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Sunday, November 09, 2008
Give It Up for God
By Rev. Jerry Herships
Scripture: Romans 12: 1-2
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.
I don’t know why I like Romans. It is a hard text, one of the most complicated, and one of the most theologically deep. It is the one that scholars say Paul spells out his theology. If this is the case, Paul is not a great speller. It sometimes feels like Paul is talking in circles. Like this part of Romans 7… “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” While this might be true, I think anyone would have a hard time making it stand up in court. “No your honor, it wasn’t me…it was the sin that dwells within me.” Good luck with that, counselor. Paul’s writing can be clear as mud. Thank goodness I am not preaching on Romans 7.
Instead, I have chosen to preach on Romans 12:1-2, which some scholars have argued is the interpretive introduction to all of Romans. So much for easy. Raymond Corriveau goes so far as to say that these two verses are the ground rule of Christian ethics. So…off we go!
The letter to the Romans was a bit different from the others because it wasn’t addressed to a Christian community that Paul founded. In fact, it was the only letter Paul wrote to a church that he himself did not establish. Paul in many ways was a stranger to these people. That in some ways explains why Paul spends so much of his time explaining his theology. This is not like the other letters Paul has written where he tries to solve that church’s individual problems. Either these people barely know who he is, or they HAVE heard a lot about him and are a bit suspicious. Paul is coming in and saying, “I don’t know what you might have heard, but here is the way it really is…”
The Church in Rome was already established by 57 or 58 CE when it is believed that Paul probably wrote the letter, but no one knows for certain how or when it first got there. Paul is taking a leap in writing style in his letter to this community. As Harvard Prof. Krister Stendahl points out, “He is trying to write at the proper cultural and educational level.” Notice how much emphasis Paul puts on the mind. He begins by writing about how the listener of Romans should give their whole lives as a living sacrifice. This was a slogan in Jewish terminology. The focus here is not the understanding of sacrifice where animals had to be killed and where there was blood, but rather the understanding of sacrifice as a tradition that focuses on repentance and the person’s devotion to God. As Bart Ehrman says in his book The New Testament, “Those who believe in Christ give themselves to others in self-sacrificing love. Indeed, this is the new cultic act of worship that fulfills the old cultic acts of sacrifice.
By devoting yourself to God, you devote the whole self including your new and improved… renewed mind! According to Candler Prof. Fred Craddock, with your new and improved mind, “God does not have to conform to human logic.” That is an interesting twist. Our minds are IMPROVED when we recognize that God does not have to fall within the bounds of human logic. Paul isn’t saying don’t use our minds. Paul is saying use our minds BETTER.
That is all well and good, but what does that mean for us today? We have to get behind the letter. We have to remember that we are eavesdropping on Paul. Whenever we are looking at any of the epistles, or letters that Paul wrote, we have to remember they are not written DIRECTLY to us. We are listening to a specific person talk to a specific group of people in a specific time and then, only after remembering that do we ask ourselves, what do I hear that holds true for me today? What things were specific for the receivers of the letter (the Romans) and what are the deeper lessons for us to learn from today.
I think one of the things Paul was trying to convey to the readers of his letter, and to us, is that you don’t half-way worship God. True authentic worship is devoting ourselves to God completely, like the back wall says: mind, body and spirit. Is one harder for you than another? Before I went to seminary, I was big into the spirit side of things. Seminary got rid of that quick! I was a big fan of Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer, Bernie Segal and Depock Chopra. I still am, in many cases. I believe much of what they say is useful as life lessons. Before seminary I was really focused on the spirit side of God. I was fine with mystery and didn’t understand why I needed to read or learn anything about the writings of the past or the history of God and the church. It was all about the LOVE. I was way into the mystery.
Once I decided to go into the ministry formally (I had already been in the ministry for years while I was bartending), I found out the United Methodist Church wanted that pesky seminary degree. I was so bummed! I just wanted to go out and love on people. I didn’t like authority, and now I was trying to become one! I am reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Leaving the Church and she mentions a dialogue she had with a Bishop one time. He said to her about going into formal ministry, “Think hard before you do this…Right now you have the broadest ministry imaginable. As a layperson, you can serve God no matter what you do for a living…once you are ordained, that is going to change. Every layer of responsibility you add is going to narrow your ministry, so think hard before you choose a smaller box.” That doesn’t make it sound too appealing now does it? Even so, I felt this is the direction God wanted me to go. So I went back to school at 40.
I thought seminary was going to be all prayers and meditation and chanting and, you know, holy stuff. Not even close. See, Iliff is a school of THEOLOGY. They teach you how to THINK about God. Just like a school of business teaches you how to think about business or a school of engineering teaches you how to do engineering. It was all theory and papers and books and reading and debating and critical thinking. I asked so many times, what does this have to do with me being a pastor or a minister? And when it comes to the day to day work, honestly, not much.
But what it did do was give me a new appreciation for the mind side of God. This is another reason why the United Methodist Church is really pretty cool. We have something called the quadrilateral. It means we look at God through four lenses: Scripture, Tradition, Experience and…REASON. As Methodists we are encouraged to use our minds. This does NOT mean everything has to fit into a nice neat box. As you talk to people at St. Andrew and your larger world, you begin to realize that, as people share their stories, not everything they have EXPERIENCED (one of the Quadrilateral big four) falls perfectly into shape. Life, like God, is a mystery – and some of those experiences we can’t explain. That shapes who we are and shapes our understanding of God. That does not mean we throw out the baby with the bath water and stop trying to exercise our minds. The mind is just one more tool we use to try to understand God. We can try. We just need to know that we never will.
The sermon writing process for me is an interesting one. I will be pretty sure I know where I am going with a sermon and then, suddenly, it shoots out in a different direction. I intended to focus on the sacrifice piece of this passage. I was trying to draw the correlation between the sacrifice mentioned in the passage with the sacrifices we make as individuals. The thing that they have in common for me is the idea of being willing to sacrifice yourself for something bigger than yourself. Tuesday is Veterans Day, and one of the most obvious examples of sacrifice is the way people who serve in the military are willing to give of themselves and some of their most beloved things, to serve a cause larger than they are. Please do not misunderstand, this is not about supporting or not supporting war or our troops. That is the easy place to go and the easy way to start arguments. What this is about is looking at the quality of sacrifice and to ask ourselves, “What are we willing to sacrifice for a greater good? What are we willing to give up for God?”
Maybe you are a stay-at-home parent willing to sacrifice big earnings to be with your kids. Maybe you are going to work, sacrificing your time with your family so that you can provide them with an education that they might never otherwise have. Maybe you sacrificed your personal dreams for the love of your life. Maybe you sacrificed income so you could go back to school and get another degree. I can relate. See, the truth is, we make sacrifices all the time. We are constantly picking one thing over the other and there is always a cost. There is ALWAYS a cost. So the question becomes, what sacrifice are you making for God? What things are you turning away from and instead focusing your devotion on God? It is a hard question. For some of us it is the fact that you are here, right now. You have given up 50% of your weekend “sleeping in mornings” so you can be here now. 75% of the country doesn’t do that. 75% of the country is sleeping in and reading the paper and going out for a late brunch. (I have to be careful I don’t make that sound too appealing! The lines at those brunch places are AWFUL!) But being here? That is a sacrifice.
Others have taken it further. Do you know what some of the people on some of the committees at this church do to make ministry happen? They give 10, 20, 30, 40 hours or MORE depending on the project, committee or team. Remember, these are regular people. They have other things to do! It is amazing to me and it is inspiring to me the time that the lay membership of this church puts in. It makes it REALLY hard for me to whine and say, “I’m tired” when I know they just got done working 8-10 hours at their paid job and THEN come here and put in another 1-4 hours in meetings and committee work that they don’t get paid for. That is sacrifice.
What are the things you are doing that is making your life a living sacrifice to God? Paul is talking to all of us. The “you” Paul is using is closer to “y’all (unlike English, Greek distinguishes singular and plural in the second person). So although I think the question still applies to your life, in Paul’s letter he is asking the community, “What are y’all doing TOGETHER to offer to God as a living sacrifice?”
When we really start offering ourselves up as living sacrifices, trying to discern God’s will, we already know the answer, at least collectively. The answer is in the Old Testament. In Micah we are told to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God…and as we do…we will find ourselves not conforming to this world but rather the world that God values. This will truly prove to be a sacrifice. Many times, not always, but many times the more you try to discern God’s will the answers you hear might not be the easy ones you want to hear. Barbra Brown Taylor quotes Susan B. Anthony’s ideas regarding divine guidance, “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I have noticed it always coincides with their own desires.” This was definitely true with me. I can’t tell you how certain I was that God wanted me to move to L.A. and become a big star when I was first starting out.
So really the question is two fold: What are we doing as individuals as a sacrifice to God, and What are “y’all”, myself included, giving to be a sacrifice to God? Are you part of that sacrifice? Find that thing or those things, say a prayer, take a deep breath… and Give it up for God. Amen.