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Sunday, May 02, 2010

I THOUGHT IT WAS FOR THEM

By Rev. Jerry Herships

Scripture: Romans 12: 1 – 2

¹I 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. ²Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what the will of God is—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

As I read Cindy’s sermon last week I realized I couldn’t have paid her to preach a better sermon to come before what I wanted to talk about this week. For those of you who might have missed it, Cindy talked about apathy and being asleep and not being awake to God and the Holy Spirit. How we have to be careful that we don’t just fall into a routine and miss what God wants to show us. 

Last time we got together like this I told you that reaching out to the world was a good idea for the world. This time, I’m going to tell you why it is a good idea for us to reach out beyond our doors. The next time we get together, I’ll give you one last reason why reaching out into the world is really what we must do if we are serious about being followers of Christ. 

So this message is a follow-up on the last sermon I preached about outreach and being different. 

Paul is telling us to be different here, too. He is telling us not to be conformed, molded, and shaped by the values and standards of this world. He goes on to tell us to transform ourselves by the renewing of our minds. The end goal here, for Paul, is so that we can know God’s will for our lives. 

There is very little there that most of us would say no to. We know we don’t want to value what the world values; money, power, prestige. We all would love to transform ourselves to a newer, better, more enlightened self. And who wouldn’t want to know the will of God in our lives? The question is…how? How Paulie? These are great goals, but how exactly do we change. How do we become our best self? How do we transform our lives? 

Now to be fair, Paul does give us a clue when he says don’t be conformed to this world. He is saying that sometimes the things that the world values are simply not the things God values. God does not care what letters are before…or after our names. Things like PhD. and CEO and Doctor, Senator, and yes Rev. These titles are nice but they are things of this world. We often put too much importance on titles and trappings. When we do, it can lead the owners of those titles to feel Entitled. This is never good. This is the kind of entitlement that Jesus couldn’t stand with respect to the religious leaders of his day. 

God doesn’t care how much money we have, the car we drive or the neighborhood we live in and Paul is reminding us that these things won’t lead to what we really want anyway, transformation. 

Many of us hope that transformation will come from Church. We hope and pray…literally, that if we come to church every Sunday and pray hard, maybe take a class or two, we will be transformed. This can happen and has happened. The challenge with this is that far too often people will come to church wanting church to be presented to them. There are people that consume church. I did, for years. I went and took and took and took. And I remained…stuck. It was fun and I made lots of friends. I saw cool shows and heard amazing things. But the truth was…I was stuck. I never felt anything close to a transformation. Nothing changed for me until I learned English. Yep, English was what brought me around. I had to learn that “church” was not a noun, it was a verb. 

For so long, years really, I could not figure out why church was, in a word, dull. I didn’t get much from it. And right there was part of the problem. I was focusing on what I GOT from it. I wanted to take and from that, be transformed. I think part of what I am discovering is that it is when we give that the transformation occurs. We don’t take stuff to be transformed; we give stuff to be transformed. 

Now it might just be a coincidence that the people that I see being transformed are people that are reaching out into the world. It could very well just be a coincidence. 

But I doubt it. 

Paul is telling us that helping others will help with this transformation. In this passage, Paul seeks to motivate them and us "through the mercies of God." The Greek word translated "mercies" (oiktirmos) means "pity, compassion for the ills of others." One scholar says that it is "the tender feeling of pity for those in distress." 

Now know that there are times in our life when we need to TAKE. We are hurting and broken and need to heal from one of the many body blows life can deliver. When we are in that place, the church is a hospital to help us heal. 

But when we are healthy, the church is an outpost. A place we come back to so that we can get recharged, gather what we need, and go back out into the world to serve and give. And when we feel stuck, giving is where it’s at: giving to the world. Don’t get freaked out by the word “giving.”  I am not talking about reaching into your wallets. I am talking about reaching into your heart. It doesn’t matter where you give. Find your cause. Find that thing that makes you angry when you hear about it on TV. Or that thing that makes you cry when you read a story about it in a magazine. Honestly, I don’t know why I care about the homeless. Yes, my uncle was homeless and I have spent ONE night in my car right after the earthquake in LA years ago, but those things were correlation, not causation. 

I believe that the reason I have an affinity for the homeless is because in some way, shape or form, God put that on my heart. We can so easily get freaked out when we talk about the Holy Spirit, but I think it is a pretty cool idea. It makes God a living thing. It doesn’t put God off in the clouds but right here, among us. Right here in us. 

I think it was when I started to listen to that call of the homeless that things began to change for me. There was a transformation. Church became a verb. It wasn’t something I consumed weekly. It was something I DID. Church is at its best when we go out and do. The scripture did say GO FORTH and make disciples. How do you make disciples?  You go out and do. We all know that we all learn better when someone shows us rather than tells us. If we want people to know who we are, we can’t just tell them…we need to show them. 

See, the irony is that for so long I thought that we went out into the world to help THEM; whoever the “them” was. That’s wonderful and it is great to help others but really, it is when we help “them” that we feel the change. We thought it was for them but it is really ourselves we are helping. Transformation happens when we put them first. And when we do that, we get closer and closer to finding out what it is that God has in store for us. 

So if church has become a drag, if you ever find yourself, like I did, saying, “I’m just not getting anything out of it,” maybe the answer is to find a way to serve. Find a way to engage with something bigger than yourself. If you are anything like me, feeling stuck is a lousy feeling. It is that feeling of being asleep that Cindy talked about last week. It is just a drag. 

It is when we stop listening to the world, when we stop trying to conform to the world, when we start looking at the world and saying, “What can I give” rather than, “what can I take” that the transformation begins. Aren’t you tired of feeling like you are just going through the motions day after day? Aren’t you tired of feeling like you are living the movie, Groundhogs Day? Aren’t you sick and tired of being sick and tired? 

When you make church a verb instead of a noun, you will not be conforming to the world. When you make church a verb and not a noun, you will be moving toward God’s will in your life. And when you make church a verb and not a noun, your transformation will begin. When you work on transforming the world, it is your own transformation that will begin to fall into place.