The subject of today’s sermon is human sacrifice. (Pull out large knife.) I was wondering if I might have a volunteer?
The idea of sacrificing a human being on an altar is pretty revolting, isn’t it? I know when I see artists’ renderings of Aztec priests, in their fanciest feathered head dresses and gold jewelry, cutting the heart out of some poor young woman during a religious ceremony, I think “how barbaric!” Imagine your reaction if I were to actually take this knife to one of our children this morning. Imagine the screams, the disbelief.
Are you as horrified as I am when you hear the biblical story of God telling Abraham to go up and the mountain and sacrifice his beloved son Isaac? Aren’t you disgusted by the image of Abraham tying Isaac on the altar, grabbing the knife, and preparing to execute his only son?
I recall hearing the story as a child. I tried to be a good, humble, accepting student in Sunday school. We were told that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was evidence of Abraham’s total, unquestioning, trust in God. Abraham’s absolute, unhesitating faith was held up as a model we should emulate. The lesson was that we should trust God completely. We, like Abraham, should be willing to make whatever sacrifice God demands.
I accepted the interpretation. Mostly. Yet the story was profoundly unsettling. I understood that complete trust in God was a good thing. And I took some comfort that all this happened long, long ago and far, far away. I took even more comfort in the fact that my own father’s faith was pretty weak. I didn’t think that he trusted God enough to follow orders to sacrifice me on an altar (not even on those occasions when I might seem to deserve it).
Many years later, when I read the story again as a sophisticated adult, the image still disturbed me. Oh, I knew that this was not a historic event. I knew it was just a story written to make a point. It was a legend, that’s all. Isaac was never in real danger. Yet in some ways this made the story even worse. What kind of god would ask for such a proof of loyalty? And what kind of man would worship such a god? Why would the Jewish people think it so important to pass this story down century after century? Why in the world would the writers of Genesis think this story was important and worth preserving? How is this so different from the “primitive” and “barbaric” religion of the Aztecs?
It is amazing to me how important the idea of sacrifice is in religion. When human beings imagine a god, we so often imagine an angry deity that needs to be appeased or a being that wants blood and death in exchange for a good crop or a successful hunt.
Our own Hebrew and Christian scriptures are full of sacrifice. I looked in my concordance and found what must be a couple of hundred references to sacrifice in the bible. There were too many to count.
The idea of sacrifice is, of course, at the very center of orthodox Christianity. In orthodox Christianity, Jesus is a human sacrifice. In fact, he is more than a human sacrifice. Jesus is a divine sacrifice. Orthodox churches teach that Jesus is the lamb of God and his blood washes away our sin. “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?” is the question that determines our salvation.
Lots of early Christians wanted to emulate Jesus. Like modern Muslim suicide bombers, many early Christians wanted to be martyrs. They went out of their way to be martyred. They died willingly. The fact that so many were willing to die actually helped to spread Christianity.
The Christian tradition, even to this day, glorifies sacrifice. Sacrifice is seen as noble. Some theologians, like Rebecca Parker, president of our own Starr King Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley, and Rita Nakashima Brock, argue that this glorification of sacrifice and suffering has contributed to modern forms of martyrdom. They are convinced, for example, that some Christian women remain in abusive relationships because they have been taught in their religious upbringing to see suffering as virtuous.
We modern progressives are not much into suffering or sacrifice. We find it all very distasteful and repulsive. Washed in blood? Yuk. We think human sacrifice is horrible. And yet, I am convinced that in our own way we still practice human sacrifice. We really do. We practice human sacrifice all the time without realizing what we are doing.
We don’t construct stone altars on the mountain, but we have other altars. This morning I want to look at our altars and the ways we sacrifice other people, and ourselves, on these altars. And then I would have us imagine a world without these altars, a world beyond human sacrifice.
Let me give a few examples of modern human sacrifice. How many people have suffered for years because of their “abnormal” sexual identity? They have been forced to deny who they truly are, felt enormous shame and self loathing. Sadly, some actually kill themselves rather than admit the truth to family and friends. Anxiety about being homosexual is a major cause of suicide among teenagers. We sacrifice people on the altar of what is “normal” all the time.
And how many people do we know who have been sacrificed on the altar of success? We carry around these images of the good life. An enormous advertising industry thrusts these images on us. How many people spend their working lives in a profession they do not really enjoy? How many become human sacrifices on the altar of some expectations laid on them by family or by teachers? Some years back I read a book by a psychotherapist who described a disturbing pattern in some patients. These patients were all exceptionally successful. They were widely admired. They were authors, physicians, academics, business people. They had all been precocious, gifted children. As children they were praised for their accomplishments. As children, they were very sensitive to what pleased their parents and other adults. The more they were praised, the more they wanted to please.
As young people, these accomplished children had worked hard to please their parents and teachers. What the therapist found in these patients is that they had spent so much energy pleasing others and reaching the next goal that they completely lost touch with who they were. As middle aged adults they found themselves miserable and lost. They sought the help of a therapist. They didn’t even know what gave them satisfaction in life. They were human sacrifices on the altar of success.
I have often wondered what messages I gave, even unintentionally, to my own children. I think about all of our children in our religious education classes this morning. I think we need to be careful. Even without our intending it our hopes and expectations for them can bind them to the altar of success.
We have other altars, too. On a collective level our ideologies can so easily become altars that lead to human sacrifice. An obvious recent example was communism. At one level, communism was the expression of a deep ethical impulse. In theory communism was about sharing, about escape from alienation, about rising beyond class conflict and oppression. In practice it became authoritarian, bureaucratic, oppressive and violent. Millions of lives were sacrificed on the altar of the ideals of those in power.
At one level, the ideology of the neoconservatives who are the architects of the war in Iraq is moral and ethical. Most of these people honestly believe in the spread of democracy. But, like the communists, they fell prey to their own rhetoric and their own oversimplifications. Their pride and arrogance blinded them to what was really happening. They built an altar to their beliefs and have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of people. Likewise, there is no doubt that market economies are more efficient. Yet what about all the people left behind, both in advanced countries and in the developing world? How many people are we willing to sacrifice on the altar of free trade and economic growth?
Closer to home, I wonder about the ideologies many of us share. Like many of you, I am sympathetic to social programs that seek to provide opportunities and care for the least powerful and the poor. I want to fund schools, universal heath care, social security, public transportation and all the rest. And yet I suspect I am probably slow to see consequences that don’t fit my theories. Progressives are typically way too slow to pull the plug on ineffective programs, too slow to realize that some criminals really are sociopaths that need to be locked up, too slow to see that what we intend as generosity can easily become patronizing and destructive. How many women and kids stuck in intergenerational poverty are human sacrifices on the altar of my liberal ideology?
There is great irony here, and great cause for humility. The irony is that we can so easily do harm when we mean well. Sometimes our noble and ambitious ideals turn against us. And, in real life, there is no angel of the Lord to shout to us at the last second. Alas, in real life we finish the job; we commit human sacrifice. Our beliefs, our ideals, our desires for our selves and our children can so quickly turn from good to evil.
Parents who burden their children with expectations only want what is good for them. Gifted children who want to please others so easily grow into confused adults with no sense of self. They didn’t intend to. The adults who praised them only wanted to encourage them.
People like Marx and Lenin and Mao were all idealistic. The man who blew up 120 or so Iraqis in the market yesterday was an idealist who gave his life for a cause.
Some of the most deadly altars we create are built of our most noble aspirations.
Can we create lives where we put a stop to human sacrifice? Can we stop sacrificing those we love, our selves, and others on our abstract altars?
I believe we can. This pattern is so deep in humanity that it won’t be easy and we won’t stop human sacrifice right away. However, there is a lot we can do.
We have to begin with our selves. We have to begin by taking a long, careful, and honest look at our selves. We have to know who we are. We have to know what really matters to us.
We begin with practices that all the great spiritual traditions advocate. We have to be still and reflect. Our reflection may take the form of meditation, or journaling, or prayer, or spiritual retreats, or whatever helps us get in touch with our true selves again. We begin with the ancient question: Who am I? Who am I, really? What do I truly love in life? Honestly, how do I want to live?
When we take the time to be with our selves, we learn that there are some things that are just fundamental, things we will never change. If I am straight or gay, that is just the way I am. I have some gifts; some things are beyond me. I am never going to sing at the Metropolitan Opera or play professional baseball. It was never in the cards. You have your gifts; you have your limits. We need to be honest with ourselves. And once we have an honest picture of ourselves, we need to accept and embrace who we truly are.
We begin with personal reflection, but personal reflection is never enough. You and I are relational beings. We come to know ourselves in relationship. We need long term, honest, loving relationships. Alone we will lose our way. Alone we are all susceptible to denial and self deception. This is one reason we come together as a religious community. We come to be reminded of who we are. We come to be in relationship with others. We come to learn, explore, practice and serve.
If you and I are to stop human sacrifice in our lives and the lives of those we touch, we need to pay attention. We need to pay attention as a spiritual and religious practice. We need to experience what is really happening in our lives and all around us. It is so very easy to see what you and I want to see. This habit of seeing what we want to see is perhaps easiest to recognize at the collective level. Part of what happened to communism is that it could not see what was happening. Ideologues see what they want to see and what they expect to see. Because communist leaders never could accept what was really happening, communism could never adjust. Those who led us into this war in Iraq and have led the occupation were blinded by their ideas. They saw what they wanted to see and what they expected to see, not what was actually happening.
You and I are guilty of seeing what we want to see, too, and it gets us into all kinds of misery. Some very wise person once said that if you discover that you are in a deep hole, the first thing you do is stop digging. We have to pay attention. We have to stop and pay attention to what is actually happening in our lives. Do I really like my work? Is my child happy and thriving? How is my marriage doing? I spent years trying to convince myself that I could have a personally fulfilling career in government. I was only able to move on to something else when I confronted the reality of my experience, a reality at odds with my plans and my wishes. We have to confront the consequences of what we are doing. This is what the Bible means when it speaks about knowing a tree by its fruit.
When you and I really pay attention, we are able to learn, to change, to adjust. Only when we face reality will we hear the angel yelling at us to stop the knife before we kill somebody.
My friends, none of this is very complicated. It is simple. That does not mean it is easy.
When we take the time to reflect and face our true selves, we will find that what we want in life is pretty basic. We want to be true to ourselves. We do not want to live a lie. We want to be loved and to love. We want honest, deep, enduring relationships. We want harmony and peace. Deep down we don’t want to exploit anyone, nor do we want to be exploited. We want depth and joy.
And the great truth is that in order to have the lives that you and I truly want, lives that are faithful to who we are and faithful to what we most love, you and I do not have to sacrifice anyone. We do not have to sacrifice other people and we do not have to sacrifice our selves. In fact, when someone is being sacrificed we know that something terrible is happening and that we must stop.
Let us put an end to the horror of human sacrifice.
My prayer today is that each of us may learn to know and to accept and even to love who we really are. My prayer is that, knowing who we are, we will reach out with an open heart. Let us accept and love one another. I pray that we might pay attention and learn from life.
If we do this, we will have no need to sacrifice anyone. Let us destroy the altars of human sacrifice. Hear the angel. Put down the knife.
Amen.