“Eid Al Adha – Sacrifice & Delight”

A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, November 8, 2011

Today we look at the Muslim holiday of Eid al Adha, a holy time that celebrates the story told in the Qu’ran of the Patriarch Ibrahim’s willingness to obey Allah and sacrifice his son Ishmael. The willingness was enough, and at the last moment, Allah provided a lamb as a substitute sacrifice. For Jews and Christians, a similar story is told in scripture, only the Patriarch’s name is Abraham, the son is Isaac, and the sacrifice is a ram. For all three religions, the message is the same – honoring the dedication and commitment to God that leads to willing sacrifice, even of something treasured and beloved. (For those who look askance at a deity that would even ask such a thing, all three faiths stress that God did not allow the sacrifice to take place.)

If you think that this situation is one that could never happen today, think again. Just yesterday, on a reality television program (yes! I confess! I watch reality TV!) about in-laws in conflict, I watched as an over-protective mom demanded that her son-in-law sell his muscle car, a car he had lovingly restored and worked on since high school, in order to prove that he really loved his wife, her daughter. It was the worst thing in the world to that young man, and he agonized over it. As he delayed, the mother-in-law escalated her taunts. Then, as a tow truck arrived to take the car away, the son-in-law broke down and went inside the house to hide his emotions. The mother-in-law watched from the stoop as the car was hooked to the towline, and at the last minute, seeing that her son-in-law was willing to go through with it, she asked the tow truck driver to disengage. She was convinced the young man truly loved her daughter, and the sale itself was unnecessary.

“Sacrifice” is another one of those religious terms that we Unitarian Universalists have trouble with. In last week’s service, we looked at a selection from a young UU blogger who was near despair with this religious movement because of the inability or unwillingness of the UUs around her to discuss traditional terms like salvation, sin, and redemption in UU terms. The blogger Wondertwisted did not mention sacrifice, but she might well have added it to the list of words that UUs don’t want to talk about.

Sacrifice, like salvation last week, is a term that Unitarian Universalists can relate to better once we look at its original meaning. Sacrifice comes from two Latin words, sacer, holy or sacred, and facere, to make or to do – so its original sense was “to make holy” or “to perform a sacred function.” Like the familiar legend of the bluebonnets, of the Indian child who sacrifices her favorite doll in order to bring rain to her tribe, a sacrifice can be a giving away, a giving up, or a giving to one’s God. It is taking something that might be thought mundane or ordinary, and making it holy.

I want to talk about sacrifice today, and not just because today is the start of the Muslim holiday of Eid Al Adha, and not just because we religious liberals can relate to the original meaning of the word. I want to look squarely at the idea of sacrifice for religious liberals, because I believe sacrifice is not only essential to spiritual life, but to all meaningful relationships. I believe that sacrifice is inextricably intertwined with all the delight in our lives.

I know that’s a big statement, so let’s unpack it. Think of everything most important in our lives – intimate partnerships, parenting and grandparenting, being part of families, achieving success in careers and avocations, belonging to a religious community, even participating as active citizens in our country. Every single thing that we can name that is important to us requires a certain amount of sacrifice. Maybe we don’t use that word for our choices in all those different areas, but sacrifice is exactly what is happening.

Take your closest, most personal relationships, whether an intimate partnership, being a parent, or just being part of a family. In order for those connections to work and to satisfy us on emotional and spiritual levels, we have to give up at least a portion of some things that normally we hold dear – complete independence, total personal autonomy, the ability to do al-most anything we want anytime we want to do it. We sacrifice those things – even if we don’t think of it that way – for a higher good, the relationships, the connections, because we believe it is even more sacred to us than our freedom. And when things are going well and the relationship is in balance, we reap great delight from that sacrifice.

The same principle applies when we exercise our talents in work that is paid or in our favorite hobby or past-time. In order to get really good at cooking or playing trumpet or writing or selling or practicing medicine or law or whatever, we have to sacrifice some of our time in order to learn basic, intermediate, and then advanced skills in our field. We have to sacrifice financially, to be educated and trained in the area of our interest, perhaps also purchasing expensive tools or instruments or materials. But in the delight we get from gaining new skills and being able to get even better doing something we love doing, we tend not to think about the sacrifice involved.

What is true for intimate relationships and for work (whether paid or unpaid), is even more true in spirituality. Belonging to a faith community, committing ourselves to a religious path, requires sacrifice. Want to sleep late on the mornings of worship services and have all your after-work time to yourself? Gotta sacrifice that. Want to spend every cent of your money for your own and your family’s current and future pleasure and security? Gotta sacrifice that too. Want to have a life free of complications, conflicts, and challenging decisions? Oh yeah, gotta sacrifice that too.

No one in relationship, in religion, or in work is completely free. In order to be partnered, to be a parent or a grandparent, to be in religious or secular community, to excel at something, each one of us makes a sacrifice of some of our precious autonomy, our individuality, our ability to be on our own, our monetary resources. We sacrifice for our delight and most often find, when things are going well, that we don’t even think of it as sacrifice.

Many of you could tell a story of sacrifice if you began ot think of it that way. It might have been after Katrina, when you were living in evacuation in someplace maybe cleaner and safer than New Orleans, a place not riven by disaster. Maybe folks around you urged you to stay. But for whatever reasons crazy to outsiders, you gave up all that and came home to New Orleans, to your ruined house that had to be rebuilt, to your near-ruined city, and this near-ruined church. It was a sacrifice, given in love, for what you thought – and hopefully still think – was a higher good.

In the spring of 2007, when Board president Ann Maclaine called me in New Jersey to tell me First Church wanted me as your Consulting Minister, I was completely delighted and accepted at once. Only later – in fact, a few hours later, when my spouse Eric asked me about it – I had to sheepishly call her back and ask how much the compensation package was. I truly didn’t know, and frankly, I didn’t care. And when she told me a figure that was considerably below the Atlanta-area congregation that wanted me as their Interim Minister, it didn’t matter. It didn’t feel like a sacrifice, because I was coming home to New Orleans and to First Church.

Sacrifice and delight are indeed two sides of one coin. These two cannot be separated. If one is a devout Muslim or a Jew or a Christian, the sacrifices made in the name of Allah, Yahweh, or God, are worth it because of the religious delight one receives from adhering to the precepts of one’s faith and obedience to one’s God. Sacrificing for one’s partner – as that partner also sacrifices for you – builds our delight in one another. Sacrificing for one’s child, for the child’s health and well-being and future, is part of the delight of being a parent. Making certain sacrifices for one’s religious community and one’s home city, to ensure its health and continuity, enhances the delight we feel in those communities.

Of course, no one’s life is all sweetness and light, and none of us is always glad about the sacrifices we make. In fact, although it is true that most of the time – when things are going well – we don’t even think of what we’re doing as “sacrifice,” when we hit potholes and rough spots in our lives and relationships our sacrifices are suddenly revealed to us (and not in a good way). In times of conflict and controversy, things we once did for love are transmuted into onerous and painful sacrifices.

In really negative circumstances, we regret the sacrifices that we once made in perfect willingness; we might demand to be repaid (as when one former spouse demands recompense for putting the other former spouse through school), or we might want some kind of punishment to be inflicted on the party that hurt us, or we might draw a line on the sacrifices we’re willing to make in the future (as when parents decides not to loan their feckless adult child any more money).

When we begin to look at it that way, it might seem like sacrifice and delight are completely separate, or even that they are opposites. We might be tempted to say that when we’re happy, there’s no sacrifice, only delight, and that when things are bad, there’s no delight, only sacrifice. But underneath we know it’s not so. Sacrifice and delight are partners, and work together in all the most important aspects of our lives; it’s just that we don’t always see them in their true light.

So it is not a question of “Will I ever sacrifice?” or “Am I willing to sacrifice?” for the simple reason that, unless we are complete hedonists or complete hermits, we already ARE sacrificing in some area or aspect of our lives. The question is instead, “What in our lives gives us the most delight, is most valuable, most sacred, to us, and what are we willing to sacrifice for its sake?” An important follow-up question might be, “And am I willing to stay the course when things get difficult?” in our relationships and in our communities.

Eid Al Adha is a Muslim festival of sacrifice. It may sound strange to our ears, celebrating sacrifice. But maybe we too need a time to remind us that sacrifice brings delight, and to reflect on what is most valuable, most sacred, in our lives, to which we would willingly sacrifice. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!