True Nature of "Sacrifice"

Last night I found a copy of the 1599 Geneva Bible available for download as an audio book. If you don't already know, begin to learn this fact about me: I love audiobooks. In fact, I already have an audio copy of the NIV on my ipod (along with more books than I've ever had time to listen to and archives and archives of Flood and Cornerstone messages that "I will get to someday.") I've been looking for another one though, because the reader of my current copy tries a little too hard, if you know what I mean. All that to say, finding this translation intrigued me. This is the original translation to make its way from Europe to the Americas with the Puritans. I'd never even heard of it before until coming across it last night, but the comments related it to the King James, so at first I was hesitant, knowing that the KJV and I have never been the best of reading companions, but I decided to give it a shot. First of all, I love it. Second of all, maybe its the difference between audio and text as opposed to a difference between this and the KJV, but the thees and thous and thither and whenceforths just don't seem to make a difference. It's just the word of God being spoken aloud like, I might mention, its authors originally thought it would be (since literacy was rather on the low end back in biblical days).

The point is, I've been listening to Genesis all evening as I made dinner, fed the cats, cleaned my room, baked banana bread, and worked on a photo book for my UG kids. [Sidenote: one of the things I love about an audio Bible is that it allows scripture to become an integral part of the logistical day-to-day things I have to do. Even if you're not a big spoken word audio listener, I'd suggest trying an audio Bible for a day, just for that reason. If you're interested, I can get you a copy; shoot me a comment or an email and we can work it out.]

Jacob's "Sacrifice" to Esau

One of the major Old Testament figures in Genesis is Jacob, second son of Isaac, swindler, stealer of his brother Esau's inheritance, husband of two sisters whose servants he "knew" at his wives' own behest, father of Joseph (of the techicolor dreamcoat) and the man who wrestled with God and was renamed Israel, after whom the entire nation of God became named. In the following passage, Jacob is returning to the land of his father Isaac, which he fled after stealing Isaac's blessing intended for his brother so that Esau would not kill him. He's been away at least 20 years living and working in the house of his mother's cousin, has married 2 women, has many children, and acquired vast flocks of livestock. Returning, he hears that Esau is coming their way along the road with many soldiers. The following is their final meeting.

Then [Esau] said, "What was the meaning of all the flocks which I met coming this way?" (Jacob had sent all his livestock ahead and had told each drover to tell Esau that they were gifts for him.) And Jacob replied, "I have sent them that I might find favor in the sight of my lord (Esau)."9 But Esau said, "I have enough, my brother; keep that which you have."10 And Jacob said, "No, I pray you, as now I have found grace in your sight, then receive this present from my hand: for now that I have seen your face, it is as though I had seen the face of God. For you have accepted me and are pleased with me!11 Take, I pray thee, my blessing that is brought to thee; because God himself is dealing graciously with me; I have enough." And because Jacob urged him, Esau finally took it.

This section of Jacob's story has a lot of uumph to it, but it often gets overlooked, because what did Jacob do while he was waiting for Esau to arrive? Oh yeah, had a literal wrestling match with God and was renamed a name that means "for you have struggled with God and with men and have won." But seriously, this scripture has a younger brother who has done nothing but bad to his older brother being welcomed back into the fold with no animosity, accountability, or violence, only tears of joy and questions after the blessing of his new family around him. So we can hit on Jacob's humility as a great topic, or Esau's forgiveness, or God's ability to make all things right, or what it means to be a true peacemaker like Jesus. But I want to go to sacrifice, namely Jacob's gift of the flocks to his brother.

Prior to this evening, I'd always viewed the giving of the flocks as just another one of clever Jacob's schemes to preserve his own skin. In fact, Jacob himself (in Gen. 32:20) says he intends to pacify his brother with these gifts. And let's be honest, sending vast herds of tribute is a pretty dang good way to butter up your brother you completely betrayed before you run into him again. But that's the human in me (and in him!) speaking. Tonight, I got some Spirit.

After asking Jacob who this group of people with him were (his wife and children), Esau's immediate question is "What the heck? What was with all the cattle and sheep?" Now, if we were to believe Jacob's interpretation of the situation, and the one we all probably would have run into the meeting with, Esau is pissed, self-righteous, seeking vengeance, and deserving of being so, considering everything his baby brother put him through. But God has a different plan for this meeting than for human-jacob to meet human-esau and battle or bribe their way out of a bad situation.

"You have to keep them," Jacob says, "Because when I saw your face today, and saw that you were smiling and glad, it was like seeing God's own face." Jacob didn't insist that Esau keep the herds he had sent ahead as safeguards because he believed that this sacrifice was what would keep him in his brother's good graces. He refused to take them back because he was so excited that God had hooked it up and his brother actually wanted to see him. "God has given me enough," he says, "please take this gift." It's a tribute to their relationship. This blessing, originally intended to be manipulative and self-serving, got taken out of Jacob's hands and turned into a true expression of what sacrifice ought to be. Motive matters, guys.

Time and time again we see the Old Testament cast offering sacrifices to God, to kings, or to pagan gods, frequently without much of an explanation as to why. Sacrifice gets all tangled. It makes God seem very much like the human kings or capricious Baals, requiring sacrifices from their people just so that the people might live. But that's not what God's sacrifice is about. Our God doesn't require sacrifice of us that He might then look upon us with favor. Our God wants us to be like Jacob. That even when we know we have sinned and betrayed and fallen out of all possible understanding and hope for forgiveness, we come forward to him anyways. And, as we are human, he knows that we will bring him sacrifices to try to appease his wrath. We will look on the meeting of God and us after a time away with trepidation and fear, just as Jacob feared his meeting with Esau. But the depth and heart of the matter is this: when we finally look upon God's face we will know that all is forgiven as he sweeps us up in his arms, crying for the joy of being able to hold us again. And it is in that moment that our sacrifice undergoes a transformation, just like Jacob's did. We realize, I don't have to buy my way back in! He loves me anyway! So do we take it back when he offers? Of course not, because now we understand the true heart of sacrifice, now we understand the only reason God wants sacrifice from us at all: We are meant to sacrifice in celebration, giving up what we have been given because we are full of joy to be in the presence of God; not because He requires it, but out of our joy that He does not.

scripture from Genesis 33, a combination of the New Living Translation, the King James, the Geneva, and my own heart understanding.

Pennies and Palm Trees + Lent

Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, a day in the traditional church calendar set aside for remembering that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. In many churches, Ash Wednesday is an extremely somber affair. It is the reminder that we are not the end all-be all. It also begins the season of Lent, 40 days (plus Sundays) leading up to Jesus's death and resurrection on the cross. For many people, like many churches, lent is a very somber affair. It is all about fasting the thing you love the most, giving up your favorite food, disconnecting your cable, removing sugar from your diet. Somewhere along the line, Lent became what we were giving up. The trials of removing a central thing from our lives for 40 days became so forefront that the entire reason for fasting during lent is lost in the process.

It would be easy for me to sit here and rewrite what lent means to me, spending a half hour spelling out why I love lent, with new metaphors, new language, new anything. But I feel like that would be falling into the pit we have already dug for ourselves in lentan tradition: making it about us instead of about Christ. So instead of doing that, I'm going to copy+paste my Lent-Is-Starting post from last year (pulled of my tumblr, so you may or may not have come across this before).

"As a Luthern, or at least as a member of Trinity Lutheran Church, I grew up spending this night attending a somber service in which our pastor would remind “Woman, remember that you are created from dust, and to dust you shall return” and sign the cross on our foreheads in ashes. For as long as I can remember I wondered why we had our Ash Wednesday service at night and all of the Catholic kids had theirs in the morning before school. Wouldn’t people think that I was a bad Christian if I didn’t have that indecipherable gray smudge on my forehead all day long? I remember one year in middle school when I ran to the bathroom between walking to school and attending first period so that I could smudge my own cross on my forehead, the charcoal art pencils in my backpack replacing the symbolic ashes. I had no idea what the point was, but wanted to be dedicated enough to be one of those weird kids with the ashes on their foreheads all day. Or at least I wanted people to think I was that dedicated. What was the point in having Pastor smudge ashes on my head at all if the only people that were going to see it were the ones who I already went to church with anyway?

Fortunately, my strange gravitation to the visibility of the Ash Wednesday forehead cross got left behind with many of my other middle school misconceptions of the world. But my confusion as to the real point of lent took a lot longer to grow out of. My childhood self saw lent as the time when the colors would change on the altar coverings and pastor’s robes and we could start thinking about dyeing Easter eggs. My middle school self remembers Lent as the time when Confirmation classes (from 3:15-5:00, effectively extending the Wednesday school day) blurred into an hour of homework time leading into Wednesday night soup dinners and Lent services and I couldn’t go home until 8:00 when the whole long day was finally over. My high school self started trying to play the Lentan fasting game, giving up swearing, or soda, or candy, or something equally “acceptable” but meaningless, and ultimately failing to get past week 2 or 3 without abandoning the idea altogether. What was the point of fasting anyway? I knew that Jesus died on the cross for me, and I believed, that’s all that mattered. Right?

Well, yes.

But also no. It is by faith and grace alone that we are saved. Fact. If my only point is to guarantee my spot in heaven, I’m good. But woah, how lame of a point is that when there is so much else being offered to us on a silver platter?

But that’s a whole other topic in and of itself. Back to Lent.

On Flood’s opening introduction to 2010’s daily Lent devotional blog, I found this written in the last paragraph. “One of the challenges we face is that we can easily separate God from this season. We prove to ourselves and others that we can handle the challenge. It’s a challenge of the will. “

I think those three sentences sum up for me what Lent always was. My challenge wasn’t (isn’t) accidentally separating God from the season, but putting God into it to begin with. I fasted, because everyone else did. I went to Lent soup dinners, because I could stay away from my parents that way. I wore a cross on my forehead, so people would look at me and think I was awesome (I don’t know how being a weirdo with charcoal on my forehead equated with awesome in middle school, but you know, middle school.) It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I really started realizing that lent was meant to be something more than an opportunity to prove to the world that I could be a “great Christian.” And it probably isn’t until this year that I’ve actually cared enough to do it right.

You see, fasting, or giving something up, for Lent isn’t about whether we can accomplish 40 days without something we love, whether we can beat a vice for 6 weeks, or whether we can follow the strict rules except for on Sundays when we cheat [2011 A/N: Sundays aren't about cheating, which is how "you can eat the thing your fasting on Sundays" has always translated to me in the past. Its about Feasting. The bible is full of the two things paired together. We must fast AND feast. On Sundays in Lent, we celebrate the resurrection every week, with a feast of thanksgiving.] It’s not about beating yourself and growing better self discipline. It’s about spending more time with God.

The advent season (pre-Christmas) is for preparing for Jesus’s birth. Lent is ultimately about preparing for his death and resurrection. We give something up to make more room for Him in our period of waiting. The purpose of fasting, or at least what I’ve come to understand the purpose of fasting to be, is that at each moment when we crave the food, activity, drink, whatever it is that we’ve given up, at each moment when we crave it, we think about God. It’s a trigger, a tripline, a sign post pointing upwards. Or, if you’ve given up some time consuming activity—say TV or the internet—it’s a space MAKER. Instead of a simple reminded to have a chat with dad, it’s creating the time where you before had none.

And all to the point of having a deeper relationship. Nothing has ever gotten me closer to my faith than making space for prayer. And I mean think about it: have you ever had a good relationship with someone when you don’t make the time of day to talk to them? Don’t you think our relationship with God has similar properties? How can we get to know him better if we don’t spend any time conversing?

It’s also about sitting.

This season of Lent, for me, is about making space and about sitting. It’s about reclaiming the prayer spaces that I made for myself in Uganda and about relearning how to sit in God’s presence without doing. It’s about being Mary for a little while instead of Martha. I am so dang good at being Martha. Being Mary is way harder. (See Luke 10:38-42). It’s about choosing what is better.

So excuse me while I turn off my facebook and wake up a little earlier, while I run away to the beach when I should be studying (probably), while I write uselessly long journal entries about a faith that few of my friends who will read them actually share, while I seem to waste a lot of time not doing. Today is Ash Wednesday, and today I, Woman, remember that from dust I was created and to dust I will return, and that it is only by the grace one man gave to me by sacrificing his all too real life that I can claim my birthright as God’s own child and become anything more than molecules and science facts. Today I start sitting."

This year, I begin Lent in a different place than I did last year. My growth group and I have been discussing how much different we feel from the person who we were little more than a year ago. But strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, how I feel about Lent and the invitation for fasting that God has given me for this year is almost identical to last year. I'm just lucky this year, because the discipline of fasting is something He and I have already been working on. So instead of asking me to Sit for lent this year, he's asking me to decrease my input and increase my output, because sitting before Him and with him has already become a part of my daily routine.

Decrease my Input; Increase my Output.

What in the world?

If any of your have taken the Gallup's Strengths Finders test and/or spoken to me about my top 5, you may know a little something about "input" and "intellection". These are simply two vocabulary words that help me to describe something I already know about myself: I obsessively take in information (and stuff) and my brain is constantly turning over all that information in my head (whether it be "knowledge", facts, or people habits I've observed.) I drink up books, audiobooks, blogs, websites, sermons, basically anything, like someone who's been thirsty for years.

Well, God's giving me a heads up that I do a little bit too much of that, and quite a bit too little of talking to Him without the added outside input (this also includes music).

So Step 1 of Lent this year is to turn down the noise. Unplug from being so plugged into Twitter. Don't check my facebook while I'm at a stoplight just because I have a phone that can. Leave/Put the books He hasn't asked me specifically to read in a box. Drive in silence. Go to sleep either listening to the scripture or nothing at all.

But there's a Step 2 as well.

He wants me to stop just thinking and pick back up writing. Write about Him and the amazing things He is doing, every day. Blog. Tweet. Change my facebook status. Paint and upload the pictures. Upload whatever project I've been working on. POUR OUT.

Basically, it comes down to this. Take all the streams that have been pouring into me and reduce them to one: Him. Then, stop simply letting all that living water seep out of the cracks and fill me to bursting; Intentionally pour it out.

The reason I blog this initial post is to explain why you may see me around facebook or twitter or whatever social media interaction we have, but won't see me comment on YOUR status, or respond to YOUR tweet, or read YOUR blog. Sounds selfish and self-absorbed, I know. I'm going to write and not read? Bad relationship patterns there. But it's about continuing to be willing to out pour what he gives me while shutting out the distractions for a time. This is actually going to be more difficult than what I did last year in simply giving up social media. Because this means I actually still have to go to my facebook, login to twitter, check into tumblr, but control my desire to scroll around and see what everyone else is up to.

End point: Refine the Intake; Expand the Outpouring.

Lots and lots of love!

(and a better explanation of what the heck Pennies and Palm trees is to come).