Twelfth Sunday after Trinity
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Readings: Isaiah 51: 1-6 and Romans 12: 1-8
When you hear the word ‘sacrifice’, I wonder what comes into your mind? Some ancient ritual when animals are slaughtered to please or appease some blood-thirsty God? The deaths of young combatants in war? Something you really enjoy which you had to give up in order to achieve something else? Perhaps you sacrificed something of a good life-style to finance your children’s education? Maybe you sacrificed a holiday in order to save money for a home improvement? Is that a sacrifice? The word certainly implies that something should be given up, maybe lost for ever, in order that something else may happen.
In the reading from Romans today, St. Paul suggests that Christians should become ‘living sacrifices’ for God. He calls on them to make an offering of their lives to God, so that their bodies become a ‘living sacrifice.’ In fact, it is probably easier to think in terms of ‘offering’ rather than ‘sacrifice.’ We can perhaps understand the concept better when we think of people who have offered-up their lives in the service of some good cause – such as those lost in war, or people going out to a developing country to help with teaching or medicine, or the many folk who put care of sick relatives before career.
But St. Paul suggests that every Christian should become a living sacrifice for God. In the Jewish world in which Jesus was brought up, life was thought to reside in the blood, and that was why blood had to be shed in sacrifices. But our Christian faith proclaims that Jesus himself was the sacrifice. He offered his life and shed his blood that we might have life. And that sacrifice was made once, for all – for all time and for all people. So we do not have to please God by offering our blood, but by being living sacrifices.
St. Paul was much concerned about Christian behaviour. He doesn’t say too much about it in today’s passage, apart from one very important instruction. “I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment.” There are certainly some people very much in the public eye who have an inflated view of themselves. Note that Paul didn’t say “Don’t love yourself at all” but “don’t think of yourself more highly than you ought to.”
You may remember the short parable Jesus gave about the two men who went up into the Temple pray – a Pharisee and a tax-collector. The Pharisee is concerned with justifying himself. He doesn’t really pray to God, but tells God how good he is, congratulating himself that he is not like certain other people – particularly that tax-collector in the corner. The tax-collector simply beats his breast and says ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner.’ He was eaten-up by his feelings of worthlessness. The parable Jesus told is not a really judgment on the life-styles of the two people involved, but it is about their attitudes; their attitudes about God and towards other people. It was the tax-collector, who acknowledged who he was before God, who went away justified.
Some people consider that Christians generally should be doormats – easily walked over – but I don’t go along with that. Yes – Christians might be – should be – servants, readily willing to serve others – but not doormats. After all, Jesus taught us to love our neighbours as ourselves. Sometimes we have to learn to love ourselves, as well as loving others.
To help us understand this and what it is to be a living sacrifice to God, St Paul urges “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Most of us instinctively know when we are doing something wrong. When we make a false tax return, or cheat in some other way, or lose our temper and take it out on someone who can’t answer back – we know that these actions are not ‘good and acceptable and perfect.’ When we take to heart the instruction ‘not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought’, we see that these actions are sinful, underhand, or unfair.
Of course, we all get it wrong sometimes. But fortunately, we don’t live in isolation from other people. How sad life would be if we only had ourselves to live with. We have all been born into some human family, and for nearly all of us there were good role models – parents; other family members, teachers, godparents – who showed us right from wrong and tried to help us become rounded and fulfilled human beings.
And in matters of faith and our understanding of God, the Church is our family. St. Paul says that “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” Together, we are the living sacrifice – living out the love and goodness of Jesus, and trying to abide by his teachings. None of us is perfect, and the Church has its faults and failings, as we are often reminded, for it is made up of fallible human beings.
The Church is an institution in the world, but it will not always follow the standards of the world. When we look at some of the unhappy periods of the Church’s existence, and the conflicts caused – very brutal in some cases, we see the danger of devoting too much loyalty to this institution. But Jesus saw this Church as the instrument of making God known to the world and bringing the world to God.
These days, I hear many people upset by the state of the Church. In recent decades we’ve seen many historical abuses being uncovered, and people have been shocked when it comes to light that senior figures in the church are fallible human beings like everyone else. Some Christians and non-Christians bemoan the apparent inability of the Church to take a lead in issues of morality or about national or world affairs. Or they see the Church full of internal struggles and divisions, or seemingly more interested in structure and financial survival than in living out the gospel.
Maybe when issues of the present seem uppermost on our agendas, it is good to remember that God’s purposes embrace past, present and future. In the reading from Isaiah today, the prophet encourages the people to look back with thanksgiving, and forward with hope. “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug” he says; “Look to Abraham your Father and Sarah who bore you” – in order to face the future with greater confidence. “My salvation will be for ever, and my deliverance will never be ended.” So here is a long-term framework and promise in which we can rest secure. The God who held the past also holds the future.
The Church may be imperfect in many ways, but we shouldn’t forget that we are as much a part of the Church as the Archbishops, the Pope, or the diocesan officials who work out strategy. Together and individually we are that ‘living sacrifice’ as we follow Jesus in a world that needs his saving love as much now as it ever did. Let us give thanks for the signs within the Church that show the building up of the kingdom of heaven; not when it relies on power and authority, but when people come to a deeper love of God and devotion to him by the teachings they hear, the sacraments they receive, and the common life they share in his name.
And let us again be grateful for and mindful of the gifts God has assigned to each of us, that Paul sees in the Corinthian congregation – gifts of giving, teaching, generosity, diligence, compassion – and cheerfulness; gifts to be used for the building up of the body and for the common good.