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Romans 12:1-8 Pentecost 15A -- August 24, 2008 In the name of Jesus. Amen. Some years ago when living in Zanesville, OH, I was on my way to a meeting with my husband and an attorney to talk about some things related our adoption process. Running, typically, a few minutes behind schedule, I approached a stop sign at a rather lonely intersection of two lightly traveled streets. I came to a creeping “almost stop,” looked carefully in both directions twice, and then proceeded through the intersection. Just that fast, I heard a police car siren chillingly close, looked in my rear view mirror, and saw the flashing red lights of a squad car. I pulled over to let him pass, wondering where he was going. To my shock, he pulled over behind me, got out of his car and, after writing down my license plate number, walked up to my window. “Do you know why I stopped you, ma’am?” “Honestly, officer, I have no idea.” “I didn’t think so. You just ran that stop sign.” RAN the stop sign?, I thought. I’ve seen people “run” a stop sign, and that is NOT what I did! I was practically stopped! I looked carefully, TWICE, before going through. How can he say I RAN the stop sign? He continued, “The wheels didn’t come to a complete stop before you proceeded proceeded through the intersection.” Good grief. But knowing better than to nit-pick with an officer on duty, I kept my annoyance to myself, took the ticket he stuck through the window, and proceeded to the attorney’s office – now truly late. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” I apologized when I entered his office. “A police officer without enough to do stopped me for “running” a stop sign. He insisted that all four wheels hadn’t to come to a complete stop. Good grief!” He grinned slyly and said with the impeccable logic of a lawyer, “Joan, if one wheel is still rolling, they’re all rolling. There’s no such thing as ‘a little bit’ stopped. Either you’re stopped, or you’re not!” I had one of those “I wish I could think of something witty to say right now, but I can’t” moments. So, I cleverly changed the subject instead! “No such thing as a little bit stopped. Either you are, or you aren’t.” It’s a phrase St. Paul could have used in his writings to the Christians in Rome, struggling with their life as disciples of Jesus and as a community of faith. Only he might have phrased it, “There is no such thing as being a little bit Christian. You are either a Christian/disciple of Jesus, or you’re not.” People have changed so little since then. That’s why Scripture is still so powerful even 2000 years later. Paul saw those early Christians bringing the ways and influence of the world into the community of faith, rather than the community of faith bringing the ways and influence of Jesus into the world. Don’t we so often do the same? How honestly do we acknowledge that we are heavily influenced by our increasingly secular society, by advertising, by family pressures, by job and organized sports requirements, by our own tendency toward spiritual laziness? It is so easy to be content with trying to be “a little bit Christian.” We sparingly offer ourselves in service to others, sparingly return a portion of God’s blessings as offering, and often do both with strings attached, as if the offering of our time and our treasure is a mere exchange for goods and services rather than an act of worship. Many people in our culture these days regard the church, the community of faith, as little more than a spiritual service station where we come to “gas up” or “tune up” from time to time, assuming someone else is paying for all of this – building, staff, programs, materials; assuming someone else is teaching Sunday School, organizing events and activities, planning, serving others in their need. They simply expect it all to be here if and when they come, as if we were entering a religious shopping mall. I remember a rather provocative question that was going around in Christian circles some years ago. You probably remember it; it went like this, “If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” Do we blend in to our secular culture so well that no one would have any idea that we are followers of Jesus? St. Paul says to the Roman Christians, as paraphrased in The Message: Don't become so
well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even
thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from
the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly
respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down
to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, and
develops well-formed maturity in you.
Paul is saying that Christianity, being disciples of Jesus and followers of his Way, isn’t simply a matter of outward form -- coming to worship, giving our money, bringing our kids for Baptism and Confirmation. Following Jesus, Paul says, is allowing Jesus to transform us from the inside out. Instead of our lives being dominated by human nature or by cultural trends both of which can one minute be inspiring and the next be decadent, as we mature in Christ, our lives are dominated by Christ’s nature, by his Spirit living within us. As we learned in 40 Days of Purpose: Christianity is not a self-centered life but a Christ-centered life. Christ literally “changes our minds;” that is, our very way of thinking about things becomes different because we have opened our minds to being transformed by the mind of Christ. I love this verse in our Hymn of the Month, “Will You Come and Follow Me?” -- the speaker in the first four verses, of course, being Jesus: Will you leave yourself
behind if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind and never be the same? Will you risk the hostile stare, should your life attract or scare? Will you let me answer prayer in you, and you in me? At the Installation service for our new NE Minnesota Synod Bishop, Tom Aitken, yesterday, our ELCA Presiding Bishop, Mark Hanson, preached a sometimes humorous but always challenging sermon, as he always does. One of the things Bishop Hanson said was: “One of my pet theological peeves is when people talk rather glibly about ‘God’s plan’ for a certain person or situation, as if WE know the mind and purposes of God.” Hanson explained, Luther taught this paradox: we cannot explain the mysterious purposes of God; at the same time, we are called to participate with Christ in the purposes of God – that ultimate purpose of restoring all of creation to God as God originally intended it. St. Paul would say, being a follow of Jesus is not simply a matter of showing up for a worship service on Sunday. Real worship, which Paul calls “spiritual worship” (and the OT prophets say this as well) is not the offering to God of a human-made liturgy, however noble, or a ritual, however magnificent. Real worship is the offering of our lives to God, not something performed in a church or a temple, but something which sees the whole world as the temple of the living God. St. Paul continues, again according to The Message1: “So here's what I want you
to do: Take your everyday, ordinary life -- your sleeping, eating,
going-to-work, and walking-around life -- and place it before God as an
offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do
for God.”
We aren’t called to blend in to our, or any, society. We aren’t called to “stop and shop” at religious service stations called churches. Christ didn’t die to open the way to abundant life on this earth and heaven in the life to come so we could be “a little bit Christian.” We are called, transformed by water and the Spirit in Baptism, by the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, to live individually as disciples, and in our life together as the Body of Christ, to be a sign of the reign of God which has come, and is coming, in Jesus. When we talk at Lutheran Church of the Cross about discerning God’s will and listening for God’s purpose for us -- which is what the Strategic Planning Process was all about last year, where hundreds of you gathered in homes to talk and share and pray -- when we ask what pleases God rather than what pleases ourselves, the outcome may agree with what the world and we desire, or what we regard as important -- but it may not. What pleases God may be fundamentally opposed to what we or the world idolize. Do you hear the good news woven in here? Jesus didn’t just die for “the world” -- some vague concept of humanity. Jesus died for YOU. Jesus received you into the Kingdom through the waters of baptism BY NAME. In Jesus, God drew you into God’s heart, and committed himself to you for all eternity. You have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the saving cross of Jesus, forever. Now do you hear it? Do you hear the good news? YOU CANNOT BE REPLACED. God doesn’t love just a bit of you; God loves you body and spirit, heart and mind. When we begin to internalize that, when the Christian faith is more than a concept we believe, Christ changes us, transforms us, from cultural chameleons to committed Christians, from a religious service station to the Body of Christ. There’s no such thing as being a little bit reborn, a little bit saved, a little bit Christian. Christ has claimed you, the whole of you, for his own. Amen. 1William
Barclay, The Letter to the Romans,
Revised Edition, (Westminster John Knox Press, 1975), p. 157.
Rev. Joan Gunderman,
Senior Pastor |
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