Sacrifice and Inconvenience

I was down in Cajun country this weekend, catching up with an old college buddy – a Mississippi transplant who’s spent the last six years adjusting to Lafayette, with some limited success. Our conversations wandered across a wide range of topics, but one of the things that we kept coming back to – given the similarity of our vocations (he’s a pastor, which is just another way of saying he’s a glorified teacher who wears a funny collar and doesn’t have to grade papers) – was the idea of “community” and the necessity of sacrifice, especially in education.

I think our modern culture has lost perspective. That’s a truism, I realize, and it’s probably been said by more people, at more distinct periods of history, than just the talking heads we see on the Fox News Channel or on Sunday mornings behind the pulpit. By way of example, though, think about the two words in the post-title up there. When most of us think about sacrifice, we think about depriving ourselves of something. We think about “going without” by giving to others. Especially as our 101 sections approach the service-learning component of the course, it’s going to be easy for us to throw around that word “sacrifice”: “Yeah, I sacrificed some of my time on Saturday afternoon to play with the kids from the Baptist Children’s Village.” And it’s something that your Comp professors – that all professors – are susceptible to, also: we “sacrifice” our efforts, our time, our abilities, and our economic well-being in order to teach.

[Digression: If you haven’t yet noticed, education is not a lucrative career. But honestly, have you ever thought about the fact that just about any of your profs here could be pulling a salary twice as large in the private sector?]

But that’s a misunderstanding, or at least a limited understanding, of what that word “sacrifice” means. You see, based on all those examples in the previous paragraph, we’re not actually “going without,” even though that’s what we mean by “sacrifice.” The student still has some free time on Saturday – presumably she didn’t spend 18 hours with the BCV kids – and even if she doesn't have any free time on Saturday, she'll have some on Sunday, or Monday, or ... And we profs still have our own little private spheres, however tiny they might be, of activity and freedom and intellectual stimulation, and we still get a paycheck, however tiny that might be. Sure, we’ve been deprived, temporarily, of total autonomy – of being able to do what we want with what we have. But that means that we’ve been “inconvenienced”: we may have experienced a hiccup in our normal routine, or a slight depression in terms of our liquid assets, but we have not “sacrificed.”

The biblical paradigm is substantially different. The exemplar is, of course, Christ. But when we think of sacrifice these days, we think in a more Old Testament kind of way: “Okay, I’ll send this heifer over to the altar, but I’m keeping the other fifty-two.” “An offering? Sure. I can manage sacrificing a tenth of my grain harvest.” Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure there was some sort of emotional twang when you saw that bushel of grain being consumed by fire, that finely-ground meal for which you had sweated and labored by (1) tilling the ground; (2) planting the seed; (3) tending the field; (4) harvesting the heads; (5) threshing and culling the grain; and (6) grinding the meal. There’s a lot of time and effort in that, no doubt, so it was a real, tangible loss. But the whole point is that it is a representative portion of your life and livelihood – not the whole thing. Those kinds of “sacrifices” are metaphorical, typological, and symbolic.

But Christ’s example is totalitarian. That’s part of the pathos of the Gospels, if pathos is a word that can be applied to the divine. He didn’t just give one-tenth, not even one-half, of what was asked of him. All. Everything. Entirety. Nothing held back, nothing reserved, nothing to “fall back on.” Some of you will remember Christ's words in John 12, “Unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die, it doesn’t bring forth anything; but if it does die, it produces lots” (or something to that effect). Or a couple of chapters over (15), “The greatest love involves laying your life down.” It seems that what Christ’s teachings and example are telling us is that the only way to achieve any lasting, eternal, significant value in life, is to sacrifice. Not inconvenience; not temporary deprivation; not – however willingly – experiencing an annoyance, obstacle, hindrance, or bother in our pursuit of our goals. Rather, abandonment.

And so I’m forced to re-assess my own life, and this grand project of education that we’re all involved in. To what extent do we treat education as an “inconvenience”? As something to be endured for four, twelve, eighteen years, before we can get on with “real life”? As peripheral, something on the side, something that makes our life a “little bit extra,” something that distinguishes us from the uneducated? I don’t want to know your answers; I’m already depressingly aware of my own. Apparently, if we accept the biblical model, our education will produce no lasting effects unless we singularly rethink our approach to it. It will remain just an “optional feature” – something that we can trot out at dinner parties to appear clever or intellectual, or something that enables us to get the job before the next guy – unless we sacrifice ourselves for (or “to”?) it. It will not change us; it will not help us change the world; it will only remain a dust-covered trunk, stuck up in our attic, with all the old notebooks and mementoes from our four years at Mississippi College.

But we’re also neglecting the other part of the biblical paradigm. Namely, that if we do sacrifice, there are results. Always. The kernel of grain that falls to the ground and dies produces a whole field full. [Incidentally, remember the etymology of education? educare? to draw out, to bring forth…the seed metaphor that we talked about?] The one Man who lays down his life for his friends produces a whole new race of sons and daughters of God. I can’t imagine what the corresponding result would be if we sacrificed our lives for education, for knowing the truth (the Truth), not in some intellectual elitist sort of way (“I know more than you do”), but because we realized that without that Truth we will remain bound up in our tiny, separate, ineffectual, temporal, and – dare I say it? – wasted lives.

Go and die, my friends.

But not before you've written your first essay.