“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
We have reached probably the major turning point in Romans and one is tempted to say that we leave the lofty heights of theology behind us as we enter the grimy streets of Rome where people live; that chapters 1 – 11 are meant for the doctors of the Church but from now on Paul will deal with practical Christian living. I suppose that is partially true, but there is always the temptation to separate theology from life, to separate grace from works, to separate the Old Testament from the New Testament, but in fact Paul begins by stating the opposite – that there is a way of life that ought to flow from the narrative of God’s love, a way of life that is reasonable and that Christians are responsible to incarnate:
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God…”
Paul certainly is about to hand out very specific advice on how Christians should behave toward one another and how they should behave toward the rest of the world, but he states from the start that what he is about to say is the only reasonable response of the man or woman who has grasped God’s surprising and sweeping initiative of love:
“therefore… by the mercies of God…”
Paul has told the old story of God’s remedy for our sin-sick world – the story of Abraham and his faith, of Jesus and his faith, his faithfulness, his glory, and his love. Paul spent 11 of Roman’s 16 chapters to elaborate the narrative of love that begins with human beings, who possessed the intellectual capacity to know God, but who turned against their own reasonableness and chose a lie and as a result of that human beings ended up worshipping and serving the creature rather than the Creator. It is important that we not give short shrift to St. Paul believed about human beings’ capacity to understand and to pass correct judgments upon our experience because it is just that capacity that makes us responsible for our sins and misdoings as well as making us responsible to perform good works that Paul will unambiguously state are pleasing to God. If I think about that for a minute it strikes one as outlandish and unreasonable to say that we human beings possess the capacity to please the God who is God. But I am getting ahead of myself. Here is a point I want you to have: our shame and our glory as human beings is contingent upon our ability to understand, to pass correct judgments, to know and to choose the truly good:
“Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them (human beings); for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they (we) are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” Romans 1: 19-21
St. Paul says that humanity’s betrayal of what they knew to be true resulted in a self-inflicted wound that has darkened our hearts. He does not say that the seat of human reason has been destroyed, but that we consciously and intentionally dismissed God while consciously and intentionally siding with and implementing a lie and the upshot is our darken hearts and a battered creation:
“Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.”
Listen: take note of the connection between our intellectual life, our ability to know, to judge truly, as well as what and how we worship, and in addition to that what we do with our bodies. For example Paul cites humanity’s betrayal of their own reason, specifically their genuine knowledge of God, which led to a plethora of imaginative ways of dishonoring and discrediting their bodies. The truth of God that humanity dismissed is that God is God and the whole world belongs to God. Humanity’s guilt is not ignorance of the truth, but it is rather humanity’s rejection of the truth of God as God. This is a major point for St Paul’s story of salvation: our existence, our way of existence, and our perception of reality, crashed and burned when we exchanged the Lordship of God for the lordship of creation. By rejecting what ought to be the principle object of his thought and his devotion, the God who created the world, humanity has become attached to illusions rather than reality. As we learned at the very beginning of this study of Romans this rejection of God brought about what Paul and for that matter what Jesus called “the wrath of God.” Because humanity has dismissed the God who is God, three times in chapter 1 Paul writes that God has “given them up” or better “turned them over” as in relinquishing custody and in each of the three cases God hands humanity over to their own custody. This is the wrath of God: man released from God’s custody to live on his own. Our dismissal of God has brought the wrath of God but his wrath is manifested not by hammering us, but by stepping aside. The vices and sins that St. Paul lists in his epistles do not provoke the wrath of God; they are the wrath of God already present in our life. The cause of the wrath of God is humanity’s “suppression of the truth” of God as our Lord and Creator. God has granted mankind the separation that he wants. Man’s desire has become man’s fate, his wish has become his unavoidable punishment as he detaches from God and makes the creature his lord. The life that Jesus the Messiah lived, the death he died and his resurrection from the dead is the Gospel that can save us from this living death – as Paul puts it in the first chapter of Romans:
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”
Romans 1:16
Paul walks us through the bloody streets of Rome and then into the desert where the God who is God made a promise to Abraham that he intended to use him and his family to make the world right again. And that story continued to unfold, sometimes with milk and honey and sweetness, but more often with blood and one miserable betrayal after another. But God did not withdraw his promise to Abraham and when Jesus the Messiah came he matched Abraham’s faith in God with his own faith in God and that begat his faithful death and Jesus’ faithful death begat his resurrection from the dead and his resurrection from the dead begat the sending of the Holy Spirit and the sending of the Holy Spirit begat his Church and his Church begat both gentile and Jewish children of Abraham and that is the sum of what Paul refers to as the “mercies of God,” which ultimately gave birth to our text for today:
“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 this brings us back to where we started today which is to realize that the reasonable response to God’s story of love and mercy for his creature man is to worship and love the God who is God; the God who is making of all humanity one people, one family, one nation of priests who will lead all creation to the God who is God who reigns from the cross. And our first work as Abraham’s family is to mimic the God who was made flesh and offered his body a living sacrifice by doing what he did:
“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.”
Remember chapter 11 and the Olive Tree: The many bodies that are offered up to God are the many branches that have been grafted into the one Olive Tree. Right? The branches do not remain just so many individual branches because the branches are grafted into a tree. What Paul called branches in chapter 11 he calls bodies in chapter 12. What he called an olive tree in chapter 11 he called the Body of Christ in chapter 12. Note that Paul does not call upon those who read or hear his epistle to “present your bodies as living sacrifices,” as though you have never been grafted in, but rather he writes:
“present your bodies a living sacrifice…”
That means that the presentation of the branches, our presentation of our bodies does not end with the presentation of many individual sacrifices, but rather when we present bodies to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ – all our many individual bodies are made into one, single sacrifice which Paul says is “holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” Be attentive to the meaning of the words “sacrifice” & “reasonable.” The NIV has translated the sentence to read “sacrifices” & “spiritual,” but that is absolutely not what the words are – the word is singular: “sacrifice” not “sacrifices,” & the other word is based on the root logos and correctly translated “reasonable,” not “spiritual.”
A major point that I want you to see is that we do not become a bunch of individual sacrifices but rather we as branches grafted into one Olive Tree, we as members of one Body – we who are many become one sacrifice to God. By being grafted into one Olive Tree, we are strengthened by the root and we all feed upon the richness of the sap so we do not think of ourselves merely as branches, but as the Olive Tree itself. A branch may rightly say, “This is my olive tree. I am in the olive tree and the olive tree is in me.” The leaf that sprouts from the branch is not merely a leaf on the branch but rather the leaf relates to the branch and the branch to the root and the root to the trunk in such a way that when we behold the tree before us we do not say “there is a leaf and a branch, sap and a flower, there is a trunk and an invisible root.” What do we say? We say: “There is an olive tree.” So when Paul calls upon the branches to “present your bodies a living sacrifice…” he is saying that there is one sacrifice and it is the one Olive Tree that is making that sacrifice and part of our glory and joy as branches is that what would be merely a bunch of individual sacrifices are gathered up, made a collect, of one sacrifice of the one Olive Tree. The Olive Tree is Jesus the Messiah who is Israel in his body. Jesus is the Olive Tree and if you are grafted into the Olive Tree than means you are grafted into the Messiah of Israel. This is why Paul begins his plea to his reader by saying:
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice…”
There was a time in the Paul’s life when he believed that right standing with God meant being grafted into Israel, which meant being grafted into Abraham and that was accomplished either through natural birth or for the gentile through conversion to national Israel. In chapter 11 Paul sums up his long discourse on the love of God and he is especially addressing the gentile Christian who, like a wild olive shoot grafted into a cultivated olive tree, has been grafted into the Israel of God, but in a manner simply unimaginable to Saul the Pharisee. Peter sums it up for Paul: That God has made Church, the Body of the Messiah, both Jews and gentiles:
“a chosen race, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
I Peter 2:9
I will stop with that today, but one last point I want you to understand that this is why you should be in Church, this is why you are needed in the pews for the celebration of the Holy Communion and you will see that in the Mass today when we present unto God “our selves, our souls and our bodies to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice” unto God right now, in this place, at this moment because that is your spiritual work, your reasonable service to God that no one else can do.
“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.”