Christ has no body but yours

Sunday 16th September: Trinity 16: Proper 19

Isaiah 50: 4-9a. The word "servant" does not appear here but this is reckoned by most to be the third of the so-called "servant songs" and it is the most intensely personal mentioning the tongue, ears, back. cheeks, beard and face, emphasising that God always uses real human beings to fulfill his purposes. 

James 3: 1-12. A great piece whose main thrust is personal integrity and the equal treatment of others, all made in the image of God.

Mark 8: 27-38. Peter is dismissed as "Satan" for standing in the way of the will of God for Jesus. The essence of true discipleship comes in verses 34-38. Taking up your cross and laying your life on the line is the kind of devoted allegiance that Jesus is looking for. 

How does God’s will and purposes get carried out on earth?

The answer, pre-eminently of course, is through human beings.

The Bible stories are, in the main, stories about how human beings have heard and responded to God, from Abraham onwards, all the way through the kings and prophets of Israel, reaching their climax in Jesus Christ, and then through Jesus’ followers since the Jesus event.

True, God has also used people who were outside the fold to fulfil His will, perhaps most famously King Cyrus, a pagan, who nevertheless was absolutely necessary to the story of the people of Israel, who ended their exile in Babylon, so God can use absolutely anyone at any time but in the main He needs to use conscious followers of God, who have spent time in prayer and study of God’s word to purposely do His will in the world.

But as this famous prayer asserts;

Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

Christ Has No Body

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

The servant songs in Isaiah are a wonderful example of this from the Old Testament and when you read them you are left in no doubt that being a servant of God is not an easy ride.

You have serious decisions to make and these decisions can often result in a certain amount of suffering and opposition. These are not willed by God but are a natural consequence of the world’s opposition to God. But such is the nature of the spiritual battle that these sacrifices are necessary and happen as a direct result of following God’s will.

The suffering servant in Isaiah, whose back was struck, who had his beard pulled out, endured insults and was spat at in the face, was of course attributed to Jesus himself of course, but as they and the early church were to find out, included them as well.

Such outright violent opposition is almost unknown to us in this country though many millions of Christians live under similar opposition, especially in many Muslim countries, but the opposition in the West comes in a much more hidden and subtle form.

You can be belittled, called stupid, ostracised by some circles, called a bigot or a fascist. Made to feel that your input is not wanted or needed by intelligent, polite society to the extent that so many Christians are left feeling that they don’t have a voice in modern society.

We are too old fashioned and our ideas are outmoded so the opposition from the liberal secular elite is to silence us not by violence but derision and social exclusion.   

Pushing us to the margins in a social and intellectual sense has been far more productive than violent oppression.

The response from Jesus and therefore expected of ourselves as found in the words of Isaiah is to stand firm “and set our faces like flint” against our accusers.

Our best defence is personal integrity. In this wonderful piece from the letter from James on both the damage and the good that our tongues can do, James implores us to train our tongues to bring forth fresh not brackish water, and for this to be a reflection of our internal disposition.

If we can train ourselves to do and speak well of people, and to stand firm in defence of our faith despite all provocations we provide a much better example to everyone and will make even our detractors think twice about what we have, and what motivates our lives.

Jesus, in the gospel story knew what was coming to him for daring to stick to his guns – “setting his face like flint” against his accusers.

He knew that His actions would defeat evil and win salvation for the whole world so He could not be sidetracked.

This is what drew that stern response to Peter for trying to deflect Jesus from his path.

Jesus called him “Satan” for even suggesting that Jesus should not suffer at the hands of his enemies.

Here, what might be characterised as “evil” came not beating him, spitting at him, pulling out his beard, but in a velvet glove, with good but misguided intentions.

Proverbially we know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Often, we don’t understand, we don’t know what to do or say, and Peter’s tongue earned him a stern rebuke from Jesus.

He needed to be less impetuous, show a greater understanding of God’s will, and intuit a greater knowledge of the realities of life in this world.

As Jesus said; 

In this world you will have trouble but take heart for I have overcome the world.(John 16:33)

But also as Paul notes; 

And if God is for us, who can be against us. (Romans 8:31)

Internal and external relations

Sunday 9th September - Trinity 15: Proper 18

Isaiah 35: 4-7. A beautiful poetic account of salvation. Before salvation can be experienced, evil must be defeated.

James 2: 1-17. All followers of the "way" have the same rank in God's eyes. We are all children of God, which means that all other ways of distinguishing between ourselves (in particular wealth) are worldly logic and unbecoming to a Christian.  

Mark 7: 24-37. What binds the two separate instances of healings together in our passage of scripture is that one explicitly happens to a gentile (the Syrophoenician woman) and the other happens in the region of the Decapolis, gentile cities mainly inhabited by Greeks, so is implicitly means that the deaf and mute man was a gentile. Ethnic partiality is challenged here. Although the Jews are God's chosen instrument for revelation and disclosure of His will, He is and always will be Lord of all.

There is an intrinsic tension between the fact that the Jews were “God’s chosen people” and the fact that God is the Lord of all creation, and so all the different people’s of the world are loved equally by God.

In fact being “chosen” is often seen as a burden as much as it is a privilege.

I often think at this point of Tevye, the father in the film “fiddler on the roof”, who after yet another pogrom raises his eyes to heaven and says,

“Lord, I know we are your chosen people, but just once in a while, couldn’t you choose someone else?”

Chosen to be a light to the gentiles, a light to the whole world, as a revelation of god’s will and purposes, but it was inevitable perhaps that many Jews just so themselves as

“chosen, special, better than everyone else, blessed by God”

And it is that underlying tension that underpins the gospel reading today.

The first woman is explicitly named as a foreigner, and the second healing takes place in the region of the Decapolis, which were ten Greek cities of a mostly Greek or mixed population, and was therefore a shorthand way of saying non-Jewish people.

The first healing miracle of the woman’s daughter is a masterclass in addressing that tension I spoke about.

When the woman came on behalf of her daughter Jesus said,

“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and feed it to the dogs.”

Now Jesus’ expression and tone isn’t recorded, but I can picture Him with a big grin on his face, because the word he uses for dogs is actually a diminutive form and means “doggies” and he is teasing her with this outwardly stern understanding of Jewish privilege.

But she was a quick-witted person and joined in with the analogy,

“Sir, even the doggies under the table eat the children’s crumbs”

And Jesus, underlining the fact that he is just teasing, does so in the most direct and straightforward way he can and He heals her daughter”

The message for the church is plain.

We are the new Israel. We too are to be a light to those outside the church, so while we too are chosen; we are in no way to think of ourselves as superior. Our role is to model the love of Christ in our lives so that it is attractive to those outside the church, drawing people back to God.

Just like the Jews, we have discovered that this can prove a mixed blessing sometimes, and I’ll leave the question open, and for you to ponder as to whether we have been any better than the Jews were in modelling that vocation. 

So for Jew and non-Jew in that instance, read Christian and non-Christian today. Our vocation is to model the new creation in Christ and make it so attractive that people are naturally drawn to us no matter who they are or what they currently believe.

And everyone believes something. Atheism is a belief system as much as Hinduism or Buddhism or Islam.

When we move to the letter of James, we move to one of the characteristics that should define Christian communities. Our internal disposition towards each other.

The example used by James is the issue of wealth. We are not to show partiality towards any other Christian because they are wealthier than another Christian.

Why? Well there is a lovely phrase that I think sums it up, and which also has a much wider application.

“Don’t hold any man in contempt for whom Jesus was content to die”.

As Christians we have a new identity. Who am I? I am a child of God.

And so are you.

We are brothers and sisters in the same family. God is our Father and Jesus is our adopted brother.

Unfortunately, we act less like a family and more like a business sometimes, and even when we do resemble a family we enflesh the worst traits of dysfunctional families such as rivalries, endless bickering, always looking to be the favourite in God’s eyes and taking advantage of each other; instead of modelling the unmerited support and love of our brothers and sisters, and always looking to encourage each other and build each other up.

If we to model it in our church communities it would provide such a contrast to the febrile, shouty, dismissive and cynical world of social media that seems to define modern society nowadays it would help create an oasis in our churches.

There used to be a saying “If you’ve got nothing good or constructive to say, don’t say anything at all”

As Christians of course, our burden, should you choose to see it that way, is to go far beyond that and be and say constructive things that build us up and encourages us to be better people and better and stronger communities.

It is this, as a basis, and developing that to be of practical help to people that I think James means when he says that faith by itself, if it has no works (or outcomes) is dead.

I believe that the fruits of the Spirit are a work of God and when I read works I see fruits as they are grown in individual lives as they grow into God.

The capacity for growing into the full stature of Christ is and always was here.

Accepting Jesus into our hearts by his Holy Spirit is an act that must see results in the way we see and treat each other, and also others outside the fold. Otherwise says James, our faith is dead.

We have something precious, the pearl of great price that is the knowledge of God and the experience of his goodness and love for all his “potential” children out there.

In modelling how this affects our lives, we become that light on a hill offering both a direction and a destination for people’s souls.

Unwrapping the gift.

Readings for Sunday 2nd September: Trinity 14: Proper 17

Deuteronomy 4: 1-2, 6-9. Don't forget about God's goodness and wisdom which is self-evident even to outsiders, rehearse them in your mind and relay them to your children.

James 1: 17-27. Belief and action in unity is the hallmark of much of the epistle of James. People who "hear" the word and even ascent to it but don't act upon it - their religion is useless.

Mark 7: 1-8, 14, 15, 21-23. The difference between man-made traditions and the Christian tradition has long been a hobby horse of mine and here is the scriptural warrant for it. Once we elevate human traditions above God in our minds we are guilty of idolatry.

“In vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.

You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

One of the starkest warnings to the modern Christian church in the west, if we think we can ride roughshod over God’s laws and precepts, believe they are outmoded and replace them with our worldly logic, traditions and customs.

I firmly believe that the reason so many children of Christians don’t follow their parents in "the way" is that those children have only ever come into contact with man made church traditions and a certain churchy sensibility, which they largely see as irrelevant.

They have never been captured by the Christian tradition, the rock on which all shifting man made church traditions are based.

We must be able to tell the difference.

I wrote recently about being asked about the choice between staging “traditional” or so-called “happy clappy” worship in our churches.

As I wrote at the time - this is a false choice. The only real choice is between authentic and inauthentic Christianity.

Both authentic and inauthentic forms come wearing both robes and jeans, kneeling piously and waving arms in the air, stressing both silent contemplation and raucous praise choruses.

When you get to the position where the most important question is whether the priest is wearing a chasuble or not, or whether the minister refers to himself as a priest, minister or pastor, you know we have travelled a long way up a no-thru-road.

Something has gone very wrong indeed when who reads the gospel is more important than the content of the gospel itself.

The history of my own engagement with Christianity and the Christian tradition as enfleshed within our own Anglican tradition I could say is “learning to see the wood from the trees.”

And please don’t misunderstand me. I am not playing down the relevance of our man-made traditions as far as they lead people into the Christian faith.

But I am saying that we must recognise which is which.

Jesus denounced the Pharisees as hypocrites, which as you probably know is a Greek word meaning “actors”, people simply playing a role, reading their lines and dressing up!

When they don’t believe what they are saying or carry out what they are saying into their daily lives. It is a charade; dead religion.

Jesus famously said, and as a Christian minister this always brings me out in a cold sweat;

 Matthew 7:21-23 

²¹ “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.²² On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ²³ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

This is essentially the very thing that James is saying in his letter today. James was Jesus’ brother and it was because of this blood connection to the Lord himself that I suspect that James became the first leader of the Jerusalem church after the crucifixion.

You’d have thought it would be Peter, or one of the other disciples but no. James, a part of Jesus’ family who hadn’t really followed Jesus in life but had obviously repented after his brother rose from the dead led the early church.

He saw straight into the heart of Jesus’ teaching and wrote;

“But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves”

True religion, James asserts is to care for orphans and widows in their distress. Note that he doesn’t mention prayers, dressing up, or making sacrifices, he just concentrates on how the faith is made real in our lives outside of the church or synagogue.

Too much modern church in all its church traditions is a triumph of form over substance. The two need each other and should reflect each other. Form and substance in unison

This is our goal as Christians. The goal of every Christian service I preside is to lead people more richly into the Spirit of God.

It my fervent prayer no matter what form the service takes; high, low, eucharistic or non-eucharistic, formal or informal.

It maters not what state you are in when you receive the Spirit of God;

Joyful or bloody minded

Looking forward or depressed.

God will meet you where you are at this very moment. And he will help you deal with whatever state you are living with.

Let us open ourselves to the Spirit of God and let Him lift us up and give us wisdom, peace and insight. Insight into our faith,

Insight into our worship

Insight into our community

And insight into our very selves.

Amen.

God's hidden hand and the war within!

Sunday, 26th August, Trinity 13: Proper 16

Joshua 24: 1-2, 14-18. Joshua assembles all the Israelites at Shechem (modern day Nablus) and challenges their loyalty. Loyalty can quickly fade if it loses touch with God's loyalty to us, not as a set of facts to shame us into temporary commitment, but as the framework within which we live our lives.

Ephesians 6: 10-20. The armour of God is not a popular metaphor in the modern church because it is deemed militaristic. However stupid that may be, it must be noted that all the armour is purely defensive save one, the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God!

John 6: 56-69. Last week we emphasised the humanity of Jesus which is absolutely central to any Christian theology of human salvation and this week the stress is on the spiritual dimension. "It is the Spirit that gives life. The flesh is useless"(verse 63) 

The twin themes running through our readings today are loyalty to God and the spiritual dimension of our faith and life.

What you find again and again both in the old and the new testaments are lists of all the good things that God has done for us, as a spur to us to respond with a similar loyalty to God.

Joshua gathers all the Israelites together and they are challenged to renew their loyalty to God and in so doing they are reminded of all the wonderful help they have received from God, starting back with the exodus from Egypt all the way through to God clearing their path to take control of the promised land which ends with the desired result;

“Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God” (verse 18)

How can we learn from this? Because we so quickly forget.

Let me use an example from Louise and I’s recent history. In September last year we decided that Louise really had to pursue the call that she had received to become a professor at Exeter university.

But that was a mammoth undertaking.

Although she had been headhunted she still had to go through the whole official selection process.

I needed to find and secure a post near to Exeter within commuting distance.

We had to move 300 miles changing job, house, part of the country, friends.

We had a house in Newcastle we had to sell to all the other stresses.

It was one of the most stressful moves we could have dreamed up and our prayers were for our path to be made straight – that God would smooth out any bumps in the road. And those prayers were more fervent than usual.

What we experienced was truly amazing.

The finding of two new jobs a new house and re-locating from the North East to the South West was achieved just one week apart from each other.

All the bumps, and there have been some, like being stranded in a snow storm in East Budleigh for three days, the vicarage being on a six month let, were all smoothed.

And we were delivered to this wonderful part of the world where we are thriving.

God’s help, God’s loyalty to us was palpable, and the only repayment that God requires is that we stay loyal and true to him in all our doings.

Now each one of us in this church this morning will have your own personal story to tell.

Because God is faithful. In just a couple of moments think about how God has been experienced in your life, about his faithfulness to you.

It could be in a series of little things or in big things for God is Lord of all.

God has been faithful and loyal to us corporately as a church as well.  He doesn’t want to see us fail. He asks for our loyalty and renewed commitment to him.

When we do that we lay ourselves open to spiritual warfare. That sounds grandiose, but the devil won’t come at you with a pitchfork, breathing fire.

He comes at us in the niggling doubts and fears in the small hours, uses arguments with our loved ones or grievances in the church to ferment discord, to throw us off beam. He works through cynicism and defeatism, using our worst traits against us. The battles are being fought in our hearts and minds and souls.

They are spiritual battles, and we need spiritual protection against the wiles of our enemies.

God’s Holy Spirit is available to offer all of us that protection. The belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit which is the word of God.

These are protections offered to us by God himself and it is up to each one of us to put on this armour – to utilise them for our own benefit.

The alternative is that we face the father of lies, undefended and unarmed, and he is far more experienced in spiritual warfare than any of us will ever be.

In this battle it is exactly as Jesus characterised it. “It is the Spirit that gives life, the flesh is useless. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (v. 63)

The final exchange in our gospel reading today brings together those two strands of loyalty and the life of the Spirit in which many people had deserted Jesus.

 John 6:66-69 English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK)

⁶⁶ After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. ⁶⁷ So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?”⁶⁸ Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, ⁶⁹ and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”

Amen

Food glorious food!

Next Sunday 19th August: Trinity 12: Proper 15

Proverbs 9: 1-6. Wisdom in the Bible is a divine quality and so gaining even a little wisdom is much prized. Wisdom is also closely associated with the Logos (the word) so we can say that Jesus Christ is the wisdom made flesh!

Ephesians 5: 15-20. Paul also extols people to gain wisdom. Part of this wisdom is to be continually filled with the Holy Spirit rather than wine. Jesus liked a drop of wine himself so is a warning against excess obviously.

John 6: 51-58. "Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man". We are used in Christian circles to talk of the "body" of Christ but using the word "flesh" adds a more carnal dimension. John starts his gospel by stating that the word became flesh, so flesh is the physical reality of Jesus, and "eating his flesh is communion with the humanity of Jesus.

There are lots of different genres of literature in the Bible, such as history, prophesy, apocalyptic writings such as Daniel or Revelation but there is one kind of writing that at first sight seems to be a strange category; Wisdom literature.

Wisdom is the voice of reflection and experience, which instead of a list of commands, persuades us, almost teases us into seeing the connection between God’s order in the world and his orders to humanity and tries to show us how absurd it is to go against the grain of his creation.

So we have in books like Job or Ecclesiastes or pre-eminently today in Proverbs we have a literature that wrestles with problems of suffering or the meaning of existence mixed together with down to earth advice about more prosaic problems about how we should live, react, or deal with everyday problems of life.

The starting point for all true wisdom is “the fear of the Lord” and the book of proverbs gives advice on all aspects of life which has its source in God.

Remember in our gospel reading last week Jesus said, “They shall all be taught by God”.

How? Through the word of God in the Bible.

God’s wisdom is revealed in these books for the living of a good life.

But more than that, wisdom is a quality of God who appears to emanate from God the Father himself.

Wisdom appears personified as a woman and according to the text in another part of Proverbs (chapter 8: 22 on) she was there at the dawn of creation and in that same chapter in verse 31 she delighted in the human race.

It is inevitable that wisdom and the word (Jesus) became forever entangled to the extent that it is entirely orthodox to equate the word made flesh with the wisdom made flesh.

God’s wisdom, his way of life made concrete in the enfleshed Jesus of Nazareth is he who shines from the pages of the Bible.

And when we speak of the word made flesh, we are bound to emphasise the humanity of Jesus.

We commune today not just with his divinity, but with his humanity.

We have a dignity in being human because God chose to become incarnate in his son.

There is no room in Christianity for a theology that downplays our very human needs and wants. Those needs and wants must be channelled in the right way if we are to please God – that is the purpose of wisdom literature – but those needs and wants – are wholesome in and of themselves.

When Paul writes today that instead of getting drunk on wine we should aim to get drunk in the Spirit, this is wisdom.

He is not saying “don’t ever drink”, that would be absurd. Jesus, wisdom made flesh himself enjoyed wine and parties, and the central sacrament of the Christian church involves drinking wine. But there is a big difference between enjoying a few glasses of wine and debauchery.

The wisdom lies in knowing and recognising the difference. 

Returning to John’s gospel, the thrust of it is in knowing that we recognise that Jesus was a fully functioning human being and we commune with that humanity as well as his divinity that we have life.

The Hesychast (Charismatic) tradition of the Eastern church has a saying;

That God became man so that man could become God.

The goal for humanity is deification, becoming one with God – sanctification as it is called in the west – but that starts by knowing in our hearts that God first became human in Jesus. 

This is the bread that came down from heaven. You eat of it (commune with it) and you have LIFE.

Eternal life – that quality of life I talked about last week – our present possession. We all already have eternal life.

Our response to that fact can only be one of joyous celebration.

Filled with the Spirit of God we respond by

“singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,

Singing and making melody to the Lord in our hearts,

Giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

An infinite horizon

Sunday 12^th August: proper 14: Trinity 11

1 Kings 19:4-8

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

John 6:35, 41-51

In the story of Elijah, where we started this morning we have charted some of the extraordinary contradictions of being human. How frail and fickle and psychologically weak we can be.

A great victory can be a hard cross to bear, especially if everything is then expected to turn out just as the successful person desires, and even a slight disappointment can bring the whole house of cards crashing down and lead to judgements wholly unrealistic in their negativity.

I know myself, and I’m sure I’m not alone, that twenty positive comments can be totally undone by one slightly critical one and lead to a dark and pessimistic mood totally at odds with reality.

The context for this piece is just after Elijah had demonstrated that the God of Israel was more powerful than Baal and had all the prophets of Baal killed.

Whatever you think about that, it was nevertheless a great victory, but Queen Jezebel’s threats against him sworn by these same worthless idols causes him to flee into the desert.

It seems that he no longer trusts the God in whose name he won the contest, he rushes into the desert and he wants to die.

But though he loses his faith and trust in God, God still looks after him and provides sustenance for his journey to Mount Sinai.

We have been exploring the idea of both physical and spiritual sustenance for the journey for a couple of weeks now and it will continue for a couple more so we turn to the ongoing treatise in John’s gospel and I want to draw out just one aspect of John’s theology which is very important to understand

Now if we substitute Elijah’s physical journey to Mount Sinai with our own life journey, what do we substitute for the cakes and water that God provided for Elijah in the desert?

What spiritually makes you get up out of bed in the morning, expands your vision, gives you insight, gives you peace and hope for the future, feeds you  until you want no more?

Eternal life can be seen simply “pie in the sky when you die”.

But eternal life, is not something that you hope might be given to you after death.

Eternal life is a present possession. We have eternal life. Eternal life is a quality of life, enriching our present.

It is not something we are grasping for just out of reach – it is the very ground on which we stand.

It enriches our life now.

We know that our lives are not lived between the perimeters of our physical birth and death. We live our lives against an infinite horizon, of which our current physical life is but a part of the whole.

Jesus said “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life”.

It is this quality of our lives that is changed when we realise fully in our very being that we are children of God.

The change in outlook is so earth shattering that Jesus called it being “born again”. Born again to a living hope that enriches our life.

Once we realise that we have an intrinsic worth, not gained by how much we earn, or what we do for a living, or where we went to school; that our worth is given by God, because we believe that God sent his son to die for us to release us from the bondage to death and decay into the fulness of eternal life.

This huge about turn in our orientation in regards to God, life and each other has moral and ethical implications of course, the whole basis of which emanates from the belief that Jesus died for us.

Moral teaching that Paul articulates in his letter to Ephesians today,

But rather on dwell on the teaching itself I think it more important to understand where these teachings come from.    

They did not come from a vacuum.

They did not emanate from clever human beings.

They are a response to what God has done for us in Christ and has the seal of God’s authority stamped on it.

As Jesus said in verse 45 today “They shall all be taught by God”.

I'll end with Paul's summing up of the nature of Christian life and action and the source of that life. 

As Paul ends this extract from Ephesians today he says.

“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God”.