I was reluctant to give up on summer this year.  I always am.  In this part of the world summer is the time when life moves outside, if not literally then figuratively.  We move “out” from being surrounded all the time by walls, hemmed in by rooms – out to where it feels like we are somehow supposed to be, like our brother and sister creatures in the rest of the animal world, as St. Francis might put it.  The glory of God’s creation is evident in every season to those with eyes to see, but summer time is when it is all out there.  Gardens arrive at their ripest, trees and shrubs reach the peak of their yearly growth.  The earth is full, and we who are part of it  receive from the earth’s fullness.  We receive our food, and we receive the fullness of our senses - the aromas of blooming flowers and plants, the feeling of carpets of grass on our bare feet, the shelter of trees from the heat of the sun.

In the last two weeks I have suggested that the seasons of the year provide a helpful way for us to see our own lives of faith and what God desires of us and for us.  Specifically, we are speaking of “sacrifice,” a posture toward life which acknowledges that though our tendency is to want to keep and hold on to what is ours, a richer, fuller life is to be found in letting go and giving what is ultimately not our own, but gifts from the hand of our loving creator.  We began with “winter” as the season of stillness and quietness, when life moves inward.  We viewed this as a metaphor for the life that stirs beneath the surface of our visible lives, of how we need to be attentive to these stirrings, for that is where the work of new and transformed life, of sacrificial living, has to take hold if it is to grow.  Spring is the season of transformation, when the work of love and sacrifice begins to emerge in our lives, like the shoot of a plant that breaks through the crust of the earth, or like the caterpillar that emerges from his cocoon with a new form, ready for a new and transformed life.

As we move now to the consideration of the summer of sacrifice, I am struck mostly by this sense of “fulness,” of growth reaching its peak just before the harvest, of lush landscapes – and I was turned toward the gospel of John, just after the beginning, where the gospel writer speaks of Jesus as the fulness of God’s grace and truth, and that from his fulness we have received grace upon grace.  Jesus is God’s summer among us!  God is entirely “out there” through the life of the son.  God holds nothing back, but in Christ God’s love is fully shown and given to the world: the lushness of his forgiveness, the fragrance of his mercy, the ripeness of his love.  And we, as fellow children of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus, have received from that fulness “grace upon grace.”

If sacrifice is giving up, letting go, giving over something that is important to you for something that is more important, then, as we have said in the last two sermons, sacrifice is something that must be intentional on our part.  Sacrificial giving, which comes from living sacrificially, is something that is arrived at through a spiritual journey that takes us through our own resistance to it.  It acknowledges that growth in living faithfully and sacrificially is not and cannot be an easy thing, because growth of any kind is not accomplished without discomfort and sometimes even pain.  A year that begins in the quiet stirrings of life beneath the surface, that emerges in new and hopeful growth into the living of our days, now grows into maturity in the season just before the harvest. 

If we are to realize the life that receives “grace upon grace,” we have to come out from behind the walls and out of the rooms that we have constructed to keep us safe and secure, and test our wings in the fresh air and open spaces of God’s love.  We cannot truly live sacrificially if our world, the world over which we exercise control, is confined only to what is reasonable and realistic in our own minds.  When we sacrifice we are giving God something to work with, something over which we have given up control because it has not come out of our abundance, but from the substance of our lives that we had considered necessary for our own security.  We are leaving our own little houses of faith and offering our own lives and resources to what God would accomplish in us and through us for the work of the kingdom.

It is very much like that wonderful image that C.S. Lewis offers when he tells about how he invited God into his life.  He thought of it like acquiring the services of a contractor to come into your house and make a few improvements.  A new closet here, a little more room there, repair a few stairs maybe.  But no, when God came into his “house,” he completely remodeled the place, adding rooms, opening up the ceiling and putting a cupola up there.     

Our Lord, it seems, is very much interested in having followers who are living “expanded” lives, lives that are enlarged by our openness to the Lord who will respond to our invitation to come into our “house;” but we shouldn’t pre-determine the outcome of that engagement, for God has greater plans for us than our own small vision often allows. 

How does a spirit of sacrifice mature in us so that we might come to that point we find it to be life-giving and faith-growing?  I think it is the result of a meeting between the fulness of God and the emptiness that we bring to it.  There is no better scriptural illustration than the meeting between Jesus and the rich young man who came to him asking what he must do to inherit eternal life.  That he had followed the commandments of God his whole life said to Jesus that he was well on his way.  Keep at it, Jesus said, and you will live.  He had reached a certain level of maturity in his faith.  But he was even more mature in acknowledging to Jesus that this was not enough.  It was not enough simply to keep the religious laws, as difficult as that is.  He knew there had to be more, something that his own achievements in righteousness to that point could not deliver.  Because he pressed the point, Jesus told him that there was one thing he lacked - to go and sell everything he had and give the money to the poor, and come follow him.  He knew Jesus was right; he also knew that he couldn’t do it - so he went away sorrowfully.

For us the options are seldom so clear, nor so extreme.  We aren’t characters in a biblical story, yet our own lives are reflected there.  And it is indeed a sign of maturity when we are able to come to the Lord in the recognition that our own efforts are not enough to ensure the fulness of life that is God’s salvation.  We too ask what more we can do to ensure it, and it would be a good exercise for each of us, I think, to consider what in Jesus’ response to us would make us walk away sorrowfully.  Perhaps that is where God is working on us.

What the rich young man missed, apparently, was the “fulness of grace and truth” that was standing in front of him.  What we do is vitally important, before and after that meeting between his fulness and our own emptiness.  But listen again to the options that Jesus put before him: keep obeying the commandments; sell everything you have and come follow me.  In the young man’s mind the first wasn’t enough, the second was too much.  Jesus knew what he needed, and I think we are safe in confessing that God probably knows what we need better than we do ourselves, and for us to discover what that is we need to be open to possibilities we had not even considered before.