What does it mean to be holy? What is the meaning of sacrifice?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: April 27-May 3
The Lord wants me to become holy. I can feel the Lord’s presence in holy places.
The definition of “holy” as offered by Jewish scholar Jacob Milgrom is beautiful in its piercing simplicity: Holiness means imitating God. It’s almost too simple, isn’t it? Holiness means imitating God. But as I contemplate God’s command to dress this garden, the Jewish concept of repairing the world, and the Ecclesiastes charge to do with might, I am struck with clarity of purpose: be a creator.
Milgrom says holiness is “that which humanity is commanded to emulate and approximate.” Revealing the hand of the Creator through our own acts of creation seems like a good step toward approximating this holiness. When I am making, I feel the spark of the divine in me. I feel the memory of learning to mimic my Father as I approximate His ways and seek to be like Him. I relate closely to what famed author Madeleine L’Engle says about her feelings when she listens to music by Johann Sebastian Bach: “Bach’s music points me to wholeness, a wholeness of body, mind, and spirit, which we seldom glimpse, but which we are intended to know. It is no coincidence that the root word of whole, health, heal, holy, is hale (as in hale and hearty.) If we are healed, we become whole; we are hale and hearty; we are holy.”
Creative work is holy work. It is repairing-to-make-whole work. It is sometimes the only work my hands know to do when all around me feels in chaos and despair.
—Paige Crosland Anderson, “A Careful Mending of the World”
Finding expression in creative forms becomes one of the most direct ways to connect to the divine, including to our Mother. Creative acts are pure manifestations of faith. They are the heartbeat of harmony, pleas for holiness to flow in the land, in our bodies, and through our transformation paths. We weave ideas into new patterns, breathe life into the seemingly lifeless, and live into being stronger and more tender threads of connection. Creative expressions open the mind and spirit to the possibility of transcendent (revelatory) experiences. … In very real ways, we participate in the re-creation of the universe through our individual transformations of intelligence, faith, and presence in the world. Our personal transformations lead ultimately to a shift in collective consciousness, bringing us all closer to wholeness and holiness.
—Kathryn Knight Sonntag, The Mother Tree
The words “heal” and “whole” come from the same ancient root, heilig. That same root gives us our word “holy.” That which is healed and made whole is also made holy. To make something holy is to set it in its proper order, devoted to its highest purpose, to make it most enduringly and intensely real and alive. … So when we read the scriptures and learn about holiness and unholiness, about being poor in spirit, about hungering and thirsting after righteousness, about making peace and giving others grace, about eternal life, about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, these phrases aren’t just meaningless religious jargon. These are deeply practical and very real things that lead to life or death. To say that Christ’s spirit is holy, and that you can receive that spirit, is to say that you can learn the sacred art of binding up all broken things, to set things within you and around you on the path toward their highest and most beautiful purpose. This is real.
—Bob Sonntag, “The Sacrifice of All Things”
The Restoration, with its sacralization of the joy of embodied sociality, should give us a feel for the holiness of this humor and the way it promotes faith in a new age of joyous, healing atonement. It should help us see how the Jesus of the Gospels looks forward to a new age of celebration—a miraculous, but also somehow mundane, feast with friends.
—James Egan, “Laughing with Jesus”
If I were to boil down the meaning of Joseph Smith’s restoration to a single aphorism, This is where everything happens might be my best try. This idea was the engine of the early church’s first migrations. As revelation began to flow, the earth under Joseph’s feet became holy ground in widening circles of sacred geography. The remnant of the house of Israel? They’re here, just down the river. New Jerusalem, site of the second coming? Watch this space, coming soon. The garden of Eden, primordial belly button of the world? It’s here too, in Missouri. Eve ate the apple on the same Ozark highland where my robin ate the inchworm.
If you find a touch of the absurd in this, I agree. We’re accustomed to thinking of the sacred as something apart, exalted. And we have good reason: the roots of the word sacred contain the idea of something protected and removed from ordinary settings, everyday experience. Sacred space is an ancient land, a walled garden, or the top of a mountain, the higher the better. But the restoration introduced a low-elevation version of sacred geography. Right here, at ground level, among normal places and events, sacred things happened.
I hear a twinkle in the divine voice as it relocates the high-and-holy to its new rough-and-tumble neighborhood:
A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county, declaring the three witnesses to bear record of the book! The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light! The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness between Harmony, Susquehanna county, and Colesville, Broome county, on the Susquehanna river, declaring themselves as possessing the keys of the kingdom, and of the dispensation of the fulness of times! (D&C 128:20-21)
Broome County, a holy land? Is Saul too among the prophets?
As the Restoration unfolded, these geographic circles extended outward with no apparent limit. A general principle came into view, a kind of axiom of the Restoration: the whole world is holy, because it is where we encounter God. In time, Joseph understood that these sacred circles, always widening underfoot, were both geographic and metaphysical. The spirit world? Look around, it’s here. Heaven? Also here, wherever you are. Eternal life? The people and relationships closest to you. For better or for worse, our relational heaven is here and it looks a lot like now, but with the added burden of glory.
—Rosalynde Welch, “Airborne at Low Elevation”
By each expression of faith, by each act of love, by each quest for holiness, by each act of self-healing, we give hope to our creators: hope that we will use the light they have placed within us to dispel the darkness in our lives, that we will use the love they have placed in our hearts to create peace, and to give hope to others by lifting their burdens, by healing their wounds, and by working for justice. Each step we take toward the light, each act of love gives hope to our Heavenly Parents that they can trust us with more light, more love, and more holiness. As Rabbi David Wolpe states, “By each act of love, by each expression of holiness, we give hope to God.”
—Robert A. Rees, “A Perfect Brightness of Hope”
The Lord asks me to make my offerings with a willing heart.
When people’s wealth took the form of crops and livestock, offering an animal to God required one to part with a significant economic asset. To place a bull or flawless lamb on the altar of God, one had to make a difficult choice about a scarce resource. One had to choose God over something else in a meaningful way. In a culture whose most valuable resource is attention, concentrating wholly on God requires precisely the same kind of sacrifice. Where your attention is, there will your heart be also.
—Michael Austin, “The Sacrament of Attention”
My chronic grief about not being a great musician makes me wonder earnestly about the disconnect between what I think God would like and what I can actually give. It occurs to me sometimes that most of what we bring to the altar is not nearly as valuable as we suppose. The difficulty of figuring out what the Lord wants from us is illustrated in Genesis by Cain’s rejected sacrifice, articulated again in Samuel’s insistence that “to obey is better than sacrifice,” and the psalmist’s recognition that “thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” The Nephites are instructed that their “burnt offerings shall be done away, for I will accept none of your sacrifices and your burnt offerings.” And just before the Saints at Kirtland are asked to give a tithe of money to build the temple, a new kind of sacrifice, they’re reminded that “all among them who know their hearts are honest, and are broken, and their spirits contrite, and are willing to observe their covenants by sacrifice—yea, every sacrifice which I, the Lord, shall command—they are accepted of me.”
Perhaps we need to be told exactly what to sacrifice because we aren’t very good at recognizing what is valuable. Maybe Paul’s description of gifts within the body of Christ isn’t just about other people’s gifts that we wrongly think are less worthy than our own, but about our estimation of what it is we ourselves have to offer.
Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary:
And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.
For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked.
Maybe artistic gifts, like all the others, are useful for bringing us to the place where we can offer all that we really have to give—our brokenness, our need, our yearning to know and be known.
—Kristine Haglund, “The Beauty of Holiness”
The word “sacrifice” means literally to make something sacred, to take something mundane and ordinary and to put it to the service of a transcendent and sacred purpose. To give it up, or upward. Those moments when life feels meaningless, purposeless, or arbitrary, or when we feel at war with ourselves, those are moments when the pieces of life are not gathered properly in our own judgment in service of what we believe to be most high.
You have to sacrifice everything you have and everything you are. You have to sacrifice yourself. …
I can imagine each of us in a quiet moment kneeling and offering ourselves to God. And I can imagine God’s response: “Good. I can work with that.” But I can also hear him say “That’s only the beginning. You don’t even know all the parts of yourself, let alone how to sacrifice them.” I’m sorry to say that you will discover these pieces of yourself as they break down, and fail, and when you confront problems you don’t know how to solve. When that happens you have to let things die which have grown old and insufficient; ideas, desires, ways of thinking and understanding, habits, and paradigms, and more.
But the miracle of the cross of Christ is that those things that are given willingly to death upon it will be resurrected. When you choose to give your life as a body for Christ’s spirit, you will find that pieces of yourself will die along the way. But you will also see those pieces resurrected, now filled with God’s spirit and put to their proper use. The perfection that God has in mind for you isn’t a neutered, amputated, lobotomized sterility, where pieces of your spirit and body have been turned off. Christ wants all of you. This will not be a movement toward a uniform cookie-cutter image of pious, bland, sameness. Instead it makes each of us more fully and uniquely and eternally ourselves.
—Bob Sonntag, “The Sacrifice of All Things”
Discipleship happens at the intersection of the requirement that we sacrifice all things and the inevitability of losing all things. As a result, to imagine a life of Christian discipleship you need only imagine a religion that requires you to sacrifice everything in a world that will, regardless, exact the loss of everything.
Imagine, then, treading the path of discipleship and preemptively willing—as an act of love and sacrifice—your own already inevitable loss of all things. Imagine the practice of your religion as the business of willing the end of the world.
What would it look like to willingly give up your life and loved ones and world? What would it look like to give them up and then keep loving them and living with them and caring for them? What would it look like to sacrifice “all things” intentionally rather than just inevitably? How would it change your relationship to life? How would it change your relationship to property? How would it change your relationship to your parents, your spouse, your children? And how, in particular, would this sacrificial gesture utterly transform your relationship to time?
What would it look like to be a disciple of Christ as the world collapses around you?
What does discipleship look like at the end of the world?
—Adam Miller, “Discipleship at the End of the World”
In this conversation, Josh walks us through the pattern of the ancient tabernacle and Solomon’s temple, helping us begin to understand what temple worship and sacrifice looked like for the ancient Israelites. Gaining an understanding of what the temple experience was like anciently has really helped to enrich my relationship with our modern temple. I was struck by both the similarities and the differences in how we relate to the temple today. Josh breaks down the various types of sacrificial rites the Israelites performed and shows how they are more similar to our modern law of sacrifice than we might expect.
These were people who faced the same challenge we face today: how to move beyond outward performance and truly offer our whole heart and soul to the Lord. Josh teaches that, in the end, the only thing we can really offer God is our will. God invites us into the experience of sacrifice and repentance—a journey that both transforms and liberates, a journey back to Eden. And all that is needed to begin is our desire. —Larkin Swain
Temple ordinances were given anciently.
What are the differences and similarities between the ancient and modern temple experience? Learn from Matthew Grey in this episode of Sanctuary:
As we leave the temple endowed, anointed just as [the ancient priests] were, with the garment of the holy priesthood, we have a mission to go out into the world just like the priests did, and bring people who are separated from God, who are alienated to God, and help them come back. … We have a role just like the temple priests had in ancient days of welcoming people and helping them be able to be restored themselves.
—Jennifer Lane, “An Embodied Discipleship”
As people who wear the robes of the holy priesthood, we are playing a part in helping God’s people to be reconciled to our heavenly parents, to Christ. … Precisely how the Lord is reaching out is through people who have taken the name of Christ upon themselves and who can then go out to the world bearing his name, bringing his love.
—Larkin Swain, “An Embodied Discipleship”
Now that we’ve been clothed and anointed just like the priests were, when we leave the temple, we have a mission, like the priests did, to be a part of helping God’s people be reconciled. And when you make these covenants with God, the purpose of your life transforms, and it becomes about this journey, this great project of reconciliation to God—and not just our reconciliation with God, but with each other, forming those bonds, drawing us closer to each other and building, nurturing, and cultivating this familial relationship with all of humanity.
—Larkin Swain, “A Walk Through the Temple Ordinances”
Hear Jasmin Rappleye explain some of the history and symbolism behind the modern temple initiatory in this episode of Sanctuary:
Because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, I can be forgiven.
In Alma 34, Amulek teaches that “the Son of God” will offer himself as a “great and last sacrifice” and that “thus he shall bring salvation to all those who shall believe on his name” (Alma 34:14–15). How, though, does this “thus” work? How does Christ’s sacrifice bring salvation to those who believe? How am I saved?
Amulek develops a powerful theory of atonement in this chapter that is unique to the Book of Mormon. Rather than treating Christ’s sacrifice as a way of generating moral influence, ransoming us from the devil, or vicariously appeasing God’s wrath, Amulek treats Christ’s sacrifice as a revelation that satisfies the demands of justice by showing how mercy was—all along, from the foundation of the world—“the whole meaning of the law” (Alma 34:13). Taking God’s law as a sign or type, Amulek treats Christ’s sacrifice as an “epiphany” that redeems by fulfilling and displaying the true meaning of that divine sign.
… Amulek does not treat Christ’s sacrifice as an ad hoc workaround for sinners, a late arriving amendment that is foreign to God’s law or the demands of justice. Rather, Amulek treats Christ’s sacrifice as the “whole” meaning of the law, and Christ’s mercy as the fulfillment of the love that the law itself commands.
—Adam Miller, “The Word Is Mercy”
This is the power of justification. It may look like a simple mathematical equation or a righting of a wrong, but when Christ chose to atone for mankind, he did not atone mathematically; his sacrifice wasn’t about numbers, economics or arithmetic. He atoned infinitely, and his infinite sacrifice brings forth infinite and eternal joy and consolation.
—Chanel Earl, “Atonement as Justification”
