Burnt Offerings: Sharing our Gifts with
the World
“The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great upon
the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only
evil continually. And the Lord was sorry
he had made humankind on the earth and it grieved him continually. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the
earth the human beings I have created – people together with animals and
creeping things and birds of the air – for I am sorry I made them.”[1]
Now those are words you definitely do not want to hear if you
happened to be living anywhere in the Biblical world, especially if you haven’t
reserved a berth on the good ship Noah’s Ark – because the last planks had
barely been nailed into place and the last slow-poke platypus stowed onboard
before the God of the Hebrew Bible spoke the words that caused the “fountains
of the great deep to burst forth, and the windows of the heavens to be
opened.” Rain fell for forty days and
forty nights, annihilating the world that was.[2]
Many of us are familiar with the rest of the story. “The waters swelled for one-hundred and fifty
days” before they began to recede. After
a few months in the cramped and probably smelly ark, Noah released a dove,
which came back with an olive branch, and then another, which never came back
at all, and was presumably busy building a cozy nest to call home. At any rate, Noah knew it was safe to leave
the boat.
So they all walked, crawled, slithered, hopped and flew out
of the ark – two-by-two – squinting into the unfamiliar glare of a bright and
cloudless sky. “Then Noah built an altar
to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and clean bird and offered burnt
offerings on the altar. And when the
Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again
curse the ground because of humankind; nor will I ever again destroy every
living creature as I have done. As long
as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter,
day and night shall not cease. And the
Lord blessed them.”[3]
This mythic moment is one of the most important in Judaism,
Islam and Christianity – for it is in this moment, as the world is wracked in
mud and fear and an unclear future, that God makes a new covenant with all of
Creation, promising not just humans, but all living things that no matter how
many times we may go astray or break our vows to one another and to God – God
will never again cut off his part of the relationship, but will instead leave
his hand forever stretched out in fellowship to the rest of creation. We are told that the rainbow is a symbol and
reminder of that promise – the promise to save and to serve creation instead of
using, consuming or destroying it. The
rainbow then is a symbol of the loving interconnectedness of all things in the
web of life.
This is a great story, and I have loved it ever since I was a
little boy. But today I want to focus on
one little piece of it. Burnt offerings.
It would be easy to read Noah’s offerings cynically or
literally, as nothing more than ritualized murder, an attempt to pacify an
angry and vengeful God. But I think to
do so is to miss out on a good deal of wisdom.
Most biblical scholars do not believe that the Bible was or intended to
be a literal record of people and events, but a mythic and symbolic tapestry to
help people make meaning and live well in a terribly complex and dangerous
world.
One way to read this story is to read it symbolically, which
is how I will use it today. Before the
flood, communities had fractured and frayed as people became more and more
selfish, greedy and violent. Human
beings were increasingly cut off and alienated from one another and from
god. Relationships were lost and
promises were broken.
Without the web-like network of relationships that holds
creation together, the world as it was could not keep itself together. It collapsed in flood and darkness.
And even after the water receded it could have remained that
way, every person and every animal for themselves. But the first thing Noah did after he
staggered down that wobbly gangplank was to build an altar and offer up the
precious animals and birds he and his family depended on for their very
survival. But what wafted up in soft
smoke-spirals was not just burning meat – but Noah, himself. Noah, by offering up what was most precious
to him, was reaching out beyond himself, and renewing, on symbolic behalf of
all humanity, our relationship with the rest of Creation.
And this, for me, is the crux of this story – when Noah,
humanity, reached out beyond himself in a spirit of giving, fellowship and
commitment – God, creation – accepted his offering, took his hand and offered
deeply of itself in return. This kind of
relationship is what Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would call inter-being, in action.
This view of sacrifice or offering can be found in many
cultures and faith traditions. Although
when we hear the word “sacrifice”, many of us may think, in a knee-jerk way,
about losing something, or giving something up that we would rather keep – the
word sacrifice, from the Latin, actually means “to make sacred.” In Hebrew the term is korban, and means “to draw near.”
In both cases, the giving of oneself is seen as a profoundly sacred
activity; one that draws us deeper into relationship with one another and with
the rest of creation.
In Hinduism this concept is called “yajna.” Hindus believe that
all of life is should be an offering – called “jivayajna”, an offering of oneself – through which comes spiritual
fulfillment. By walking the path of
self-sharing we gradually learn that we are not separate entities, not isolated
units – but part of a great whole.
In the great Hindu sacred text the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna
tells us that all of creation began with the sacrifice or offering-of-self of God
and that all of life consists of graciously and respectfully accepting the
offerings of people and of nature even as we continually offer of ourselves in
return. The greatest sin is to remove
oneself from the open flow of sharing. The Gita tells us that, “whoever enjoys
what she gives without returning is, indeed, a thief.”[4]
This passage reminds me of a funny teaching story by the
Islamic Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, who tells us that:
A dervish knocked at a house
to ask for a piece of dry bread,
or moist, it didn’t matter.
“This is not a bakery,” said the owner.
“Might you have a bit of gristle then?”
“Does this look like a butcher shop?”
“A little flour?”
“Do you hear a grinding stone?”
“Some water?”
“This is not a well.”
Whatever the dervish asked for,
the man made some tired joke
and refused to give him anything.
Finally the dervish ran into the house,
lifted his robe and squatted
as though he were about to relieve himself.
“Hey, hey!”
“Quiet you sad man. A
deserted place
is a fine spot to relieve oneself,
and since there’s no living thing here,
or means of living, it needs fertilizing.”[5]
In contrast, Tibetan Buddhists take the idea of offering as
relationship to a whole new level – or altitude, I should say. Many Tibetans practice a rite called
Sky-burial, where every part of a dead body is broken apart and fed to
scavengers, especially great birds of prey like the Eurasian Griffin, a giant
and awe-inspiring vulture. As the great
birds feed and fly away to hatch their young, life is fed by death, which will
in turn result in more life and more death – and so the great wheel turns –
powered in part, by our offerings.
In many cultures, from Judaism to Hinduism to Tibetan
Buddhism and on and on and on, offering and sacrifice are seen as core spiritual
practices, and the various rituals of sacrifice are there to help remind us
(forgetful and easily distracted as we are) to live our daily lives in a spirit
of offering. In the end, the act of
offering oneself is a continual affirmation of our belief that everything is
connected, that relationships must always come first and that we must always
strive to be brave enough and loving enough to reach beyond ourselves – out
into the unknown sky.
I know all of this can get pretty abstract pretty fast, so
let me share a story with you that captures the spirit of offering. A good friend of mine is a social
worker. She has been working for years
at a shelter for victims of domestic violence and their children. Needless to say, she has seen and heard some
terrible things, but she loves to tell this story.
The shelter was over-full as always. It was too cold outside and too hot inside
from too many bodies and a heater with an overzealous sense of
responsibility. Women and children were
packed in tight, with only a cot or a narrow mattress to call their own. Tempers were running hot as well, with
arguments breaking out over the tiniest things and imagined insults resulting
in bitter tears.
Into this tinderbox came little Juliana and her mom. They had just left home, with all its
attendant abuse, a few hours ago – and not for the first time. Hopefully, my friend thought – this time they
wouldn’t go back. They had run away with
nothing but the clothes on their backs and now they sat together on a bare mattress,
stunned. Juliana looked too lost and
afraid even to cry; she just sat there with her thumb in her mouth and her eyes
focused on the empty air in front of her.
One of the other children, Jacqueline, was playing on the
floor nearby. Jacqueline and her mom had
been at the shelter for a while now, but they too had left home with almost
nothing. All Jacqueline had was a dirty
and well-loved stuffed-animal bunny. She
literally never let go of it, not for a second – not when she slept, not when
she bathed, not when she ate – she had lost a lot, but there was no way
Jacqueline was going to lose that little pink rabbit!
A few hours went by as it rained a steady drip outside. Juliana was still sitting there on that
mattress, more or less unmoved, when suddenly, as if she had appeared out of
the ground, Jacqueline was standing there in front of her with her little
chubby arm outstretched. Juliana’s eyes
slowly focused on the dangling pink bunny held out toward her by one ear. Slowly, hesitantly, she reached out and took
the bunny and then hugged it to her chest.
She didn’t say thank-you and Jacqueline didn’t seem to expect one. She went back to playing, and little Juliana
still sat where she was, but now cradling and rocking a new friend. The night passed uneventfully, but the next
morning, the two girls were playing as if they were sisters.
My friend tells me that she has had to summon up this memory
more than once when her faith in humanity was slipping. It always makes her smile and renews her belief
that the work she does is important and that love can rise up unannounced even
in that shelter.
Jacqueline made an offering, a sacrifice. She saw a lost and hurting stranger, and
freely offered up her most cherished treasure.
On one level it was just a little pink bunny – but it was also an
offering of profound love and support.
We all know how easy it is to give deeply and freely to those we love –
but strangers are in a whole different ball park. Little Jacqueline gave deeply of herself with
no expectation of return. She just
opened the doors of her heart and let go.
I cannot imagine a more beautiful offering than that, and I can only
hope to someday be able to live that way myself, even just for a moment.
A life of offering oneself is like anything else, you have to
practice and practice and then practice some more. And you have to fall short – a lot. But every act of offering, every time we let
our hearts float up out of our chests into the unknown - draws us nearer to the
deep relationships we can have with one another and indeed with all of
creation. Every time we offer our
treasures, letting them rise freely in the air like plumes of scented smoke –
we are that much more likely to feel another heart or another hand, taking ours
gently in friendship.
So let our lives increasingly be lived in a spirit of
individual and collective offering.
Through our actions we affirm all we hold sacred. Every day has the potential for us to take
one more step in a continual journey of offering; of giving and receiving. We must integrate these lessons into our
small, and often difficult daily lives as we grow ever more able to see our own
faces in the faces of every stranger.
I have mostly been talking about collective offerings this
morning, but the spirit of an offering life is also deeply personal and
individual. Remember, the central
purpose of offering is to nurture, heal or strengthen relationships. It is to extend oneself unconditionally so
that connections can be made, healed or deepened.
Are their people in your life you would like to make an
offering to? To offer-of-yourself
to? Are there offerings you feel called
to make to your family and friends? To
this, and other communities of which you are a part? It is important to answer this question: to
whom and to what do I want to offer of myself – and once you answer that
question, the next step is just to make a commitment to yourself to start doing
it, just a little more each day.
Please join me know for a time of silence.