Psalm 50 (links validated 11/4/24a)

Sometimes today we find the idea of sacrifice noble and attractive and at other times not so much. In baseball we have “sacrifice” fly balls when a player willingly hits the ball deep into the outfield knowing it will be caught and he will be out but he does it so his teammates already on base can advance forward or even come home to score a run. The player sacrifices the chance to get another hit added to his batting average for the good of the team. And of course another place you hear of the concept of sacrifice being cast into a positive light is military personnel who sacrifice their lives on the altar of freedom. But in a lot of other arenas, people don’t like to be told to sacrifice something. President Jimmy Carter has written that when as President he began to suggest that life had limits and that sometimes we all needed to give up some things for the greater good, that message did not sell. When the USA boycotted the Olympics in Moscow to protest Soviet policies, the message that American athletes needed to sacrifice winning medals for a greater good did not go over well. Americans prefer the idea of limitless opportunity and ambition, to go for the gusto and seize the brass ring and achieve and earn for themselves first of all. If anything, we hear about people “sacrificing” family time in order to keep climbing the ladder of success. But that kind of sacrifice does not have the ring of nobility to it. That is a sacrifice that ends up being self-serving after all. So maybe we find the sacrifice of truly valuable things to be noble when others do it but not so much when we ourselves are called to do so. Sacrifice does indeed turn out to have a lot to do with the bent of any given human heart.

("The theologian James Alison has written about this kind of worship designed to create an experience as what he calls 'Nuremberg worship.' He's referring to the rallies that took place in Nazi Germany leading up to the Second World War...")