Walked into the deli next to the church Monday night for a quick bite to eat before the small group I am co-leading began.I looked for something simple: grilled cheese and tomato, bag of chips, golden delicious apple, and a lemonade.
Took it all to the checkout: $11.15.
Un-believable.
***
I preached Wednesday night on sacrifice. The message was a meditation on a book I read based on its review in Christian Century: Held in the the Light. It's the story of Norman Morrison, who sacrificed his own life by setting himself on fire outside of the Pentagon in 1965 as a protest to end the war in Vietnam.
Having never heard of Norman Morrison, I found the story dizzying and difficult. What do you do with a 31 year-old father of 3 who kills himself to protest the killing of innocent Vietnamese children? Every sacrifice--even that of Jesus--is a complicated, multivalent symbolic act. There can be no single way of reading a sacrifice. Anne Morrison Welsh, Morrison's widow, makes that clear in the book.Maybe I've been in a particular church culture that focuses on healing for too long, but the whole subject of sacrifice--incurring self-inflicted "wounds" for the sake of someone else's well-being or for the sake of transcendent values--felt important to me. Sacrifice was a hallmark of the early church--but how many contemporary congregations lift up sacrifice as a present-day animating principle?
Sacrifice is clearly counter-cultural in a world that believes the end of the self is fulfillment, rather than emptying. Even in religious circles, if sacrifice is invoked, we prefer to frame it as an internal gesture (ie, repentance), rather than a physical, bodily act. I remember presenting on the Sacrifice of Isaac to my lectionary study group two years ago and at the end of my presentation, several pastors said flat out that they would NEVER preach the text--it was simply too difficult a subject.
Surely sacrifice cannot be something that people are pressured or coerced into--sacrifice that is not freely chosen is not holy. But sacrifice is too central to the teaching of Jesus ("take up your cross") for us not to speak of it at all.
I would like to read a book by his 3 children. What must it be like to know your father felt others were more important to him than you. SO more importnat that he would take his own life, regardless of the fact that you existed and need his love, and care. Thats the book I would like to read.Seems to me the sacrifice was his children. When he killed himself he gave up on them.
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