5/9/21 “Anything Worth Doing” by Nancy E. Petty
John 15: 9-17
We’ve got a saying in our house. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. This axiom often comes into play when Karla’s family is coming to our house for a gathering. She and I usually have a conversation about what time, and what we should serve, and we make a decision – for example, one day recently we decided to serve a light snack and coffee as they were coming around 10:30. Then she goes off to the grocery store and I go off to do my errands. But when I return to greet the family I find the light snack has turned into two kinds of turnovers, a mixed fruit bowl, yogurt cups, toast with three kinds of jelly, peanut butter crackers and pimento cheese. And it isn’t just the kinds of foods, it’s the quantity. For three family members and us we have more food than we could eat as a full congregation. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
Well, this morning, I’m guilty of overdoing. We could easily wrestle this morning with the difficult question of what is love? Is it a warm feeling? Is it affection? Is it caretaking? Passion? Is it service? Is it placing the welfare of others above your own? Is it playful or serious or both? Is it even something we can define? And when I say I love you, does it mean the same thing to me as it does to you?
But we aren’t going to grapple with just love, because anything worth doing is worth overdoing. We’re also going to introduce the slippery idea of sacrifice as we consider the question of sacrificial love that our text presents to us this morning. No tenet of the Christian faith has been more central than sacrifice, after all, this is the foundational teaching of the traditional Christian church – God took the form of a human, and then sacrificed God’s self for us. And even though most of us have turned away from the theological teaching of sacrificial atonement – that Jesus had to die because we are sinful – we still can’t walk away from the truth. Jesus did die, and he names his love for us as the reason. We consider this as the seminal act of sacrificial love of our faith. But what does that mean? Is sacrificial love something only Jesus has to offer, or is it expected of us as well? And the big question for me, is there any love other than sacrificial love?
But before we go too far, let’s wonder about these two big words, love and sacrifice. When I say the word love, what comes up for you? What happens in your body – do you have sensations or do you notice an opening or a warming? What happens in your heart – do you feel softening or tenderness? And now what about sacrifice? What happens in your body – do you tighten up or tense? What happens in your heart – do you feel concern or alarm? Words are often meaningless – we use them loosely, or carelessly, we don’t bother to confirm that others hear them the way we speak them, they can be almost worthless. And yet, words are like little icons, they do carry energy and power, and even if we don’t know that everyone experiences the same thing, we know that some words evoke in us impressions, or memories, or reactions based on our lived experience. I find it interesting as we start this inquiry that love and sacrifice seem to evoke for me almost opposite reactions – one an opening, and the other a constriction. Maybe that makes it more unusual to speak them together, almost like saying Yes No as one phrase. One term holding distinctly different impressions is a sure sign that there is a profound and potentially inscrutable truth lurking behind the phrase. Sacrificial love.
In her book The Wisdom Jesus, Cynthia Bourgeault invokes two well-known stories as illustrations of sacrificial love. The first is the Gift of the Magi, by O Henry. In this classic tale, a pair of newlyweds each sell something they treasure in order to give a precious gift to the other, only to find, in the end, that they have each sold that which was needed to make use of the other’s gift. The story is poignant, and while it proves the point of sacrificing something precious for the sake of another, it also tugs at the heart that the gift can’t be received as intended. The second is the book and then movie, Babette’s Feast. This time, the main character, who has lost a great deal of social standing and fortune, wins the lottery. But instead of re-establishing her station in life, she uses all of the money to host a magnificent dinner for the frugal, pious community she has been serving. In return for her generosity, she receives judgment and shame from the members of the community who vow not to enjoy the evening to prove their own piety. In the end, the night is magical, and proves the eternal gift of the ephemeral joy to be found in giving away what you love most.
There are several clues we can glean from these stories about sacrificial love. First, the sacrifice is something very precious – something we might consider priceless, something that cannot be bought, cannot be replaced. For the newlyweds, this was a lifetime’s length of beautiful hair and a watch given by a beloved grandfather. These are tangible things, but things that mean much more than what our society would consider their “market value.” In Babette’s case she literally gives away the lottery, more money than she will be able to make in the rest of her days, but more importantly she gives away what the money would have bought her – comfort, rest, a return to a better life. It seems we learn from these stories that sacrificial love is costly.
It is very interesting to me that in both these examples, the gift of sacrificial love is not something the receiver expects or anticipates. The sacrifice is not demanded, in fact, it isn’t asked for at all. Instead, the sacrifice rises out of the giver’s attention to what is needed but out of reach. Neither of the newlyweds would dare to ask for what they long for because it is too expensive, and yet the lover sees the desire and wants to meet it. In Babette’s case, the gift, at first, seems to be about her – she makes the choice to put on a feast that is not only not asked for, but not welcome. What we learn as the story unfolds is that Babette is not just revisiting her past by showing off fancy food, she is using the extravagant food to create what she knows that kind of loving preparation can provide, a mystical transformation of simple elements into the food of love. Indeed, as the night of the feast unfolds, old women and men discover love that has laid latent in their souls from their youth, and rather than this remembered love breaking their hearts, they are able to taste it and find it is as fresh and as life-giving as it ever was. In the words of the pivotal toast in the movie:
Man, in his weakness and shortsightedness…
believes he must make choices in this life.
He trembles at the risks he takes.
We do know fear.
But no.
Our choice is of no importance.
There comes a time when your eyes are opened.
And we come to realize…
that mercy is infinite.
We need only await it with confidence…
and receive it with gratitude.
Mercy imposes no conditions.
And, lo!
Everything we have chosen…
has been granted to us.
And everything…
we rejected…
has also been granted.
Yes, we even get back what we rejected.
For mercy and truth are met together.
And righteousness and bliss…
shall kiss one another.
Finally, these two stories feature sacrificial gifts of love that are personal. For the young wife, it is her hair, a very part of her person and body. For the young husband, a family heirloom that was gifted from a generation past and gone. For Babette, the money is not the gift, nor are the expensive ingredients, rather it is her gift as a master chef that she offers, the food serving as the instrument on which she plays her exquisite music. Sacrificial love, it seems, is deeply specific to both the giver and the receiver, it is particular, it is personal.
For a moment, I want to talk about if and what role sacrificial love plays in the lives of us ordinary folks. Yes, Jesus gave up everything for us, but let’s face it, he was the Son of God, and we’re just average people. Surely less is expected of us mere mortals right. So now, in my attempt to honor the criteria I’ve laid out, I offer a personal example of this sacrificial love we are chasing this morning. Today is mother’s day, and for many of us, the narrative of mothering is one of sacrifice. We want for our children. We want them to be happy, but we also want other things for them, things that we know as adults and as parents are important, even if they don’t always agree with us. Things like brushing teeth, and doing homework, and taking a shower (and not just running the water, but using soap). In the early years with our children, we mothers and fathers play the role of teaching good habits, teaching right from wrong, and hopefully setting our children on a path that will make them happy.
But as all parents can attest, holding the line between what you want for your child and what your child wants is tricky. All of you who know us know that Nora and I are very different people, different personalities, and we hold different priorities. In adolescence, she and I were often at odds about the day-to-day demands I made as a parent and the day-to-day requests she made as a teenager. God knows there is no right way to navigate the great becoming that happens to humans in those in-between years, but I did what I thought was right, and accepted the struggle as a normal part of adolescence.
It wasn’t until years later that Nora was able to help me see that I wasn’t just holding on to what was best for her. I was often holding on to my internal picture of what was right and best. I’ve spoken before of the valuable therapy, DBT or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy that we did as a family, and it was in DBT that I learned the meaning of validation – to really see, hear and honor what another is telling you. Validation sounds easy, until you are standing in front of a painful truth that you don’t agree with, but must accept as true for the other, so that they can be seen and heard and accepted. And as I learned that skill, I was finally able to see that it was my own expectations of what Nora’s life should be that most often created conflict for us. That’s not to say that there wasn’t plenty of conflict that was real, but when I could finally let go of the ideas I had about what “should be” I was better able to do what I wanted most – to love her.
That letting go was a sacrifice. It didn’t involve any tangible goods, but what we hold in our hearts might be the most expensive gifts we have. For me to let go I had to give up hopes and dreams. When is the last time you gave up a hope? That kind of letting go cuts to the core of who we are. We lose our balance, we doubt ourselves, we often grip even tighter at the thought of what lies beyond what we already think we know. But if we are able to lean into and surrender, we find exactly what General Lowenhielm said in Babette’s Feast – what we choose is given, and even what we reject is given. For me and Nora, laying down my own projections of who she should be opened space not only for her to become who she is, but space for us to see one another, hear one another, love one another at a different level. In our case, I had to sacrifice something to move more deeply into love.
Do we always have to sacrifice something in order to love? I don’t know the answer to that, but my guess is yes. My sense is that love inherently involves offering some part of ourselves, which may be given back to us, but which first has to be surrendered. There are about a million ways this teaching gets perverted. Maybe you’ve lived a few of them yourself. I am afraid there is no side-stepping the deep gullies that fall away on either side of the path of love. The road must be built as it is walked. But I offer you this, the taste of sacrifice based in authentic love is distinct, and won’t be confused with its lesser look alikes. That taste is trustworthy, and through it you may find that you don’t have to be right, you don’t have to be perfect, and you don’t even have to be good. But you do have to give away whatever you are holding onto.
Up to this point I’ve talked about personal love, but what of love in the greater body of the community and society? Does this definition of sacrificial love still apply? I would argue that it does. Cornell West said it this way, “Justice is the shape that loves takes in the world.” What would sacrificial love for the planet look like? What might we need to give up, to surrender, to sacrifice so that the Earth might breathe, repair, flourish? What would sacrificial love look like for indigenous people? What might we need to give up or give back when we think about Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, sports mascots and land treaties? And what would sacrificial love look like for our Black brothers and sisters? What might we have to surrender in terms of our myths of this country, our Fourth of July, our preferential hiring and housing, and our right to be the normative bodies and voices and hair of America?
And to bring it closer to home, what would sacrificial love look like in our life as a faith community—as Pullen Memorial Baptist Church? What might we need to surrender, let go of, sacrifice to broaden our love for one another and for others whom we wish to be in relationship with? The kind of love that will make sure justice is done in the world. The kind of love that will have us venture beyond the safety of our community into the broader society to see that it is transformed by this sacrificial love that Jesus modeled for us. I don’t know the answer to this question I am asking. But I do know it is the question our faith asks of us. And furthermore, our text reminds us that if we want to experience joy, it is this kind of love that must follow to find joy within us.
Cynthia Bourgeault comes back to the story of Babette’s Feast. She writes: “An extravagant sacrifice is in one sense wasted, because these poor peasants cannot really comprehend the magnitude of the gift, and by morning, when they’ve sobered up, they will probably have lost most of its beneficial effect. But no matter; the banquet table is set before them anyway. In her no-holds-barred generosity Babette offers these broken, dispirited souls a taste of reassurance that their long years of faithfulness have not been in vain. She mirrors to them what God is like, what love is like, what true humanness is like.” And so I wonder this morning, how will we mirror to others what God is like, what love is like, what true humanness is like?
I close with the words of the poet Rumi.
The Jesus Trajectory
Love is reckless, not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Loves comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.
Yet in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard-surfaced and straight forward.
Having died to self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.
Anything worth doing…
