Sermon preached August 24, 2014
Texts: Romans
12:1-8
Sly
and the Family Stone, “I Want To Take You Higher” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDjnB_61k58
Like
the style of that song or not, there is something very biblical, very Christian
about it. “I Want to Take You Higher.” That’s what Jesus is about. That’s what’s at the heart of the Christian
faith. Theologian and biblical scholar
Marcus Borg, in his book The Heart of Christianity, writes, “the
Christian life… is about ‘being born again’ and the ‘kingdom of God” (126). These are “two transformations at the heart
of the Christian life: the individual-spiritual-personal and the
communal-social-political” (103).
Jesus
wants to take you higher. God’s Spirit
wants to transform your life. Every
Bible ought to come with a warning label – “If God’s Spirit speaks to you
through these words, you will be changed.”
Every worship service ought to come with a cautionary note, “God’s
Spirit transforms lives – watch out!”
Do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your minds (Romans 12:2a). We have already encountered some other
renderings of this passage. Do not let the world around you squeeze you
into its own mold, but let God remold your minds from within
(Phillips). Do not 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 (The Message).
So
what’s so wrong with the world that we need to be taken higher, transformed? The thing I really appreciate about the
alternative renderings of Romans 12:2a is that they don’t assume that the world
and the culture are without value. But
they do assume that there are some concerns, that fitting in without thinking
is a problem, that being squeezed into the mold of the surround culture
squeezes something important out of us.
During
our vacation, I came across these words, written by Lin Yutang (1875-1976), a
Chinese writer, inventor and translator.
They were written in the mid-Twentieth Century. The
three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire
for achievement and success. They are
the things that make Americans so unhappy and so nervous.
Seriously?! Our vices are efficiency, punctuality and the
desire for achievement or success? I
want to do well. I don’t really like
waiting. If things can be done more
efficiently, why not? It saves time and
money. But step back a bit. Do you remember a time when you pulled into a
gas station and someone actually came out to fill your gas tank, and wash your
windows? Now I can fill up my car and
not even talk to anybody, but what happened to those jobs? We can go to the grocery store, and never have
a cashier check us out. It can be
efficient, but what will it do for employment?
Do we even stop and wonder if there can be something to consider other
than efficiency? Do our lives ever
become too governed by the clock? Have
you ever encountered someone who was a success by most standards, but wished
they had been less of a success and a better parent or spouse or friend?
Being
different from the world does not mean rejecting the beauty and goodness we see
in our culture, but it asks us to see the darker sides as well. It asks us to look at the ways we remain
caught in issues we would just as soon be over.
Ferguson, Missouri reminds us again that there remains deep fissures in
our society based on our history of race relations. I have a pretty high trust level in police
officers. They are there to enforce the
laws, and they are often put in difficult situations to do just that. Might my feelings toward law enforcement be
different if in the not too distant past the laws that were being enforced were
laws that systematically discriminated against members of my family, laws that
made me drink at separate fountains, sit in separate places, attend different
schools. It takes time to heal deep
wounds, but we Americans are not really that fond of history – get over it, man
up, move on. Working with our difficult
history – personally and socially, can take time and be more complex. That work is not always “efficient.”
The
Spirit of God wants to take us higher, to be different. Don’t be squeezed into the mold of the
world. Don’t fit into the surrounding
culture without even thinking about it.
The entire chapter 12 in Romans explores some of these significant
transformations, and we will be looking at this chapter this week and next.
Jesus
wants to take us higher. We are invited
to be different, but let’s be honest about the difficulty of that. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “People wish to be
settled; only so far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them” (in Anne
Lamott, Stitches, 56).
So
let me, in the last few minutes of this sermon, look at one way we are invited
to be different, to be transformed. I
want to again hear from that significant theologian, Sly Stone. Sly and the Family Stone, “Everybody is a
Star” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m29F4FtVo-U
Everybody
is a star. “We have gifts differing
according to the grace given to us” (Romans 12:6a). You are gifted. Now that may not seem very counter cultural,
but I think it is. We often refer to
those who are gifted as persons with very special talents. That’s o.k., but not all of us necessarily
have those kinds of extraordinary talents that others would call “gifted.” We are almost encouraged to envy those who
are so gifted, ignoring the ways each of us is gifted. Someone writing about Romans 12 penned these
wise words. Our society is desperately searching for people with a sense of
adventure and Hilarity, those who feel good about themselves and delight in
their own capabilities and visions and gifts (Truly the Community,
69-70).
Is
that us? Do we really believe this about
ourselves, that we are gifted? Earlier
this week I came across these word of Joan Chittister in a devotional. We are
full of the riches of a life-time – the experiences we’ve had and the wisdom
that has come from them; the dreams we’ve had and the things that obstructed
them; the hurts we’ve had and the things that cured them. (Living Well,
105) No one else has had your
experiences, and the wisdom you’ve derived from them. No one else has dreamed your dreams, and
worked with them. No one else has
suffered your hurts, and dealt with them.
You are gifted. You have
gifts. If you want to explore one way to
look at those gifts, I would invite you to take a spiritual gifts inventory (http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/spiritual-gifts-online-assessment)
and I will put a link on our Facebook page for that, and it will be in this
sermon when it gets posted on our web site later this week.
Do
we believe we are gifted, that we have gifts?
Maybe the best we can do is believe it sometimes, but that in itself, is
a gift.
But
here’s another part of this whole idea of gifts that is different from what we
often encounter in the world around us.
We have gifts, but they are different gifts, and because we do not have
the same gifts, we need each other in some fundamental way. Paul uses the image of the body. Each part of the body needs the other parts. We need each other. Part of our transformation happens when we
are together in community.
And
here is yet another part of this whole idea of gifts that is also different
from what we often encounter in the world around us. We are to develop and use our gifts in such a
way that we contribute to a larger good.
Our gifts are less about self-aggrandizement than about enriching the
world, helping transform the world just as we are being transformed by God’s
Spirit and the love of Jesus.
I
want to wrap up this morning with a quote and two brief stories that speak to
me about the kind of transformation God is working in our lives. In all honesty, I think I have shared these
before, but they are some of my favorites.
I
used a longer version of this last week, but this line is a good reminder to us
of our gifts and the right use of our gifts.
The place God calls you to is the
place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet (Frederich
Buechner, Wishful Thinking) Your
deep gladness is a clue to your giftedness, and those gifts are to be used to
meet some of the deep hungers of the world.
Rabbi Zusya said, “In the world to come,
they will not ask me “Why were you not Moses?’
They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?” (The Spirituality of
Imperfection, 2)
A brother asked one of the elders, “What
good thing shall I do, and have life thereby?”
The old man said, “God alone knows what is good: Yet I have heard that
one of the Fathers questioned the great abbot Nistero, who was a friend of
Anthony, saying, ‘What good work shall I do?’ and Nistero replied, ‘All works
are not the same. The Scriptures say
that Abraham was hospitable, and God was with him. And Elijah loved quiet, and God was with
him. And David was humble, and God was
with him. What therefore you find your
soul drawn to and desiring in following God, do it, and keep your heart and
know peace therein.’” (The Desert Fathers, 5; The Desert Fathers,
(Waddell) 68; Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, 25-26)
Do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your minds.
Jesus wants to take you higher.
Do not let the world around you squeeze you
into its own mold, but let God remold your minds from within
(Phillips). Jesus wants to take you
higher.
Do not 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
(The Message). Jesus wants to take you
higher.
You are gifted. You
are a star. Don’t let the world tell you
differently.
You have gifts
that can help heal a broken world. Don’t
live in the world without out remembering that.
We need the gifts
each other offer here. Don’t let the
world squeeze that truth out of you.
The Spirit is
taking us higher. Amen.
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