Conform vs. Transform
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
Proper 16A/Ordinary 21A/Pentecost 15
Romans 12:1-8
Theme: Living out our individual gifts through the Holy Spirit
“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. 2Do 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. 3For 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. 4For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, 5so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. 6We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; 7ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; 8the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.”
There’s a problem with Paul’s letter to the Romans. SOME would consider it a problem. Others most likely wouldn’t. It just depends on where it catches you. This is it: there’s too much there.
You may have become aware of it as we’ve been going through Romans over the last couple of months. Generally speaking, the passages we’ve been reading are several verses long. And what usually ends up happening is that I will focus on a phrase, or a particular verse within a passage, or a central idea within the thought being expounded on, and more or less let go of the others. There’s a reason for that; it is actually a calculated move. Romans is one of the ‘meatiest’ letters of Paul. There is very little “fluff” in it. That may go without saying, if you are at all familiar with it. But what ends up being the case is that we COULD, if we wanted to, spend … at the very LEAST several months, if not several YEARS going through this letter phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph, even word by word. In case you are wondering, I don’t plan to do that! Yes, we’ve spent the better part of the summer going through it, but as you’ve seen, we are just covering parts of it here and there. If you remember, I think for the first Winter Bible Study we did after we moved here, we studied Romans, and even then, we knew going in we weren’t going to exhaust it. That is why we go back and touch on things time and time again – in some cases, because of new readings – new ideas that come through in a new way after reading the same familiar passage, in others simply because we knew we were going to come back to “the other part” of a particular passage later – sometimes months, sometimes years later. The point is, although we have touched on parts of different chapters in Romans, beginning in chapter 3 at the beginning of June, and continuing today as we are in chapter 12, you can count on coming back through these same chapters at some point in the not-too-distant future. It is a treasure trove of faith and practical application and understanding to help us in our daily endeavor to get to know God through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
So, on to the text: I want to deal with the CON-form vs. TRANS-form issue up front – the thought that prompted the title to today’s message. First, definitions: to conform means “to be the same as or very similar to something or somebody, or make something similar”, while to transform means “to change somebody or something completely, especially improving their appearance or usefulness, or to change completely for the better”.
Now: how is Paul using the words? In relation to what our relationship to God is supposed to be like, or to affect us, influence us … over and against the relationship we are to have with the world around us. He says it outright: to allow the Spirit of God to transform us (to change somebody or something completely, remember?).
The question that MIGHT pop into your head when you hear that is, hopefully, “what does that LOOK like, this ‘transforming of the mind’?”, and how can we tell the difference between it and what being ‘conformed to this world’ looks like?
It used to be simpler. But then, everything was at some vague point in the past. Life was simpler when we were children – that goes for all of us. It’s an accepted paradigm. For almost anyone, our childhood is nowhere near as complicated as our adulthood. Yesterday as we were driving back from the retreat at
Her comment may have been prompted by a daily devotional thought we both subscribe to – it is from a website established by the Church of the Savior in Washington DC – it’s called ‘inward/outward’, and yesterday’s devotional was from Richard Foster’s book Freedom of Simplicity. I’ll tell you right now that I’ve not read the book, but after reading the excerpt, I have it on my list to get as soon as possible. In the few paragraphs that were quoted, Foster tells of reading a book by another author, Thomas Kelly’s Testament of Devotion. I think I just added that to my list of books to read as well. To make a long illustration short, what Kelly proposed and Foster resonated with was the need, the ability, the desire to live out of the center of our lives – what DO we center our lives around? Is it work? Is it school? Is it church activities, committee meetings, responsibilities, or is it our relationship with our Lord?
Foster tells of realizing that he spent a LOT of his time doing good, noble, meaningful things, but being miserable and exhausted because of it. He knew how to say yes, but based it primarily on what would make him look good. He was neglecting an inner connection with God that needed to be nurtured and maintained. He tells of his first decision to begin to put the practice of Christian Simplicity into action. He decided to set aside Friday evenings for his family. Shortly thereafter he received a call from a friend asking if he’d speak to a group the following Friday evening. He hesitated, then said ‘no’. There was a pause at the other end of the line, and after what seemed to be a long time, his friend asked if he had another commitment, to which he simply answered ‘no,’ and didn’t elaborate on the why of the negative response. He writes that they exchanged a few other ‘pleasantries’, as he called them, and the call ended. Foster wrote that he doubts his friend even remembers the conversation, but to him it was a world-changing event. There’s a comment section on the website where you go to read the full devotional if it doesn’t, like this one didn’t, fit in the email that goes out, and the first or second comment made was a disagreement with one small point – that Foster did indeed have another commitment on that Friday evening – with his family, and through them, with God.
As Leslie Sanders touched on last Sunday, and as we are all aware with the distribution of our Nominating Committee report, and our upcoming special called business meeting, we are in that time of year where we gear up to jump into the fall season of activities, with a new year starting, with, in some cases, new responsibilities, new roles, new duties among all the different things that have become part of what we call ‘the life of the church’— through which we are trying to figure out what it means to be workers “together with God” in this endeavor to break in the Kingdom of God on Earth. It is a high and noble calling. It’s a worthwhile effort. It is to the benefit of our community and in a small way to the benefit of the world.
But I think we do seriously need to ask ourselves, not in a selfish way, but in a realistic way, Paul calls it ‘not thinking of yourself more highly than you ought to think’ is what I am doing, what I have offered to do, coming out of a sense of duty, of a sense of responsibility, of requirement, or is it coming out of a heart full of gratitude for what God has done in my life?
I fully realize that can be a dangerous question to ask 3 days before we vote on the Nominating Committee report, but I think it is a necessary question to ask. If we are engaging in an activity that is going to reflect as ‘the life of the church’ and all it does is drain the life out of US, because it imposes on us a sense that ‘we do this to please man, and not God’ then maybe we need to NOT be engaged in that activity. I honestly didn’t have any particular in mind as I wrote that, it was just something that needed to be said.
Over the last couple of days, at the retreat we attended, the speaker mentioned a book that I began to read several months ago, but have yet to finish: it is called ‘The Simple Church’, by Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger. In it, THEY boil down the purpose of the church into three simple goals: Love God, Love Your Neighbor, and Serve Your Community.
Paul speaks of the church as the body of Christ beginning in verse 4 of the passage. He names just a few of the gifts we might see within the body of believers. His exhortation to the believers in
What does that mean for
It means this: if what we engage in, as individuals, as an organization within the church, or as a family of faith doesn’t fall into one of those 3 simple categories, then perhaps we need to rethink its place in our life as a community. I’d like to draw your attention to verse 5. Paul writes:
“… so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another”
“Individually we are members one of another”. Paul is speaking to what it truly means to be part of a community of faith. We have traditionally called ourselves a church. That is an entirely appropriate term. We call ourselves a community of faith, a family of faith, and that is fine as well. And we have also called ourselves a ‘body’. With the prevailing ethos of our society being one of business and organizations related on whatever level to THAT, when we use the term ‘body’ in the corporate sense, it seems we have … turned it into a soulless term, a term devoid of physicality, if you will. We’ve lost the connection that is evident if you take the words at face value.
If we are the body of Christ, think of what that means in terms of your own body: a hand, an arm, a leg, a foot. Think of your right hand as Sam, and your left hand as Elwood. Think of your eyes as Helen or Edythe, your legs as Frank, or Cliff, your feet as Soozin or Joyce. Think of your heart as Margie, your lungs as Linda and Hilda … we are each an integral part of this body – not in a corporate, business sense, but in the flesh and blood sense of being a valued and valuable part of what this body needs to live – to move, to breath, to think, to ACT, to do.
In a lot of ways, that is what this sheet of paper, this list of positions and responsibilities is trying to put in black and white for us AS A BODY. So as we think in terms of what we do as a part of
Let’s pray.
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