In the last couple of days I came across a well meaning article about ‘Sacrificial Giving’. As so often such pieces – in this case written in response to a news item regarding a church – skims the surface and fails to ask any deeper questions or examine presuppositions regarding the very nature of things, or in this case questions like ‘why do we have paid ministers at all?’

The following was written over a week ago but I forgot to send it for inclusion in the Parish Magazine. What I suggested was that all giving, that is all Living involves sacrifice. Sacrifice is unavoidable, the question is ‘What is the Goal of your life?’ Your End? This determines the nature of the Sacrifice and whether or not it is Good. We all Give all the time. All Giving is Sacrificial . . . but to what End? (Which brings us back to ‘paid ministry’ and the World of what Joseph Pieper calls ‘total work’ which we inhabit and shapes our perceptions regarding work and reward and indeed ‘The Good’.) But enough of that – here is the article I wrote.

‘Death and Resurrection’

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

We continue our journey through the Easter Season. On Good Friday we heard how Jesus, the Living One, by his death on the Cross tramples down Death, and thus sets us free from the fear that death generates, free to Live his Life in obedience to his commands, which are Spirit and Life.

At Easter we heard more of how Jesus’ Death and Resurrection was not simply a three day period in a 30 year human life, but how it encompassed his entire life and ministry.

Coming from the Eternal Father into the realm of death and dying, corruption and decay in which all things are subject to moth and rust, and in which thieves break in and steal. Jesus is born into Good Friday and Death, as ikons of his birth at Bethlehem reveal; the swaddling clothes and stone feeding trough mimicking the shrouds of burial and the stone tomb.

Thus Holy Saturday in which St Peter tells us ‘He preached to the spirits who were in prison’, refers as much to his speaking words of life to us in a world bound by fear, as it does to any speculative going to ‘the underworld’. As Jesus says, ‘My words are Spirit and Life’ – spoken to us who are in the realm of Death and Sin.

Finally Easter reveals the One who is Alive for evermore, and so we live in the season in which we learn what it is to follow him in a living that looks like death to the world bound in fear of death. Letting go our fixed grasp of life, to Live.

Reflecting upon the nature of a life well lived, Jesus is surely its pattern, for all life requires sacrifice, ALL life. Sacrifice is the means by which we spend every moment of our existence, and indeed the way in which we enter the world.

A very simple illustration. Any choice we make for a certain course of action necessarily sacrifices a literally infinite number of other choices, most hidden from our eyes. Thus it is we live, by dying to other possibilities, and thus the shape of every life comes into being. I can’t help but think of the story of Michelangelo, who said that he saw his great sculpture of David within the stone, waiting to be revealed. Our lives come into being as we chip away at that which will not constitute us – in the End.

The Question that this leaves us with is this; ‘to what End’ do we live? Towards what goal? What is our Guiding Star? For we who dare to call ourselves Christian, our LIght and Life is that Known in the revelation of the Eternal Life that is in Christ Jesus.

Such a life is marked by self-forgetfulness. It is not marked by making plans for ‘the life we have always wanted for ourselves’. For a Life we live for ourselves in the End is one which moth and rust consume, and into which thieves break in and steal. A life that is rather, in the pattern of Christ, life given away for the Glory of God – is one which is revealed finally to be Life without end, rather like a river, a metaphor which Jesus himself uses and which bookends the Holy Scriptures in Genesis and Revelation.

St Paul expressed this well, I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Living by faith is Living with the eye of our heart directed towards God in Jesus Christ. It is a Contemplative Lived and Living response towards God in which God then goes to work to sculpt a Life after his image and Likeness, as Living Stones. We entrust ourselves into his hands, as Jesus did upon the cross. This brings to mind a favourite prayer of the Iona Community, returning us to the fashioning of our lives through sacrifice . . .

O Christ, the Master Carpenter,
who at the last through wood and nails purchased our whole salvation;
wield well your tools in the workshop of your world,
so that we who come rough-hewn to your work bench may be fashioned to a truer beauty by your hand.
Amen.

May we say Yes to His Life and Good purposes for us, as He shapes us in these days of Resurrection

Grace and Peace

Eric