Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Self Sacrifice

Rita Hays
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

Today is Easter, a day of rejoicing in the Christian tradition. It is a celebration of spring, of reawakening. In my childhood, it was the day to wear a new dress, very likely one that Mother had made for me. It was also the day to bring out short socks and to put away the awful full-length stockings of winter. It was a day to hunt colored hard-boiled eggs, and later to eat devilled eggs.

A spring celebration is a part of most traditions, and most of us remember some sort of welcoming of the spring in our childhood tradition. Another example is the Passover Seder, which we Unitarians will celebrate in a few weeks. It also is a time of rejoicing.

But the Easter story also leads us to think of sacrifice. According to the story, Jesus allowed himself to be killed, a self-sacrifice. He set an example for the many martyrs of the early church, and even for the modern-day suicide bombers who perceive their act as a shortcut into heaven. One might ask why instead didn’t he hide and let the troubles blow over? His parents did that when he was a baby, when they took him to Egypt to escape the slaughter of infant boys. If he had lived longer, he might have built a large viable organization, instead of leaving a handful of disciples to start a new religious sect without its leader. Think of the good he could have done had he lived!

I would like to talk about a less extreme form of self-sacrifice. We see self-sacrifice all around us. Right here in this church, we have the choir, people giving up their time and effort to beautify our services. They have the gift of voice, and they share it with us without expectation of reward beyond shared pleasure. We have the flower-gifted, who enrich our sanctuary. We have the Sunday-school teachers, who give time on Sundays to enrich the lives of our young people. We have the leaders of PIA, who represent our congregation in actions to improve our community. We have those who started and sustain the Ripples program and those who started and continue to support the Opportunity Center. We have the Green Sanctuary group. The list goes on and on. In each case, people are giving of themselves, doing something that they consider worthwhile, not expecting reward.

But in our world, the self-sacrifice is limited. We don’t usually risk dying for the cause to which we are giving. There are exceptions, of course, such as the police and fire fighters who take risks to protect us. But they are taught to be prudent, and more often than not they escape from dangerous situations. Then they are still there to save the next in need.

The doctors who used to take care of patients with contagious diseases before vaccines and antibiotics reduced their terror were risking getting the diseases themselves, perhaps dying of them. Even now, those who take care of patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis are risking getting that fatal disease themselves. Yet there are those who happily put themselves at risk so that they can offer hope to the sufferers. But they take precautions. They know how to protect themselves and do as much as they can. Not to do so would be stupid.

I see a form of self-sacrifice in the patients who volunteer for controlled clinical trials. These are often studies where an unproven treatment for a disease is compared with whatever is considered to be the best current standard treatment. To ethically justify such a study, the clinicians who do it must be in equipoise — that is, they must really not know whether the new treatment is as good, better or worse than the standard treatment. But what about the people who volunteer to such a study — to be randomly assigned to either the standard or the experimental treatment? If they are like most of us in this room faced with a serious disease, they will have consulted as many authorities as they can. They will have Googled their condition. They will know who are the experts and have consulted their opinions. They may or may not decide that the “standard treatment” offered in the study is the right way to go. If they do, why would they enter a study where they may get that treatment or they may get a new, incompletely studied one? Time and again, when I talk to a person who has volunteered for such a study, I hear that the most important motivation is a desire to be helpful. The patient may say, “I know that this may not help me, that I may even die of this disease, but I would like to make my contribution so that someone in the future may benefit.” Now that is self-sacrifice that really means something!

We must be prudent in our self-sacrifice. We must believe in the cause to which we are giving and we should even find joy in the giving. And, unless the cause really is worth dying for, we must preserve ourselves so that we can continue to give in the future. That is the right kind of self-sacrifice.

 

Sermon: Saying Yes to Life by Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern