Living Sacrifice to the Living God - Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on August 27, 2024, the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost.

Peter is so dear. He’s exactly himself, no matter where you put him, and he reaches out to Jesus with boldness. In those two qualities (and few others, really) he is extremely sturdy, reliable, rocklike in his consistency in showing up exactly as he is and trusting that God can work with that. Trusting that God will reach out to him and save him. Here, Jesus asks the twelve who they have heard people say he is, and then waves their pat responses away with another question—“but who do you say that I am?” He’s throwing them a bone—who do you say that I AM? It’s Peter of course, Rocky himself, who catches this echo of the divine name, the I AM THAT I AM liberating God of the Exodus revealed to Moses at the burning bush. By grace in this moment he gets it— you are the Messiah, the son of the living God! The living God, I AM, being itself  blazing through creation, heaven and earth are full of God’s glory. Jesus, the Word of God dwelling among us, is the One who lives always out of unbreakable union with divine love, the One who lets that glory shine forth through him. He is truly the Son of the living God, offering himself up in each moment to God’s loving purpose. 

Well, so what? Must be nice for Jesus. If we stop there, Jesus is the Son of the living God, we don’t go far enough. Jesus is the Son of the living God and through him in the Spirit each of us are adopted as children of God, heirs of God in Christ. We’re each made to live as a child of the living God, offering ourselves up in each moment to God’s loving purpose. Paul says as much to the Romans and to us: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God-- what is good and acceptable and perfect.” God doesn’t want your burnt offerings, your dead performances of an external moral code, your clawing attempts to fix yourself. Not a dead sacrifice, Paul says, but a living sacrifice. God wants you, all of you, your body and your mind, heart and soul, as a living offering. God wants you to live, first off! And God wants you to flourish exactly as the person you are, to let Christ shine forth through the particular contours of your face and frame. 

“Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” There are powerful forces of collective sin at work in our culture that pull us away from knowing and expressing the love of God. Racist violence, rampant consumerism, the ravaging of the earth, the crush of poverty: all these pull on us, press on us, and they will conform us to this world and run us, automatically, until and unless we learn to open to something else. Until we learn to let God renew our minds over and over, moment by moment, as we open to receive the mercies of God. Opening, being renewed, we can be transformed in Jesus, each one revealed as a child of the living God we truly are. 

This is a bedrock union with God that underlies even our experience of separation. Read through our Isaiah passage, Peter the Rock’s nickname shows us that he is inseparable from the quarry he has been hewn from. “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.” This is the prophet’s advice for anyone pursuing righteousness: don’t pursue righteousness, actually, but turn to your source, turn to the God who made you. Abraham was but one when the Lord called him and blessed him. Sarah laughed at the prospect of joy past her prime but the Lord called her and blessed her.

Pursue the living God, and whatever needs to be done, the living God will do it. The living God is pursuing you, moment by moment, living in us, renewing us. You’re a chip off the old block, so let Christ live in you, let Christ be offered up in your own flesh and bones day by day, a living sacrifice. A sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, gratitude being all we truly have to give to God in return for the grace we have received. Gratitude answers grace. “We love because God first loved us.” This is the human vocation, to pray and praise. Isaiah continues: “The Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.” A living sacrifice to the living God looks a lot like praise and thanksgiving, a grateful receiving of all that God gives. 

If Peter the Rock is hewn from the quarry that is God, if all of us are hewn from the quarry that is God—and we are—then there’s no separation. Fr. Thomas Keating says: “The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from Him. . . . We fail to believe that we are always with God and that He is part of every reality. The present moment, every object we see, our innermost nature are all rooted in Him. … God constantly speaks to us through each other as well as from within.” When we drop the story of separation from God, our minds are being renewed. We find God is part of every reality, calling to us from within and also calling to us through each other. This is the unity in diversity of the Body of Christ: many members, many diverse gifts and functions, yet gathered into One Body in the Spirit. 

We see the violation of this One Body reality constantly, the racist gun violence in Jacksonville, FL this weekend being just the latest tragic instance. We mourn with the families of those who have died. May light perpetual shine upon them. And we mourn also for the racialized hate that motivated this attack and others like it; we mourn for a young man who became so conformed to the death-dealing world of white supremacy that sees only separation and hierarchy where God has made us members of one another. As Mother Teresa wrote, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” and so ”All works of love are works of peace.” God has made us belong to each other. 

We’re cut from the same quarry. God is calling to us, from within and through every created thing. God is calling us, and so are our neighbors, human beings and all creation besides. Flesh and blood, bread and wine. Each moment offers a new opportunity to wake up, to hear, to answer each other, to offer our life up as praise and thanksgiving. When we’re closed off—which is much of the time—when we’re blocked off, conformed to some pattern of automatic action, some obsessive track of thought, creation is still calling: We belong to each other.

It’s not about perfection. When Peter is sinking like a stone, failing to walk on water, he’s the rock, there, too, as he cries out in his distress, “Lord, save me!” His forthrightness and his trust in God are the sturdiness Peter has to show us. The foundation laid by all the apostles and prophets is this humble, trusting dependence on God. That’s what the church is built on: trust in the living God, and as the hymn says, “All other ground is sinking sand.” 

The call to present yourselves as a living sacrifice is a call to ordinary love. Nothing more tender, nothing more difficult or more beautiful. I keep coming back to the image of a beloved college teacher of mine standing around with a bunch of students after an evening class. Dave Shuler taught anthropology, international development and world religion, and after class there were always a few of us hanging back for scraps of wisdom and wit. One night he pulled two battered clementines out of his messenger bag as four or five of us stood there talking. Dave was in the middle of a messy divorce and he kept forgetting to eat. He’d started keeping a pile of fruit in his office to remediate the lunch situation, but he kept forgetting those, too. These clementines had seen better days, but as he peeled them, still talking, citrus oil sprayed and perfumed the space between us in this basement classroom. The dented peels came off in curls and, still talking, utterly without self-consciousness, he handed each of us a few orange half-moon slices, crushingly sweet. A living sacrifice to the living God, refreshed moment by moment.