Dear St. Mary’s Church and friends,
Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God. So St. Paul advises in his Letter to the Ephesians (5:2), but these words are familiar to most Episcopalians from the Holy Eucharist. This is one of the most commonly recited verses of Scripture to start the Offertory, which is that moment in the service when we bring our bread and wine before the Lord and place them on his altar, but also when we pass the alms basin to take up a collection. “Walk in Love” is also the theme of this year’s stewardship campaign for St. Mary’s Church.
That verse of Scripture, though: the word sacrifice is interesting. What kind of sacrifice are we being asked to make when the alms basin is in front of us? Are we being asked to give till it hurts? (For some of us, it’s not very difficult to get to that point, especially with the way the virus has affected some people’s livelihoods.) Or are we asked to sacrifice in order to buy off some angry god who can’t stand to see us happy? (That’s an old-fashioned understanding of sacrifice, but it’s around these days more than you may realize.) Asking sacrifices of people just runs the risk of sending the wrong message: “Sure, what Jesus did was great and all, but now it’s crunch time and if we don’t step up to the plate, the game’s over.” Is that what it looks like to “walk in love”?
Recently, we’ve been staying with the Prayer Book’s “Rite One” version of the Eucharist, and the traditional words for the Eucharistic prayer have some helpful insights for thinking about sacrifice. The prayer is clear that Jesus made on the cross “one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice … for the sins of the whole world” (BCP, p. 334—an oblation is specifically an offering made to God). There is one sacrifice, it only had to be offered once, and it is “full, perfect, and sufficient.” But then the prayer goes on to say some strange things: “And we earnestly desire thy fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” (p. 335). Or “Here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee” (p. 336). Jesus’s supposedly made the only sacrifice that would ever be needed, but then there are these other sacrifices happening.
The key to this puzzle is to recognize that these other sacrifices aren’t other sacrifices. They are a sharing in Jesus’s once-for-all sacrifice. Though Jesus is not dying on the cross all over again when we make the Eucharist. He died once, and that’s enough. But that perfect sacrifice, while remaining itself, is manifested among us now when we gather for the Eucharist—through bread and through wine, on the altar and on our lips, in our souls and in our bodies. It’s incredible that we can bring such humble things to Jesus and he can do such wonderful things with them. Even us—a fairly small group of people who don’t have all that much in common becomes Jesus’s own Body placed completely in his Father’s hands.
This opens a different way of looking at the alms basin we see every Sunday or the pledge card that shows up in the mail every year. The first thing it tells us is that the whole thing isn’t hinging on us. Jesus made the once-for-all sacrifice. When we walk in Jesus’s love, though—including when we share what we have with the Church—that once-for-all sacrifice comes barging into today. Jesus isn’t sitting in heaven with his fingers crossed, hoping you’ll make the gift that he so desperately needs for his mission not to fail. No, he has wondrous things in store, and we’re invited to take part in them.
People are so stressed out! Many of us feel lots of pressure to come through for others, whether it’s holding together a family business or volunteering around town or helping a grandchild who got himself into a big mess, while of course the Church could use help too. But whatever Jesus has called you to do or to give—in your family, your business, your community, your congregation—the Lord is not expecting you to cater the whole party, though we often think it’s all on us. Instead, Jesus just asks us to show up with some crackers and a can of sardines, but when we put them in his hands he can work wonders with them.
Crackers and sardines—the bishop who once gave me this advice was alluding to the story of a boy who gives Jesus a couple of fish and a few loaves of bread, not nearly enough to feed the thousands of people that were gathered there. When Jesus asked for such a humble offering, I wonder if the boy worried that if he gave it away there wouldn’t be enough left for him. It must have been a shock, discovering that Jesus loves him and would make sure he has what he needs, too. Imagine what the boy must have been feeling as he walked home that evening.
Yours in the Lord,
Stephen+
Комментарии