21st Sunday after Pentecost Sermon

When someone uses the word “sacrifice,” it can mean many different things. Each has its own legitimacy and worth.

At a very base level, to “sacrifice” something is a gesture of obedience. We’re giving up something because it’s required of us, like paying our taxes. We might not willingly give this much away if it weren’t required of us. But it is. So we do. It’s a sacrifice that costs us.

A variation of that sense of obedient sacrifice is what, I’d term, duty. In this case, it’s not required. No one is forcing us to do it. But rather, we choose to give something up because (to varying degrees) we believe it’s the right thing to do. Parents, make this kind of sacrifice all the time. We give up the meal we’d prefer to eat or the book we’d prefer to watch or how we spend our Saturdays to choose instead the food or book or activities our children would prefer. It’s a duty as parents to work around the needs of the most vulnerable members of the household. So we do it.

Giving money to charities or the church can often fall into this category as well. In a spirit of duty, we give so that the church is able to function. We value what the church is about, so we do our bit to help pay its bills. (And let me be clear, I appreciate this, since I – in fact – am one of those bills that needs to be paid.)

But it’s also worth noting, that this kind of sacrifice may or may not be truly costly in any significant way. With our kids it usually is, but with charitable giving, for many, it often doesn’t affect the way we’re able to live or our future security. It’s not costly in that sense.

Which brings us into a much deeper level of sacrifice, which I call giving ourselves away. So far as I can tell in this life (especially the spiritual life) as we mature, we come to believe more and more that – in our essence – we belong to one another. We are not alone. We are part of the whole, such that my well-being is now found in participating in and contributing to the well-being of my neighbor.

Our values, our priorities begin to shift, so that sacrificing for the other’s good becomes my growing desire.

Gordon Fee was one of the top-ranking New Testament scholars of our generation. He died earlier this week. And in reading the various testimonies circulating online, I heard this story.

Late in his life he was revising his commentary on First Corinthians for the umpteenth reprint. His is the commentary on First Corinthians that any serious scholarship has to contend with. But in this last revision, he was only focusing on the footnotes because, as he told his friend, “’for scholars, you make or break your work in the footnotes, not the actual text. So, we often use the footnotes to pick apart the work of others and to show our own superiority so we can one-up each other…So this time when I edit the book, I’m not editing it for content…I’m editing it for kindness.’

“He went on to explain that he was combing through his own footnotes from years ago, weeding out anything he felt was demeaning, not honoring, self-serving, or anything else that would not pass for kindness. One of the world’s greatest teachers and scholars and [at the end of his days] his main priority was the kindness in his footnotes.”

This is a sacrifice of “giving ourselves away,” no longer needing to define the self by demoting the other, but by blessing the other, and being one.

Ultimately, the one to whom we give ourselves away is God. It is the discovery that – not only my possessions – but I myself belong to God. And the way I choose now to live is in step with who I believe to God to be, which for us Christians, we see in the life of Jesus, who lived in a perpetual spirit of giving himself away.

It’s like that scene in Les Misérables, if you’re familiar with the book or the musical. Jean Valjean was a former criminal and outcast whose life had been redeemed by a priest’s extraordinary act of mercy. Then he goes on to live a strong, upstanding life, but under an assumed persona. But then he learns that someone else has been captured and falsely identified as Jean Valjean and is about to be tried and sent to prison. So he’s thrust into this moral dilemma: do I stay silent and save my life? Or do I save his life, by turning myself in? And, in the musical version, there’s this powerful moment of reckoning,

“Whom am I?” he sings. “My soul belongs to God, I know; I made that bargain long ago. He gave me hope when hope was gone. He gave me strength to carry on. Who am I? Who am I? I’m Jean Valjean.”

And so, he gives up his comfortable life, his reputation – to give himself away for the freedom of another. (Now in this case, he also runs away and goes on the lam!)

But the point is, “My soul belongs to God I know, I made that bargain long ago.” So if he belongs to God, there really is no choice, but to give his life away.

It was this same spirit that I experienced in Gordon Fee. He was my New Testament professor. A mentor. A friend. His influence on me and my faith was incalculable. But beyond the academic, what he taught me, in his person, was the absolute worthiness of God as the ultimate object of our life’s pursuit.

And it is this conviction of God’s worthiness in our worship that lies at the heart of sacrifice. In our Christian tradition, our concept of sacrifice is rooted in the world of the Old Testament. Jewish culture of that era revolved around their covenantal relationship with God, which took its shape in temple worship, which itself was entirely focused on the sacrificial system.

And in that system, there were three basic types of sacrifice,

First there was the oblation, the burnt offering, in which a sacrificed animal was entirely consumed by a sacred fire. It was a way of recognizing God’s totality and God’s rightful possession of everything that is.

Then there was a peace offering that culminated in a sacrificial meal, through which the worshipers perceived themselves as having entered into a closer, peaceful fellowship with God.

And then there was the Sin Offering, an “Atonement” in which the faulty creature acknowledges their shortcomings and obligations and offers a sacrifice of penitence.

Now, culturally, it’s really hard for us to relate to this sacrificial system of worship, particularly with our modern sensitivity against cruelty to animals. But if we can get past that cultural barrier, there is a profound wisdom in how all three of those forms of sacrifice tap so deeply into our human psyche.

We do have a craving to adore something worthy, and we want to sacrifice things to it. Think about the early days of surging, romantic love. You can’t stop spending money on each other. Even if you don’t have it! The giving itself, the sacrifice, is such an essential part of that all-consuming experience. But sadly, our culture (even our religious culture), has stopped hoping for such a passionate experience with God. Which is terrible. Because ultimately, God is the one, the only one, who can rightly satisfy the depth of our yearning to adore something utterly worthy, utterly holy.

And then the Peace Offering, the one that leads to a meal. We also crave that kind of relationship with God. As much as we need to adore passionately, we also want to know ourselves at peace with God, at home with God, welcome and secure.

And then the Atonement, the sin offering. When we are guilty, and our hearts know it and we’re ready to admit it, there is within us an impulse to make up for it, to pay a price, to set things right.

Sacrifice, in all its forms, is necessary for the human spirit. It reverses our selfishness and self-centeredness. It is love of neighbor and love of God. It is concrete and tangible. It is, in its essence, a positive act – something given; not something given up.

And it is all these things that we see in Zacchaeus. Although Zacchaeus was rich, his wealth came from being a tax collector, which made him an outcast in Jewish culture. In their eyes, he was a thief and ally of the Roman oppressors. But he’s intrigued by Jesus; he wants to see him, to understand what all the hoopla is about. And when Jesus dignifies him by coming into his house, his response has all the hallmarks of sacrificial worship:

“Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay it back four times as much.”

His response is robust and passionate and impulsive – this need to give away. And it happens at a meal, that he has shared with Christ. And it is penitent; he wants to make restitution for whatever he has done wrong. In this one scene, in this one person, the entire sacrificial system of the Jewish Temple took on flesh and blood.

Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

Now we, too, in the church, have a sacrificial system at the heart of our worship. Holy Communion takes place at an altar, where “we offer to [God] our gifts of bread and wine, and ourselves, a living sacrifice.” The bread and the wine ritualistically become “Christ our Passover, sacrificed for us.” Embedded in our prayers is the profound hope that this altar becomes both a place of our sacrifice and God’s sacrifice – our gifts and our lives, and Christ’s gifts and life.

But as much as we need the ritual of Eucharist, we also need the spirit of Zacchaeus who ran to the sycamore tree and climbed up its branches to see Jesus. We can’t control how God will reveal God’s self in our lives and this world, but we do have the power to seek God. We can be curious about God and the things of God; we can seek and rediscover those buried yearnings in our hearts to adore something worthy of giving our lives to; we can examine our conscience and feel remorse for where we have errored, and seek to make recompense.

We humans were not made for dull and cautious things. Our spirits were made for sacrifice.