Sacrifice yourself
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
August 23, 2026—Proper 16A
Exodus 1:8-2:10; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20
“I appeal to you therefore … by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God…” (Rom 12:1). Paul would like you to know that you are the sacrifice. Which is to say that you are the offering you make to God, the gift that you give back to God, in gratitude for all that God has given you.
The challenge Paul then presents is that your gift (the gift of you, your body as a living sacrifice) must be made “holy and acceptable to God.” So we have to ask how to make it that way. I think the instinct, so often, has been to think that making our bodies holy requires getting rid of the things about our body that are, well, bodily: food and sex and all the various desires and emotions that come with living in a body. Somehow, holiness become synonymous with self-denial, as if sacrifice only means to give something up, rather than to offer your life up to God as a gift.
Which is not to downplay the spiritual growth that can come from thoughtful self-denial. Nor to ignore the ways in which our bodily appetites and desires can become disordered. But there’s nothing in this passage to suggest that the denial of the body is the central truth of holiness. In fact, what Paul goes on to talk about are the various talents and qualities we can embody, to make our lives a gift worthy to be given to God: teaching, serving, giving comfort; generosity, love, hospitality to strangers (Rom 12:6-13).
Which suggests that it is the fullness of life that becomes our gift to God. “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee.” And what God has given us is nothing less than life itself. But not just life as a disembodied spirit. God gives us life in a body, capable of pleasure and pain, driven by needs and hungers, breakable and beautiful, self-contained and yet wildly interdependent. And it’s this whole marvelous messy thing that we are called to make into a holy offering, into something that reflects Kingdom life. Not by attempting to become less bodily, but by bringing all that we have to it, to use the gifts we have in the time and place we find ourselves, to embody generosity, hope and hospitality; to let our love be genuine, and hate that which is evil (Rom 12:6-13).
Witness the way this plays out in our story from Exodus today. We’re in Egypt, in a land ruled by a king who is as fearful of losing his power as despots always are. In particular, we are told he has become afraid of the Israelites, these foreign slaves who came to Egypt to escape the famine in their own country. Their labor has surely increased the wealth and power of Egypt, but the pharaoh now worries that they are becoming so numerous that they will someday outnumber the native Egyptians.
So he orders all of the boy babies killed at birth. What’s interesting is that he seems unconcerned about the girls. He clearly has no concept of how to control population growth, and no sense that a girl might threaten his power in any way. But what happens? It’s the women. The midwives who refuse to follow his command, claiming that these Hebrew women are just so strong that they birth their babies before the midwives can even arrive. And Moses’ mother, who casts her baby in the river as commanded, but not without first placing him in a basket she has woven (side-note: the word for this basket is the same word as that used for Noah’s ark). Then there’s his own daughter, who pulls Moses out of the river. She knows he is one of the Hebrew children her father has ordered destroyed, and yet she takes him as her own to raise. Lastly there is Miriam, Moses’ sister, who quickly devises a way to bring Moses back into the circle of his own people, offering their mother as a convenient wet nurse for the child.
Most of them have little societal power, but they bring the gifts they do have to the situation they find themselves in. And Pharaoh never saw it coming. This whole web of women, who conspired together to save Moses, ended up breaking the tyrannical hold Pharaoh had over the Hebrew people. Acting out of love, from an instinctive sense of what was right, they protected a child and thereby preserved the hope of an enslaved people. They did it, the ones Pharaoh wasn’t even paying attention to.
To do so, they had to keep a secret. Which is another interesting theme in today’s readings: the part that secrecy plays in the workings of salvation. In the gospel story, Peter bursts out with his great realization: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!” and Jesus praises him for having figured it out. But then he immediately swears them all to secrecy. “Don’t tell anyone that I am the Messiah.”
We have a tendency to think of secrets as a bad thing. But in situations like these, it would be dangerous to tell the truth. Something fragile and precious would likely be destroyed if the truth got out too soon. The wrath and fear of those in power could well turn on Moses, or on Jesus, not allowing what was begun in them to grow as it needed to. Sometimes more time is necessary, some quiet for things to germinate, to spread out roots, to become stronger before confronting the opponent. Keeping silent about a good thing might be just the protection it needs to survive and flourish.
I think these elements of secrecy and surprise in today’s readings also tell us something about the nature of salvation: It won’t always come from the direction we expect it to. It might be being worked out in people we hadn’t even noticed. For Pharaoh that was the women; for us, who knows? It might be germinating right under our feet, or halfway around the world, gathering its strength to burst out and surprise us.
Salvation is unpredictable; it is wild and untamed, growing where it will and popping up in unexpected places. Keep an eye out for it. Look for people and movements fighting for liberation. Seek out sources of compassion, lovingkindness and healing. And if you are given the opportunity, do what you can to help nurture their growth. Protect them if necessary, because there are forces seeking their destruction.
Let your love be genuine, and hate what is evil. Throw your whole body into it. This is what will make you holy and acceptable to God. This is what will make your life the truest expression of gratitude, and the offering God desires.
And if our Exodus reading is to be believed, it is also what will eventually undo the forces of domination. They are more than ready to meet force with force, but they might not even notice things like compassion and mercy, and will allow them to grow unchallenged. Which means that the Kingdom of God just might sneak up on them unannounced, bringing them down, or transforming them from within.
We could do worse than to be sleeper agents for the Kingdom of God, my friends. Taking these bodies God gave us and using them, offering them to the hard and complicated work of loving each other and loving this world. We lift them to the Lord. Amen.