Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Elise Feyerherm, June 11th, 2023

For almost five hundred years, various versions of the Book of Common Prayer have referred to the celebration of the Holy Eucharist as “a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving,” or words to that effect. All of the eucharistic prayers in our prayer book except for one include a version of this phrase, and even the one that doesn’t include it embodies the sentiment behind it. The phrase was included in part because the framers of the prayer book wanted to make sure that worshipers knew that Christ’s sacrificial death happened once for all on the cross, and was not being offered again on the altar, but instead, his death and resurrection were a full, complete satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.

The phrase appears in our psalm as well – “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and make good your vows to the Most High.”  The prophet Hosea might just have this psalm in mind when he tells the Israelites that God desires “steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Jesus stands in the tradition of the prophets when he quotes Hosea: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

People have argued for centuries – millennia, even – about what sacrifice to God means, what we should be offering to God, if anything. It goes all the way back to the story of Abraham and Isaac, which is on one level a criticism of the practice of human sacrifice that was regularly a part of Canaanite worship, a reminder to Israel that although God asks for commitment, killing one’s children is not part of that commitment. Apparently there was a difference of opinion about this, thus the story needed to be told!

Animal sacrifice was a central component of worship in the Jerusalem temple as it was in many religious cultures in the ancient world, including ancient Greece. According to the Torah, you give back to God the first and best fruits of your flocks and herds, a reminder that everything you have is a gift from God in the first place. The ritual sacrifice by a priest made this offering holy, set apart, a reminder of the transcendent power of the Divine.

Centuries before their exile to Babylon, and before the Jerusalem temple was destroyed, the people of Israel had come to understand that this form of ritual sacrifice was not a way of bribing God to bless them. Unlike the gods of Greece and Rome and Babylon, the God of Israel could not be controlled and tamed by getting the sacrifices just right. And they understood that these sacrifices were not a substitute for following the Law of Moses, either. Worship of the transcendent God, the God of Moses, led to being holy as God is holy, and if it didn’t, then something was wrong. Worship and ethics went hand in hand.

Hosea and the psalmist are both responding to situations in which the people have lost sight of who this God is whom they are worshiping, and they have forgotten that how and whom we worship shapes how we live our lives. It is the very nature of holy sacrifice that is at stake.

We need to ask ourselves the same questions, and be honest in our answers. What does it mean to offer sacrifices to God? What is the nature of the sacrifice that is required? And what is the nature of this God to whom we offer them? The answers to these questions all depend on one another – how we answer one will determine how we answer the others.

What does it mean to offer sacrifices to God? The point of sacrifice is to offer something valuable to God – to offer what is central to our lives and ask that it be made holy, transformed, by God. The psalmist reminds us that God does not need or require the stuff of this world – money, animals, grain, wine, whatever it is that humans find valuable. “Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?” God asks – proof that God appreciates sarcasm, by the way!

What does God want from human beings? Not material goods, but in the psalmist’s words, thanksgiving. According to Hosea, God wants from human beings steadfast love; and in Jesus’ words, God desires mercy. Thanksgiving, love, mercy – these are the offerings that our God wants from us.

What are we offering as sacrifice? This will tell us as a people, as a church, as a nation, what we are actually worshiping. The kind of sacrifices a god requires tells us everything we need to know about what kind of god it is. Do we worship the right to defend ourselves by means of firearms? We will know when the sacrifice demanded is our children and the poor. Are we willing to watch while people of color are consistently sacrificed?  Then it might just be the god of White Nationalism that is being worshiped. Does our god require the sacrifice of those whose gender and sexual identity does not conform to cisgender and binary norms? The god of traditional family values might be the one being worshiped.  Are we content to sacrifice those at the bottom of the economic ladder while the incomes of the 1% grow exponentially? What god are we worshiping then?

Who or what are we willing to sacrifice? That will tell us who our God is. Our primary act of worship every week is the offering of praise and thanksgiving to the God who has created and redeemed the world, given us all good things, and has become our neighbor in Jesus. If our weekly worship is a sacrifice of love and mercy, praise and thanksgiving, what does that tell us about the God who asks for this sacrifice?

Perhaps it all comes down to this: the offering that God desires most of all is, yes, our praise and thanksgiving, but what that really means is that God longs to receive our hearts – our deepest selves.

This is why what we do every week in the Eucharist is part and parcel of the love and service we offer to a hurting world. We offer our praise and thanksgiving, our bread and wine, our very selves to God, and this is the amazing thing – they are given back to us, renewed and sanctified for the life of the world.

If all this is true, if our sacrifice is offered to God, along with the bread and wine, and is filled with heavenly benediction and offered back to us to be consumed as the Bread of Heaven and the Cup of Salvation, what then might be possible? What might we be able to say and do in the face of those other gods whose requested offerings require the sacrifice of all those whom our God most cherishes – children, the sick, the poor, the marginalized?

Jesus calls us to follow, just as he called Matthew the tax collector to leave his booth and offer himself to God. But Jesus also follows us into the world, as he followed the leader of the synagogue to the place where the man’s daughter had died. This is what we are promised happens when we offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, to God. The old cloak is repaired properly and made new; the new wine is put into wineskins that will hold and protect it for the journey. The promise is that that God has in fact given back everything we have offered and more, so that we may enter with courage where death and suffering dwell, bringing the God of life with us.

Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Amen.