2023 Proper 16A

Last year, before I got COVID and then had my injury, I made myself do something I hadn’t done in over twenty years.

I gave blood.

I’m O negative, also known as the universal donor. My blood can be used for just about everyone. My first blood donation was in college, and I used to give blood regularly back in my 20’s. But then in the summer of 2001 I had a horrific experience during a donation—I will spare you the details—and just the thought of trying again made my heart pound and my legs go weak.

But you may recall that there were urgent pleas last summer. Supplies were very low. And I had made a birthday resolution that I would take more risks. So four days after my birthday, I found myself in the basement of the Ripley Building, reclining on a gurney with a needle stuck in my arm, watching the bag fill up with a part of me that could become a life-changer for someone else.

It reminded me of a conversation I had years ago with Russ Tornrose (may he rest in peace and rise in glory). Russ had been volunteering at a blood drive, and he told me how moved he was by the people who came in, especially those coming in for the first time, making their donation with a certain amount of fear and trembling. He told of one man, a big burly guy, who was really nervous about the process but felt a real urge to participate. After successfully donating a pint of blood, his eyes filled up with tears as he expressed his joy in being able to do something for others. I can still see the awe in Russ’s face as he tried to describe the mystical experience he had, of seeing life flowing out of that frightened but brave man’s arm. Flowing out without diminishing the giver. Flowing out to be given away, so that another could receive it in a critical moment. Life that the giver could afford to lose in order to help another person defeat death.

Russ made the connection between that man’s experience and the reading from Romans which we heard today.  Paul tells his listeners, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” I imagine Paul would have loved to have an example in which bloodshed didn’t come from violence or lead to death, but was instead an act of giving. A living sacrifice of a pint of blood that would be used to heal and strengthen someone else.

I imagine God would probably have been especially pleased that the big burly guy didn’t let his fear keep him from doing something good that day. I don’t know if he had ever set foot in a church, but surely those tears were an indication that on some level he recognized that he was participating in something holy, and there was worship in that.

Paul was writing to a community made up of Jews and Gentiles.  Both came to the table with an expectation that worship included animal sacrifice. It’s hard for us to get our heads around the idea that anyone could think that such a violent, destructive act could in any way be pleasing to God. We are—rightly—horrified by the idea. But for the people of the time, sacrificing animals proved your devotion to God by giving up the most valuable thing you had. In that society livestock was wealth. So you gave up the best of your flock in sacrifice to God as a sign that nothing was more precious to you than your relationship with God. 

Unfortunately, sometimes people treated sacrifice as more of a bribe, a way to manipulate God into giving you what you want. The prophets of the Old Testament spend a lot of time chastising the people of Israel for assuming that they could do whatever they wanted as long as they were “on time” with their sacrifices.

For the Gentiles, the whole religious cult of sacrifice was also bound up with Roman politics and status. One was expected to make offerings to the Temple of Apollo or Athena or whatever Roman god was patron of your city. One proved one’s patriotism by contributing to the sacrifice.

Imagine how shocking Paul’s words must have been, “a living sacrifice.” What a shift in understanding—there would no longer be any need for bloodshed, no more violence. No killing something else on our behalf, for our benefit. Instead, we would offer ourselves, all our gifts, all our skills, even all our weaknesses and vulnerabilities—we would offer them all to God to see what God could do with them. Living sacrifice is being open to the idea that God might be interested in transforming US so that we can cooperate with God in transforming the world.

What Paul is saying is that God wants us to funnel that desire to love and please God into our relationships with one another and with the world. When he says we should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought, he’s not calling us to false humility, he’s not saying we should sit in the corner on our hands and do nothing. He’s saying that we need to see that we all work together to accomplish God’s purposes for this world. None of us individually can do it all. We have to be honest about what we can—and cannot—do and graciously receive other people’s offerings without comparing them to ours. Just celebrate that by working together we can do so much more than we can do alone.

We need every person to offer to the world what brings them life and celebrate other peoples’ gifts that can address other needs.

To go back to that metaphor of blood donation: if we said that only the “universal donor” O negatives could give blood, there would never be enough. It’s only by recognizing that there are a variety of blood types to meet a variety of situations that we can even hope to meet the need.

When a person presents themselves as a donor to the Red Cross, they have to go through a screening process. They have to answer a few questions.

But none of them is, “Who do you say Jesus is?”

I doubt many would answer, like Peter, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. But I do think that on some level they “get it”—we are interconnected. Even if they don’t speak of it as “the Kingdom of God,” even if they don’t even acknowledge that there IS a God. They are thinking and acting like citizens of the kingdom, even if they don’t realize it. Even if it only lasts for a moment. God has revealed something to and through them, something with the power to transform.

When Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus tells him that he didn’t figure that out on his own, that God revealed it to him. And Peter, despite all his flaws, has the courage to say aloud what he has learned by walking with Jesus all those days. This, too, is a “living sacrifice”—the willingness to risk looking like a fool in order to speak the truth in the moment.

Peter won’t always get it right—in fact you will hear next week that Peter let this go to his head, he “thinks more highly of himself than he ought” and ends up being pretty harsh chastised by Jesus. Peter needs to learn that this ‘living sacrifice’ stuff is hard, because it’s ongoing. You can’t just declare Jesus the Messiah once and be done with it. You then have to live with that knowledge, and try to shape your life in a way that is consistent with that belief, staying open to the ways in which God will continue to reveal God’s love in and through you. That is harder than it seems.

This week in our Wednesday Bible Study I reminded us that the word martyr really just means witness. It is troubling to me that we have so glorified dying for what we believe that we discount any other kind of sacrifice.

It seems to me that living one’s faith, day after day, year after year, might in the long run be a more effective witness than dying for it.

Amen.