About the preacher: The Rev. Dr. Peter Robinson teaches at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto and lives in the cities east end with his wife and three children.
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, 2014 – Exodus 1:8-2:10; Psalm 124; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20
I exhort you, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Now what in the world does that mean for us today? In Romans 12 Paul shifts gears moving from what God has done for us in Jesus Christ and what God intends to do for the world to – how we should respond – how should we live? Now the way we frame that question is huge. It is not ‘how should we live if we want to get God’s attention’, or ‘if we want to get on God’s good side’, but how should we live because of what God has already done for us and because of what God is doing and will do.
The Early Edition was a tv show that ran from 1996 – 2000. The main character in the show, Gary Hobson, would find the next day’s newspaper on his door step. He would pick it up and read all the things that were about to happen. Then it would be up to him to do what he could to change events before they happened. To save people who don’t even know that they need to be saved.
O to be able to predict the future. Just imagine what we could do. We could make a killing on the stock market – people lose money every day with their bold predictions of what the stock market is going to do next. What about world events – what is Vladimir Putin going to do next? What will happen in Iraq or Gaza over the next year? What could we do to change the course of world history?
In Romans 8 Paul speaks of the hope we have which is grounded in God’s plans and intentions for the future: ‘the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.’(8:21) It is not that God gives us tomorrow’s news today but that God has shown us what he is doing and will do.
We are not invited to look ahead into the crystal ball. Rather we are invited to put our confidence in the one who will work all things together for good.(8:28)
But here is the key – our knowledge of the future, our confidence is not in the details – we can’t predict the what, or the when, or the how, but we can know the one who holds us all in his hands.
Romans 8: I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
In the Early Edition Gary’s response to knowing the future was to run around and try and fix or change what was about to happen. To arrive in the nick of time and to save those who didn’t even know they were in danger. That is not our job, thanks be to God. But it is our job to live in light of what is to come. How do we do that? Or what does that mean in a practical way?
That brings us back to Romans 12 and how we are to live in light of what God has done, is doing and will do. Verse 2 is one of the best known verses of the bible – do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. That little phrase ‘the renewing of your minds’ is a favourite phrase that has been used in book titles and conferences and workshops to encourage people to live the Christian life: Renew your minds, change the way that you think.
It is a strange thing that all too often we have come to believe that the Christian life is primarily about changing the way that we think: what a lot of confusion that perspective has brought. Tom Wright’s book After You Believe targets the problem that far too many Christians become Christians and then don’t know what to do next. After all they have understood that being a Christian is about a change in the way we think – it is about choosing Jesus. But after that decision, then what? Confusion. Even many of our endeavours to educate one another in the Christian faith have focused on more information – because changing the way we think is what we are supposed to do – isn’t it? But, we have to ask, is this what Paul meant? And here we need to tread carefully. Paul certainly sees the vital importance of renewing our minds but Paul isn’t operating with the same picture of the human being as we are. Paul doesn’t believe that change is something that happens primarily in our heads. Paul understands that the Christian life involves our head, our heart, our will, our imagination, our body: and not just our mind.
The idea that formation in the Christian life is primarily about a correction or realignment in the way we think has led to a great deal of frustration, confusion and disappointment. We have tried to change the way we think and then are surprised that we fall back into the same old patterns as before.
To make matters worse the focus on our minds has been further confused by another modern notion that we work with; that is the promise of instant gratification. We are thoroughly conditioned consumers so we have been taught that if you want something you buy it, now. Companies like McDonald’s have built their business on the notion of instant gratification. In England Tesco’s grocery chain became hugely successful by making sure there were enough cashiers that customers never had to wait: we want it now. Not surprisingly we think of formation or change in the same way – if we want something we should be able to have it now simply by choosing to think differently. But, it just doesn’t work like that. So what is Paul saying about transformation – about living the Christian life?
A few thoughts:
1. We are being drawn in to a complete change in who we are and how we live (which of course includes changing the way that we think.) There are hints both of the Jewish sacrificial system and of Christian baptism in these verses. We are to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. The contrast with the sacrificial system is intentional. This is not about giving an animal to be sacrificed to God it is about giving our bodies, by which Paul means giving our whole selves to God. What lies behind Paul’s argument is baptism which has rendered the sacrificial system obsolete. It is in Christ’s death, in his baptism, that we both die and live. This goes back to what Paul spent the first part of Romans explaining – that in Christ’s death and resurrection, his sacrifice, we now live. So our self-offering, this living sacrifice means we give ourselves to God as the only possible response for what God has done for us. Framing this in terms of death and life makes the point – the transformation Paul is talking about is wholesale, a complete change in who we are. Gone are any idyllic pictures of the Christian life as the promise that God will help us become all that we want to be. In its place is a call to radical restructuring where everything about us, our values, character, desires, behaviour, every part of us is to be remade.
2. There is no instant gratification: because this is a wholesale transformation it is not a short term program. We can’t go away on retreat for a couple of days and then come back transformed and get on with our lives. The reordering is far deeper and more significant than that. For context we need to go all the way back to Romans 1 – we have been shaped by the world around us: shaped to think in certain ways, to hold particular values and to be moved by a set of desires. This is not a superficial formation that we can simply put aside it is the stuff of marrow and sinew – the form and material that is structural to our identity, how we understand ourselves and how we see or perceive the world. When Paul talks about sin in Romans 3 his point is not that we have all been bad boys and girls and that we better start behaving. No, his point is that we have all been and are being fundamentally formed by a world that is turned away from God. To be redeemed by Christ and in Christ means that our future is no longer determined by the world around us. Where we were conformed to the world, now we need to be transformed or re-formed in Christ: heart, soul, mind and body. And that is a long, slow process.
3. It is all about God. Paul has spent the first 11 chapters of Romans telling us what God has done and is doing including a long section in which he speaks about the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in the world. It is only now that he focuses on how we should respond. The focus is clear – it is all about God, it is all about grace. We enter into the process of transformation because of what God has already done for us. We don’t seek to be transformed with the hope that if we do it right God will accept us. No we seek to be transformed because God has already accepted us, adopted us as his children. We seek to be transformed because in that transformation we come to truly know God.
And that brings us to worship which is fundamental to transformation, fundamental to living the Christian life. Paul tells us that it is our spiritual worship to present our bodies, ourselves to God. Worship is response. It is the response which grows naturally out of the recognition of who God is and what God has done. It is a response to God in which our desire is to bring pleasure to the one who has done so much for us.
An image of worship that helps me is of a little child doing something to please their parent. Perhaps it is presenting a mother’s day breakfast of burnt toast and runny eggs with a huge beaming smile.(Which means of course that you have to eat all of it.) Or maybe it is like a child seeing their mother or father across the room and their whole face lights up as they run to hug them. This is the kind of worship that God desires of us. It is a response to the one who loves us in an extraordinary way.
The whole of the Christian life is meant to be worship, to be a response to God; when we wake up in the morning, as we eat breakfast, as we go to work, every moment of every day. It is also learning that when we fall we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and set off again. Worship is to offer our bodies, our lives, ourselves to God. So that we might be transformed, that we might be aligned with God and with God’s desires and intentions for this world.
So our Early Edition is not about tomorrow’s news; it is about God and the heart of our transformation is to see God more clearly. Because in knowing God and God’s intentions for us and for the world we learn to live with confidence, with hope, into the future. We can’t predict what is going to happen in the next hour let alone the next day. But we can come to know, to discern the will of God, the heart of God: that which is good and acceptable and perfect. At the heart of transformation is worship because worship is learning to live in the light of God, the one who holds our future in his hands.
