Living the Gift

I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t love a present. Christmas, birthday, anniversary, milestone event, whatever. Just a couple of weeks ago, Rachel and I gave our high-school grads presents. A laundry basket, some kitchen items, and a bag of peanut m&ms. I can’t imagine getting all excited for a laundry basket and some tea towels, but JD and Chloe seemed to. And good for them. Even if the present in itself is merely useful instead of spectacular, it’s nice to know someone is thinking about you. Right?

We all love presents.

Now, imagine coming to the tree on a Christmas morning. You’re bleary-eyed. Dying for that first cup of coffee to get you through a busy day of unwrapping, church, turkey dinner, and all the rest. And your child comes up to you and says, “Where’s my Christmas sacrifice?” Or you say to your child, “Why don’t you start handing around the Christmas sacrifices?” Or your spouse says to you, “Oh honey, thank you for the sacrifice. It’s just what I wanted.”

Well, that’s what I want to reflect on with you a little this morning.

And perhaps the first thing to say is, an ancient reader, whether Jewish or Christian or Hebrew, would have no trouble understanding what I just said. Where we are utterly confused, for a reader from the fifth century before Jesus up to the fourth century after (at least) the notion of sacrifices given at Christmas time would be utterly obvious. Why?

Here’s why: we have no idea what a sacrifice is anymore. If we use the word at all anymore, we use it as a metaphor. So we might say, “She works hard all day so that her children can go to university. What a sacrifice.” She is doing something unpleasant in exchange for something greater. He is sacrificed his job in order to help his aging parents. He is giving up something good for the sake of something better. When we use the word sacrifice, we don’t think of an animal ritually slaughtered. We don’t think of an altar smeared with blood, or with a ritual burning in which the smoke rises to God.

For an ancient on the other hand, a sacrifice was, at its most basic, a gift offered to God, and it was a gift offered in exchange for something else. A pagan general may go to the temple of Ares, the god of war in ancient Greece and offer a sacrifice in order to get the god on his side in battle. A Hebrew woman may go to the temple after child-birth and offer a sacrifice in order to be cleansed from ritual impurity (Mary did that in Luke 2:22 and following). So a celebration in which gift-exchange was the central motif making use of the language of sacrifice would, to an ancient, make perfect sense.

Now keep in mind that sacrifice and gift overlap as we turn to our Scripture.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romas 12:1)

That verse contains the weightiest “therefore” in the Christian Bible. It is the hinge on which the book turns. The first 11 chapters of this New Testament book is about the righteousness of God that is fully revealed in Jesus Christ, a righteousness that places both Jew and Gentile in right standing with God, a righteousness poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. That’s some heavy-duty theology right there.

But it is heavy-duty theology put in service of a very practical question. It is not the psychological question that drove Martin Luther mad, namely, how do I, a sinner, stand before a holy God. No. It is a question that is much more practical question: “How do Jews and Gentiles get along in one church?” And Paul’s answer is, both Jews and Gentiles stand under God’s wrath because of sin; both Jews and Gentiles are placed in right standing with God through Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Did Jew or Gentile earn this mighty act? No! It is a gift from first to last.

So, if Jew and Gentile are alike under condemnation, and placed in the right by the same mighty act of God, and lay hold of that gift in the same way, namely, through faith, what difference does that make? If that’s true, how should Jew and Gentile together live?

Paul’s answer starts in Romans 12 and continues through to the end of the book. But look, it’s not a shift from doctrine to ethics. It’s a shift from doctrine to liturgy: I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12:1).

After the death of Christ on the Cross, no longer would Christians smear blood on altars in order to cover or cleanse sins. After the ascension of Christ, no longer would Christians burn the bodies of lambs and goats to send the smoke up to God as a pleasing aroma. His death and resurrection was once for all. It brought all the previous ones to their true end. The sacrifices of animals were the metaphors. The one sacrifice of Christ was the great reality to which they all pointed.

The sacrifice of Christ was THE great gift given by God the Son on behalf of sinful humanity, to God the Father to forever wash humanity’s sins and turn away his wrath, in the power of God the Spirit. AND it was the gift of God given to us, to make us right before God when we could do nothing to earn it. A gift to be laid hold of only through faith. And that faith is itself a gift so that we can boast in nothing.

Why should Jews and Gentiles get along? Because Jews and Gentiles are caught up in that one great act together. They share in the one sacrifice, the one gift of the Son to the Father in the Spirit. In the Spirit, they made into the one community together caught up in the eternal love-gift that the Son gives to the Father. And what does that worship look like?

So all the behavioral stuff that comes after—thinking soberly about ourselves, recognizing the giftedness of others, outdoing each other in works of love, extending hospitality to strangers, and on and on, all the way to the end of the book. All of that is not ethics. It’s worship. And not just worship, but sacrificial worship. Sober self-awareness, generosity, hospitality, love--that is what the Christian worship sacrifice looks like. That is what the Christian gift to God looks like. A life given to and for others.

Which brings us to our Gospel lesson that we read earlier today. Peter has just recognized that Jesus is the Messiah. And from that time Jesus begins to teach them that being Messiah means suffering for the sake of the world even to death. And then, Jesus says, “If anyone would be my disciple, let him humble himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

Here, Jesus and Paul are in complete agreement. The living sacrifice that is the spiritual act of worship that Paul speaks about IS the cruciform life that Jesus calls his followers to.

It is a life of self-denial, of humility. Now let’s be clear: this does not mean that you are called to be a door mat, to be the willing subject of abuse by others, or to negate your own needs. It is rather, a radical call to what might be called other-centredness. Instead of asking, “what’s in it for me?” ask, “how can I help you?” It’s a radical letting go of expectation of reward; it’s a radical embrace of self-as-gift.

It is a life of the cross. Not meaning merely the willingness to give up something pleasant for another’s good. Though it might mean that. This is how John Wesley thought about temperance for example. If the use of alcohol keeps my brother in Christ, my neighbor, my enemy even, poor, I won’t use it for his or her sake. Alcohol here is not bad. It is not in itself immoral. But what if, when abused, it becomes a way to entrap people in poverty because of addiction, then? Well then, we might have to relinquish it in order to help another.

It is a life of the cross. Not meaning merely the embrace of something unpleasant for another’s good. Though it might mean that. As I have walked with Dad this least 18 months in and out of hospital, I am amazed at how nurses embrace all sorts of unpleasant things not simply because they get paid (though they are worth every cent they make!), but because they genuinely love their patients.

It is a life of the cross, meaning, simply and straightforwardly, a life lived as a gift to others even if that giving means our death. There’s no softening with metaphor here. It means death. Jesus’s disciples understood that. That’s why Peter rebuked Jesus. Surely not Lord. You’re not going to give yourself even unto death. Yes Peter, I am. And that’s what I expect of my disciples, too.

But here’s the good news: It is a life of following. Jesus does not ask us to do anything he has not already done. Jesus does not ask us to go anywhere where he has not been. Even unto death.

Now, what does all this have to do with us? We’re not facing the struggle that the Roman Church did, namely, how to integrate a racially or ethnically diverse group of people. (Other contemporary churches are, but no, we’re not at the moment). We’re not living with the real possibility of dying for Christ. Sneered at, mocked on social media, fair enough. Maybe even tension at work or even a lost job. But not death. (Other contemporary churches do face the literal cross, but no, not us. Not now).

And yet. . . . I can think of ways in which we might have similar troubles integrating around here. In our community, here on the Quebec side of the Ottawa Valley, they will likely have more to do with language and politics and denomination than ethnicity, but that doesn’t make them any less real. How do French and English get along in one Church? How do Separatist and Federalist live together as Christian brothers or sisters? How do Protestants and Catholics worship and work along side each other? Maybe those are live questions for us where Jew and Gentile was the live question for Paul. What do you think?

Paul’s answer is still the same: In the light of the universality of sin, those distinctions don’t matter a whit. In the light of the gift of God in Christ, those distinctions mean nothing. In the light of the one Spirit in which you both share, those differences pale into insignificance. Therefore, present your bodies as living sacrifices: humble yourselves, take up your crosses and follow. Live the life of Christ that is already in you. Live a life centred on the flourishing of others.

Still too hypothetical? Then let’s make it more concrete. This congregation wants to build a building. We have the plans. We’ve started the fundraising. But let’s stop and think for a moment about why. If we are entering into this project with a view to helping ourselves out—we will make it easier for our congregation as it ages. We will have more space to do the things we want to do. Whatever, we have not heard the call to discipleship made yet again this morning by both St. Paul and our Lord.

If we are entering into this project so we can welcome more people with mobility issues, so that we have more space for a growing youth group that is largely otherwise completely unchurched, so that we have larger and better space for the moms who come to Shawville shenanigans, so that we can turn outwards toward Shawville more often, in more different ways, to show hospitality to strangers, to outdo each other in love. Whatever. Then we have heard the call. And if we’ve truly heard the call, the budgetary challenges may not be nearly as challenging. We all know turning outward requires money. Not just money. But money.

That’s concrete. But it’s down the road. It’s a ways off yet.

OK. How about immediate? You’ve seen the devastation in Houston. There’s relief happening right now in Houston under the auspices of churches—some of them churches of our own denomination. Relief offered by churches is vital because it is fast. It is fast because the facilities are already there, the people are already there, the networks are already in place. Our brothers and sisters in Lone Star Cowboy Church, in Mexia Texas, our brothers and sisters in Crossroads Church in San Antonio are there on the ground helping. As are so many others in other denominations.

Instead of merely throwing up  #prayforHouston on our facebook or twitter account, let’s be like the Macedonians in 2 Cor 8 who, though they were poor themselves, when they heard about the suffering of the brothers in Jerusalem begged—that’s the word Paul uses—begged for the chance to give beyond their capacity. The ways you can give are in your bulletin today.

That’s what a living sacrifice, that’s what a spiritual act of worship looks like for us, today. That’s what self-denial, cross-taking, and following looks like for us, today. That’s what living the life of Christ, the life that has been poured into us by the Holy Spirit looks like.

And that is the life which we remember and in which we share when we come to this table. For as we take into ourselves the Body of Christ given for us, we become ourselves the Body of Christ—the Church—given to and for the world. As we share in Christ, his come to live in, and live out of, his one sacrifice given once for all.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

You can watch the sermon recorded or streaming live on our facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/418195504911505/.