Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

• John 15:13

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

• Romans 5:8

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

• 1 John 4:10

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

• John 3:16

SPOILER ALERT WARNING

If you intend to read this book, the following may give away the mystery

But not much of one this time.

“So that is the outline of the official story- the tale of the time when God was the under-dog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men He had made broke Him and killed Him. This is the dogma we find so dull – this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero. …
“If this is dull, then what, in Heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore – on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.
“’Sacrifice’ is another word liable to misunderstanding. It is generally held to be noble and loving in proportion as its sacrificial nature is consciously felt by the person who is sacrificing himself. The direct contrary is the truth. To feel sacrifice consciously as self-sacrifice argues a failure in love. When a job is undertaken from necessity, or from a grim sense of disagreeable duty, the worker is self-consciously aware of the toils and pains he undergoes, and will say: ‘I have made such and such sacrifices for this.’ But when the job is a labour of love, the sacrifices will present themselves to the worker – strange as it may seem – in the guise of enjoyment.”

• Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Boilerplate

In this mini-series, I will fulfill a promise.  Some time ago, published 14 January 2025, I wrote a brief synopsis of the book, Subversive by Crystal Downing.  The post is called A Subversive Christian.  In that book, I talked about the three books in the photo above.  And I especially wanted to do a mini-series on the book on the right, The Gospel in Dorothey L. Sayers.

Note that the title uses the preposition “in.”  Dorothy L. Sayers did not write a fifth gospel.  She did not write as if inspired directly by God.  The canon of Scripture is complete.

But in stating what this is not, then what is it?  All Christians have the Holy Spirit within them, guiding them.  When being a Christian is something you have inside you and through you, then your life will reflect that.  This book is how you can see various aspects of the Christian life in the works of Dorothy L. Sayers, mystery novels, plays, letters, and essays.

After the Introduction, it starts with Whose Body?  The editor’s attribute of a Christian that she focuses on is “Conscience.” Whose Body? is her first detective fiction novel featuring her main character, Lord Peter Wimsey.  Then in Death Must Advertise, we find Lord Peter has a couple of middle names.  His full name is Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey.

But we will stay in the Introduction for more than a week.  There are at least a half dozen quotes just in the introduction that look interesting.  I am not in a hurry to speed through this book.  I was not in a hurry to start it with me being over a year since I promised to make it into a mini-series.

But I would hope people could read my short stories and see the gospel being acted out in the characters in my fictional stories.  Deviled Yeggs grew up in a family of safe crackers, robbing from others.  He set out as a policeman, and then homicide detective, to redeem the family name but learning each person must have Christ redeem them individually.  Deviled’s wife, Trinity Naomi Tesla (TNT) Yeggs, was nicknamed “Nitroglycerin” (Glyce for short) by her parents because she was explosive when shaken.  But she found calm and peace in her husband’s arms, and eventually she found the same comfort and peace in the arms of Jesus as she faced “shaky” experiences.

Even when not writing about Jesus directly, the Good News (Gospel) appears in many ways in what a Christian writes.  Let’s enjoy this journey with possibly my favorite author (outside the Bible with C.S. Lewis in a tie with her), Dorothy L. Sayers.

Discussion

In this chapter, the editor again quotes several pages of The Nine Tailors.  This portion of the book was at the very end, after the mystery had been solved.  And some people were not technically guilty of a crime, but since they unknowingly contributed, they felt guilty.  Then a call for help came from the gates of the Sluice.  A reminder here: the story is set in the fens, in days where flooding could destroy an entire town.  It had been a terrible rain, and the old gate could not hold.  Lord Peter arrived as they were putting sandbags against the gate, but one of the workers told Lord Peter that he could do more good to go to the church.  The alarm had to go out to all of Fenchurch.  There was going to be a flood.

With the evacuation underway, Lord Peter went back to the gate.  He saw a man in a dangerous position, and he was told that another man, one of those carrying guilt, had jumped in to save him, but the waters were too strong, both would drown.  Lord Peter did all he could but then he felt a strong arm pull him from the work and place him in the car.  As it was, the water was up to the hubs of the wheels as they made their escape.  It never says whose arm, but Bunter was always by his side.

Dorothy L Sayers’ book, The Mind of the Maker, is considered by some to be a classic.  It is a non-fiction book of Theology.  She endeavors to explain the Trinity by comparing the Triune God to an author writing a novel.  At least, she had experience in 1941 in the field of novel writing.

In the quoted paragraph, where she explains sacrifice, she mentions how the boss sacrifices his time to make sure the department is run smoothly.  The boss, during hard times, will give a speech on sacrificing and tightening their belts, but the sacrifices that the boss makes are so trivial compared to the hard workers beneath them.

I know that one all too well.  I did not want to take the job at an engineering company in the Pittsburgh area, but God saw to it that I worked there for nineteen years.

An engineering company hires when they have work and then they lay people off when the salesmen can’t sell anything.  Your job is never safe. And I had been out of work 16 months of the previous two years.  Financially, we were in disaster mode.  And each long layoff, my wife was able to find work.  But when I had a job, she was not as fortunate.

But the first layoff for the engineering company did not involve me, but it occurred when I was in Thailand, two years after I had taken the job.  My boss called me as I was preparing for bed.  He said to get the rest of the team to the airport in Bangkok.  We had to go home immediately.  We were not to tell anyone.  My boss had already talked to the concierge, and a van was ready at three in the morning.  None of us were laid off, but they had just gotten word that the company that was hosting us had gone bankrupt.  Southeast Asia was in a massive recession.  I went from having over one million dollars in project backlog to having nothing to do but clean up the Thailand project.  The US government gave our company some money due to the losses that we sustained, but the work had to be finished.

But that was when the president/CEO gave his speech.  We had about half the company that was laid off.  Then, another thirty percent of the original company got a 20% cut in pay.  The remaining 20% were the executives and the sales staff, and a few bosses.  Their pay was cut 10%.  Then he said that his ten percent cut would hurt about as much as our 20% cuts.  Of course, everyone translated that into his pay was twice our pay.  And we noticed over the next few months that his lifestyle had not changed, while we were not eating out, cancelling vacations, etc.  I was blessed in having a wife who knew how to spice up a poor man’s meal.  We stretched our groceries, which meant less driving around.

The next layoff four months later involved one of our three-man team that had been in Thailand.

And the sad thing was that I had just gotten a project that I helped sell.  I was on 80% pay, but while others took off each Friday, I had to work to ensure that I made my deadlines.

Out of the 19 years with the company, there were six or seven layoffs.  I was only laid off with the last one.  But in all those times that my pay was cut to 80%, I did not sacrifice in the way that God had Jesus sacrifice for my sins.  I truly think that God was helping me in those hard times.  My wife and I relied on God to see us through.  It was always at that point when more layoffs were coming if we did not get a sale when a large sale was announced.  My sales got the best profit margin.  When no money was coming in, those projects were significant, but my projects would pay my salary, and maybe a couple of other people.  But my little jobs would not allow the company to rehire some of the laid off engineers.

But in all the sacrifices that we endured to keep the company afloat, nothing compares to the sacrificial love that Jesus showed us.

Even in risking one’s life to save another, like the man in The Nine Tailors, what are our motives?  The quote from Ms. Sayers speaks of it briefly, but my experience is that you react more than thinking it through.

I wrote once before about being in a live-fire demonstration during my military training, with senators and congressmen watching at a safe distance.  The artillery was supposed to get closer and closer to our position, demonstrating softening the enemy’s entrenched defense position.  When they got to the far side of the battlefield, they were supposed to stop. Then we would start firing using tracer rounds.

Everything worked fine until the 105mm howitzers began firing rounds into the barbed wire immediately in front of our foxholes.  As hot shrapnel and pieces of barbed wire flew by my head, I ducked down.  The sergeant was yelling into the radio that the artillery was too close and they needed to shift further down range.  Then as the artillery shifted closer to our foxholes, the sergeant yelled for a ceasefire.  Something was horribly wrong.

I knew that I was safe.  As long as I did not stand up, there was a log roof with a foot of sod on top.  This would not survive a direct hit, but as for now, the danger was the flying shrapnel.  

I was set up as the M60 machine gunner.  In the foxhole with me was my ammo bearer.  He panicked.  He got up and ran for the opening at the back of the foxhole.  I knew that in a second or two, he would be standing at ground level, no protection at all, in the middle of a swarm of angry bees, in the form of pieces of hot metal that whistled as they flew past.

I took two steps and tackled the ammo bearer.  I crawled over the top of him until my body covered his.  We had no cover overhead, but I thought that if we got hit by shrapnel, it would not be at high speed.

In another minute, the bombardment stopped.  The sergeant came out of the foxhole In a low voice he said, “Don’t ever do that again.  We don’t need any more dead heroes.”  At this point, we were still having men killed in Vietnam.

There was a call to get into formation.  But the sergeant called another sergeant over.  The two picked bits of shrapnel out of my uniform.  He told the other sergeant that they would have a lot of paperwork to fill out if a piece of shrapnel nicked an artery when I sat down in the cattle car, our usual ride back to the barracks.

Was the sergeant upset that the man that I saved would become a lieutenant a year later?

But in reading Ms. Sayers methodical thought process when you risk your life to save another, I reacted in a split second.  Yes, I measured the odds of success and felt them worth the risk.  But why did I take the effort?  If I did not have God in my heart, I might think like the sergeant might have thought.  This person showed cowardice, and who wants him leading other men?

But with God in my heart, all I thought of was someone who may or may not know Jesus was about to meet Jesus face to face, unless I did something.  That took no thought process at all.  It was God’s love causing me to act.

And that is what sacrificial love is all about.  Only God can do that kind of love.  But with God in us, He can make us capable of showing His love in that manner.

Closing Prayer

Father, guide me.  We can only love because You first loved us.  Jesus suffered an excruciating death on the cross so that we could become sons of God.  That kind of sacrifice makes all our sacrifice pale in comparison.  Do we really understand that immense and intense kind of sacrificial love?  But whether we understand it or not, I thank You for Your love.  And may I again be filled with Your love like I did that night in an Army training exercise.  May Your love fill me with sacrificial love to show Your love for someone else.
In Thy Name I pray.
Amen

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.