A LIVING SACRIFICE
Scriptures: Romans 12:1-8
Mark 14:12-25
Today begins a kind of two-Sunday arc as we prepare ourselves for an emphasis on Stewardship. As I hope you’ll come to understand during these two Sundays, stewardship is about a lot more than money – although it IS about that as well, and we should make no bones about it. We sometimes hear that our response to being called to be stewards is “sacrificial giving”. But that has a negative and rather painful connotation to it. I’d like to start our thinking about stewardship today by talking about what it means to be a living sacrifice.
[walk to altar] What is this? It looks sorta like a large table. But we refer to it as an altar. Both in Biblical times and in today’s dictionaries an altar is defined as that place where something is sacrificed. Well, here are the communion elements all laid out, which is appropriate because the sacrament of communion is a form of sacrifice – in fact, it is often referred to as the sacrificial meal. What does it mean for us today to accept these sacramental elements as a sacrificial meal?
If the idea of sacrifice is taken in its normal meaning as found in the Hebrew Scriptures – that of animal sacrifices to gain God’s favor – it is certainly repugnant to us. And even many of the prophets had the insight to see that God did not want that kind of sacrifice. Rather, what God wants from us, as we said in the Call to Worship this morning, is “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God” – a quote from Micah 6:8. The Psalmist also sees this when he says in the 51st Psalm, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Clearly, sacrificing something else – such as an animal or a burnt offering – is not a very helpful way of approaching the divine, which, by the way, is one reason why the practice of giving up something during Lent (a kind of sacrifice) has become rather clichéd and meaningless, since what is chosen to be sacrificed is most often something outside ourselves which doesn’t touch our inner core and the way we might walk humbly with our God.
But the sacrament of Holy Communion celebrates not something that we bring to sacrifice but rather someone who has been sacrificed for us and by us. Even so, if we were not immune to the vividness of the language after all these years of hearing communion liturgies, we might find that the images which this sacrament conveys really are repugnant. “This is my body, broken for you” – broken like bones that are smashed and crushed in an auto accident? “This is my blood, shed for you” – like the kind of blood spurting from gunshot wounds that many of today’s films revel in? (I do not recommend that you go see the Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio film The Departed, but if you want an idea of what I’m talking about here, this film certainly delivers it.) And then to go to the next step and say that we are symbolically tasting of that body and blood when we take communion is surely to invite repulsion. The Episcopal communion liturgy has a prayer – or, at least, it used to; I haven’t checked the prayer book recently to see if it’s been changed – which says at one point, “Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body…..” An Episcopal priest once told me that his daughter upon reading this when she was about 11 or 12 refused to take communion for several years because of her horror at the images conveyed.
Nor do I think that these feelings of horror and repulsion would be out of place as we come before the sacrament. After all, what is the crucifixion of the Christ if not a testimony to all the batterings, breakings, and blood-lettings that we foist upon one another? Child abuse, spousal abuse, the use of violence to settle disputes – these are as prevalent in today’s world as ever. So, when we take communion at least a part of what is happening is that by our actions we are lifting up before God all the crucifixions of our time, small and large – from the infant beaten in its crib, to despair over the seeming impossibility of peace, and the debilitating influence of poverty. As these realities from today’s world become part of our communion consciousness, we are indeed caught up in an honest horror at what the crucifixion-event tells us about humanity’s inhumanity one to another.
However, we can’t stop there. The fact that this is a sacrificial meal eventually moves us beyond horror to the sacred. The clue to our understanding of how this sacrament can be a sacrifice is in the similarity of the words. A true sacrifice points toward that which is sacred. Think about celebrated sacrifices, whether real or from literature: Joan of Arc; Sydney Carton at the end of “A Tale of Two Cities” (“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known." – you can just hear Ronald Colman’s lilting phrasing from the 1935 movie); Nathan Hale (“I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”); Robert Jordan at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Such examples stir us and point us toward the sacred in our midst. And then there are the less romantic sacrifices – seemingly small and yet large in the lives of those who make them: the child who cares for an aging parent at the cost of living their own lives; the young husband who puts his own career on hold while his wife gets her degree; the worker who takes an extra shift so her friend can spend time with an ailing child. Such mundane examples of sacrifice also partake of the sacred and God’s spirit.
All of these instances of human sacrificial living bring us back to the one great sacrifice that we commemorate in this communion: the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, which we represent on this altar. The empty cross and the candles symbolizing Christ as light testify to the continual crucifixion of the Christ in our own world. The offering plates announce our intention to offer sacrifices of ourselves, limited and insufficient as these may be. But more than that -- they are also a symbol of what God is offering to us.
Bruce Modahl, writing in this week’s The Christian Century tells about visiting the Cathedral of the Icon of Kazan in St. Petersburg, Russia. There were tourists there who came to gawk at the celebrated icon, but there were also worshippers “who’d come to look into the mysteries of faith to which the icon pointed.” At one point a priest appeared with a large basket. Bruce assumed it was an offering basket, but the worshippers started reaching into it and taking small packets out, unwrapping them, and eating the bread that had been wrapped up. This, Bruce finally realized, was the antidoron – the blessed bread brought out at the end of the service from the altar behind the chancel doors – a special altar, not for the tourists, which represented the holy mysteries of God. Bruce Modahl concludes: “It was an offering basket all right, but I had been confused about the direction of the offering. These worshipers knew that the offering comes from God to us, and that we live in response to God’s offering of God’s own self in Jesus Christ. This is eucharistic living. It begins with God’s gifts to us. Our offerings and lives of service are a response to the offerings that God gives to us.”
Jesus the Christ is God’s living sacrifice for us. It is a sacrifice that did not have to take place, but it was willingly accepted. When we take communion we lift up the sacred which has come to us in sacrificial form. But communion is meaningless if it is just commemoration. Roman Catholic thought – and here is one place where I feel we can learn from Catholic theology – is that the sacrament makes Christ present for us today. We do not, by our actions before this altar, simply remember a past, historical, and therefore frozen event, but rather through this sacrament past and present come together making the sacrifice of Christ and his presence very real for us in our here and now world.
How is it possible for this sacrificial presence to become real for us? Simply – profoundly – by our being willing to offer our own sacrifices – which is to say, to offer our whole lives. Paul says it best at the beginning of the 12th chapter of Romans. You have the New Revised Standard Version translation before you in the bulletin, but you heard Ray read this passage from the King James translation, and here is one place where I think that old translation hits the nail on the head in the last two words: “I beseech you therefore (brothers and sisters) by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” “Reasonable service” – not “spiritual worship” as the NRSV has it (although perhaps a whole different sermon could be written around the idea of presenting your bodies as “spiritual worship”). For Paul it was only reasonable – that is, it was the expected thing for Christians to do – to offer their whole selves (which is what “your bodies” means) as living sacrifices. In response to Christ, who has made the greatest sacrifice, we present ourselves. And this is a sacrifice that is holy and acceptable to God.
The sacrament of communion grew out of the Passover celebration. The disciples’ rather plaintive question to Jesus as they prepared to sacrifice the Passover lamb, which would come to symbolize him: “Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?” has its echoes when we wonder about where our sacrifices can be made. And the point of the subsequent events is that living sacrifices can be offered anywhere in the world. Christ withdrew into the seclusion of the upper room to have his Passover meal, just as we come into the security of this church for our sacrificial meal. But the actual sacrifice – the crucifixion – took place on the town’s dung heap, in squalor and among unbelievers. Although he could have remained there with his friends, Christ chose not to stay in the comfort of the upper room.
As we prepare our minds and hearts to partake of this sacrificial meal, may we become ever more aware that if we are to be true to the sacred nature of these elements, we will be called to become living sacrifices on all the Golgothas of all of our worlds.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
November 5, 2006