Romans 12 1-8 2005
Pentecost 15
August 28, 2005
Romans 12:1–8
Jeremiah 15:15–21; Matthew 16:21–26
Sacrificial Living – The Way of the Cross
after R. Zagore, C. fichensure
Good evening/morning! In our epistle lesson from the letter of St. Paul to the Roman Christians, St. Paul uses a very important word I’d like us to learn. The word is “sacrifice.” Let’s say that together: “sacrifice.”
What does sacrifice mean? A sacrifice is something that belongs to us . . . that we’d love to keep . . . but that we give to somebody else to make him or her happy . . . that we can’t expect to get back. That’s a sacrifice. Like if you’ve got a really great snack, let’s say a monster cookie, maybe chocolate chip, and a friend of yours doesn’t have a snack. So you break your cookie in half and give part of it to your friend. That’s a sacrifice—you’d love to eat the whole cookie, but you give part of it to your friend to make him or her happy, and now you can’t have it anymore. That’s a sacrifice.
In Old Testament days, before Jesus came, God commanded his people to make sacrifices, often animals. An Israelite would have an animal, like a lamb, and he’d sacrifice it to God. He’d give it to God by letting it be killed and burned on an altar.
In our reading, Paul says we should give our bodies to God as sacrifices. How are we going to do that?! We need our bodies! How can we give them up? Well, Paul means we should use our bodies to live for God, to say things with our mouths, do things with our hands, go places with our feet, that make God happy. See, because we’re sinful, we’d often rather use our bodies to do things we want to do that God doesn’t want.
So why would we give our bodies to God as sacrifices, do the things he wants? There’s a very good reason. It’s because Jesus sacrificed himself for us. He gave his life, which would have been much more pleasant for him to keep, for us by dying on the cross. And, boy, does that make us happy, because it gives us our lives back forever, with Jesus in heaven! When we know we have that, heaven and eternal life, we can sacrifice—give our bodies to make God happy—and know we don’t need to keep them for ourselves.
Evolutionary teaching suggests that for us to be here, the fittest and strongest must survive and the weak must die. Even in view of this theory, most people believe in the opposite position, and that position is the almost universal acknowledgement that self-sacrifice is noble. The survival of the fittest also does not fit with the Christian truth that the Fittest, that is God in Jesus Christ, has sacrificed himself for the sinful, frail, and dying. Yet this self-sacrifice is not only a great power, but it is the power of Christ’s heavenly throne today. We, the members of his kingdom, gain access to his kingdom through his self-sacrifice and find meaning as citizens of his kingdom by offering our bodies as living sacrifices.
Matthew’s Gospel gives us the account of Jesus insisting that his self-sacrifice is necessary and that those who stand in the way of it are a “scandal” to him. He then speaks of his disciples’ need to likewise “take up his cross” and follow him. In other words to live a life of sacrifice (v 24).
Introduction: In January 1982, people watching TV had the horrifying and gratifying experience of watching a moment of such real life tragedy and heroism that it’s still a living memory for many today. Twenty seconds after an Air Florida flight took off from National Airport in Washington DC, it crashed into the ice-covered Potomac River. The news media was there covering the comings and goings of important people in Washington, and that day was no different. Immediately, camera crews were at the Rochambeau Bridge on Fourteenth Street, the site of the crash. A live television audience watched transfixed as one passenger, later identified as Arland Williams, reached the rope that a police helicopter dropped to victims in the river. Instead of taking the lifeline himself, he passed it to another survivor nearby. Five times he held the rope in his hand and passed it to other survivors. Before the sixth attempt to save his life could be made, he disappeared beneath the water’s surface. The Rochambeau Bridge has been renamed the Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge.
It took nearly six months to identify the man the news media had called “the unknown hero.” The nation was moved by his self-sacrifice. For a short period of time even the cynical news media knew they had seen something extraordinary. The man was called a lifeline to both the survivors in the water and the observers on the bridge, because he exemplified the nobleness of sacrifice.
It’s a Wondrously Powerful Thing, Self-sacrifice!
I submit to you that the heroism that is rightly celebrated by all is a lifeline, for reasons that people perceived but didn’t understand. That’s because self-sacrifice undercuts part of what is hurting our world. Our sinful natures, which rebel against God, try to find a reason for our lives that has nothing to do with God. As a result, people teach that human beings are the product of a big bang, an ancient accident and the chance collision of atoms and of amino acids. Some believe that our ancestors crawled out of the primordial ooze—the product of random chance and survival of the fittest. The hope in this system is that somehow, over time, we are getting better and stronger and smarter. The problem is that when you believe this is where we came from, it changes the way you think about yourself—and about others too. If that’s true, we are all accidents in a fatherless universe; hope is an illusion; and life, progress, and strength are the meaningless possessions of a swiftly passing moment.
Arland Williams’s self-sacrifice gets in the way of believing in evolution because it puts on display the stark difference between evolutionary hope and real hope. If survival of the fittest really is the rule of nature, then the entire world that watched the heroic events surrounding Mr. Williams’s death should have decried him as a great fool. He had given up all that he had and all that he would ever have—his life. In fact, by helping those less fortunate than himself, and considering the needs of others even before his own life. The heroism of self-sacrifice cannot coexist with an evolutionary model of human origins. And yet, in our spirit, the Law written on all our hearts (Rom 2:15) gives silent testimony to the fact that his sacrifice was an absolute good. In every generation and every culture, self-sacrifice for the sake of the needy and less fortunate has been celebrated and glorified.
Of course, self-sacrifice is the way of our Lord, and the message of the apostle in Romans 12: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship” (v 1).
Paul goes on to say that we who are known by the Lord are called to understand the transformational power of sacrifice: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (v 2).
The power of self-sacrifice is really the power of love: real love, Christ-like love. Self-sacrifice is the center and content of genuine love, the kind we see in the crucified Christ and His love and sacrifice for the people of the world when He, God Himself, died on the cross. This sacrifice flows into our lives. Perhaps one of the best way we see it is in Christian marriage. Jenny Wendling and Nathan Augustine were married here today/yesterday. Their vows exemplify sacrificial living. In marriage there are the sacrificial words of living together “for better or worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health”. Our wedding vows are a call to sacrificial love. But even though marriage ceremonies start people off with the admonition to and promise of sacrificial love, it’s common that people don’t recognize or believe that the “worse,” the “poorer,” the “sickness,” and the sacrifices these require will ever really come. But they do come. These trials are really the opportunity for genuine love and sacrifice to be expressed. Those who live this sacrificial love have stronger relationships. We look to them as our good examples.
The language of love is the language of self-sacrifice. It’s a sacrifice that begins with Christ giving himself for our sake. As you look at the cross of the Crucified, the word fun doesn’t come jumping to mind, but nowhere is love more evident. “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). You and I are the recipients of the greatest love that can be given. Through his self-sacrifice we stand forgiven, renewed, restored, and hopeful for our future together with him.
The transformational power of self-sacrifice is impossible to understand or receive apart from Christ’s sacrifice. The Bible speaks in a joyful hymn about this connection. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:3–11).
III. Self-sacrifice is a transformational power.
His cross and resurrection give you life through the forgiveness of sin. And now, we who are forgiven are invited to a new life. This invitation does not follow the pattern of the world. The world seeks by force of jobs and money and the will of the fittest to conform you into its mold. But the apostle reminds you of the freeing power of Christ’s self-sacrifice and the new life he offers: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your body as living sacrifices. . . . Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:1–2).
You are invited to participate in the circle of love and self-giving that defines Christ’s throne and his kingdom. You are invited through Word and Sacrament to receive not only the benefits of his sacrifice, but to participate in its giving to others. You are invited to love and be loved, not according to the narrow, selfish, pleasure-seeking ways of the fallen world, but according to the pattern of him before whom every knee shall bow. This is not the path to earthly pleasures. It is the way of the Crucified, who reminds us, in today’s Gospel, that to follow him, we must bear our crosses.
Conclusion: Now we, like the man in the icy Potomac, have a lifeline from on high. It’s ours to grasp and ours to give. But unlike earthly lifelines, this one we can grasp and give at the same time. Christ has come to save. His love and sacrifice have transformed the nature of power, of our hopes, and of our minds. Today his Word bids us to give as he did, to love as he did. He calls us away from the destructive, self-serving, pleasure-seeking patterns of the sinful world to a life won through the power of sacrificial love. He calls us to see the power of love outpoured and to rejoice in the survival of the forgiven. Amen.