“Present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” Whoa. That’s a big ask. And a really big Biblical concept. Think fire and animal slaughter and blood of bulls poured out on an altar. Or how about the sacrifice of praise that we talk about from our own altar at Trinity? From Genesis to Jesus to the culture wars of our day, sacrifice is integral to how people relate to God, across ages and cultures. And it’s a concept that merits some sermon attention because—as a Christian leader—I confess that I’m sometimes wary of the way sacrifice has been talked about church. The one sacrifice of Jesus’ life—made once and for all—should never be a reason to demand unreasonable sacrifice of ourselves or others. As has been done to enslaved people and woman and—especially important to mention on this Pride Sunday—queer people. Yes, God invites us to give ourselves fully to God’s purposes. But we are called to do so as a choice we make out of love; never out of obligation or coercion or shame.
The Latin root of the word sacri-fice means—literally—to “make holy”. So it has less to do with giving something up than it does with giving something over. We make something holy by giving it to God. When we talk about sacrifice in our Eucharistic prayers, that’s what we mean. We are surrendering ourselves—and the gifts of bread and wine—trusting God’s grace to make more of these earthly elements than we can imagine. We might say that our sacrifice is what makes space for God’s transformation.
Barely two weeks ago, the Episcopal Church remembered Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a young martyr to the cause of civil rights. Some of you may have watched my short take about him last week, when I found myself thinking about the sacrifice of his life. As a seminarian in 1965, he was moved to join the struggle for civil rights in Selma, Alabama. In a dangerous moment—one he surely did not plan for or expect—Jonathan stepped between an armed racist and a young black woman. He was shot in the chest and died almost instantly. Something about the changing times compelled a white supremacist to take a life, while it compelled Jonathan to save one. You might say that we honor Jonathan’s memory every time we choose the sacrifice of faith over fear and hatred.
Pat Hubbard has observed that I like to write about the lives of saints, as I often do in my weekly column for The Villager newspaper. And she’s not wrong. I love their stories, not because they died and became martyrs—some did and some didn’t—but because they made holy choices during their lives. With their very bodies: birthing like Mary mother of Jesus, nurturing like Monica of Hippo, healing like Florence Nightingale, teaching like Peter and Anna Cassey, and sometimes even dying for the life of others, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Jonathan Daniels. When our church identifies these people as saints—as a great cloud of witnesses, actually, which we do quite democratically in the Episcopal Church—we make their holy choices visible for future generations. I commend the wisdom of these ancestors to you.
Which brings me to Saint Paul: church planter, preacher, and teacher to generations of people seeking to live holy lives. The vast majority of them people like you and me, faithfully committing to be the church of Jesus Christ even when it wasn’t or isn’t popular. The very act of showing up for Sunday worship being a certain kind of sacrifice of our bodies. Consider Jim Alexander, for example, who will be teaching a theology class in person on Sundays this fall. I happen to know that he doesn’t love zoom, but more importantly, he loves the holy gift of your bodies in a classroom. Smiling, questioning, hearing from each other and leaning in to learn. Our spiritual worship, as Paul observed, involves presenting our bodies, in service to the renewal of our minds. Which can be entirely joyful.
Paul, as we well know, had a lot to say about what we do with our bodies when we are together. Some of which I don’t love, or at least don’t appreciate the way the church has interpreted Paul. Like when he admonishes women to keep silent in church as he does in 1 Corinthians 14, or by appearing to condemn same sex relations in 1 Corinthians 6. Never forget this: in the Christian tradition, sacrifice is choice we make out of love, never out of obligation or coercion or shame. Bearing in mind, then, that Paul was a man of this own time and place—and that these passages have often been shamefully interpreted out of context—I still take his body theology very seriously. Paul cared deeply about what we do with our bodies. Or to use his words, how we offer them to God for holy purposes. Individually, certainly, but perhaps even more so as a community.
“For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” The characterization of community as a body was not unique to Paul, but he used it in a way that was unique for his time. In the wider Greco-Roman world it was common to speak of classes of people as playing greater and lesser roles in the body politic. And their roles were fixed. So if you were the kind of person who played the role of a foot by virtue of your social status, your family might be walked on forever. Paul, however, turned this commonplace image upside-down. His body language emphasized the mutual obligation of all parts, while still giving special honor to those who had lower status within the community.
This vision for the embodied people of God—each person and part being needed and important—takes on additional meaning in light of Peter’s confession of Christ. Dear impulsive Peter: how grateful I am for his openness to God’s revelation in Jesus, and for the boldness of his proclamation. But if he were the only one called to prophecy, ministry, teaching, exhortation, generosity, diligence and compassion, we’d be a poor church indeed. He got it right in the Gospel we heard this morning. But you may recall that a servant girl’s question to Peter, in the courtyard of the high priest on the eve of the crucifixion, was enough to get him to deny the same Christ he had just confessed. Peter may have been a rock, but he clearly crumbled when he was left alone.
So rather than viewing sacrifice as a personal commitment that individuals offer in proportion to our faith—expressed in the various ways Paul mentioned—it might make more sense to view Paul’s invitation as being to a common sacrifice that we all make, in body mind and spirit. Which allows us to discern together what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Keep that in mind as our Vital + Thriving team begins to roll out the results of all the congregational surveying we did this spring.
Pat Hubbard and Villagers, you’re not wrong. I do love the saints. And I also like to write about them, which is why I thought this might be the Sunday to rewrite a verse from favorite hymn, from the perspective of our whole body we are, made holy by and for God—
We love our Lord so dear, so dear, and God’s love makes us strong;
and we follow the right, for Jesus’ sake, the whole of our good lives long.
We may be a soldier, we may be a priest, may we not be slain by a fierce wild beast: but there’s not any reason, no, not the least, why WE shouldn’t be saints too.
