Does God demand Jesus’ sacrifice to redeem a fallen race? I can’t quite believe that, but I have come to believe from experience that unless I choose (at least sometimes) to sacrifice myself and my needs for the sake of my brothers and sisters, I have a real hard time living in relationship to God.

I sometimes wonder if we Presbyterians aren’t a little too afraid of sacrifice, of saints and altars. Our own church’s architecture goes so far as to create niches and leave them empty to demonstrate just how far we have gone to throw off all that sacrificial stuff. We are very careful to keep our communion table from becoming an altar. We put chairs in front of the reredos to emphasize our polity and keep it from being mistaken for something, God forbid, Roman. There are very good and manifest reasons for those things. We have a whole Reformed system that helps us to understand communion almost entirely apart from sacrifice, and that system appeals to my need for both boundaries and insight. But it is a system.

The most moving experience I have ever had in worship was at mass in my in-laws’ parish church. I saw a little Hispanic boy with his arms around an old woman—maybe his grandmother–determined to help her struggle up the aisle to the altar to receive Jesus sacrificed for them in the Eucharist. The priest could have brought the Host to her in the pew, but neither of them was going to let the opportunity pass to meet that sacrifice with their own. All my resentment about being excluded from the altar by yet another system just melted away.