Sermon
©1999
Dr. Laurel Hallman
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Probably two of my least favorite stories in the whole of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are the two I read today: the story of Abraham and Isaac, and the story of Jesus and the rich man. The first, because, obviously, I can barely stand it that Isaac is bound and placed on the sacrificial pyre. The second, because, taken literally, it creates unnecessary and difficult financial dependencies. Our denomination now has a brochure on the financial implications of going into the ministry—for those who are prepared to sell all that they have, and use their retirement fund to go to Theological School with never a thought about what they will live on later when they still have school debt, and are ready to retire.
But, of course, the Abraham and Isaac story is not about family relationships, and the teaching of Jesus is not about retirement planning. They are about sacrifice.
Sacrifice—a word we don’t use often these days—could be said to be one of the major themes which runs through all of Western Scriptures, including the Koran. In the Hebrew scriptures, the sacrifice is a gift to God, homage, loyalty, devotion, a demonstration of right relation with God. Nothing is to come before that loyalty. In the Christian scriptures, the sacrifice is of one’s self, as a model of God’s sacrifice of his only son—giving oneself to others, as God gave his son for us.
A careful reading of the Hebrew Scriptures will show them as a story of the consolidation of a loosely organized wandering people into a deeply committed, well-organized community, with a significant culture and self-understanding. The “relative homogeneity” of the dispersed people over the breadth of Asia, Africa, and Europe, despite all the variances in local culture, came about because the core of the Hebrew tradition—faith, tradition and practice—was the same. And nothing demonstrated the development of that core more than the evolution of the rituals around sacrifice.
When the tribe was a simple nomadic, wandering group, complaining about this and that, in and out of slavery, in and out of battles with enemy tribes, forging and then defaulting and then forging again, their essential covenant with God—the sacrifice—was a way of underscoring an agreement, a promise. When Jacob and Laban agree to the boundaries of their lands, Jacob seals it with a sacrifice on the mountain, sacrificing a lamb as a way of saying, “God be my witness.” .. (Genesis 31:54)
A sacrifice could be done anywhere, at any time. Wood, a ram, fire, and the ritual could be accomplished. The primary relationship between God and the worshipper would be reaffirmed.
As time went on, the sacrifice became a priestly activity. The tabernacle, the holy of holies—still portable—was the place of sacrifice. You didn't just go out on any mountain, or out beyond the tents to light the fire and sacrifice the ram. It became a specialized activity, increasingly ritualized. A communal ritual. Less for the individual, than for the community. Still movable. The holy of holies could be transported from place to place, but it was more central to the community.
In time, and we’re talking centuries here, the Torah, the Talmud, the books of law and understanding, pointed to Jerusalem, and the center of Judaism had a place, a sacred, central place, where sacrifice became even less individual, and more communal, and by the time the second temple had been built in Jerusalem (after the first one had been destroyed), the synagogue service was viewed as a substitute for the sacrificial practices of earlier times. “The core of the service was not sacrifice,” as one writer has said (Schwartz), “but the soliloquy of the heart and the utterance of the lips. The book of Psalms was developed in this time, and spoke of sacrifices of righteousness (Psalm 4:5) to prove one’s loyalty to God, and sacrifices of joy (Psalm 27:6): “I will sing, yea, I will sing praises.”
Ultimate loyalty to God is demonstrated in many forms of sacrifice, by then. Defined in the story of Abraham and Isaac, proscribed in the law, consolidated in the temple, and then reframed after the building of the second temple as a gift of joy or righteousness, or even, as it says in Proverbs 21: “To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.”
Without belaboring the point, the Christian scriptures, of course, center around God’s sacrifice for us. The reverse of the Abraham and Isaac story. The ultimate sacrifice, which God demanded from Abraham and then prevented—the sacrifice of his son—is now reversed in the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus as God’s son. This time, not as a tribute or marker of loyalty to God, but as a final sacrifice for all time, for all sin.
The story, to many of our ears, is as incomprehensible as the earlier Abraham and Isaac story. Why are these questions of loyalty, fidelity, right relationship—questions of sacrifice for one’s sins—so pervasive? Why does the theme in all its various forms keep coming up, century after century, in development after development as religion arises in all its varied forms. And why has the idea, the word, even a secular definition of sacrifice, become so nonexistent in our time?
Now I know my parents sacrificed for me so that I might go to college. I know sacrifices, little and large, are made all the time between and among people. But it’s not a word you hear often in common conversation among us. You'll be more likely to hear words like autonomy and independence and self-reliance.
In the Western world there is a move away from sacrifice as a binding value, whether sacrifice for another person, or as the proof of one’s loyalty to God. Even when Gandhi says, “There is no worship without sacrifice,” many of us find it hard to understand what he might mean, even knowing he sacrificed himself greatly for the liberation of India.
Now, even as I have made broad sweeps across the history of Judaism and Christianity, now I will make some broad statements about why I believe this is so. Knowing that there are many among us who have made great sacrifices, for their children, for justice and peace, in situations even unknown to us.
It makes less sense to talk about sacrifice in post-holocaust theology. What good is the sacrifice of the ram? What good is even the search for justice as a sacrifice, in the light of the holocaust? What good is sacrificing one’s life in the war to end all wars, when another one follows closely behind? Or to sacrifice ones’ son or daughter in Vietnam in the name of patriotism, when our involvement in the war itself is questioned by history, damaging even those who survived? And why sacrifice your resources so that your sons and daughters can receive an education, only to have them turn on you as provincial, rigid and anachronistic, to loose them to drugs and hedonism, as so many did in the ‘60s?
And why would a woman sacrifice herself for her family, only to have her husband leave her, and her children resent her bitterness? Why sacrifice oneself for civil rights when the problem of racism persists and persists and persists at ever more subtle levels?
Take care of yourself, it seems most of recent history is telling us, and the rest will follow. If you are self-reliant, and resilient, you will model what is needed for your children. God helps those who help themselves, after all. And patriotism turns into nationalism so quickly. And politics does not inspire higher values anyway.
How unfathomable it seems to many of us, to take time out to build the fire, find the ram, and kill it out of duty or honor to God. How unthinkable it would be to plan three trips to Jerusalem a year, a holy sacrifice of homage. Or, perhaps, even consciously and intentionally deny ourselves something we needed or even wanted for someone else.
Is that portrayal cynical enough? I’ve tried to push it to its edge to make the point. While there may be sacrifices small and large being made all around us—as a religious concept, as a high value in religion, as a core, a thread which weaves itself through the centuries of faith in all its forms—sacrifice has faded. And where it hasn’t, we have fundamentalism, and militias, and rigidity of all sorts rising up in its name.
So why bother to mention it, you might ask? Would I want you to get up on Sunday morning to come here to contemplate sacrifice, or as Gandhi said, not only to contemplate it, but to couple sacrifice with our worship? Would I expect you to come here as an act of sacrifice?
Yes. I would.
Because I’m here to tell you today that we all give all that we have to something. We all give the days of our lives to something. We die for something. If not as martyrs to some great cause, then we die because we have lived. We have walked this Earth as an embodiment of what it means to be human. Our lives, at the very least, are examples of what it means to live. And we die for that privilege.
We give all that we have to something. And it doesn’t take much thought to figure out, for each of us to figure out what that might be, what several things that might be. We give our time, we spend our money, we do our jobs. We give it all away. Sometimes in exchange, sometimes not. We give to others, whether intentional or not. We give of the qualities of our spirit. Hope, joy, peace, as well as muddle, or even hate. We give of our resources. To the automobile dealer, to the bank for our mortgages, to the checkout clerk at the grocery store. We give and give and give of the time and resources of our lives. We actually give all that we have, even unto death.
And worship (if it is rightly understood) is participating in acts of worth—in choosing worth-ful values. In this daily pouring out of ourselves, pouring out the minutes and hours of our lives, pouring out the labor of our bodies and minds, pouring out the affections of our hearts, we pour out the actions which are in keeping with our values.
Believe it or not, singing together, even if you can’t sing, is a worth-ful action. Praying together, being in silence is a worth-ful action. In these days of autonomy and individuality, of cynicism and skepticism, coming together like this can be a radical act.
Tending to one’s values, one’s purposes, the way we give all that we have. For we inevitably, inevitably do. Tending to how we give all that we have, is worship. As much as Abraham’s awful willingness to sacrifice Isaac.
I don’t believe that one day we arise in a mood to sacrifice ourselves for some cause or action or difficulty. I believe such sacrifices, and history is full of them—lives given for large purposes—such sacrifices, which tend to define what we mean about sacrifice, such sacrifices come in these few lives a day at a time. They don’t arise whole cloth and pull one from one’s daily life.
Sacrifices, if we are to live the word today, are made in the midst of willingness. If we are to understand sacrifice today in any importance sense—if religion is to claim sacrifice as any important value at its core—it must be understood not as a denial of one’s self, but as the polarity, the pole which is always tied to anything important. It is the pole to which love is connected. We give our hearts and our loyalties to love, even as now we know we must maintain our own selves. We give our resources to the common good—even as we know we must be able to support ourselves and be smart about our future. We give of ourselves to our children, even as we realize that they are separate from us. We give ourselves to our work, our daily work, even as we know that we are not only what we do. And, in an ultimate way, we give ourselves to Life, knowing that what Life calls us to do is not always what we would choose, and yet choosing to survive and survive and survive, when sometimes it seems that life itself will kill us.
Sacrifice is not the same as it was. It could be said it never was what we thought it was. Sacrifice: the gift of ourselves, our lives, to Life, to God, to Love, to Children, to the Larger Good, to causes, to creative work, even to the mundane. The giving of ourselves happens whether we intend it or not. Ritualized, as the ancient Israelites did, communal, as the worshippers in the second temple celebrated, an ultimate gift to the good of humanity, as so many martyrs have given, or even in a small act of generosity—such sacrifices make a difference.
So, do we sacrifice when we come here? Is Gandhi right when he says there is no worship without sacrifice? Knowing Gandhi, he probably meant at least in part that there is no worship without deprivation. And that is worth contemplating. But whether deprivation is required, I’m not sure. What I do know is that the sacrifice of time to be here, the sacrifice of other things (all those things the bumper stickers say the driver would “rather be doing”), the sacrifice of other highly valued activities to be here, to think about what it takes to live, to love, to pass on to the next generation what is needed, to be compassionate, to create a great and livable city, a poem, a song, to be less cynical and skeptical—all require an openness, a generosity of spirit that is not always easy.
May we worship in truth, in love, and in the open hearted spirit that calls forth from us, the best we have to give, as we live.
Amen |
