Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 9/30/07
Sacrificial
Isaiah 53:4-6
Matthew 20:20-28
These two texts – the one from Isaiah and the second from Matthew – are about sacrifice – the one quality of discipleship that most of us would just as soon avoid. As a general rule, we don’t turn to faith to find out what we can give up. Yet with Commitment Sunday now just two weeks away, it is helpful to approach this subject because sacrifice really represents stewardship at its best.
Our pledges and offerings each week aren’t about membership dues. This isn’t a country club. At their best, rather, those offerings (and our whole approach to stewardship) are about our response to God. They are an expression of our gratitude, our love and our commitment. At their best and most meaningful, they involve some sacrifice.
When we turn to God’s Word we see the crucial role that sacrifice plays all through Scripture. It is the lever that God uses to move the world. It is the instrument of God’s life-changing love.
Here in our texts we find three points lifted before us: the power of sacrifice in God’s economy; the role of sacrifice in a life well-lived; and the place of sacrifice as the mark of Christian commitment.
The first of these, the unique power of sacrifice, reflects the under girding spiritual structure of our existence. In words that seem to foreshadow Jesus’ crucifixion, Isaiah points to that power in his image of the suffering servant; “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgression, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.”
How are we healed? How are we made whole? It is through the sacrifice of this other. Whether speaking here of an individual or of the whole nation of Israel, Isaiah is highlighting here a truth that all of us have experienced at some level: sacrifice has an extraordinary power to impact our lives.
We see it in the parent whose gift of self so shapes a child’s life. We see it in those teachers whose commitment, dedication and love have an enormous impact on their students.
There is great power in putting the needs or welfare of others ahead of ourselves. It has been the mark of some of this nation’s greatest leaders; people like Washington and Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman. At critical moments in their tenure, each was able to put the good of others ahead of self-interest, and the welfare of the nation ahead of political expediency. That quality of sacrifice and the capacity to put others ahead of self is a defining characteristic of great business leaders, as well.
This past week the publisher of Forbes recommended Jim Collins’ Good to Great along with a number of other books. Good to Great has been around for a while now, but it remains a wonderful read. Of the various components necessary to help a company transition from being good to being great, Collins’ puts at the very top what he refers to as “Level 5 Leadership.” He writes:
We were surprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good company into a great one. Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy – these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.
The power of sacrifice was there in Moses’ decision to leave the comfort and security of his pastoral existence and lead a hard-headed people out of captivity and through the wilderness for forty years. It was there in the prophets, and their commitment to speak the truth no matter what the cost to themselves. It was there, most of all, in Jesus – the very Son of God – and in that journey to the cross which stands at the very heart of our faith.
A week ago PBS began airing Ken Burn’s remarkable documentary of the Second World War. Angered by the ignorance of so many, Burns was determined to create an accurate, compelling account of that world-shaping event. He was also committed to showing us war in all its horror. The photographs he chose were unflinching, the letters and statistics overpowering. Watch even a small part of his series, and you can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the sacrifice involved.
One night it was the story of an entire division ordered to cross a river. The commander knew they didn’t have a chance, but they followed orders. They went ahead, and the losses that day were staggering. Another night it was the account of hundreds of planes being sent out against the Japanese fleet. Taking off, the pilots knew they didn’t have enough fuel to make it there and safely back. They knew that darkness would set in before their return which would make a carrier landing particularly treacherous. But they went ahead, and as a result were able to inflict tremendous damage.
Sacrifice. Two years ago a teacher named Martha Cothren tried to bring that lesson home to her students. They arrived on the first day of school to find that their classroom empty. All the desks were gone. Cothren told her students they could have them back if they could tell her how they were earned. Throughout the day those students kept trying to figure out the right answer. They couldn’t. At the end of the day Cothren gathered them together and told them she was finally going to tell them. With that she opened the door and 27 veterans wearing their uniforms walked into the classroom, each one carrying a desk.
“You don’t have to earn those desks,” she told them. “These guys did it for you… they paid a price for you to have that desk, and don’t ever forget it.”
Sacrifice. We wouldn’t be here today, we wouldn’t know the freedoms we have, without the sacrifice of those who have gone before us. Sacrifice has this amazing power to change the world. It has the capacity to touch and change our lives.
We see it in something as simple as a gift. What is it that gives a gift its meaning? It is the sacrifice that lies behind it. Its absence is what makes a wealthy family’s gift of a BMW to their sixteen year old almost meaningless (except to perpetuate a terrible sense of entitlement). That sixteen year old knows that the real sacrifice for those hard-driving parents would be the gift of themselves, the gift of their time and their attention. And on the other hand, is the presence of sacrifice that makes the home-made gift so incredibly special to us.
There is, first of all, great power in sacrifice. It can move the world. It can change people’s lives. Sacrifice is part of God’s economy; part of the way God has structured this world.
But second, sacrifice is also the key to a well-lived life. Here, in our second lesson, we find James and John approaching Jesus along with their mother. She clearly gets Jesus. She kneels before him. She knows that he is far more than a rabbi. Her very question reflects her conviction that one day Jesus is going to come into his Kingdom where he will reign in power and in glory. She gets Jesus right, but that is not enough. She still doesn’t understand what it means to follow him.
We aren’t all that different. We tend to place all the emphasis on believing the right things about Jesus, but like James and John we still want the good stuff. Like them we tend to think that the good life is all about avoiding any kind of sacrifice.
In his book, Don’t Waste Your Life, John Piper shares the story of two women, Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards. Ruby was over eighty, never married, and had poured her life out in trying to reach the poor and the sick in the Cameroon, West Africa. Laura was in her late seventies, a widow and medical doctor who had chosen to serve at Ruby’s side. One day their brakes failed and their car plummeted over the side of a cliff. The two were killed instantly.
Was it a tragedy? For Piper, absolutely not. These were two lives extraordinarily well spent. Twenty years after most Americans retire, here were these two women still out there, still making a difference. There was nothing wasteful about it. By contrast, he offers the story of a couple that he read about in Readers’ Digest. He was 59 and she was 51 when they chose to retire. They moved to Florida where they cruised around on their trawler, played softball and collected shells. Piper continues:
At first, when I read it I thought I might be a joke. A spoof on the American dream. But it wasn’t. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life – your one and only precious, God-given life – and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells… That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream.
There is nothing more empty or less satisfying than doing nothing, than simply living for ourselves and for our own satisfaction. We weren’t designed to live that way. We were designed, rather, to make a difference. It is part of who we are, it is woven into our DNA.
When God placed Adam and Eve in Paradise, God didn’t say “now you can just sit back and enjoy everything I’ve done.” No, God gave them a task. God told them “be fruitful and multiply.” God said, “till the earth and keep it.” There is something deeply satisfying in being involved in a work that is bigger than us, and in knowing that our lives are making a difference.
It doesn’t stop when we hit sixty five. It doesn’t disappear as we move into our seventies and eighties. The minute we begin to live only for ourselves, no matter what our age, we’ve begun to move away from our purpose, to move away from a defining need in our lives.
A week ago, the New York Times Magazine featured an article on Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. At 87 he is still going strong and playing a defining role on the Court.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Northwestern in 1941. He fought in the Second World War, was awarded the Bronze Star, and was part of the unit that decoded the message of Admiral Yamamoto’s fateful flight to the front lines. After the War he went back to school and graduated two years later from Northwestern Law School where he was first in his class and had earned the highest grade point average in the history of the school. When Gerald Ford appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1975 he called him the finest legal mind that he could find. In that Watergate era marked by profound division between the White House and Congress, Stevens’ appointment was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 98 to 0
The point is, gifts alone aren’t enough. You don’t achieve that kind of success with great discipline. You don’t achieve it without sacrifice.
Sacrifice. The funny thing is that it’s the one thing that so many of us work so hard to avoid. Yet it is precisely this quality, this willingness to give of ourselves and to live for something beyond ourselves, that holds the key to lives well-lived.
So first, sacrifice has this extraordinary power in the economy of God. Second, it is the key to lives that are full and rich. And finally, it is the defining mark of genuine commitment.
Back when I was playing rugby we always had a few guys on the team who really weren’t that committed. They would show up for the practices. They would be there on the field during the matches. But you would never find them at the center of a difficult tackle. They would never be around to catch one of those high, short punts designed to give the opposing team a chance to get under the ball and clobber whoever catches it (there are no “fair catches” in rugby).
The rest of us knew who they were. We never talked about them. Never criticized them behind their backs. Usually they would be around for just a season or two, and for the most part, they were never really at the heart of the team. It wasn’t rugby they loved. It was the idea of being ruggers.
There are Christians like that. People who show up, who like the parties, but who never actually go that next step. Eugene Peterson talks about them in his book, Run with the Horses.” He recalls a woman named Rosie Ruiz who was the first woman across the finish line of the Boston Marathon back in 1980. It turned out she hadn’t actually run. She had jumped into the race during the last mile. Peterson continues:
In reading about Rosie I thought of all the people I know who want to get in on the finish but who cleverly arrange not to run the race. They appear in church on Sunday wreathed in smiles, entering into the celebration, but there is no personal life that leads up to it or out from it. Occasionally they engage in spectacular acts fo love and compassion in public. We are impressed, but surprised, for they were never known to do that before. Yet, you never know. Better give them the benefit of the doubt. Then it turns out to be a stunt: no personal involvement either precedes or follows the act. They are plausible and convincing. Buy tint he end they do not run the race, believing through the tough times, praying through the lonely, angry, hurt hours, They have no sense for what is real in religion.
So here, I would suggest, is the great divider within the Christian community. On the rugby pitch, it is the willingness to take a hit. In the walk with Jesus, it is the commitment to make the sacrifice.
Jesus once said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mark 8:34,35).
Sacrifice. Nothing truly worthwhile can come without it. As we approach Commitment Sunday two weeks from now, this would seem an appropriate time to consider the place of sacrifice in our lives; a time to ask ourselves what we are willing to sacrifice to further the purposes of God’s Kingdom.
Jim Collins, Good to Great, (Harper Business, New York, 2001), pp. 12, 13
John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life, (Crossway Books, Wheaton, 2003), pp. 45, 46
Eugene Peterson, Run with the Horses, (IVP Books, Downers Grove, 1983), pp. 106, 107