On Living Sacrifices--June 20, 2025

On Living Sacrifices--June 20, 2025

"I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect." [Romans 12:1-2]

To be clear, God isn't hungry. Not even peckish, not even a little bit.

In other words, God doesn't need to be fed... or fueled... or powered up... by our sacrifices. That's not how God works. Plenty of gods and goddesses in ancient pantheons were thought to need sacrifices to keep them appeased, or their celestial bellies filled, but not the God we meet in the two Testaments. The God of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses and Miriam, and of Jesus himself, doesn't get hungry, and doesn't need to be fed.

While we are on the subject, neither does God just arbitrarily demand sacrifices from us out of some cold, logical calculus. God doesn't demand a pound of flesh, like Shakespeare's Shylock, and God doesn't require our contributions in order to get some kind of heavenly response. God doesn't dole out blessings in proportion to how many goats we have slaughtered at an altar, how many sheaves of wheat we have laid down as tribute, or how many zeroes are on the offering check you put in the plate last Sunday.  God doesn't need any of those things, even if it might just turn out that we need to give things to God. The living God whom we meet in the Scriptures has never been bound to such transactional, "quid-pro-quo" kind of thinking.

And yet... the God we meet in Jesus does indeed call forth sacrifices from us. No, more than that--this God calls us to be sacrifices! What on earth can that mean?

Well, let's look at the other qualifier that Paul gives us here in Romans. We are called to offer ourselves as "living sacrifices," rather than dead ones. There is no demand of blood, or meat for the altar fire to fill the nostrils of the divine. Your heart doesn't have to stop beating to be a living sacrifice--in fact, it's about how God will use us precisely with our hearts beating, our hands serving, and our muscles working in showing love. There is no talk of God needing payment, or of our sacrifices providing fuel to power God up for answering our prayers. God doesn't need us to die in order to make something else happen. Instead, it's really the opposite: offering ourselves as living "sacrifices" to God means letting our minds be renewed and our whole selves be brought more to life! We are not made less by becoming living sacrifices--we are made more than we were before: more alive, more in tune with God's justice and mercy, more connected to God's goodness and grace toward all people. God's goal is not to sap our strength to power up some divine project--but to make us actually more invigorated and enlivened by letting God shape our hearts and direct our priorities.  In other words, we are called to be disciples--people who offer our thinking, our loving, our speaking, and our acting, to be shaped by God in Christ's likeness.

I think that's really what's at stake here in the idea of "renewing your minds." It's not about proving our love to God by memorizing Bible verses, but about letting God's priorities become our priorities... it's about letting God's way become our way, rather than me getting to keep my self-centered, "Me-and-My-Group-First" thinking that bellows, "No one can tell me what to do!" When we fall into those mindsets, we are less alive. When we let God shape our thinking, our loving, and our acting, even that act of surrender makes us more fully alive. That's what this is all about.  Discipleship is about allowing God to make us more fully alive--hence "living" sacrifices.

So here's the sacrifice part: to be a living offering to God means we give up our old self-centered mindset that is only interested in what's "good" for me or what's "convenient" for me. But it turns out that the life lived bent in on self is a waste anyhow--when God pull us outside of ourselves, it's like being yanked out from the deadly pull of a black hole in outer space. We are pulled into life that is fuller, love that is deeper, meaning that is richer than just angrily insisting, "Nobody else can tell me what to do." So it's a sacrifice, but it's rather like being asked to give up the bottle of poison you've been nursing sips from for too long, and instead being given clean water to drink and discovering that you are more alert, refreshed, and energetic because of it. It means letting go of all the Me-First programming the world has done its darnedest to instill in us, and letting God write new words on our hearts that lead us in a way of love--that lead us in the footsteps of Jesus, who is our rabbi.

But at no point does God need us to give up our vitality in order to feed the Almighty--God isn't hungry, and doesn't need our death to sustain divine life. God, instead, is calling us to new ways of being more fully alive, like a chrysalis becoming more fully alive as it opens into a butterfly.

Come, dear ones. Let's be fully alive today--let us allow God to reshape our minds and hearts and actions into the way of love.

Lord Jesus, we offer our deepest selves to you--make of us what you will--even as you make us more fully alive.