Lent 2 Mid Week: March 3, 2010

Genesis 15:1-18   

SACRIFICE—“TO MAKE SACRED!”

 

Our Lesson tonight contains a bizarre and even a weird story. It sounds like an eerie tale of the occult rather than an account from Holy Scripture. God asked Abraham to bring him a cow, a goat, a ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon. Abraham obeyed. He brought the animals before the Lord and slaughtered them. He cut each animal in half and laid the pieces in two neat rows.

Vultures hovered and circled over the slain beasts. Abraham flung his arms in a wild frenzy driving the birds of prey away. Exhausted from his vigil, Abraham fell into a deep sleep. The sun slowly settled beneath the horizon and a dreadfully dense darkness covered the land. Then, out of nowhere, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch floated from the darkness. For a moment these two objects lingered and vacillated; then, the smoking pot and the flaming torch leisurely, but deliberately, passed between and among the carcasses of the animals that covered the ground. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the smoking pot and the flaming torch disappeared as if swallowed up by a demon of the darkness.

Now, this spooky scenario, as baffling as it may be to us, was not so baffling to Abraham. Rather, he saw this curious ceremony as a familiar ritual of covenant-making — a common spiritual experience of the divine presence. The smoking fire pot and the flaming torch were symbols that God was personally present. God was passing between and among the sacrificial animals to seal a covenant between Himself and Abraham.

Before Abraham had slain the animals, the Lord came to him and said, "Fear not, Abraham, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great."  Then, God made a promise to him that, even though he and his wife, Sarah, had been childless all through their long married life, a son would be born to them. Abraham would become the father of a mighty nation, and through him all the nations on earth would be blessed.

All the stories we read from the beginning of the Bible — the Garden of Eden, the slaying of Abel by Cain, Noah and the flood, the Tower of Babel — all of these stories are but a prologue to the profound moment when God confronted Abraham and called him to leave his native country for a new homeland: and, with the call came the promise: "I will make you a great nation and I will bless you ... and by you all the families of the earth will be blessed."  This divine promise of blessing runs like a golden thread through the woven tapestry of myth and legend, poetry and history which form the content of the Old and the New Testaments.

The God who had fashioned the heavens and the earth now narrows His creative concern until it concentrates upon the solitary figure of Abraham, the father of the people whom Yahweh chose for a special task in His overall plan for history. Coming almost immediately after the tragic story of the Tower of Babel, Abraham's call is like a burst of light that illumines the whole landscape of the Biblical story. In contrast to the ambitious builders at Babel who aspired to make a name for themselves, God promises that He will make Abraham's name great. The people of Babel attempted to penetrate heaven and to touch God; Abraham knelt down in obedience and was touched by God. Abraham's greatness was not in himself, but in the God who had called and chosen him.

It is important for us to note that here we are not only dealing with a biography of a man named Abraham; he is more than an individual. Abraham is a personification of all the people whom God calls and chooses to be His children. As God established a covenant of promised blessings with Abraham, God also establishes a covenant with us, His disciples. Abraham is truly our father-in-the-faith. We are heirs of Abraham; and, as heirs, we share with him God's promise that we will be His people and He will be our God. We are joined together with God in one inseparable union — one family bonded together in love. God, and God alone, seals this covenant-promise with a sacrifice.

The word "sacrifice"  has negative overtones for most of us. Oh, we speak about the sacrifice  of Christ on the cross, particularly, in this Lenten Season. We stress in our stewardship drives that we should sacrifice our time, our talents, and our income for the church, for missions, and for social services. We sacrifice  for our children. We feed them, clothe them, and send them to college. Most of our experience with sacrifice  is associated with suffering and the giving up of something that we cherish and desire for ourselves. Sacrifice is conceived of as a loss incurred without an expected return. However, in the Bible, sacrifice  is associated with a gift gladly given. It is an offering which creates a special communion and an in-dissolvable union with our God. In the Bible, sacrifice  is a means of releasing life in order that a greater life may be given to us. The focus is not on the loss, but the focus is on what is gained by the act of sacrifice. Sacrifice really means “to make sacred,” and if in the process we give up something it is only so that we may take it back in a new and transformed way. Life then becomes sacred and holy.

The offering of a sacrifice was never thought of as an act of presenting the dead carcass of an animal to God; rather, the act of sacrifice was the releasing of the animal's potent life and the offering of that life to God. This "life" was conceived to be resident in the blood. The fact that the animal died was incidental. The important thing was that "life was in the blood."  What was offered to God was not dead flesh but the blood of the animal which was filled with life. The body of the animal died, but its life lived on in the blood. It was this living blood of life — this "life in the blood" — that was offered to the Lord.

Broadly speaking, there are four basic types of sacrifice in the Bible. First, there is human sacrifice. There is little direct evidence of this in Scripture. The story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to God is a familiar and classic example. However, it was well known that in Canaan, as well as throughout the ancient world, human sacrifice was a common practice. The intervention of God in the Abraham and Isaac story, where God provided a ram for the sacrifice instead of Abraham's son, ended human sacrifices in the common worship practices of the Hebrew religion.

Secondly, there is animal sacrifice. It played an essential role in the religion of Israel, and it dominated the worship of the temple. However, the pre-exilic prophets — Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah — condemned these sacrifices, and they strongly declared that animal sacrifices, even offered with the best of intentions, are less acceptable to God than the offering of a pure heart and a holy life. Recall the words of the Psalmist in our liturgy, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” 

This brings us to the third type of sacrifice — the bloodless sacrifice of a pure and an obedient life lived for the Lord. Paul powerfully presented this type of sacrifice when he wrote to the Christians at Rome. He appealed to the people that they should present their bodies as "a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God" (Romans 12:1). This, for Paul, is the true act of spiritual worship.

The fourth type of sacrifice is unique to the Bible. It is the divine sacrifice. The whole process of sacrifice is radically reversed. Instead of the people offering sacrifices to God, it is God who offers the sacrifice of Himself to His people and for His people. This is prophetically implied in our text for this evening. In the visible signs of the smoking fire pot and the flaming torch, God Himself is present, and He passes between the pieces of the slain animals; thereby, He offers the sacrifice of His holy presence and, at the same time, He seals His covenant-promise of blessings and love to Abraham and to us.

The most significant sacrifice that God offers to us is on Calvary. It is so significant that it ends the mandatory rite of blood-sacrifice in the Biblical history of the church. God becomes incarnate, and He willingly goes to the cross where He sheds his life-giving blood for us.

The role that sacrifices have played in the history of the Bible and, in particular, the essential element of Biblical sacrifice — namely, "the life is in the blood,"  is essential for our understanding of the crucifixion of our Lord. Christ died. True. But, what is so often overlooked is the profoundly important fact that He shed His blood for us. His life was not taken from Him on the cross: His life was released  on the cross. His life was released from the limitation of His body that it might flow into our bodies; thereby, this makes us one with Him and, at the same time, seals for us God's promise of life — an abundant life of blessings for us as His children.

Every time we come to the communion table, we drink the life-giving blood of our Lord. We participate in the greatest and the final blood-sacrifice of all Biblical history — the sacrifice of God Himself — for us! Rejoice, because the blood of God flowing within us gives us eternal life.

A precocious preschooler attended Sunday church school and listened intently as his teacher described in detail the death of Jesus. She told her students how the Roman soldiers drove nails into the wrists of Jesus and how his blood spilled out on the ground.

The next day Charlie was playing in the backyard, and he snagged his finger on a broken tree limb. Charlie watched in horror as the blood began to flow from his wound. Charlie panicked. He ran to his father, "Daddy, Daddy that tree tore a hole in me and all my blood is running out. I'm going to die like Jesus."

The father took his son's hand and carefully dressed the wound on the cut finger. Then, holding his son's hand in his, he said, "Charlie, many times in your life, things are going to hurt you and cut you. You might bleed, but you will not die. Because Jesus died for you, you will never have to fear death for you will always be alive in Him."

How true. Because God seals His covenant of love with the death of His Son, Jesus Christ, we may bleed; but, we will never have to fear death. In the Bible, death is understood as the act of being separated from God. For Abraham and for us God sealed His covenant-promise that He would never leave us or forsake us. On the cross, God shed His blood as the final sacrifice that assures us that nothing can separate us from His love. A covenant is sealed by a sacrifice. This seal can never be broken because it bears the indelible blood of God Himself. It is the royal insignia of the cross, which testifies to the fact that we are one with God. The blood of Christ flows in our bodies and enlivens our lives with eternity. We are made sacred by His sacrifice. 

We may bleed, but we will never fear death. Rejoice! Death is dead.

Amen!