally refers to outside the city walls of Jerusalem. Outside the gate. Jesus suffered. Golgotha was a trash heap overlooking part of the Hinnom Valley below where people poured their trash. That's where Jesus was sacrificed, outside the gate. He's the taking away goat who takes it out.

So this is not just geography. This is expulsion. This is deep theological truth. He's treated as unclean. He's executed as public shame. He's cast out. And these two come together at the cross.

I want you to hear this. We're about to walk into holy week and we're gonna remember what happened on Good Friday. But when a person gets hurt, you get up in the middle of the night and you run into something, you cry out the body part that hurts. So you get up in the middle of the night to get something to drink, stumble over something: my knee, ugh. Right? My ankle.

Matthew tells us in his version of the crucifixion that Jesus screams the words of Psalm 22 from the cross. So when he's on the cross he doesn't scream, ah, my hands. He doesn't scream, ah, my feet. He doesn't scream, ah, my head. He screams:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? — Psalm 22

Jesus is the one who's the sin offering, the sacrifice who takes away the sins of the world. Both of those are met in him. Hallelujah. What a savior. It's both.

Sermon not over. Sermon not over.

Following Jesus Outside the Camp

Because what this passage says is something really remarkable that's really hard for us to hear: God calls us to follow Jesus outside the gate, out of the camp. This is verse 13:

Let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach that he endured. — Hebrews 13:13

That's a summary statement of what it means to be a Christian. To be a Christian is not just belief in the goat, the goat of goats, right? But it is also to follow him, to follow him, to bear the reproach. It is personal spiritual relocation.

Charles Spurgeon once said in his preaching about this text: "Christians must leave the camp of easy religion and join Christ where the world rejects him."

Notice the order though. We don't join him in receiving that reproach in order to be accepted by him. Verse 13 tells us no. Because we've been accepted by him, because this debt of sin has been paid and we have been brought in, therefore we join Jesus outside the camp.

So this means several things. First, it means this: non-camp identity. Our identity is no longer based in belonging to cultural groups. For a Christian you don't need that anymore. We are people who follow a rejected king. Our expectation is that people aren't gonna really understand us. Our expectation is people aren't gonna like us. Our expectation is being identified with Jesus means people will mistreat us.

Jesus said:

If they hated me, they're gonna hate you. — John 15:18

We have a new identity that's outside the camp—we're outside the camp people. It frees us from respectability anxiety. We gotta be respectable.

It frees us from tribalism and rage politics and defensive Christianity. Christians should be the least shockable, least fragile people in the world. Non-camp identity means we need some emotional resilience, friends. We live in a victim culture, and to be victimized is to garner a lot of sympathy and power in our culture in some ways. It's a weird reversal. And in a lot of ways—I'm not making a political statement—that needs to happen. There's some things where victims need to be cared for and protected. But there's a tendency for Christians to use that label inappropriately of ourselves. We are not victims.

Jesus told us the world will hate you because it hates me. — John (paraphrased)

We—Jesus told us this is our expectation. We follow a rejected king. What do we expect? Christians should be the least fragile, the most resilient, because rejection doesn't threaten our identity anymore. We're accepted by the king of kings. What can harm me?

Non-Camp Home Address

Non-camp home address. We have verse 14: a lasting city. Now that may sound a little weird. He's switching metaphors from tents—remember the Bedouin tents—to a city. But that makes sense, doesn't it? We're going from temporary to permanent, from canvas to bricks and mortar. A camp is tarps and tents, a city is bricks. To people who have a lasting city means that we have a new home address that's permanent and it's not right here.

I remember reading a story. This was national news for about a week back in the seventies. There was this guy named Victor Belenko, a Soviet lieutenant who defected to the United States. He flew his top-secret MiG-25 and landed it at an air force base in Japan and declared he wanted asylum in the United States. 1976. He said, "I want to become an American citizen." And that sounds like, "Oh, that's kind of cool, you know." But think about what he left behind. To defect from your country is a radical break. This guy gave up the Soviet Union, his citizenship, he gave up being called Russian, gave up his primary language which was Russian, he said goodbye to everybody he knew—never see them again—and said, "My new home address is the United States. This is where I now live."

To be a Christian, to go away from the camp, is to defect. It's to defect. It's a new identity based on your new home address. Here's the question for us: In my heart, have I defected? Do I want to live with a foot in the kingdom of God and a foot in the rest of the world? To defect means everything changes about me. I'm a citizen of a city that I can't see. I got a new way of thinking, speaking, seeing. I look at my goods as not my own—they belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. My house is not my own, my car is not my own. Everything I have belongs to him and it's all for his use and his glory.

Have I defected to live as a non-camp person in a world in which everybody else thinks they need a camp? I'm talking to you middle schoolers and high schoolers this morning because this is a really hard thing. And I'm also talking to the larger version of the middle schoolers and high schoolers in this room because nothing's changed inside of you. You still want to fit in. I get it. To defect means we put to death those things. We leave them behind. Have you defected?

Non-Camp Purpose

Finally, non-camp purpose. I want to tell you: our church, despite what you see about this being a nice comfortable place, our church is not here to be a nice comfortable place. Our church is not to be a safe Christian club, it's not to be an anti-world Christian club, not a safe Christian enclave that costs us nothing. We are a church that, since we were founded in 1999, has never gathered around sameness or socioeconomic status or any of the goods and services of a Christian community that's all alike. We've always been an outside-the-camp church. Since its founding, we've gone outside the lines. We've centered on a kingdom-sized mission for the world.

Our elders back in January 2020 said our vision for our church is church planting and biblical justice and cross-cultural discipleship. We really care about those things. You may be like, "Well, I haven't heard y'all talk about them much recently." We're in the process of revisiting our strategies as elders around all those things. But we're not letting go, because this is who we are. We're not meant to be a club. We're outside the camp. We're an outside-the-camp church, and you know what happens in an outside-the-camp church? It's weird. People are like, "I don't get that church. They do things different over there. It's just not very comfortable going to that church." Good. It's not what we're here to try to do. We're here to make a difference.

Back to the beginning of my sermon, if being left out and excluded is something we deeply fear, why in the world would we choose to identify with a savior who goes outside the camp? How are you going to do that? Why would you self-exclude yourself? What in the world would sustain you to do that? What would give you the strength to be an outside-the-camp person? It's right here in verse 10.

We have an altar from which those who worship at the tabernacle do not have a right to eat. — Hebrews 13:10

What does that mean? Here's what that means. The priests who served in the tabernacle got the leftovers from the tabernacle. There's a story in 1 Samuel 19 about the priest Samuel. He had two sons, Hophni and Phineas, and they're really bad guys because when the sacrifices came into the tabernacle to be processed, they would take the best part for them instead of the best part for the Lord. The priests were supposed to give the best part to be burned up, and they were like, "Don't burn that up. Give that to me." Right. So the best parts were supposed to be burned up and the leftovers go to the priests to sustain their families—that's how they lived. Instead they were reversing that.

So the priests ate the leftovers from the tabernacle, and this is what's fascinating. The writer of Hebrews is saying, we've got something even better than the priests have. There's another altar that's not the altar in the tabernacle. There's other food that's been sacrificed. That's our food. What's he talking about? He's talking about feeding on Jesus.

In John chapter six, Jesus says, "Truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day because my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Anyone who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him." — John 6:53-56

Gross. If you're like, gross—yeah, you get it. Feeding on Jesus is imaginary, but it requires imagination. Let me say that again because some of you just missed that. Feeding on Jesus is imaginary, but it requires imagination.

There's an old movie starring Robin Williams called Hook. It's about Peter Pan, now all grown up. He's a workaholic lawyer and he goes back to Neverland. He reconnects with the lost boys, and they keep trying to engage him as Peter Pan, but he's a lawyer now. He's grown, he's boring, he's tedious. And they keep trying to engage him, and they spend this whole day with him, and he's completely disconnecting. Finally they sit down to dinner and he's like, "Oh, I'm starving. Dinner." So they sit down at the table and they begin to bring out these giant pans. They open the lids and the steam coming out smells so good. It's like, "Oh, I can't wait." The platters come out, they open the lids, and there's nothing that Peter Pan can see in the platters. And suddenly the boys start digging in. He looks around and the boys are eating invisible bites off invisible bones. They're scooping up invisible soup out of bowls with spoons and eating invisible corn. We have a picture of this. Here we go. Right?

And he is just like, "I'm starving. I'm starving." Peter is starving while everybody else is feasting. And I wonder if this is you. I wonder if this is you. If you're a Christian, I wonder if you hear me say things like, "Hey, feasting on Jesus, that's what sustains us," and you're like, "I don't know what you're talking about, pastor." Because I look around during the Lord's supper and people are crying, people are rejoicing. People are in my Bible study and they're reading God's word and they seem to be really feasting, and I'm not getting anything from this. You can hear about Jesus and know about Jesus but not know how to feast on Jesus. You can't see anything. Nothing of Jesus is filling to you. Is that you?

See, Peter Pan has a breakthrough in the movie when there's a food fight that causes him to drop his guard and get really worked up and start shouting back and forth. Suddenly he not only sees but he tastes. The food was never imaginary, but it required imagination. Right? And I think that's another name for faith.

Each week in our church we sit down to the Lord's supper. We say this is a meal, and it's never just about the bread and the cup. It's always about feasting on Jesus. Now you can feed on Jesus in lots of places. You can feed on him in Bible study, you can feed on him in silence in his word, you can feed on him in your community group, you can feed on him in times of prayer. But the best and easiest—just like when you come together with the lost boys, it's around a table. You watch, you see.

This is a community meal. Every week my prayer is that eyes are opened. And we're like Jesus is the thing I've been craving so long. He's what I want. That those who come in skeptical or weary or defensive or distracted or objecting, you're like, oh, I see what you're doing here. I see what you're doing here. Because his flesh is real food and his body is real drink. The only thing that can sustain you as a lost boy in this world, see what I did there? The only thing that can sustain you in that is feeding on Jesus.

To live outside the camp requires a person who knows how to feed on him. In just a moment I'm gonna invite you to do that. Let's pray right now and ask him to meet us at his table.

Prayer

Lord we thank you for Jesus who was sacrificed as a payment satisfying the wrath of God for us. He paid the debt against us. Thank you that Jesus is the scapegoat who took away our sin and went outside the city gate where he was crucified. He was both sin offering, propitiation. He was the taking away expiation.

Father we pray for courage to live as a community that follows you outside the camp, to be outside the camp people. Father we confess this is really scary to us. We live based on what we see. And Lord, we pray for grace today to come and feast on Jesus at his table and remember how he's been sacrificed for us and also courage to live differently. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Would you respond to God's word together? Stand and let's sing.