I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. Romans 12: 1-2
Advent is a season of anticipation meant to prepare us for the celebration of the Nativity of our Lord as well as his sure and certain second advent. Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany relentlessly call attention to the Incarnation:
Behold, the great Creator makes Himself a house of clay,
a robe of virgin flesh He takes which He will wear for ay
Hark, hark, the wise eternal Word like a weak infant cries!
In form of servant is the Lord, and God in cradle lies.
That boy coming of age in the Gospel narrative is the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of the Father, and the Son of Mary, and it is that same Lord who died on the Cross, the same Lord who was raised bodily from the dead, who ascended bodily into the abode of the Trinity, and it is that same Lord who will one day return to his redeemed and recreated creation on this planet that is already teeming with life that will never. The fact he was born of the flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is equivalent to our flesh, and the fact that he was nailed to the cross, that he died, that he was raised from the dead body and all and he ascended into heaven body and all — those actions of the Word made Flesh demonstrate his absolute solidarity and commitment to our flesh and the whole material creation. What is assumed by the Word of the Father is healed, perfected and saved.
Gnostics hate this. Gnostics want to transcend the body, rise above the material world, shed this tricky body of tissue and muscle and bone and fat — this carnality, this human nature and be rid of it. But Paul was always reminding his little parishes of the glory, the shame, the worth, the vigor, the virtue, the weakness of flesh.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
St. Paul and all the other Apostles and the whole Church, ancient and modern, agree that God has committed himself to materiality and in particular he has committed himself to the material substance of the human body. God loves Flesh. He has chosen to anchor flesh in his divine his life forever. The immutable, unchangeable, invisible God has become visible. He has entered our mutability, our changeableness by the Incarnation. As I have said many times before, a Man, a Human Being in the flesh is seated at this moment upon Throne of the Universe. This separates us from all other religions since the central project of other religions is to escape forever the “prison of the flesh.” Our God-given project is to love our bodies as a “Temple of the Holy Spirit” and to present our bodies to God as a living sacrifice. That has everything to do with worship.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
This verse answers the question, “What kind of worship pleases God and why?” Some folk have probably never thought of this verse from within the liturgical context, but it is very much that. The word that we have translated as “service” is used exclusively in the New Testament to mean the worship of God and that use survives in our tradition when we refer to our acolytes, the crucifier, and the boat boy as serving at the altar; that is worshipping at the altar. But furthermore Paul makes a point that God calls us to reasonable worship — our translation has it as “reasonable service.” And if that is not enough to make the point other words in the sentence pile on the same meaning. The word we have translated “present,” as it is used here describes the act of presenting a gift to God in a formal liturgical setting; it refers to the specific act of worship in which the gift, the sacrifice is presented on the altar. That word, the word for sacrifice, is exactly the word used here and it appears 11 times in the New Testament and it always means an offering to God.
If we take this text merely moralistically, as an appeal for Christians to exercise bodily discipline against sin and thus make it all about me and my will power and not about acceptable worship — if we do that, we will miss the point and possibly undermine the good fruit of righteousness that St. Paul is absolutely confident will follow from presenting our bodies to God as a living sacrifice in the Holy Communion.
It might help to remember that we have committed ourselves to Christian orthodoxy but we also need to remind ourselves that the word “orthodox” does not just mean believing the right thing — the word literally means worshiping the right way — (ortho) correct, (doxa) worship. I realize that may sound high-handed and overbearing to well-meaning Christians who care deeply, as we all should, that people feel comfortable and at home in Christian worship today. That is no small thing, but our desires need training and formation and Paul is robustly confident that the worship that pleases God will also form the right desires of our hearts. Thus ortho-doxy does not only mean correct worship, something that could easily become a matter of sinful pride, it also means correcting worship — that is worship may, by the grace of God, become remedial, corrective in the sense that worship is God’s instrument of choice for our salvation and for our perfecting in grace. Just as orthopedic shoes may prevent or correct a crooked walk, ortho-doxy, correct worship, may prevent and correct a crooked life. So worship that pleases God has a total effect, but there are many parts to it and each part — praise, adoration, confession, absolution, and our resolution to bring our lives into conformity to the life of Christ – all that enfolds us as it unites these diverse activities into a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving as we worship God in the Holy Communion. The total effect is that we are what we eat, we imitate that which we admire, and we become what or whom we worship.
So for example what we do in worship when we sing is different from what the preacher does when he preaches a sermon. We do not expect the same thing from the singer and the preacher, except that they are alike in being attentive, being intelligent, being reasonable, and being responsible. We do not want our preachers nor our singers sleep-walking when it come worshipping the God who is God. When we sing a congregational hymn it is usually a hymn that we have sung many times in the past and if it is new and if we approve of the content and the form we will probably sing it many times over in the future. When our choir sings an anthem it may be an anthem that we have heard before but even if it is new it is the case that it is not new to the choir that has put hours of rehearsal into their work. Thus we expect to hear it again because learning a new piece of music requires attentiveness to the work, intelligence, and practice, and direction and so there is so much invested because that piece of music has been judged worthy of their labor. But then there is also the desire to perform it again because each performance perfects the skill and perfects that piece of music as a sacrificial gift to God. The work of the celebrant of the mass is similar to the work of the singer, he too is expected to stick to the text and any celebrant who decides to add his personal extemporaneous prayers to the mass is exercising a supreme arrogance and by adding he would actually subtract from worship by distracting us from our focus upon God. The celebrant performs and over time he gathers a feel for the words, the phrases, the sentences and the moments of silence and he wants to do well — not as entertainment, but like the congregation, the cantor and the choir, as one who is praying the Common Prayer of the Zion. When we sing a hymn we usually cover old ground and we may cover it for better or for worse. The celebrant when he says the mass is covering old familiar ground and coving it for better or for worse — we all do our best. And even the preacher must cover old ground if he expects his parish to grow in the things of God. The preacher should not dish out comfort food in the pulpit. Which means that the preacher should not be stuffing himself with comfort food instead of real study because it will make him fat and lazy and unfit for the work of preaching. Singing a hymn or an anthem, celebrating the mass, serving at the altar and preaching a sermon have different functions but all are necessary for the good of Christ’s Church. All of these activities enfold into reasonable, bodily worship of the blessed Trinity. But why reasonable?
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
Our ability to grasp reality and rightly judge and choose the truly good is our created endowment as human beings, but our first parent’s misused, ignored, & truncated that endowment is what happened in the fall. On our own we are hopeless. But we are not on our own. Through Holy Baptism we have received the Holy Spirit and God has infused us with the theological virtues and holy desires. We now have God’s reason and God’s judgment in Jesus the Messiah. The reasonable conclusion for people who believe that to be true is the blessed Trinity should be the entire focus of our attention, our love, our devotion and our worship.
That is why true worship involves the use of humanity’s highest powers, the very powers that were once ignored and today are misused by consciously and intentionally dismissing God and siding with a lie — in true worship we appropriate our endowment of reason and understanding to pass correct judgments, to know and to choose the truly good as we devote our selves, our souls, and our bodies to Jesus the Messiah. In true worship our minds; our highest powers are renewed in the power of the resurrected Christ. The more we worship Jesus the Messiah in the Holy Communion but greater will be our grasp of the truth and the more reliable will be our discernment of the good will of God. As we engage our highest faculties in the worship of Christ our God we learn to distinguish between our frequently warring desires and the truly good, we learn to tell the difference between reality of Christ and illusions of the world.