Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Romans Chapter 12
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
You have something to offer, the person sitting beside you, and they have something to offer you.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:Today, we are wrapping up our series in Romans until next year, that is. And we find it super helpful around here to slow it down in the letter to from, Paul to the Romans to take some time to reorient ourselves with what Paul was really on about. But before we get to chapter 12 today, I want to talk with you about another kind of slowing down. For the last twenty years of my spiritual journey, I have been really drawn to the contemplative life. The Christian tradition has all kinds of pockets of contemplation from monks in the desert to communities of urban monasticism spread across the world today.
Speaker 1:And I'd even say that contemplative practices added to prayer and scripture reading have sometimes felt like they truly rescue me. It feels like they rescue me from some panic and doubt and seasons of uncertainty. And with the prayer team here at Commons, we work really hard to make some of these ancient practices of contemplation available to you. And some of you have attended our labyrinth retreats and lectio divina and welcoming prayer sessions among others. Well, we've got another one coming up during Lent, which begins this week, and I wanna tell you about it.
Speaker 1:On Saturday morning, March the sixteenth here at our Kensington Parish, I'm inviting you to an introduction to Tazay. An introduction to what now? An introduction to Tazay. And Tazay is a place and a practice. It's an ecumenical community in France that began as a youth renewal movement.
Speaker 1:Maybe some people at Commons have even visited or been there before. Well, I actually have not been there. But my dear friend Rod Olsen has, And Rod is going to shape a Tazay experience for you. With the help of some instruction and song, we will explore this practice, and I promise you, your heart will be moved with grace and beauty and imagination for your Lenten journey. And you don't have to be a singer to get into Tazay.
Speaker 1:I am absolutely not one, but I get a lot out of these sessions. So if you're curious or you know right now, yes, for sure, Taze is for me, then head to commons.life and find the event contemplative prayer in the events tile to register. I really hope that you'll think about joining us and also joining my good friend Rod who really is one of the most lovely humans that I know. Today, we wrap up Romans for another year, but first, skipping ahead a little bit, the apostle Paul signs off the letter with a a shout out to the deacon and patron Phoebe. And Paul, in fact, commends her to the community in Rome.
Speaker 1:And when you look through the list of names in chapter 16 that follow Phoebe's name, you find slave and slave owner, freed women and men, the mix of the rich and the poor. All of them have come together to sit in a dining room after a meal or an atrium like living room in a larger home to hear Paul's letter read to them out loud, possibly even by Phoebe herself. And slowing down to imagine this world, the start of a new community, it helps us to appreciate the complexity of Paul's arguments and instructions in the letter. And today, we are talking about some of the practical, that's right, practical advice that Paul gives the church in Rome in chapter 12. I'm calling this sermon, what my Jewish neighbors taught me about living my Christian faith, which I realized doesn't even make sense to you yet, and that is totally okay.
Speaker 1:We will get there. But first, let's pray together. Loving God. For some of us in the room, the words in scripture are so familiar. And with that, we bring all kinds of previous interpretations, different chapters from our stories, and perhaps even fraught memories when the scriptures were used to cut us down a bit instead of heal, to control rather than to free us, to divide rather than to bring us together.
Speaker 1:And for others here today, the scriptures are strange. They're ancient and confusing and disorienting. Then still, we show up. We open our ears and our hearts, and we trust that who we really are is welcome in the pages of scripture. And we can know some of your heart for us here.
Speaker 1:So God of love, Jesus who suffers and the spirit who guides the way, we trust that in all things and through all things, you are near. Amen. So about a month ago, I wrapped up the series on friendship here in our Kensington parish, and I told you about my upcoming friendship tour, kind of a silly little title that I gave a trip that I took to visit old friends from when I lived in Vancouver. And many of you have asked me about my friendship tour. You even called it that, which is so fun, and it's so lovely that you care.
Speaker 1:I mean, of course, you do. You are thoughtful and fabulous people. Now I am not going to give you the full report of the friendship tour because some of that's just for me, But the trip did inspire some genuine reflection on community. Like, who's even in my community? And what brought them into my life?
Speaker 1:And what makes them stay? And one of the surprises for me in the friendship tour was seeing friends that I actually didn't even have plans to see. So a text message made one of those meetups happen. It's from Dave and Tara, friends from really another time in my life. And honestly, I thought our paths were drifting apart.
Speaker 1:It's been thirteen years since I moved into an East Vancouver apartment with my dear friend Angie, and Dave and Tara were our Jewish neighbors. And skip ahead, over a decade, none of us live on East 15th anymore, but a trip to the Sunshine Coast to visit that same friend Angie brought our paths back together again. And little did I know that this little text message and the ensuing visit would give me so much to think about and inspire even some really good decision making in my life, which is what happens with Paul's letter to Rome. Paul gives the church in Rome so much to think about. Like, what's up with the differences between the Jewish and Gentile Jesus followers in this one community.
Speaker 1:But now Paul turns a page in the letter to give instructions on how to live as a community with challenges that are within and also without. So Romans 12 begins, therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy. And therefore is an ordinary word used 500 times in the New Testament as common as a text message. But biblical scholar Catherine Grebe flags this particular therefore as the most important one in the entire epistle. In other words, here's where Paul's arguments meet everyday life.
Speaker 1:And there's an old joke that goes, whenever you read a therefore, ask yourself what it's there for. Groan. But the part that we are about to read is in response to the everyday that we've read in Romans, everything we've read in Romans so far. And the fact that Paul says, therefore, in view of God's mercy tells us that for Paul, this entire difficult section that we've spent the last four weeks studying is actually all about mercy. And sometimes with Paul, when you get bogged down, one of the best things that you can do is just to keep reading, keep moving forward.
Speaker 1:Because for Paul, no matter how backwards and forwards and technical or frustrated or matter of fact and intensely theological he gets, grace is always right around the corner. In my interactions, this is something that I can learn from, that wherever conversations take me, whatever emotions I feel or ways that I get a bit triggered, I wanna come back to grace. Grace for the other person, but also grace for myself. But anyway, Paul says, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship.
Speaker 1:Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, God's good, pleasing, and perfect will. Now, is an interesting opening because our instinct is to read the passage in terms of what we've given up. When we think of body and mind, we think my body and my mind. We're conditioned by the freedom that we have to assume that everyone has the same freedom, but Paul is speaking to a culture where people are not free to think of their bodies and minds as their own.
Speaker 1:According to Roman law, only the master of the household is free. The master's wives, the slaves, the children, they are not free. Their bodies don't belong to them. So the invitation to respond to God's mercy and to offer your body gives you a right to participate. You don't have to wait for someone to tell you that you're allowed.
Speaker 1:You see, Paul assumes that in this story, you do have a voice. That's a profound statement because in light of God's story and the world it plays out in, the Christian community restructures itself with solidarity instead of power structures. As theologian Juergen Maltmann describes, I am free and feel free when I am respected and recognized by other people, and when I, for my part, respect and accept others. Then the other person is not a restriction of my freedom, but an extension of it. In mutual participation in the life of other people, individuals become free beyond the boundaries of their individuality.
Speaker 1:That is the social side of freedom. We call it solidarity. In other words, our response to the grace of God is to structure ourselves around mutuality rather than power and any manipulation. We no longer find our identity and who we are against or how much more stuff we have from other people or who we keep out. We find it through mutual participation and offering what we have, even if it's all that we have, to each other.
Speaker 1:This means it's okay for you to ask for help. It's okay for you to share even the saddest part of your own story. It's perfectly fine if you wanna live with less so that someone else can live with a bit more. In fact, this is your sacrifice. And when Paul uses the language of sacrifice in the letter, he is speaking to the Romans who know a thing or two about gods and sacrifices.
Speaker 1:Either because they were Jewish converts who lived the history of sacrifice in their tradition or because they are from Gentile homes which display the evidence of gods even in the decor or simply because on their way to meet Phoebe and to hear the letter that she read from Paul, they walk by temples dedicated to various gods. So sacrifices were an established reality in Rome. But the thing is, Paul is not saying bring your bird or your goat to the temple and kill it. He's saying bring your life to the community and live it. And that's a huge difference.
Speaker 1:This language might get our attention a little bit here, but it certainly would have caught the attention in Rome because all of a sudden, it's not something outside of you that God wants or desires, it's you. In light of everything we have read in Romans so far, now God says, hey, you. You are enough for me. Eugene Peterson says it like this, your everyday ordinary life, your sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking around life, this is what God celebrates. And the reason you offer your whole self to God is that it already belongs to God in the first place.
Speaker 1:It's a beautiful coming home. You never don't belong with God. And Paul is all about living life as it actually is, authored by God, known by God, held by God. Living in your body like it's worship will have a profound effect on your mind. Now, let me pause to say here.
Speaker 1:For some of us in the room or listening on YouTube or the podcast, this passage in Romans 12 has been used to actually keep us down. Maybe for you, offering your body as worship does not actually welcome your freedom but insists on your submission. This is not what Paul is on about here. Paul is not setting up a power grab to keep some people strong and other people weak. Paul is for the strength that is found in weakness and the weakness that levels the strong.
Speaker 1:So if offering your body as a sacrifice has been anything but good news for you, hear me today. This is an empowering message for all of us. This is not a denial of your worth. It's a full bodied affirmation of it. Amen?
Speaker 1:Amen. Hello. Amen. But now, Paul moves to our minds. He says, offer your bodies as living sacrifice.
Speaker 1:Do not conform to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And first off, it's interesting that Paul starts with our bodies and then goes to our minds. That's kind of opposite of how we do things, isn't it? We start with our heads and then assume our actions will flow from there. But for Paul, it's your habits and your rhythms and your patterns that start these changes.
Speaker 1:And I don't know if you've experienced this, but sometimes we live so deep in our heads that we forget we are bodies. It can take rituals and practices to call us back into our whole selves and to shape us from the inside out. So if you wanna be more generous, give something away. If you want to let go of some stress in your life, just take a long walk. If you wanna heal a past hurt, find a therapist that you can talk to and keep going back until you can move on.
Speaker 1:Just getting your body to that appointment is part of your emotional healing too. Another passage in Romans, Romans 10, Paul says, if you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart. And that sounds backwards too. Obviously, we have to believe something before we can say it, except sometimes not. Sometimes you sing words with others who believe them for you, or you eat a sacred meal and you trust that there's something bigger going on, or you close your eyes and you bow your head and you say thank you even if you're not so sure that God is near.
Speaker 1:Because what we do with our bodies and our resources is often what shapes our minds, and Paul seems to really get that. So next, we have this neat connection between bodies and minds and place. But the Greek word for world is aeon, and it means the present age. And Paul doesn't explain it here, but in Corinthians and Galatians, he draws from Jewish apocalyptic thought where present age is matched with the age to come. In Hebrew, it's Olam Hazeh and Olam Habah.
Speaker 1:And Olam Habah, the age to come, was this idea that there will be a separate reality where everything arrives in a God given solution, kind of how we think of heaven or a world of shalom. And And what's interesting here is that Paul, like any good rabbi, says do not conform to the Olam Hazeh, the age that surrounds you. But then instead of contrasting that with the transformation of the age to come, Olam Chabah, he says, be transformed now in your mind. And this is because for Paul, the age to come has arrived. Party on.
Speaker 1:Excellent. For Paul, the age to come is here. Christ is at work restoring creation even right now. So, yes, the world is still broken. It still needs a lot of healing, but the repair is happening.
Speaker 1:So Paul wants people to live in the world awake, awake to the presence of the divine in their midst, healing all things, not waiting around for some faraway future. You live well together now because God is here. Living all of life as worship will help your mind to just settle a little bit more on what really matters. I mean, imagine this. You start to feel really insecure in a situation, but instead of sinking into that, take a deep breath and you rise up a little bit and you thank God that you're alive.
Speaker 1:Or you wake up in the night and you're really worried about someone you love, but instead of just tiring yourself out, you picture yourself taking the hand of this person that you care so much about and walking them into the presence of Jesus because Jesus is with them even when you can't be. Or you are in need of some direction and you're kinda scared of that next move and instead of stopping yourself in fear, you brave taking a next step knowing that it's okay if it's not perfect. The spirit still has something to show you. Bodies and minds in this place offered to God because they were shaped by God in the first place. And this is where Paul gets to where he really wants to go.
Speaker 1:In the light of the story of Jesus that welcomes all to give their all, that invites us into the age to come, present in the here and the now, the real test of our faith will be our communities. Paul says, if there's any way forward for a bunch of Jewish Christians and Gentile converts, it's through the honest perception of who they really are in relation to the perfection of God. And spoiler alert, no one is perfect, and we're incomplete without each other. Paul writes, for by the grace given me, I say to every one of you, do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function.
Speaker 1:So in Christ, through many form one body. We form one body and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith. If it is serving, then serve.
Speaker 1:If it is teaching, then teach. If it is to encourage, then give encouragement. If it is giving, then give generously. If it is to lead, do it diligently. If it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.
Speaker 1:Then it's easy to cruise past this and think, yeah, yeah, Paul, I know humility and unique talents and all that jazz, but let's look at what Paul's saying here because it is where his therefore leads us. First, there's heaps heaps, I tell you, of psychological research that reports that we are actually very lousy at evaluating ourselves accurately. The truth is that we overestimate our abilities. We judge ourselves as better than others, and actually, those with the least amount of abilities in something likely rate themselves a little too high. So if you think you know a lot, think again.
Speaker 1:Seriously, you're probably not the exception here. The only way to view yourself more accurately is through the eyes of another. Honest feedback from the people around you and constant learning from others will take you out of your inaccurate self perception and help you better function as you actually are. Try it this week. Ask someone in your life how they see you growing or how they see you staying stuck or just needing a little bit of help.
Speaker 1:Maybe you'll be corrected. Maybe you'll be affirmed. Either way, listening to what others have to say will open you up to community and all of the ways that community profoundly shapes you. You have something to offer the person sitting beside you, and they have something to offer you. And for the rest of the chapter, Paul launches into a style of writing called paranesis.
Speaker 1:And paranesis is found in Jewish and Greek sources. And basically, what the author does is pile up a bunch of ways that this can land for you. So Paul's made his argument and now it's time to actually live it. But he doesn't just leave you hanging, he gives you a bunch of ideas. He says, don't just pretend to love each other, actually love each other.
Speaker 1:Hate what is evil, cling to the good, Preference the experience of the other. Live your zeal, your spiritual excitement through your service. Rejoice in hope. Be patient in hard times. Pray, pray, pray.
Speaker 1:And there you have it. A bunch of ideas for how to live the stuff that Paul writes about. Now, we don't often see it all at once the way that our friendships and relationships and communities are shaping us. But we've come to see that for Paul, Grace is around every corner, and that could be the next turn that you really don't see coming. Like the visit to my friends on the coast that I wasn't actually planning to have.
Speaker 1:For over a decade, the people I moved into a house beside have been teaching me and showing up for me and honestly, honestly reflecting me back to myself. And this kind of surprising community has a way of expanding our hearts and our minds and even offering encounters with the divine, opening up surprising spaces. And one of the delightful things about my friendship with Dave and Tara is that it started out with just the three of us. I'd hang out with Dave in their kitchen and Tara on their front steps, and we'd talk about our lives and our loves and our faith backgrounds. Then their daughter grew up and she'd sing the Hebrew alphabet to me and tell me how she resisted the bullies in preschool.
Speaker 1:It went something like this, stop. Don't touch my body. It's a foundational lesson on consent actually. Now she's preparing for her bat mitzvah and interpreting the Torah for herself. And then their little boy arrived, and he grew up.
Speaker 1:And when I visited them in the coast, he told me a few things about the things he was afraid of. But then he stopped himself and he said, actually, Bobby, the only thing I really fear is fear itself. He's nine. And he walked me through all of the times that he had panicked on the soccer field and how his fear made everything worse. This series of selfies and self timer snaps is incomplete until we're all in the frame together.
Speaker 1:And in some wild way, my Jewish neighbors are still my neighbors, even though they are on the coast and I'm here in Calgary. Even when I think we are growing apart, it turns out we're still very much a part of each other's lives. We're cheering each other on. We're listening to each other's stories. We're keeping our doors open and our spare bedrooms reserved for longer stays.
Speaker 1:The surprise of spending time with my Jewish neighbors on the Sunshine Coast, friends I actually didn't plan to see in the first place, is that this visit, it's the one that gave me the wisdom I needed to deal with a situation I was dreading. At one point in the conversation, Dave reminded me, me. He reminded me, the pastor. Hey, Bobby. Slow it down.
Speaker 1:Remember the divine. And it turns out he was so right. I had everything that I needed to deal with this situation I was so worried about. Dave trusted me, and he also challenged me. And you know what?
Speaker 1:I needed them both. There are a thousand places grace will spring up in the spaces of your relationships and your communities. You don't know where your worship will take you? Bodies and minds offered to God in the everyday places that you live and play and worship. We can't go to Rome to visit this community that Phoebe read Paul's letter to.
Speaker 1:It's not there. It's here. And the words of Paul, they meet us still. Offer yourselves body and mind for the good of the other. Find the actual gifts that lie dormant in your community and open those bad boys up and see how much you shine together.
Speaker 1:And when life is hard and the struggle is so real, do not go it alone and do not put boundaries on what you can learn from each other. Yes, even across your differences. Be different. It's beautiful. But make sure that you're very careful with your difference and with the difference of others.
Speaker 1:This is a peaceful way. It's a way that leads to harmony where evil will not be overcome with violence or more evil. It is finally overcome with the good. And that's how Paul closes this chapter. And still, we will find that there is so much more to come.
Speaker 1:So let us pray together. Loving God, as we've walked through this letter again this year, you have met us with grace and imagination and great big thoughts about who you are to us, to our neighbors, and to our world. Help us not to step back from the world that we live in, but to step into it with open and curious hearts to experience your work that is in our midst. There is enough love and trust and beauty to go around. There really is.
Speaker 1:So spirit of the living God present with us now, Enter the places of conflict and worry and pain in our lives and in this world, and God, will you heal us of all that harms us. Amen.