Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost Year A

15 Pentecost A 08
August 24, 2008

Romans 12:1-8
1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect. 3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, 5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. 6 We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; 7 ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; 8 the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

Brought to Life

The world wants to conform us to it. By “the world” we mean those blind forces comprised of the collective and competing desires of a world full of people. In terms of the biblical witness, “the world” is the power of the empire, the top international dog, the one holding all the economic chips and protecting them with all the biggest weapons.

Whether you are a part of the empire or whether you are foreign to it, the empire will do everything it can on every level it can to make you fit into the smooth operation of power and resource gathering.

By the way, I don’t know for sure that the US is really the empire anymore, or indeed if it ever really was. I’m wondering these days if there aren’t bigger fish in the ocean. I really don’t see anymore how electing someone president will really change many things. A good person in office is as likely to mess things up as a bad person. The system seems bigger than any president can really deal with, or even any government.

Whatever the empire is, it’s there. It’s that behemoth that’s bigger than any one person within it. It demands that you fit the mold or it punishes you. It will take away your money. It will take away your house. It will take away your job. It will take away your family. Or maybe it won’t let you have any of those things to begin with.

Today I think the big message from the empire, the mold it wants to squeeze us all into, is that we are each of us the lord of our lives. It wants to drive wedges between people, the more wedges the better. It wants to isolate everyone in our own little prison of desire, so that loneliness will drive us to buy its products in a hopeless struggle to feel good. The beauty of the system is that if you don’t feel happy, you have only yourself to blame, because, after all, you are the lord of your life.

It’s also beautiful in that everyone else can be blamed for their various misfortunes and none of us have to help, because, after all, everyone is the lord of his or her own life. Sometimes we might help, but only after we’ve determined that forces beyond the control of the person we are helping somehow conspired to overthrow them.

All you have to do is play ball with the system and you will get its rewards. If you don’t play ball, then, well, you’re out of the game. Too bad.

God is at work however, and Paul spent the first eleven chapters of his letter to the Romans telling them about just how God is at work. God is loving his good creation despite the creation’s indifference to, or even hatred of, God. God is loving each one of us despite our indifference or open disobedience. God’s love is going to overcome our rebellion and is already doing so.

This is not like the system of the world that rewards merit and punishes disobedience. This is the awesome resurrection power of grace. It’s a whole different way of thinking that is absolutely unnatural and always, always opposed to conventional established wisdom.

Martin Luther King, in a sermon on our text, preached that most people “are thermometers that record or register the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats that transform and regulate the temperature of society.”

People who open themselves to the gospel of Jesus Christ, the story that God has entered the world in Christ, was betrayed and crucified by that world, but rose from the dead and was seen by many, open themselves to a radical transformation that wrenches them away from the conformity the world demands. The gospel changes thermometers to thermostats.

There are two lovely parallel stories in our bible that speak about little people resisting in little ways that made a big difference.

One is the story of the midwives from the book of Exodus. They aren’t given names. They were ordered by Pharoah to execute any newborn Hebrew boys. They refused. And one boy in particular was saved by being floated in a basket out into the Nile.

Now we say, “well, for crying out loud, of course we wouldn’t obey such an order.” But we underestimate our capacity to conform. Human beings have a powerful reaction to authority.

Did you ever hear about the Milgram experiment? It was an experiment on the human response to human authority. Test subjects were told by men in white coats that they were to administer shocks to other test subjects if they failed certain test questions. Of course there were no real shocks, but the people being tested didn’t know that. It was found that the vast majority of those tested were perfectly okay with administering nearly lethal shocks to other human beings just because they had been ordered to by a doctor in a white coat.

The parallel story is in the birth narrative of Matthew, when the wise men refuse Herod’s order to return to him and tell him where they found the Messiah.

If such people had been tested in the Milgram experiment, they would have been the ones who would have said, “I don’t care who you are, I’m not going to shock anyone.”

Paul’s “therefore” has to do with the implications for you and me in this news about Jesus. If we believe that God’s love for the hateful world is greater than the world’s hatred of God, then we are ready for God to transform us by the renewing of our minds. Not only that, but we are ready to be given power to do what we could never do by ourselves. We can resist the world’s demands to conform, without recourse to the world’s means of resistance.

God’s power is in his love for people who don’t know him, don’t want to know him, or even know him and hate him. That power manifests in our lives when we cease to make distinctions between ourselves and anyone else, when we cease to be citizens of any kingdom but God’s, when we cease to be anyone’s enemy, when we cease to have any status greater or lesser than anyone else’s, when we cease to belong to any class or party or social group except for the body of Christ.

The body of Christ is the nation of baptized priests, ruled by one ruler and one ruler only, the Messiah of God, Jesus. The body of Christ has no army, no prison, no court system, and never should have. If it ever has had such things, it had ceased being Christ’s body long before. The body of Christ has no classes, no privileged group, no hierarchy. If it ever did, it had ceased being Christ’s body long before.

The body of Christ does not have a dog in the presidential race or in any other election. There is no “Christian” candidate for public office. Did you know that for the first three hundred years of the church’s history it was forbidden for church members to even hold a public office? What a change when the newly baptized Roman emperor made bishops officers of the state.

Are you someone’s only friend? Do you know what I mean? Is there anyone you stand by long after everyone else has abandoned them? That’s the kind of things transformed people do. I’m not talking about defending them or protecting them from the consequences of bad decisions. I’m talking about being their friend. Do you associate with the lowly?

I do, every time I look in the mirror.

And what about the church? Are you around the church or are you in it? I believe that everyone who is here on Sunday morning is here for a reason. I believe God has brought you all here, first of all to continue in the process of transforming you through the renewing of your minds, and secondly to put you to work as a part of the body of Christ. There’s plenty you are expected to do in your personal lives out there, and it’s beautiful all the things you all do. But there is a group effort going on here as well. And God put you here because you have something he wants you to offer to it.

One of Pastor Lew’s favorite passages is: “present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” When I heard him say that in a meeting recently, I perked up and thought, “wow, I should give some thought to this.”

Sacrifice, as it has been and in some places still is practiced, has to do with sacrificing life in order to appease some God. Sacrifice was a substitutionary thing. Some god is mad at me. I’m afraid, so I substitute an animal for myself and offer its spilled-out life in exchange for mine. At the end of the day, the god gets the spirit of the dead animal, I get its carcass for dinner, and everybody’s happy.

This is what I call a dead sacrifice, and it’s the normal kind. Paul however, speaks of a living sacrifice. This is reversed entirely. In the kingdom of God, it is God who is sacrificing himself for me, and I, far from being a target of divine murder, become a receiver of God’s own life.
A living sacrifice is not offered by being killed, but by being brought to life.

What a lovely phrase, “brought to life.” We don’t say, “enliven,” or “make alive” when we speak of the dead becoming alive. We use a phrase that suggests a journey, perhaps one that is made with the aid of a guide. One is brought to life. One comes to life.

Today we will baptize Austin Norwood in the waters of the Chesapeake. It is our prayer that she will be transformed by the renewing of her mind and that she will become a living sacrifice to the kingdom of God. It is our prayer that she will be brought to life.

Amen.