It Requires Sacrifice

Hebrews 9:24-28

Marj Carpenter is a journalist who left behind a career in the newspaper business to use her abilities on behalf of the church. She often travels with denominational dignitaries on their journeys to mission stops in the USA and abroad. That way, when everyone gets back home, one person will be able to report the events so that the rest of us can pick up copies of Presbyterian Survey and gain some understanding of the work going on on behalf of the larger church.

I heard Marj speak in Pittsburgh a few years ago. She has traveled around the world to just about every mission stop we could imagine. She told us about the church in mainland China. As recently as four or five years ago, people in the West had assumed that the church had been virtually wiped out in China, decades of missionary effort washed away during the blood-letting of the "Cultural Revolution" in the waning years of Chairman Mao. Churches were burned, torn down, put to other uses.

Of course, we now know what we should have suspected all along. When threatened with persecution, the Chinese believers did as the early Christians before them who took to the safety of the catacombs in Rome. Chinese believers took their faith underground.

There was no evidence that any church-type activities were going on. But we should know better than to accept too readily the evidence our eyes supply for us. Now the church in China is back above ground, and we learn to our utter amazement that the number of people who count themselves as Christian believers--in that land where Christian faithfulness is so very difficult--has increased during the very time when we could see no signs of life!

Marj Carpenter went to China with her journalist's eye, and brought back a story of a woman there. During the fifteen or so years when there was no possibility of public witness to Jesus Christ without a certain sentence of death, each day this woman passed by the building in which she had once attended church, to touch it. She simply reached out her hand each day and gave it a pat.

Now what do you suppose that surreptitious brush of an old woman's hand meant? I have to confess, I don't know precisely what it meant to her, but to me it means a whole host of things. It means that something else, something very deep and very significant was going on in that community and hundreds of others like it during those years. Her touch may have been only the most tangible signal of an inner reality. Because for the church to have survived--thrived, in a way--during those years, something more than touching old abandoned church buildings had to have been going on.

While the outside world thought the Chinese church was dead, the people of Christ in China were going about the business of praying for each other, keeping a witness alive by word of mouth, through secret services of baptism and the Lord's Supper. How can you have a church with no denominational meeting to ordain pastors, no bishops laying hands on youngsters, no Christmas carols filling the air in December, no prayers spoken out loud? If we want to know, we need only ask the woman who touched her church every day while praying silently for an end to the Babylonian captivity of her faith. They lived on in their faith, as the old hymn says, "In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword."

The only one who wanted to get his hands on the church more than that woman was Jesus himself. He will not leave himself without a witness in the world, no matter how trying the circumstances might be. What a humbling thought: Jesus' mission in the world is important enough that it can be going on even when we are unaware of it. That speaks to our tendency to make ourselves and our own small experience the whole measure of the church.

Which leads me to ask: what are the things we would like to get our hands on? When everything else in life falls away, what is the one thing we would want to be able to keep in touch with? The old woman in China wanted more than anything to get her hands on her church. What is it for us? If everything were taken away, what would we miss the most?

Last Tuesday we met at lunch for our weekly Bible study to discuss the readings for today's service. One idea struck us about as powerfully as any other when we read the story of the widow who shared her last portion of meal with Elijah, the strange foreign prophet. It is the idea of sufficiency.

A friend of ours was once speaking about fairness in her efforts to be a good parent. She said that she had finally decided absolute fairness is an impossibility, this side of the Holy City. She said,"I'm just not going to give my life to the weighing out of snacks. That's not my goal. My goal is to give you enough. God [will] make my strength fit my need. What one will receive will be enough."

Working every day to make certain that each of her three children had exactly the same number of crumbs of dessert no longer was her goal. A more worthy goal, one she believes is shared by God, is to give her children not the same, but enough. It is not a matter of fairness. It is a matter of sufficiency.

How much grace did the Chinese church need in order to survive the wrenching experience of the Cultural Revolution in China? Apparently they received grace in sufficiency to meet the need, and then some! Was it fair for a foreign prophet to come waltzing into Zarephath during a time of famine and demand bread from a woman who was preparing to starve to death for lack of bread? No, not fair at all. But did she receive from God sufficient resources to meet her need as well as his? Absolutely. Elijah, the widow woman, and her son ate and survived on God's sufficiency.

We measure so much of our lives by the sheer quantity of things: how much, how many. When I went out with some of the neighborhood children as they made the Trick or Treat rounds the other day, I noticed that a favorite activity when the evening of door-bell ringing was over was to sit and count the number of pieces of candy. "I got 147!" "I got 155!" "I got 203!"

How much would we need to sacrifice of ourselves to make ourselves worthy to God? Should we give a tithe of one year in service to God for every ten we work for ourselves and our families? A double tithe? Triple? The fact is, no matter how much we sacrifice ourselves, it can never be enough to satisfy. The letter to the Hebrews declared that time and again the priests in the Temple in Jerusalem had to perform ritual sacrifices for the people, because it was never enough. It isn't fair to let the people go on sinning, while demanding nothing in return. So the sacrifice of their animals from time to time might remind them of the costliness of their sin. Yet, where could it end? How much would be enough? One cow? A cow and a sheep? A whole herd of cattle? It could never be sufficient.

The letter to the Hebrews declares, "He has appeared once for all to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself." The quantity of those who died? Not great. One man. The sufficiency? Complete. No further blood-letting would be necessary.

There will be other famines, like the one which Elijah and the widow endured. There will be constant reminders in this imperfect world that fairness is a distant goal, never to be fully realized. In contrast, our need for God's grace has been sufficiently met for all time in Jesus Christ. What Jesus has done does not need repeating. In him will be the fulfillment of all people described in Hebrews as "those who are eagerly waiting for him."

Another reading is suggested for today. It is from the gospel of Mark.

And Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the multitude putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came, and put in two copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him, and said to them, `Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living.

Just when we think we're finished with Jesus' well-known condemnations of the scribes, he takes us by the hand and ushers us into the treasury where another kind of parading in the name of God was going on. Rich people paraded past the receptacles and dropped in their generous gifts, enjoying considerable satisfaction at providing a spectacle of generosity.

Our living in the world requires sacrifice. Countless people have sacrificed themselves for us: parents, teachers, doctors, friends, all in large, small, and in-between ways. Yet the once-for-all sacrifice has already taken place. Nothing can be added to it or taken away from it. It is a sacrifice sufficient to meet our need. God has given us enough in the death and resurrection of Jesus. May he also give us sufficient grace to receive the gift of new life available in Jesus' name.

Robert J. Elder Salem, OR