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10. Sunday after Pentecost, 08/21/2011
Sermon on Romans 12:1-8, by Luke Bouman
Romans 12:1 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.
A dog owner's prayer.
"O God, please help me to become the person that my dog thinks I am." Such is the dog owner's prayer. And anyone who owns a dog knows that our dogs love us far more than we ever deserve. Such is the case with Merlin, our Miniature Schnauzer. Merlin knows his place in our family, or as he'd probably tell you, his pack. He eats only after we do, is not allowed to run up stairs or to enter doors before us. He usually is not allowed to greet visitors until after we do. He must always "do" something for us before he is rewarded with our attention. At night, when we tell him it is "crate time," he dutifully retires to his beloved shelter, though he would much rather sleep with us. All of these things reinforce to Merlin who is master and who is dog in our house. Dog trainers will tell you that it is good for dogs to know their place. It makes them dutiful and trainable, and Merlin is certainly both. He is a good dog; loving, gentle, playful, and full of energy for us.
Merlin also has some prized possessions. Among them are his animals, three of them, to be exact. They are his playmates and sleeping companions. Though stuffed and inanimate, they are very real to him. He loves them, I suppose, in the way that dogs do, carrying them around and chewing on them. Each morning, Merlin "rescues" his animals from the crate where they have slept with him, carrying them to various spots in the house where he can enjoy their company later. Each night, when "crate time" approaches, we ask him to find his animals and he can usually go right to each one and bring them. In all the world there is nothing he loves so much as his animals... except us. He loves us more.
From time to time, usually once a day or more, he will make an offering to me. Usually he brings it to me as I'm sitting at my desk working at the computer. His offering is his animals. He brings them to me one by one and places them on my lap or my foot, or in my hand, whichever suits his fancy. If I do not notice or acknowledge the gift right away, he will give an impatient "squeak" to the one with the noisemaker inside. It is obviously important to Merlin to make his gift. Of course I accept his gift with a big "to do". This is our ritual, and he repeats it with each of the three other members of his "pack". It is a sign that he loves us and is willing to give his whole self to us. We are worth that much to him. So I pray the dog owner's prayer, knowing that I do not deserve such devotion from another of God's creatures.
Therefore!
Paul starts Romans 12 with a "therefore". Paul has spent at least some, if not most of 11 chapters of his letter to the Romans leading up to a "therefore". Up until this point Paul is laying out for the readers what God is up to. Paul has talked about the overwhelming generosity of our giving God. He writes to the Romans about God's grace in Jesus Christ, not only when things go well, but also in the midst of the suffering of life.
Now he gets around to our response, and his conclusion is startling. Our response to God is to present our bodies, to present our whole selves as a "living sacrifice" which Paul talks about being our "spiritual worship." It is at this point that we begin to take in the enormity of what Paul is saying. God has given us everything. We respond by committing our whole selves to worship, by showing the surpassing value that the gifts of God represent in our lives.
This is something basic in the make-up of the human spirit. We respond to kindness and generosity not out of obligation or duty, but because we are awestruck by love! We understand the "worth" of the gifts we have been given and we want to respond in kind. It is not a matter of responding with a gift of equal value. With God that would be impossible. Instead we respond with generous and loving hearts. Worship, after all, has linguistic origins in an Old English word, "worthship." It means to acknowledge the value of something.
Toward the end of my time in Germany as a student in 1980, I had the opportunity to travel to Norden, a small town on the North Sea coast where my father's ancestors had originated. It was between Christmas and New Years day, and the town, a summer resort, was almost empty of people as I walked around drinking it in. About midway through the day, three young teenagers, a boy and two girls, began to follow me around town, and heckle me as they went. It seemed that this stranger in their midst was going to be their entertainment on a boring day one way or the other. My response was to stop and learn their names, telling them my name and story in the process. Immediately their tone changed and they adopted me as some long lost relative.
They showed me the town like no tour guide ever could. They gave me a sense of what it must have been like to grow up in the place. The gifted me that day. They were clear that I had given to them too. I had saved them from boredom, no doubt, but more than that. What it was, I never did learn. But each of them removed something of worth from their pockets: a key chain, a wrist band, some small thing. They handed it to me and asked me to keep it as a token of their joy at meeting me (they used the word "freude" which is generally translated as "joy"). I had nothing to give them but a couple of old "Bic" ball point pens, of a type not available in Germany. It was almost nothing to give to them, but they acted like it was treasure and used the pens both to take my address and later to write me letters (from all three at once, no less). Our day had been a blessing and our response had been to offer gifts to each other.
So often we wander through life in a trance, not noticing and not acknowledging the source of our blessings. Our lives devolve into meaningless wandering from one thing to the next, hoping to find something, anything, to satisfy our longings. We fail to see that God himself has gifted us with his presence and everything we need not only to exist, but for life to have meaning beyond our selves, beyond our place in the world, beyond one moment in time. When our eyes are closed to what is around us, though God gives in big and small ways, often the gifts go unnoticed or unused. But when our eyes are open to what God is doing, and how God is giving, we are freed to live beyond ourselves, beyond the ghettos of our lives, beyond the single moment in such a way that our selves, our ghettos and even our moments are transformed. We become a part of God's loving, giving action for the world.
Lots of things in Chapter 12 of Romans come after the "therefore". (We'll save comment on them for next week.) All of them involve being taken up into God's very way of living for others in Jesus Christ. All of them flow from God's gracious gift in Jesus Christ. All of them, Paul says, are worship. And we do them, not because we are obligated, but because we are delighted to find ourselves so loved that we feel loving in return. We become like my dog, Merlin, gifting me with his animals. We gift God with tokens our whole selves, not because God needs it, but because our connection to this giving God, to this fount of our blessings, transforms us into beings of worship. Giving is an act of our worship because we participate in the family of giving that has Jesus Christ as its head.
A Loving Response
I learned the depth of this type of worship while in my congregation in Austin. We started meeting and planning for a Capital Campaign early in the summer of 1995. Kathy and I were both working, but we had no children. As folks in the DINK (Dual Income, No Kids) demographic, we were expected and intending to make a large commitment to the campaign. Then we found out that we were expecting our son, Nathan. Since we had been told that we could not have children, we were aware Nathan would be a precious gift from God (hence his name). We made a decision that Kathy would finish teaching that school year and then would stay home with Nathan for at least the duration of the fulfillment process for the Capital Campaign. Without criticizing others who did not have the luxury of our choice, we did not think that God would bless us with so great a gift and trust so that we could place him in daycare.
That decision left us with a dilemma. We were very grateful for the gift God had given us, and our hearts were overflowing with the need to give in return, but we were planning to give up the financial resources that would allow us to make a generous gift. We simply did not know where the money was going to come from at a time when we were planning to give up 40% of our income and add the expenses of a child to our household. At the same time, we were driven by an overwhelming joy and thankfulness to God for the coming arrival of a child for whom we had waited 13 years. We didn't have the resources to make a gift, but we had lives overflowing with worshipful generosity. Gradually as the fears melted away, and though some tough years and difficult decisions lay ahead, we decided that the generosity of God would win out in our lives. We made the large commitment to the congregation that we had planned to make, in addition to our continued tithing. It was but a sign of our whole lives given to God, and it is a ritual that we replay as we continue to make our offerings each day, week, month and year.
Nathan was and is the most precious gift that God could have given us. But he is not ours to keep. We recognized that right away too. Within several months after his birth, at the Vigil of Easter, we brought him to worship to return him to God in baptism. Make no mistake, he is ours to raise, and we are his stewards and his parents still. But we are doing this as a trust from God. In Baptism we offered him to the one who is our maker and provider as a sign that we recognize that our whole lives, that Nathan's whole life, that all of life itself is a gift from God. We do not belong to ourselves. We own nothing. Each night, when we go to bed, we offer ourselves back to God in sleep. Each morning, when we wake, we take up the gift of life and use it as God bids us. Just as each day Merlin spreads joy through the giving of his animals, and each night they are gathered back to the crate with him to be recharged for the coming day. That is the way of these things. Our whole lives offered as God's beloved, our spiritual worship.