A PRAYER TO START
There is a song that we sing at the Gathering with the line “I have such a short memory / So you keep reminding me of you”. Ephesians 1 is an effort to help counter act our abbreviated recollections by developing our long-term memory. Pray Ephesians 1:3-14 as praise to our Father and grounding for your faith today…
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, I all wisdom and insight making know to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it; to the praise of his glory.
GETTING THOUGHTFUL
In Week 1, we prepared for our dive into the depths of Romans 12 by assessing the environment in which we are invited to cultivate a good world together. A task that the apostle Paul will parse out in detail for us, using the modeled metaphor of the “human body”.
What did we surmise as the pattern of this age that we are to avoid being conformed into? Division. We are in the midst of the most perceived and evidential division in our nation in at least the last 30 years. We are “affectively polarized” as a society. Emotionally, and mutually in opposition to those who are different than us—whether in thought, conviction, behavior or background. And thus we seem to live at a particular time and in a precise place in history in which our first reaction towards others is to either fight against them or move towards isolation out of lack of desire to fight.
And here is the reality that we acknowledge last week, “as members of a society, we participate, willingly, in its evils” (Berry, 81). It is not us verse them, whoever “them” might be. They are us. We are them. Or, as Nobel-Prize winning author and soviet gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, so powerfully noted after his release from Siberian prison camps,
“If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Paul has made this argument for the first seven chapters of the letters to the Romans; making sure that we understand that we have chosen the path that we find ourselves as humans, and continue to struggle to walk along even as we individually and collectively discover the gospel path of peace and restoration,
“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing…Fro I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members…”
(Romans 7:15, 18b-19, 22-23)
Internally there is a divide, I do want I don’t want to do and yet long to do what is right. There is an external divide, my mindful affections are for the way of Jesus but where I find my identity and purpose, as a member of a society of humans like me, I recognize a rebelling struggle that looks to captivate my attention and actions.
This separating division, this tearing apart of persons and societies at their core is not a new struggle. Rather, this has been the battle that has been raging since the first great rebellion millennia ago. Like our faith family in first century Ephesus, we need to be reminded that our battle is not against flesh and blood, right vs. left, them vs us, he vs she, me and I; but rather, against “the schemes of the devil…against rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:11-12) And if this is who and what we are fighting, not one another regardless of our disagreements, then the way we battle must be drastically different.
And it is. Rather than waging war against enemies, we withstand in the evil day by cladding ourselves in the armor of God, “Truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and salvation are more than words. [We must] Learn how to apply them. [We’ll] need them throughout [our] life.” Enmeshed in God awareness in order to stand firm, with all the saints (Eph. 6:14, 18). And that’s the key, we wage war not through the means that divide us, power, persuasion, or pressured compliance; but by becoming a part of new body, a part of a new whole.
Read Paul’s words in Romans 12:3-6,
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself or herself more highly then they ought to think, but to think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them…
We battle evil and division (internally and externally) by being parts of something different, by living in a different way, a way in which our differences are not in conflict but in complement, and a way in which we find our truest and fullest selves in the way we contribute to the whole. By being “one body in Christ” we are able to “not be overcome by evil, but [able] to overcome evil with good” (12:21).
How do we do what we want to do not and live free in our affections and actions? How do truth, righteousness, peace, salvation and faith become words that apply to our everyday, ordinary, going-to-work, raising-kids, walking-around; life? We make the choice to submit.
Being parts of something different, living whole, begins with a choice to submit to grace. Read with me Paul’s opening sentence to his modeled metaphor of “one body in Christ”, Romans 12, verse 1 says,
“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 and rational service.”
Paul makes an appeal. An appeal is not a command in a strict sense. It certainly denotes strong emotion and clear desire, but it is not an order to soldiers. Paul has no problem giving commands, “do this” and “don’t do that”, are common sentences in his various letters. Yet here, Paul chooses to remind us that the life of faith, the one life of one body in Christ, is a choice. A rational choice based on the mercies that allow us to make it.
Just a couple of verses before Paul says something profound for us in the midst of a divided environment and souls, “For God has consigned [or given over] all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.” (11:32) He has mercifully allowed us to experience the cut of the line that runs through every human heart and societal endeavor; so that we might also experience the healing of his restoration.
Rather than destroying evil—which would be the destruction of those who, even in the slightest, participate in that evil (i.e. you and me and every other human)—God has healed it, through the sacrifice of his Son. An action that allows all those who believe in Jesus the right to be called children of God (John 1:12-13), brothers and sisters, and one body in Christ.
Such mercy compels Paul to sing, quite literally as 11:34-36 is a hymn he composes,
Oh the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?
Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.
The nature of being one body in Christ, of cultivating a good world together, will require a living sacrifice; a giving up of some things for the sake of other things, a taking on of responsibility for something more than ourselves, a sharing of burdens and of joys. Therefore it is a choice to submit to the grace that both calls us into to such a life and the grace given to each of us to marvelously function in it; even amidst a divisive environment.
This choice to offer ourselves as set-apart for purpose from the patters of this age, acceptable as members one of another, is not done so in order that we might receive from God some good life as repayment for our gift, but rather a rational response to having received the gift already!
Our dive into Romans 12 will be of practical use to our normal moments, Paul will ensure it is nothing less. And, what is more practical than the gift of a choice? Not multiple choices, just one. Each day, to wake and present to our good Father a life set-apart from the patterns of division through genuine love for one another and even those who culturally we have been conditioned to assume are against us because we have received His mercy. Or not.
REFLECTION
Eugene Peterson hears Paul’s appeal in verse 1 this way, “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: 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 him.”
Each morning we wake to a choice to submit to grace (embracing what God does for you) or to do something else, whether “something else” be an attempt to earn that which is freely given us, or to ignore the opportunity to be a living sacrifice or even to not make a choice at all. What choice will you make, and what does it matter?
Use these questions to help you prayerfully reflect individually and/or discuss as a DNA group.
Why do (or don’t) you offer your daily attitudes and activities to God and others? What is the motivation of your choice?
How is embracing what God does for you the best thing you can do for him?
What does your presentation of a living sacrifice look like?
REVERBERATIONS
Let these conditions of “the beloved community” which is built by the grace through which we place our offering reflect off the walls of your mind, the chamber of your heart, and the actions of your hands this week.
We see how common work, common suffering, and a common willingness to join and belong are understood as the conditions that makes…the beloved community…as good…as we can hope for…
(Wendell Berry)