Mercy, Not Sacrifice Zones
As you know, the voices from our ancestors’ faith journey, inscribed in our scripture, express a fraught relationship with the practice of sacrifice. The primal murder, fratricide, takes place over Cain’s and Abel’s sacrifices. The testing of Abraham begins with God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his only son and then reversing that command, providing an animal for sacrifice instead of a human child. Myriads of laws in Torah prescribe rituals of sacrifice. In the book of Judges, Jephthah, to ensure that he would have God on his side in battle, sacrificed his daughter to keep his vow to YHWH that he would sacrifice whatever he saw first “coming out of my house to meet me”. Kings proved their wealth, power, and standing before God with staggering levels of animal bloodshed. Think King Solomon dedicating the Temple in Jerusalem. Think the primary function of that Temple, and the enslaved labor of fellow Israelites that it required. As dubious as all this sacrifice sounds, as early Christians grappled with why Messiah Jesus died as he did, sacrifice was one of their primary interpretive frameworks, as in Jesus became a perfect sacrifice of atonement for our sins. Sacrifice permeates the biblical witness.
Yet the ancient inscriptions of a people’s faith journey which are that Bible also contain powerful objections to sacrifice. These repudiations are not voiced as human resistance to giving God something people would rather keep for themselves. No, the objections to sacrifice appear in scripture as from the voice of God. It is God who says, I don’t want your sacrifices. I want your heart. It is God who says, I don’t need your sacrifices. The whole creation belongs to me.
The scriptural inscriptions for this Sunday repudiate sacrifice with divine ferocity. In the Hosea reading, this repudiation startles us at the end of a dialogue between Israel and God, in which the people appeal to God for mercy, and God rejects their appeal as specious, evanescent like morning dew. The people’s call to ‘return to the Lord’ for hope and healing is, from the prophetic perspective, merely a ploy to avoid real change. The final clincher: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offering.” (Hosea 6:6).
In the psalmody for this Sunday, the Divine Voice declares “I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds. For every wild animal of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine.” (Psalm 50:9-11). Instead of sacrifice, the psalm summons the faithful to what is not really sacrifice, but un-sacrifice, to “sacrifices of thanksgiving”, and to “calling on God in times of trouble”, and to living with integrity in all relationships.
In our gospel portion for this Sunday, Jesus famously includes the verse from Hosea to justify calling a tax collector as a disciple and sharing table fellowship with tax collectors and “sinners”. “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’” he says. Through this whole pericope, Jesus prophetically acts out this mercy, not only in the call of Matthew and his table fellowship with the unclean, but also in touching the unclean bodies of a dead girl and a hemorrhaging woman. Mercy, steadfast love, trumps the sacrifice system every time.
Lest we consign these passages to a religious argument about sacrifice we have long outgrown, consider the role of sacrifice in our own civilization. Who, and what, and where, do we sacrifice in order that some of us can have what we have? When was the last time you traced your inexpensive clothing back to the wages of the people who made it, or the water that was used, or the chemicals in the fabrication process, or the places where the vast bulk of what is made gets discarded when it is not sold? When did you, eating a mango, consider the orangutans in Indonesia driven toward extinction because their habitat is being clear cut so that we can eat that fruit (or enjoy cookies made with palm oil)? Just who is harvesting our winter broccoli, our oranges, our tomatoes, our cilantro wrapped in plastic and styrofoam, and how much are they being paid? Which rivers, which aquifers, are being sacrificed so that we can head to the golf courses in the southwest to warm our chilled bones? What insects and birds and small mammals are the collateral damage, the sacrificial victims, of our industrial, chemically dependent, monocropping? And what about the island nations and coastal regions we are sacrificing to rising sea levels? Or the once-verdant region of proud land-owning African Americans in Louisiana, now known as Cancer Alley, sacrificed to the god of Petroleum,? Or the old growth forests sacrificed for toilet paper and tar sands oil in Canada, sacrificed for livestock in the Amazon? Or the wild rice rich waterways of our Objibwe siblings, endangered by a pipeline that has already sprung leaks?
Consider this list a litany of sacrifice zones. It could be so much longer. The industrial, capitalist, imperialist, nationalistic, supremacist system which gives some of us so many good things, is one giant sacrifice system. Through this system of sacrifice, we worship the insatiable gods we have created for our own insatiable ‘needs’.
The prophetic word of Hosea, spoken and enacted by Jesus, says No. No. More. Sacrifice. God’s desire is not sacrifice zones of sacrificed people and sacrificed ecosystems. God’s desire is steadfast love for all. Mercy for all. And in this mercy, no created thing, no place, no group of humans, is to be sacrificed. Jesus’ actions in Matthew 9 and throughout the gospel demonstrate what this looks like in particularized ways and places of his ministry.
Which leads us to a disquieting question. Our whole economic system was built and is sustained with sacrifice zones. It is the water in which we swim. So how can we begin to dismantle it? I might boycott palm oil and mangoes, or forego fresh fruit and vegetables in the winter. I might wear only used clothes, and drive a fuel efficient vehicle, but I still participate in this system. Religiously, inextricably.
Moreover, if a primary understanding of Christianity is the sacrificial death of Christ, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, then how is it that we have been sacrificing other lambs of God ever since? (Sometimes, I must say, I wonder if we do more damage to the gospel by giving any role to sacrifice, including by Jesus). In yet another primary Christian understanding of the call of Jesus, we are to live the life he gave his life for us to live. We live to be demonstration plots of that kind of life. We are pollinators of this alternative way of being human for the sake of life. Desiring as God desires.
As the dialogue between the people and God in Hosea makes clear, mercy is not cheap. When we ask God for mercy for ourselves, we are often just asking for exoneration, not a new way of life. We do so wish we could get off the hook, avoid the consequences. Anyway, I do.
You know and I know that our religious devotion to sacrificing life for the sake of our way of life has careening consequences. This green-blue planet we call home may well be on its way to becoming a sacrifice zone. Sometimes all we can do is to practice mercy, steadfastly so, wherever we are, tiny pollinators of God’s desire for all creation. Pollinating a way of steadfast love, whether it is for the person we are tempted to excoriate for their politics or for the people who grow our food and make our clothing or harvest our coffee beans, who become more valuable to us, along with all God’s creation community, than the abundant cheapness of what we eat and drink and wear.
And then there is this: the faith-fullness of Abraham (and Sarah, too, ahem) according to Paul in his epistle to the Romans 4. Abraham is as good as dead, Paul writes, and yet carries on, steadfastly. Abraham, participant in the civilization of his day, still trusts God to open an impossible promise. This God whom Abraham trusts, “brings life to the dead [even a dying earth?], and calls into existence the things that do not yet exist [even an economy based on mercy, not sacrifice?]”.
Abraham was “fully convinced that God was able to do what God had promised”.
What about us?
Pastor Kristin Foster
Cook, MN
Kristin Foster, long term pastor on the Mesabi Iron Range of northern Minnesota, now retired from parish ministry, is the co-chair of the Northeastern Minnesota Synod’s EcoFaith Network and editor of the Green Blades Preaching Roundtable. Over four decades of ministry, including fifteen years as internship supervisor, she has written, preached, and worked for the rights of organized labor, the full inclusion of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, and the empowerment of small communities. As pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church in Mountain Iron, she was also the founding chairperson of the Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability. She lives outside Cook, Minnesota with her husband, Frank Davis, on an old Swede-Finn farmstead. They take every available opportunity to spend time with their two daughters, their partners, and their three grandchildren.