Given that any day now they’re going to begin playing baseball in Florida and Arizona, let’s start with a baseball story. It’s the bottom of the ninth. The game is tied. Our first batter smokes one into the left field corner, allowing him to cruise into second standing up (where he represents the potential winning run with nobody out). All we’ve got to do is get him to third with less than two outs, where he can score in any number of ways….a slow grounder….a medium deep fly ball…. a suicide squeeze….or, of course, a base hit.
But how to get him to third? That is the question. He could steal third. But he’s slow. The opposing pitcher could wild pitch him to third. But he’s good. Well, you know as well as I do how to solve this thorny little problem. We’ll ask our next batter to lay one down. A bunt, I mean. Just choke up on the old bat….barrel tilted earthward….hands supple on the handle. Don’t swing at the pitch. Just push at the pitch….gently….deftly. Get the ball on the ground. Try to deaden it on the grass. Make the third baseman charge and glove it. Sure, he’ll throw you out at first. Sure, you will have missed your chance to cream one between the outfielders or over the fence. Sure, there won’t be anything about you in the papers the next day. Because if you get your guy to third, and the guy hitting after you drives him in from third, those are the guys who will be interviewed in the clubhouse. What a rip off. Everybody else a hero but you.
Still, there’s no mistaking the sign being flashed from the bench. That sign calling for you to bunt. In baseball lingo, you are being told to “give yourself up.” And assuming you do it successfully, tomorrow’s play-by-play narrative will say that “you moved the runner over.” But the box score will have a special name for the bunt you laid down. They’ll call it a “sacrifice.”
Nice word, “sacrifice.” In the world of baseball, not everybody can do it. And some refuse to do it. Players who fancy themselves sluggers are offended by the bunt sign. Figuring they get paid to power the ball a mile, they want no part of a request to push it forty feet. But games….and seasons….sometimes turn on the contributions of players who “do the little things.” Like sacrifice.
It takes a while to learn that lesson. It also takes a while to become that person. When you are a little kid, you want it all for yourself. The attention. The limelight. The love. The toys. Especially the toys. You have to be taught to share. Which is hard if you are an only child. So your mother forms a play group or enrolls you in a preschool program. Where, hopefully, you will learn about sharing. What you will really receive is a short course in division. So many crayons, but I can’t have all of them. So I’ll color with half of them. You can have the other half of them. And if I need one of yours….or if, heaven forbid, you need one of mine….we’ll learn how to exchange them without snatching, stealing, hitting, pouting, whining, crying or running to the teacher. We’ll also learn how to take turns with toys. Five minutes for me. Five minutes for you. More division. Why, we’ll even learn to wait our turn….life’s very first lesson in delayed gratification.
Life works better when we share. It’s a good lesson. It’s also an important lesson (insofar as it goes). Because sharing only goes so far. It assumes a certain equity. I won’t get all the crayons, but I’ll get my share of the crayons. I won’t get the whole pie, but I’ll get my share of the pie. I won’t get every turn on the slide, but we’ll all share an equal number of turns on the slide. Sure, sharing involves some loss. But when we are children, we assume that the loss will be equal….and that the gain will be equal, too. Which is why children are quick to equate the word “share” with the word “fair.” As long as things seem fair, kids (at least most kids) will share.
But then a couple things happen to upset the equation. First, we discover that “fair” only goes so far….that nothing can ever be made completely fair. Second, we discover that life itself isn’t fair. I hate to tell you that. But it isn’t. Some of us are going to wind up with more crayons. Some of us are going to wind up with more dollars to buy crayons. Some of us are going to wind up with more years of good health to enjoy the crayons. And some of us are going to have a bigger canvas on which to employ the crayons.
I mean, it wasn’t fair that Dickie Honig got to play thirty minutes in the middle-high, church league basketball championship game in Jackson, Michigan, and that Billy Ritter got to play two minutes. And it was even less fair that when Billy Ritter got his two minutes of mop-up time at the end, he had to put on Dickie Honig’s sweaty jersey (because we didn’t have a numbered jersey for every member of the team). But as much as I hated to admit it, Dickie Honig was a heck of a lot better player than I was. And so my job was to give Dickie an occasional breather and push him in practice. Which certainly didn’t fit my middle school concept of sharing. But that’s the way it was. I guess things evened out eventually. Dickie Honig went on to become an All-Big-Ten shortstop (different sport) at the University of Michigan, and today is the highly-respected dean of Big Ten football referees. But he can’t preach a lick.
What I had to learn playing middle-high, church league basketball was that being part of the team meant that I had to “give it up” for the good of the team. And while there might be some gain to offset the loss, it wasn’t going to be an immediate gain….or even an equal gain. What I was being asked to do….though nobody said so at the time, nor would I have been able to understand it at the time….was sacrifice (“take a loss” for which the gain may not be apparent, immediate or ever).
There are, however, multiple levels of sacrifice. I don’t want to trivialize this. It is one thing to “give it up for the team” when what you are being asked to give up is a time at bat to bunt the runner over. It is another thing to “give it up for your brother” when what you are being asked to give up is a kidney to save your brother’s life. Even though every sacrifice costs you something, there is a vast difference in the amount.
In order to emulate the sacrifice of Jesus, Christians have been known to give things up for Lent. Which has never particularly motivated me, given my conviction that taking something on for Lent would be just as Jesus-like (and maybe more so). I first began to question the practice when, as a teenager, I saw my friends giving up things they didn’t much like. Like broccoli. And I couldn’t have been more than six or seven when it became apparent to me, one Easter morning, that my mother was very upset with the world in general, and my father in particular, because nobody (meaning him) had thought to buy her an Easter corsage. So, peacemaker that I was practicing hard to be (even then), I offered her the cream-filled chocolate eggs in my Easter basket. Which might have done the trick, had I not added: “Anyway, I don’t like cream-filled eggs. They’re yucky.” Had I offered up the big chocolate rabbit wrapped in cellophane, I might have gotten somewhere.
A sacrifice is never something you have in excess, no longer need, or didn’t like in the first place. That’s a token. Sacrifices require us to dig deeper.
“Sacrifice” is also a word that comes dripping with religion. The Bible is full of sacrifices…. some of then grainy….most of them bloody. Generally, they were offered up to God….or, in the case of the polytheistic religions of the Fertile Crescent….to many gods. Early assumptions were that God (or the gods) ate them….though no one ever saw the gods eat them. Later assumptions were that God (or the gods) inhaled them, drawing pleasure from the aroma that demonstrated how much the people loved them.
Sometimes a sacrificial animal was slain, slit open, and the blood was poured on the altar. Other times the animal was cooked whole, thus enabling the aroma to arise from the altar. In the latter case, the priest would take the meat home once the roasting was over….either consuming it, giving it to his friends, or selling it in the market.
Human sacrifice was relatively rare among the Jews. But there were times (usually in desperate circumstances) when the firstborn child was sacrificed as a supreme gift to deity. We’re talking burning a kid here….not “kid” as in goat, but “kid” as in child. If you don’t believe me, see II Kings 3:27, and especially the immolation of Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11:30-40. But while child sacrifice was rare, it was more common to sacrifice prisoners of war out of gratitude to God. See Judges 8:18 and I Samuel 15:33 (“O God, since you have given us the victory, watch us as we fire up the grill and fry up the enemy”).
The purposes for making a sacrifice were multiple. But they generally gravitated toward one of two poles….either to keep God happy or to secure God’s favor. True, the major prophets of Israel (especially Amos, Hosea and Micah) railed against it….said God didn’t want it….and warned the people to stop doing it. But much of what they said fell on deaf ears. Since good people believed that sacrifices were the way to keep God on their side, and bad people believed that sacrifices were the way to get God on their side, people kept making them. I mean, anybody who has ever tried to bribe a judge with a honey baked ham or a case of single malt scotch can understand the logic at work here. So it really wasn’t until about 400 BC….four short centuries before the birth of Christ….that sacrificial offerings gradually disappeared from synagogue worship.
So when the apostle Paul came along in 55 AD and told the church at Rome to offer their lives rather than their animals, he was saying something fairly radical for his time. More to the point, Paul said: “True worship consists in this….that you live sacrificially.” When Paul talked about becoming a “living sacrifice,” he was telling the Romans that God didn’t necessarily want their death, but their life.
Although sacrifice sometimes means your death….as in the case of martyrs, soldiers, and those two slain police officers on the southwest side of Detroit. It is for such as these that we have coined the phrase: “They made the ultimate sacrifice.”
I started telling you last week about Mitch Albom’s new book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Which is really about five lessons you learn in heaven. Or, hopefully, before. As I said last week, it’s a simple story about a simple man. Eddie was his name. Carnivals, his game. Who, on the morning of his 83rd birthday, got his body between a runaway ride car and a little girl named Amy (or was it Annie?). Which killed him, without his ever knowing if he’d saved her.
The first person he meets in heaven is the Blue Man (see last week’s sermon) who has waited to tell Eddie “We are all connected.” And the second person he meets in heaven is his old Army captain who has waited to tell him that sacrifice is a part of life. Better yet:
Sacrifice is something that’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father. This is how life is supposed to work.
The captain has waited over sixty years to say that to Eddie. The last time they saw each other was in the jungles of the Philippines where Eddie, the captain and three others were prisoners of war. But after months of brutality, there came an opportunity. To escape, I mean. Which they did. But as sometimes happens with even good soldiers (or very brave soldiers), Eddie froze on the brink of freedom. So his captain shot him (in the leg), turning him into a victim to be rescued rather than a comrade to be abandoned.
For the next sixty years, he lived with a bum leg and cursed his rotten luck. He never knew that his own captain shot him. But what he also never knew was that his captain….that very same night….stepped on a land mine in the process of extricating Eddie. Which killed him. I mean, it blew pieces of the captain twenty feet up in the air.
“Sacrifice. You made one. I made one. We all make them. But the difference, Eddie, was that you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost. But here’s the thing, see. When you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it along to someone else. You lost your leg. I lost my life. But I gained something, too.”
“What did you gain?” asked Eddie of the captain.
“I got to keep my promise that I’d never leave any of my men behind.”
* * * * *
Well, my friends, there are lots of ways to leave people behind. And more than a few of them involve a failure to sacrifice. Fail to get the bunt down and your teammate dies on second. Fail to give up the kidney, and your brother dies of uremic poisoning. And just Friday morning I heard of a grandmother who provided money she probably couldn’t spare to pay for a college education her granddaughter otherwise couldn’t have. While every day, people in churches like this reach down and dig deep….past their surplus, down into their substance….to make ministry possible and the Kingdom realizable.
Without sacrifice, nothing that matters, works.
Teams don’t work.
Churches don’t work.
Families don’t work.
Friendships don’t work.
Marriages don’t work.
Christians sacrifice after the manner of our Savior, now featured on thousands of silver screens across America. Haven’t seen the movie. Have read the book. Can’t comment on the former. Will say this, however, about the latter. To fully understand the cross of Jesus Christ is no simple thing. Sometimes it seems as if he died on it so the rest of us could fight over it. But somewhere in the midst of the mystery and brutality is the reality. That once there was a man who “gave it up” as part of his promise to never leave any of us behind.
Note: In order to generate a few short paragraphs on the concept of “sacrifice” in the Old Testament, I read through forty or fifty pages of fine print in biblical dictionaries and theological word books. It’s amazing how complex the practice was and how much interplay there was with sacrificial practices of other religions in the region. In spite of admonitions of the prophets against it, the practice was so ingrained that little was changed. I am on fairly safe ground in saying that it persisted (with some regularity) until 400 BC (and occasionally after that date). Time failed me, of course, to talk about the differentiations between cereal offerings and animal offerings, let alone the various reasons for making such offerings in the first place. But it makes good reading for anyone wanting to dig deeper.
