Etymology, is the study of words and where they came from and how they were formed. The internet is so amazing, because in about 3 minutes, I was able to find out where the word Sacrifice originated and what it meant to our ancestors who first invented and used the word.
In my own life, when I thought of the word “Sacrifice” I always thought of just “giving something up because God commanded it”. “Well, God says so, so I have to do it!” "It’s a commandment." "Sacrifice is hard, and if it wasn’t hard it wouldn’t be a sacrifice." The word always brought up associations of drudgery and pain and suffering. Unpleasantness.
This is what I found out by looking up the etymology of Sacrifice. Sacrifice, from the ancient pre-Latin (as in, the old old Indo-Europeans, like, the tribes who lived in southern-central Europe used the word “Sacer,” to make Holy, or...more accurately…. To make a treaty. IE, to pay the price for help. To offer something to get something in return. Doing business. Paying a fee in exchange for a good or service. Paying the price to belong to a community or group.
Mind blown.
Understanding where this root word comes from set off a few light bulbs. Ohhhhhhhh, God doesn’t ever just “command” something just to make us do it, just to test our obedience. He asks for a Sacrifice in return for his blessings, his protections, his gifts.
Abraham didn’t offer Isaac as a sacrifice just because God commanded it. He offered Isaac, because he knew and trusted that God would find some way to bless him in return, or to continue blessing him. Abraham had been blessed by God and had learned to trust him, and now when God asked Abraham for his most loved “possession” (for lack of a better word), his Son, he had to have trusted that God would make it up to him somehow. And we know that Abraham did trust God, and that God DID make it up to him.
Let’s see if this new understanding of “sacrifice” holds up other places: Ancient Israel, or even before that, Adam, Sacrificing their livestock, their expensive, labor-intensive animals to God. Adam told the angel, in response to why he was offering the sacrifice, “I know not, save the Lord commanded it.” Now, why would Adam do what God commanded, if he didn’t trust that God had already made it up to him or would make it up to him in the future? That’s not explicitly stated, but we can infer that Adam trusted God. If a complete stranger walks up to us on the street and says, “Give me your car.” We don’t give it to them. It’s worth too much and is too important to our daily work to just give it away.
But if a stranger walked up to us at the car dealership and said, “I’ll give you…$50,000 for your car,” we’d probably take it, unless it’s a car as awesome as my 1996 Subaru Legacy with fading paint, cracked windshield, non-functional headlight and 250,000 miles on the odometer. Just four more years and that things gonna be considered a “classic” and it’s value will automatically SKYROCKET, I just know it! Especially since Utah isn’t going to require Safety Inspections on it after the New Year! Now, if only I can get it to pass Safety next month, so I can drive it until January…...
Back to sacrifices: What about the Savior’s Great and Infinite Sacrifice? What was he giving up? He was giving up his life as he had agreed with Heavenly Father and with all of us in the Grand Council. He paid a greater price through physical and emotional pain and suffering than we’ll ever understand. What did he gain in return? What was the other half of the “treaty”? His Godhood. His Eternal Salvation, and also the keys and abilities to give us….ours. Woa. Amazing. What is your Eternal Life worth? I don’t know if we’ll ever truly understand until we’ve got it, but knowing Heavenly Father, I’m sure we will understand it someday when we have the capacity to. Like, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
In my search for the original meaning of “sacrifice” one of the meanings it gave for “sacer”, also meant, “to make Holy”. But Holy is some word that modern humans attached to Sacer to help us understand it. Turns out Holy came northern Europe, and is rooted to the word “Hal” H-A-L, as in Hallowed, or things like “Halls” or “Coverings” or “Safe Places”. The kinds of places where ancient tribal or nomadic people took shelter from storms and wild animals, to gather together as a community.
What is God, to us? Holy. What is the Temple to us? Holy. What about our Familes, our Homes? Holy. Literally, the Halls where we seek shelter and safety.
I just finished reading this really cool book about Norse Mythology. Something that features REALLY REALLY prominently in Norse Mythology are “Halls”. Ancient vikings, they didn’t have much for architecture. Each Village built Halls as gathering places, where they dined, ate, slept, counselled, met, partied, danced, and just about everything else. Communal rooms that were multi-functional to gather and protect themselves from the outside world. Odin had a great Hall. Their giant enemies had halls. The dead were gathered together in Halls, like Valhalla. To them, Halls, were, Holy, literally. The two words basically meant the same thing. Safety and protection. So fitting.
So when we Sacrifice something, we are entering a treaty, to make something Holy, or Protected. We may not always realize it, but our sacrifices, are —in effect— buying protection from God.
What do we need Safety and protection from? The world, the universe, chaos, destruction, entropy, Satan, the Adversary. All of these things. Do we know how dangerous the world and the universe can be? Not always. We learn more and more as we get older and older.
I’m sure there were members of each village who chose to leave the safety and protection of their halls, either out of a need to grow, or out of a dislike and discomfort of being around their communities, feeling out of place. I'll talk about that more in a bit.
It sounds a little funny to think like we can “purchase” protection, or blessings from God, and truthfully, sacrificing what he asks of us is not quite the same thing, but it’s not too far off. He gives a killer deal. One we don’t really deserve. Like that story of the little girl who sees a new bike in the store but doesn’t have the money to pay for it. She goes home and works her tail off to earn money for the bike, but after spending all her energy on it, she goes to her Dad to show how much she’s proudly earned and finds that she is ridiculously short on the amount needed for it. He knows how hard she’s worked and makes her a deal, a “treaty” of sorts. If she gives him what she has worked so hard to accomplish, if she “sacrifices” her money to him, he will make up the difference and buy the bike for her. She happily agrees to this and gets to ride her new bike home, both sides fulfilling their sides of the treaty. Both sacrificing for the other.
Often, we can’t see the other side of the sacrifice. We won’t be able to see the good that will come from the price we pay. We can’t see what good our payment does for others, and that’s okay. We live in a world where we can’t always pay back a service that was done to us. We can’t make up a sacrifice back to the person who did good for us. We live in a world where “Pay It Forward” is the norm. I can’t build my own home but others can. I can fix teeth and get people healthier, when they can’t do it for themselves. And most of time,we won’t be in a situation where we can trade homes for dentistry. The person who needs their teeth fixed, can fix someone else’s car, who can make someone else’s clothes, for someone who can design office buildings, for someone else who understands law, for someone else who needs help with a business contract, for…. someone who can fix teeth? We are all paying it forward. Isn’t that cool?
How do we keep track of all this service and sacrifice that we are doing for everyone else? For all the good we do for others? How do we make sure everyone’s “treaties” are being kept? It would get too complicated, so we use things like “money”. I think of money as a way to keep track of the services and sacrifices we do for others. Some of us will be able to accumulate extra money, through our skills, hard work, abilities, and very often just good fortune and luck and blessing from God. We accumulate a service debt. Others have been served so much that they have accumulated more wealth than they need, or they’ve become so good and efficient at serving others that they can keep doing it without thought of anything in return. They, then, should take advantage of that and serve others all the more.
Think of those who are able to save for retirement and then, of their own money and time, go serve full-time missions, or in temples, or just go serve others and give back and pay forward and sacrifice for other people, some of the sacrifices that others have made for them.
Think of working, as a service. We serve our employers, we serve our customers, our clients, our patients. We are doing something for them that they cannot do for themselves. But since we can’t serve forever and ever without others serving us, we get paid in money. We’ve made a sacrifice of time, energy, expertise, or knowledge. So that we can make sure to properly receive the sacrifices of others in a fair way, we are paid for our efforts. Then we can honestly and fairly ask others to sacrifice for us the things we cannot do for ourselves.
Personally, I protect others by finding and providing ways to get them out of pain, to improve their ability to eat and stay healthy, and by improving their confidence or reducing embarrassment so they feel comfortable around others. I’m a dentist. It’s not always a glamorous job, and not always a job that others…..envy, but I gotta be honest, I love it. I get to meet thousands and thousands of strangers, and in the process of trying to convince them to let me do something for them that they don’t want me to do that would be good for them, I have gained and learned a lot more social skills than I gained from childhood or than came naturally.
I feel really lucky to get to do what I do, and I’m not even seeing financial benefit from it yet, having to take care of some tremendous other expenses (student loans, cough, cough). I think dentistry is so amazing, and there’s so much more cool stuff that I’m not even doing yet that I hope to learn someday. The education I received to get here has been incredibly valuable. Learning about science and anatomy and physiology and DNA, and how atoms and molecules and sunlight and food bring life. It’s soooooo cool! And then learning about human fears and anxieties and addictions and other compensating behaviors. And through the awful, stressful struggle of trying to start my own business pretty much from scratch and making all sorts of blunders along the way, I’ve learned a great deal more about finance and economics and business and customer service, and entrepreneurship.
By the way, I saw an article the other day that summed it up nicely, the headline was. “Entrepreneurship is Service, How are You Serving Others?!” The idea is, if you serve others, you’ll be served in return. So, while I’m not receiving the temporal benefits I was looking for in my career choice, the blessings I have received from the sacrifices I’ve made are irreplaceable.
Now, very often, very, very, often, we are not dealt with life fairly, we’ve made sacrifices that we can’t be compensated for, or we receive blessings that we didn’t earn or deserve. In those very abundant cases (they are all over the place), we sometimes just have to give freely and generously, and others of us have to receive generously and freely. We share through fast offerings, through charity, through missionary funds, through donations. It’s a great way to level out the uneven playing field of this planet Earth, of this mixed up crazy mortal life. Unfortunately, we tend to think of these charitable moments as the only sacrifices we make.
What do we get out of being charitable and generous? What’s the other half of the treaty? Why do we do it? We do it for the love of our God, for our Heavenly Father. We do it to fulfill his commandments and earn his blessings and love in return. We do it to be loving to others. I’m not going to pretend to know the motives for each of you for why we are loving to others in every unique instance. The bottom line is that sacrificing, of investing some portion of ourselves to others, is hard, it’s difficult. We are doing it in the hope that we’ll be alright for doing so, or that it’ll get made up to us somehow, or, in the confidence that we have already been blessed and prospered a great deal and now get to share with others what we’ve been given. Whatever it is, giving up something that is attached to us, takes mental and emotional effort, and causes us discomfort somewhere.
I remember reading some cutesy story once upon a time, back when those endlessly forwarded emails is how we shared stuff with each other. Remember those? Before Facebook and even before Myspace, we shared cat pictures and inspirational thoughts with each other by getting an email from that one aunt who forwarded it to every single person she had in her email account. The worst were those chain emails, you know, the electric version of the old snail mail chain letters, where if you pass this inspirational story or scripture to 20 people in 30 minutes, you’ll get blessed with an unexpected gift, but if you don’t then something bad will happen? Ugh. One of those emails I got, told of a woman who lived alone in a little one room shack, surrounded by trees, and a little stream out back where she got her water, who lived a very simple but pleasant life, and had almost no possessions. When asked what she would do if she won the lottery, she thoughtlessly replied, “Oh, I would give it to the poor!” She obviously didn’t feel burdened in any way and felt she was blessed beyond what she deserves.
Our ability to sacrifice for others has less to do with what we physically own, and more with how we compare ourselves to others. We can see the wealthy who are generous, or the stingey poor. Or the flip side, you can have the poor widow who casts her only coin into the Temple Treasury in Jerusalem, and the arrogant wealthy who care for others in word only. Being poor or wealthy does not make us better or worse than anyone else. Not one bit. Nor does our status in society have anything to do with our generosity and love for others.
All can sacrifice, and fortunately, most of us do. Some of us will only be in a ward for a short time, maybe a few months, and still accept the sacrifice of a calling in Nursery or Primary where there’s a pretty solid chance they won’t get to know many other people at church for the limited time they live there. Or the sacrifice of a Bishop or Relief Society President who spends hours and hours and hours of their valuable personal time listening to the worries and troubles and heartaches of their fellow members, in the hope of offering comfort and support.
We don’t use currency in the church to keep track of our sacrifices and services. We put our trust into the hands of others. We put faith into our fellow members and to God to make it up to us, or to repay forward the sacrifices and services others have made in our behalf. We trust that by caring for the young children at church with love and dedication, others will care for ours someday, or maybe we’re past that age, and we are caring for others children, so that those parents can go serve in other ways. We have benefitted from the kind listening ear of our ward leaders in the past and are now paying it forward by helping others now.
In the temple we specifically covenant to sacrifice our time, talents, and efforts to build up the kingdom of God and the church. What’s the treaty we are entering? The covenant? We give of ourselves to the Church, to build it up. Do we benefit from a well run and fully functioning ward or branch? Absolutely! Does God bless us for it! You bet, and often he blesses those who serve and sacrifice, so that they can serve and sacrifice even more in the future. I’m not sure, but I’m guessing that President Monson and the Full time General Authorities and Presidents of the church are the kind of men and women who aren’t just willing to sacrifice and serve, but ENJOY it and can see the value that has been added to their lives by others and are eager to perform the same value for those they get to serve now.
Sometimes we get short-sighted. We fail to see how blessed we are, or what we need to invest of ourselves to earn more blessings. What causes this spiritual near-sightedness? Sometimes it is sin, sometimes it is just the mists of this world. Sometimes it is just the environment or conditions we were born into. Sometimes the cares and stresses of the world are more than we know how to handle at this point in our lives. Sometimes we are held back, either unknowingly by ourselves, or by God himself and that limitation can be so frustrating that our minds are turned inward onto our plight. I think this has to be good practice for Godhood, because someday, when we are like God and have been blessed with all that He has, we may have to solve ALL the problems we encounter, even and especially when they’re hard or nearly impossible. He does give us challenges so that we can learn to solve problems creatively and lovingly and we the help of others. In my experience I would say that that ability to solve problems creatively and lovingly and with the help of others is one of, if not the most important and valuable skill in the universe. Have you seen how DNA works and carries on all life on this planet in such an amazing and beautiful way, almost entirely on its own with just plain ol’ normal physics and chemistry? I know Brother Crane could tell you. Talk about creative. And why would God do such a thing? To serve us, to give us this garden planet floating through a universe of chaos and destruction where we can live in relative safety and peace and learn and practice to be like him.
I have a young friend in California, who’s not making some great choices right now. In fact he hasn’t been making very good choices for a long time, but now they’re bubbling up so far on the surface that it’s causing enough grief at home that he may not be able to live at home much longer. From what I can see over the distance of two large states, is that he doesn’t feel comfortable at home. He doesn’t feel like he can measure up. He doesn’t know how to achieve the beautiful, peaceful, life that his older siblings and parents have achieved. He can see the superficial surface decisions to make, but he cannot see the deeper decisions that have to be made inside yourself to achieve those things. And those things conflict with his personal desires so much that he is not willing to pay the price or make the sacrifice to gain that protection. He can’t or won’t abide by the rules of the home and so is slowly losing his right to be at home. And he’s a smart kid. He’s very bright, but some part of his mind cannot see the social impacts of his decisions.
Most of us don’t need many rules because our brain can calculate and figure out those unspoken rules, the unwritten costs we have to pay to belong to a group of loving people, but my young friend, his brain is not working in those ways and hasn’t grown enough to learn those things. (having watched him growing up, my personal opinion as to why this has occurred to the amount of video games and electronic entertainment he indulged in from a very young age.) It’s gone on so long, that now he is completely uncomfortable and feels out of place when he is at home. He is so lonely in his situation that he’s resorting to substances and drugs and the kinds of friends who’ll provide those substances to him to drown out those feelings of loneliness. Of course this is pulling him further away from his loving family and the protection of the halls of his childhood home. The interesting thing about this and why, though I disagree with his decisions, I can understand them a lot, is that our childhoods were very, very similar, even in regards to the amount of video games we played and the types of homes we grew up in, as well as personality and temperament.
A big difference is that I grew up in the middle of 8 kids, while he, has been effectively, an only child with lots of grown-ups and parents in his life. I was pressured by the social group (my siblings) I was surrounded by to learn at least some basics of diplomacy and difficult cooperation, while he did not have such a benefit. So, have I been blessed more than I deserved in that regard? I think so. Of course there are a great many other factors besides siblings and video games that have led him and I into other paths. Right now, it will be up to him and the Holy Ghost to change the direction his life is taking.
In that Norse mythology book I read, the story of Loki is extremely similar. The cleverest and smartest of the gods is eventually cast out of the hall of the gods for his mischief and the destruction he brings onto the other gods out of his jealousy and selfishness. Does this sound a bit like the story of Lucifer in our own beliefs about the premortal life? I thought so. They were both able to work hard and invest their efforts into the things they wanted, so “sacrifice” in general, wasn’t the issue. But what do we need to sacrifice to avoid their fates? We need to sacrifice for the benefit of others, not just ourselves. Just as God gives us the better end of the deal in his treaties and covenants with us, we need to give others the better end of the deal in our dealings with others. The Savior confirmed this idea when he said,
"But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven."
So, when we sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of others what do we get out of such a “treaty” or “exchange”? We get to be the Children of our Father in Heaven. He has made a treaty with us, and if we make the appropriate sacrifices, pay the appropriate fees by way of obedience, we get to return to live with God in his glorious halls in Heaven and join with all the others in our family who are also willing to do so.
I encourage you all to make the sacrifices God expects of us and do so in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
