Choosing True Joy by Choosing Sacrifice

April 6, 2025 - The Fifth Sunday in Lent

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. Long time, no see. Many of us were here just yesterday for Joan DeHaven’s funeral, and it is, honestly, good to be back with you again this morning. I look forward to this every time, and I know many of you do too.

After a wonderful and busy week in St. Louis on family vacation, this weekend has also been quite busy, in good and important ways, but all of that meant that I was physically unable to stay awake to watch Duke choke in the Final Four last night. I do need sleep at some point... Abbey stayed up for the game all on her own. Sorry to all you Dookies or those who picked them to win: Tom Cook and my dad Ken are the two brackets left standing in our Epiphany March Madness bracket challenge. I missed the game last night, but we all make sacrifices, right? Is it a sacrifice to miss a late-night basketball game?

Sacrifice is the key word for the sermon today, the message that comes out of our lectionary readings, found both in the gospel of John and in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Sacrifice. I have been preaching for the last few weeks that Lent, this liturgical season that is coming to a close here soon, Lent is a season primarily of “repentance,” which is another big Christian word, one that literally means “to turn.” The Hebrew word, shuv, and the Greek word, metanoeo, are both translated as repentance in our Bible, and they both convey this idea of turning from something, turning toward something new. For Christians, repentance then means both a turn away from that which keeps us from God and a turn toward God in all we do. With this understanding, all of us can always repent.  

But Lent is more popularly known, for better or worse, as a season of sacrifices. That comes out of that first part of repentance, that turning away from something. Sacrifice implies giving up something valuable, even something we love, for the sake of something better, something greater... so it is not exactly the same as turning away from that which keeps us from God, but the idea at least gets close, and it is important for us today. 

For me, last night, I did indeed sacrifice March Madness for the sake of being awake for church this morning... which was a wise decision, I think. In a far more serious example from the Old Testament, Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son Isaac to God. That’s a longer story with more implications than we’ll have time for this morning, but there, God told him to sacrifice a ram instead of his son after Abraham proved his faith, willingness, and devotion.

Many of you have likely sacrificed something this month, whether that’s coffee, or alcohol, or chocolate, or social media. Those seem to be the most popular choices these days. I went with the first two myself, and giving up caffeine and alcohol have actually been easier than I expected this year. I’m not sure what all I have learned there just yet, but that small sacrifice has reminded me daily throughout Lent of the larger story of Christ’s sacrifice for us, so I think that, in that way at least, it has been valuable.

Sacrifice often gets a bad rap with twenty-first century Christians in part because of our cultural self-centeredness, in part because of that Old Testament story with Abraham and Isaac, in part because the Jews understood their relationship with God to be one built on ritual sacrifice of animals, offered to appease an angry God seemingly eager to punish his creation, offered to clear their tarnished slate, as a way of coming closer to God. We don’t like that understanding of sacrifice these days, especially the animal kind of sacrifice; it seems misguided, superficial, unnecessary, and even cruel. God doesn’t need that from us, why do it?

I say all of that this morning because I’m going to ask you to think of sacrifice a bit differently today, not as the killing of an animal or as a self-punishing sort of giving up of your favorite caffeinated beverage or your favorite tiny sin of choice, whatever that may be. Sacrifice for us, today, comes straight from this gospel passage, that of Mary’s offering of expensive perfume and service to Jesus.

In John 12, we find today’s story placed at the beginning of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, the beginning of the passion story that we really start to tell next week on Palm Sunday. It is six days before the Passover, and the resurrected Lazarus is our dinner host, welcoming Jesus and the disciples, along with Mary and Martha, two often-named women who play important roles in the gospels. Mary presents what is described as a “pound of costly perfume,” and she uses it to anoint Jesus’s feet, wiping them with her hair. The house is filled with the fragrance, and in a world without showers and shampoo, the smell of this perfume would likely be strong enough to carry through the events of the next few days.

Judas, who we know to be the bad guy, presents a reasonable rebuttal, one many of us would likely consider making: “Jesus, this is expensive! Why didn’t we sell it and give the money to the poor?” John reminds us that Judas wasn’t actually concerned for the poor, but with himself and his own riches, a critique that might be accurately leveled at many of us American Christians too, but that’s another sermon for another day. Jesus responds to him with force, “Leave her alone,” and with a statement that has been misused by the church for centuries since: “The poor you will always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

Good preachers are required to address this here: this was absolutely not Jesus’s argument to neglect the poor! These words come straight from the Pentateuch, from Deuteronomy 15, where Jews were reminded to always be caring for the poor. We are always to be caring for the poor and also making sacrifices in our worship to God. It is not a choice between the two, it is always both. You may remember that love God and love your neighbor are the two greatest commandments. It is always both.

We here at Epiphany do both of these things well. We gather together to worship God, to reorient our lives around God, every week, sometimes multiple times a week. (Was that a subtle plug for Centering Prayer, Healing Service, and Evensong? Maybe it was.) We worship God through our time in this building and often outside it too, in prayer, through music, in many ways. And we love our neighbors well, here in South Haven, in Pullman, in Coloma and all around this area. We serve others as best we can, or at least we have opportunities to do so, and we participate when and where we are able.

But for few of us does that feel like sacrifice. This morning, I want to assure you that it is.Twentieth-century English mystic and pacifist Evelyn Underhill says that “Worship is summed up in sacrifice. Sacrifice is not something given up, but simply given; it is not renunciation, it is the movement of generosity in response to God’s love and sacrificial act of redemption in Jesus Christ.” Sacrifice is what we give in response to God, toward the realization of God’s kingdom here on earth. For us, sacrifice is our time and offerings on Sunday morning, our time making meals for brunch or cleaning up afterward. Sacrifice is our donations to good causes, our time given marching for awareness or in protest.

We sacrifice all the time. We sacrifice when we devote our lives to our spouses, we sacrifice when we parent and raise children rather than living only for ourselves. We sacrifice when we care for each other as we age. We sacrifice when we give an entire day to remembering a loved one’s passing, to remembering her life, and to caring for her family.

Those things may not feel like sacrifices to us, because they flow out of who we are, what we choose to like and what we love. But friends, I hate to remind you of this: we have limited time here on earth, we have limited resources. And the ways that we choose to spend our time and resources, those are indeed sacrifices to whatever we see as our priorities. Mary chose to spend her money buying perfume for Jesus, she chose to spend her time following him, anointing his feet, and wiping them with her hair. We choose to be here together this morning, to pledge and to donate, to bring meals, to share them with each other.

We choose this community; we choose to be this church.

These choices, of course, involve the sacrifice of time and money spent elsewhere. But Paul speaks to this most beautifully and directly in his letter to the Philippians, written from a jail cell: “For Christ’s sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” When we truly believe the Christian story, the story of God’s abundant love for all of creation, for all humanity; when we believe Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are true and are worthy of our time and our resources, we gladly give of them in worship of God and in love of our neighbors.

Like Mary, we make choices to sacrifice other selfish options for extravagant acts of worship, acts of compassion, of generosity, of service, of love.

Like Paul, we make choices to sacrifice other selfish options to live lives that will not make sense to others, because we know a better way, a way that gives us life and gives life to those around us.

And ultimately, like Christ, we know that a life of sacrifice to God and others is where true joy is to be found, where laying down our own lives is the greatest love. That life is available to us today and every day. We can live that very good life now, with him, with God, with all the company of heaven, and with all the saints in paradise today and forevermore, if we simply choose to live it.

Amen.