Sacrifice: To Make Something Sacred

The Rev. Sara Warfield

All Saints' Day

Scripture: Luke 6:20-31

Over the past year or two, I’ve found myself saying the same thing to different people more than I wish I had to, and that is: “the depth of grief is the measure of love you had for someone you lost.” And when I think about it, it feels really unfair.

Because grief feels terrible. When my marriage ended, I felt like there was suddenly a black hole in my life where light had once been. When I used to come home after work to a hug and commiseration about our days, I now came home to silence and long stretches without any human touch at all. When I passed the restaurants where we used to eat together, I felt revulsion, like the food couldn’t possibly taste good anymore without her company. The secret language that develops between two people who share so much time and experience so much life together…just gone, now useless, like Latin. No more trivial texts about traffic or what’s for dinner. Absence became my constant companion, almost a physical thing with its own gravity.

Now I know the end of a relationship isn’t the same as losing a loved one to death. But the measure of love lost takes its toll in all sorts of situations.

The yarn of love weaves itself in and out of the fibers of our lives, and when that yarn gets cut off, it just feels…unfair. Why should this thing, this feeling, this connection we call love, which makes us feel so seen, so cared for, so part of something bigger than ourselves, make us feel so much suffering?

But what if you were given the chance to eliminate all suffering, all pain from your life so long as you also forfeited experiencing any love. Would you take it? More to the point, does it even make sense? Isn’t the experience of not having any love also a form of suffering?

Let me say this a different way: I was recently reading about a woman who’d had the same best friend for five decades. They grew up together and couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t in each others’ lives. A rare kind of relationship. And now, in their early 50s, this woman was sitting with her friend who was dying, her body being hollowed out by cancer. She was demoralized, devastated, angry. It didn’t seem fair. So she asked her friend, “What is the purpose of it all? Why are we being so hollowed out by loss? Why are we here?”

And her friend shrugged and said, “I guess we’re here to be conduits for love.” This person who was suffering, who was indeed dying, was saying that creating and spreading and experiencing love is worth the suffering.

—

Theologically, I think there are three kinds of suffering in life. The first is the suffering that’s just part of being a human in a fragile, feeling body on an ever-shifting planet: breaking bones when we fall, the way quickly growing legs can ache, getting caught in the wrong place when the sky opens up or the earth falls apart without notice.

But it’s the second two kinds of suffering that Jesus is talking about in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes today, his Sermon on the Plain to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.

Blessed are you who are poor, who are hungry now, who are weeping now, who are hated. And woe to you who are rich, who are full now, who are laughing now, who are spoken well of. That these blessings and woes are grouped together suggests to me a correlation, it suggests to me that the situations are connected.

Jesus isn’t saying that people are inherently blessed because they’re poor or hungry or weeping or hated. That’s what Christian enslavers used to tell enslaved people: the measure of your suffering now will get you loads of rewards in the afterlife. You’re blessed that you’re in the condition you’re in.

And Jesus isn’t saying that anyone is inherently cursed because they’re rich, full, laughing, and enjoying a good reputation.

He’s talking about those who hoard more wealth than they could possibly spend, who leave more food on their plates after dinner than most people start with, who laugh in their ease, and who are revered for their accumulation, their bounty.

All while people on the other side of town are stopping by the local church to ask for help paying their rent. They’re lined up at food pantries, desperate for their children to have at least one full meal that day. And they weep when they can’t give them that. People revile them for not working harder, despite working 80 hours a week at three different part-time jobs.

What Jesus is talking about here is a second kind of suffering: suffering that is inflicted by people who lack love for their neighbor, suffering caused when one person has more at the expense of another. Jesus promises blessing to those who are regularly denied what they need to live and thrive, and woe to those who are denying them.

But then he speaks of a third kind of suffering:

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

Let’s be honest: doing these kinds of things may not feel very good, in fact they might be downright uncomfortable, sometimes even painful. They might even cause you to suffer. But this is the suffering that comes from building God’s kingdom in this world, or as the dying friend said, from being “conduits of love.”

We don’t do good to those who hate us and turn the other cheek because we’re capitulating, we do these things because we believe in God’s love. God’s love is not based on reciprocity or quid pro quo. To the extent that “fairness” depends on such things, God’s love isn’t fair. God’s love isn’t reduced to a commodity. As the SALT project’s commentary says, God’s “love lives and moves beyond the sphere of fairness; it keeps no accounts. Precisely as a gift and not a payment, love requires neither incentive nor return, neither prior merit nor subsequent compensation. It’s completely free.”

And sometimes, maybe even most of the time, this kind of love is hard. It is suffering borne of sacrifice. Do you know the etymology of the word sacrifice? It’s Latin—not a language as dead as we think!—deriving from sacra, which means “holy, sacred,” and facere, the verb “to make.” So to sacrifice is the act of making something sacred.

Creating this kind of love in the world isn’t easy. In the past 2,000 years of Christianity, the people who lived this kind of love have been called saints. Those willing to sacrifice their ego or their comfort or their very lives in order to make God’s love visible in this world. Jesus is the primary example, of course, but following him were St. Paul, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and thousands if not millions of others whose stories went untold, who sacrificed themselves in some way in order to make this world sacred.

That’s what we honor and celebrate today—all these saints, and all your saints. Those who made their own sacrifices in order to make God’s love visible in your life, to make your relationship sacred. And now those of us who remain make our own sacrifice, our sacrifice of grief. Because grief is the sacrifice we make for love. It makes those lost lives sacred.

Amen.