Sacrifice

We can readily understand that as parents we often sacrifice our money and our time to give opportunity for our children. To sacrifice is a deliberate action that we take, knowing the consequences for ourselves, but we do this so that in some way life may be made better for our children.

2. The thing offered or given up in this way.

The sacrifice in the above example is the money and our time.

3. The offering of something to a deity in order to win favour.

And so I made some notes of my thoughts about ‘praise and worship’ as a being in some way a sacrifice, and filed them away for future reference.

I found those notes a week or so ago, and I realized that in just a very few days we will celebrate Remembrance Day here in Canada. And as we approached November 11th, I thought about the meaning of “sacrifice”, in the sense of “the giving up of something of value for the sake of something else”, and how very much Remembrance Day has to do with Sacrifice.

So before I explain my thoughts about the sacrifice entailed in praise and worship, let me share with you some very personal experiences of another sacrifice, one that has had a tremendous impact on all of us here in Canada, and indeed the world.

In the year 1943, in the very middle of the Second World War, I was 14 years old and in High School in Regina Sask. There were Army and Air Force training bases all around the city, and it was impossible not to be very impressed with all the strong and vital young men in the armed forces who trained there, and who arrived and departed in crowds through the Regina Union Railway station. It was inconceivable for me to think at that time that many of those young men who left on those trains would never come back.

In November and December of 1943 there was a fierce battle of the Second World War in and around an Italian town called Ortona. That battle took place at this time of year, almost exactly 60 years ago, and the main allied force in that fierce battle was the Canadian Army 2nd division. At the time we all knew that there had been many casualties, but it happened far away, in a land I knew nothing about, and as no one close to our family was directly involved, it meant very little to me personally, other than we were told that it was a great victory for the Canadian Army.

Twenty three years later, in 1966, I went to work in Italy for 5 years, and during that time my family and I traveled to many parts of that beautiful country, and we made sure that we visited the Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries where Canadian Service men were buried. There are several British Commonwealth military cemeteries in Italy that are all Canadian – one in particular, near a small Sicilian town called Agira, that we found very sad and lovely.

But the one that I shall always remember was just outside the town of Ortona, on the eastern, Adriatic coast of the Italian peninsula. We first went to visit the Canadian Military Cemetery at Ortona in late 1968 – 25 years after that fierce battle of November and December 1943.

There are 485 young Canadian men buried there, mostly soldiers but also a few RCAF airmen. The cemetery is set on a flat hill looking over the Adriatic Sea on one side, and across the valley of the Moro River, to the ancient town of Ortona on another. The passage of twenty-five years had healed the scars on the land and in the city, and it was difficult to imagine the cold, the mud, and the horrible death of many young men on that now peaceful, beautiful site.

In 1968, when we visited, there were mature trees, which will now be old trees, and there were flowers everywhere - and I’m sure there still are; and the 485 white marble headstones, with engraved maple leafs, were set in a pristine green lawn, in neat and well tended rows. We walked those rows of crosses to read the names of men who in 1943 had been young, vital and strong, and who will never grow old. Their hometowns were places like Wetaskiwin Alberta and Assiniboia Sask., and in one row, side-by-side, there were three Cameron brothers from Pictou, Nova Scotia.

As I remembered those visits again this past week, I tried also to remember the reasons why these young men from Canada were willing to go so far away and to risk their lives. Those today who are under 65 years of age may find it very difficult to understand the apprehension, and even fear that existed in the Free World in 1943 - a fear that our Institutions of Democracy could be lost to the Dictator of Nazi Germany and the War Lords of Japan. All of Europe and most of Eastern Asia were experiencing horrible repression and ethnic extermination. Only Great Britain and the Commonwealth and the United States stood against these great evils.

The young men of Canada responded to this threat to our freedoms by offering themselves as a Sacrifice. Most didn’t think of it in those terms, but I think they knew, that in some way their future and the future of their families depended on their being willing to risk their lives. We in Canada today owe our incredible freedoms to all of those young men – to those who came home, as well as to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Those young Canadian men who died at Ortona and Monte Cassino, and indeed all over the world – Hong Kong, in France, in Germany; and in the air and at sea, during 1939 to 1945, gave up “something of value” – all of their futures - their very lives, for the sake of “something else”. That ‘something else’ is the tremendous freedom and the opportunities which people of my generation, our children, our grandchildren, and our great-grand children now enjoy in Canada. Those young Canadian men who died in that horrible war, both made the SACRIFICE and they were the SACRIFICE.

We know too that young Canadian men and women have made that SACRIFICE in our day too; in a war to prevent a sinister terrorism that hates our way of life from destroying our Western, Christian, democratic institutions.

We must always remember that their SACRIFICE ‘made holy’ our Country, our own lives, and the lives of all our children, grandchildren and generations to come.

Of course, as Christians, we believe that the most incredible SACRIFICE ever made was the ultimate sacrifice of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. The “something of value” that was offered up on The Cross was nothing less than the only Son of our Creator God, and the “something else” for which that Sacrifice was made is nothing less than the very soul of every man, woman and child. We are all the “something else” for which Christ was sacrificed.

Before Jesus Christ entered directly into the history of the world, and became the final sacrifice, the Jewish people believed that God required a perpetual animal sacrifice – primarily to cleanse their sin, although sacrifices were also made in expectation of God’s material blessings as well.

As the Apostle Paul tells us in his letter to the Hebrews 9:25-26; the Jewish High Priest went into the Most Holy Place of the temple every year with the blood of an animal. But Christ did not offer himself many times, for then he would have had to suffer many times. Instead, now, when all ages of time are nearing the end, he has appeared once and for all, to remove sin THROUGH THE SACRIFICE OF HIMSELF.

We know that our relationship with God does not depend on any Sacrifice of our personal possessions, or our time. We cannot give up anything we have of value to achieve a right-relationship with God. In fact, there is no possible way, regardless of our wealth and effort, that we could sacrifice anything material to gain God’s favour. But we don’t need to make that sacrifice – Jesus has done it for us, once and for all.

But what about that statement that I mentioned – the sacrifice of praise and worship?

When we lift our voices in song and praise, we might think “what possible sacrifice could be entailed”? Why most of us truly enjoy the experience, and participate with enthusiasm! How can it be a sacrifice if we haven’t given up ‘something of value’ in the process?”

The sacrifice we make through praise and worship is that we stop looking inward – at our worries, our desires – all those inner things of such great importance to us all - and in the sacrificial act of praise and worship, to freely give up that thing we most value - our innermost selves, our intellect, our soul, and our precious ego. And in the process, as the Latin word sacrificium suggests, we are ‘made holy’.

The ‘something else of value’ that we in turn receive from God, for that sacrificial giving of our very being, is assurance that he will be our guide and our comfort every moment of our lives.

Bill Cameron is a member of St. Peter’s Anglican Church Okotoks