Text: Romans 12

 

Today we begin a new sermon series entitled, “Life Together: the Transforming Power of Christ-centered Community.”  We’re going to get at it by spending nearly the entire season of Epiphany (the whole month of January) wading deeply into chapter 12 of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Before we do, let’s step back and see how this sermon series fits into the bigger picture of what our focus has been since this past September.  We began with a sermon series on Jeremiah 29, called “For the Good of the City,” which was all about our calling as disciples of Jesus to join God in mission.  This is the reason for which we exist: to be the people of God in an unmistakable way, reflecting the light of Christ in all the places and among all the people where we live, work and play.

But how are we transformed into disciples who follow Jesus in mission?  This is the question that’s at the heart of the Ridder Leadership Initiative.  How do we grow in the image of Jesus so that the light might shine through us with greater brightness and intensity?  In other words, how does personal transformation happen?

The short answer is by God’s power.  In Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God transforms us into disciples.  This is not something we do on our own strength and determination.  From beginning to end, transformation is God’s work.

Having acknowledged that transformation is God’s work from beginning to end, it is also true that we have a part to play in terms of being open to God’s work.  The Ridder process lifts up three key biblical convictions about how God often does his best work of transformation in us:

Personal transformation happens best as an inside out process of practicing radical obedience to Christ.  “If you love me,” Jesus says so clearly, “you will obey my commands.”  Not to earn God’s favor, but because God has shown us his favor.  Obedience is our grateful response to grace.  So in October and November we explored what it means to commit to “a long obedience in the same direction,” letting a handful of the Psalms of Ascent teach and guide us.

Personal transformation happens best when we develop a reflective lifestyle—that is, through the practice of spiritual disciplines like reading the Bible, prayer, solitude, worship, service and so forth.  Rather than living a frantically busy life full of distractions, growing in Christ requires that we learn to slow down and pay attention to what God is doing in us and around us.  We’re going to explore the spiritual disciplines in the season of Lent.

Personal transformation happens best in the context of a loving community that extends grace and truth.  Growing in Christ can never happen in isolation.  It requires Christ-centered community where we can be transparent about our lives and the challenges we face without fear of judgment, but also with those who love us enough to speak truth into our lives.
    
All three of these components go together and are interrelated.  If any of them is missing, then the potential for the Spirit’s work of transformation in our lives is stifled.  This is the discipleship model those of us who have been part of the Ridder Team have been living with for the past year, and it is the model that we are lifting up for our whole congregation.

So now let’s turn our focus to this key conviction of being a community that extends grace and truth.  As I said earlier, Romans chapter 12 is going to shape our imaginations in terms of what it looks like to embrace Christ-centered community and have fellowship with one another.

Paul’s letter to the Romans is regarded as his grandest and most theologically complete letter in the NT.  It’s a kind of “Christian manifesto” where Paul articulates his plainest and fullest understanding of the gospel.  Paul writes Romans after twenty-five years of ministry, at the end of his third missionary journey.  He’s planning to visit the Christians in Rome (whom he’s never visited) on his way to Jerusalem.  From there, Paul’s ultimate destination is Spain, where he will pick up his pioneer missionary work among a people who have not yet heard the gospel.

Two main themes hold the letter of Romans together: first, Paul’s emphasis that we, who are in bondage to sin, are justified (or put in right relationship with God), forgiven of our sin and set free by grace through faith in Christ.  Second, Paul emphasizes that God has now created a new community where Jews and Gentiles—all people—are included in the family of God.
    
The church in Jerusalem was made up of both Jewish and Gentile Christians, but Gentiles were in the majority.  There was a lot of strife and division in the church between these two groups.  Paul first addresses the Jews, emphasizing that even though they are God’s chosen people, they too have fallen short of God’s glory and are in need of a Savior.  This means that there is ultimately no distinction between them and Gentiles.  And just when the Gentiles are nodding their heads and wagging their fingers at the pride of the Jews among them, Paul turns to the Gentiles and says, “Hold on.  Now let me speak to you!  Don’t you go looking down on Israel.  Don’t you go falling into pride yourselves.  You’re no better than they.  All of you—Jew, Gentile, whoever you are—need grace.  And you have been saved by grace through faith in Jesus.  And now, you are God’s people together, you are the body of Christ.”

Unbelievable!  Generations of hostility and racism passed on between these two people groups, and just like that Paul says, in Christ, all the dividing walls come crashing down and now they are the one family of God, brothers and sisters in Christ.

Well that takes us to chapter 12, where Paul will spend the rest of the letter saying “Therefore,” since you are one in Christ, here’s how I want you to live as God’s community.  So let’s listen to what Paul has to say.  Read Romans 12

What a rich text!  There’s so much here!  Far more than we can fully explore in the next four weeks!  But let me make just a couple very important points about Christ-centered community by way of introduction.  And these two points should be kept in mind throughout the whole series.

Authentic Christ-centered community is both a gift and a responsibility.  That’s that main thing I want to say today.  First, it is a gift.  I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to offer yours bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  Do 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….For as in one body we have many members, and not all members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another.

As human beings, we are starved for true community—for genuine relationships where we can be real with one another, experience love and acceptance, and feel like we really belong.   God has made us this way.  Even those of us who have more introverted personalities and enjoy being alone, we cannot thrive without community.  

Not only do we long for genuine community, but Paul tells us that transformation happens best in community.  How do we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice?  How do we resist getting squeezed into the mold of the values of our world?  How do we, instead, get shaped and formed into the mold of Christ, where we find our truest selves?  Paul says that it can only happen in community, as we embrace our reality as the body of Christ.

But this community is not something that we must manufacture or achieve.  Paul is very clear that community is a gift of grace, something that God has already achieved for us in Christ.  If you are a follower of Christ, it automatically means that you are now part of the family of God.  And just as our status with God depends fully on what Christ has done for us, so does our status with one another as brothers and sisters depend fully on what Christ has done.

Hands down one of the best books—if not the best book—on the gift of Christian community is Deitrich Bonhoeffer’s little book titled Life Together.  Bonhoeffer wrote it during the terrible years of Nazi oppression, when he was forced underground and led a fugitive community of seminarians.  These seminarians were striving to embrace this gift of what it means to be the family of God in Christ, and all the daily joys and challenges that come with it.  From the outset Bonhoeffer makes it clear that true Christian community is a gift that is firmly rooted in Christ.  Listen to what he writes:

Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ.  No Christian community is more or less than this….We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ. (p.21).

Nothing else binds us together—not shared interests, common life experience, similar cultural backgrounds, socio-economic status, education, shared political or social views, not even agreement on every nuanced point of theological doctrine.  None of this is the foundation of our community.  Only Christ.  Jesus binds us together.  Which means there is no other community in the history of the world that is like the church—where for many of us the only thing we  have in common is Christ—and yet that is more than enough!  Bonhoeffer goes on to write:

The more genuine and the deeper community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us.  We have one another  only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity (p.26).

Yes, Christ-centered community is a gift.  “It is not an ideal that we must realize” says Bonhoeffer, “it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate” (p.30).  The apostle Paul would give a hearty “amen!”

But just because Christ-centered community is a gift, it does not mean that it is easy or always pleasant or that we don’t have to work at it.  We also have responsibility, as Bonhoeffer said, to participate in it, to nurture it, to build community rather than tear it down and erode it.  
           
I was sitting at a coffee shop in Grand Rapids while waiting for a parishioner who was undergoing surgery, and I overheard two women having a conversation about church.  “I’ve decided to take a break from church” one of them shared.  “Oh,” said her friend.  “Are you struggling with your faith in God?”  “It’s not that I don’t love God, I do,” the woman replied. “It’s God’s people I can’t stand!”

Maybe you can relate.  Even if we wouldn’t use language that strong, most of us know how hard being in God’s family can be.  Just like our biological families—the reality is, sometimes brothers and sisters don’t get along.  We don’t always see eye to eye.  Sometimes we get on each other’s nerves or disappoint each other or even hurt one another.

One of the things I love most about Bonhoeffer’s book is that he doesn’t look at community through rose colored glasses.  Bonhoeffer experienced firsthand how challenging and messy it can be.  In fact, he warns against having too idealistic of a vision of community because then we can’t embrace the gift that real community is, in all its messiness.  When we’re too idealistic, most of the time it is about us—and community only becomes a means to an end of getting our personal needs met rather than really learning to love God and others as they are.

Neither is Paul given to fantasies about community but he speaks very much to the reality of it.  Which is why he will spend the remaining chapters getting into the specific nitty-gritty details of how to work at the community that is already ours as a gift.  Chapter 12 itself provides a whole list of ingredients that are part of the recipe.  All of these ingredients fall under the primary practice of love.  Not love in the shallow, emotive way our culture speaks of love—some nebulous thing we fall in and out of.  Agape love—love that is about mind-set, attitude and will.  Love that Jesus himself embodies and demonstrates on the cross—choosing to give sacrificially for the benefit of others.  That’s how we participate in Christ-centered community: by letting our love be genuine (“not hypocritical” is the Greek word).

Let your love be genuine for each other.  Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.  Share with those among you who are in need.  Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.  Live in harmony with one another, and do what you can to live peaceably with all.  All of this gets summed up in the next chapter when Paul says, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (13:8).

But Paul pushes this call to love others even further.  Don’t just love one another, but love the strangers among you—those who are “outsiders.”  And more radical still: love your enemies.  Don’t repay evil for evil, but let God be the judge.  Overcome evil with good.

We’ll unpack all of this more in the weeks ahead, but do you see?  Christ-centered community is a gift and we all have a responsibility to work at it by letting our love be genuine.  It is in the context of community, where we practice this love, that God is transforming us more and more into the image of Jesus.  Which is why having to love people “you can’t stand” is such a gift: because it is when we choose to love those we may not even all that much like that God does his best work of transformation in us.

As Eugene Peterson quips, “No Christian is an only child.”  If God is our father, we have brothers and sisters—these brothers and sisters!  So the question is not, “Am I going to be part of the community of faith?’ but “How am I going to live in this community of faith?”

How will I participate in this family of God?  Will I invest myself fully, or will I keep at a safe distance?  Will I choose to love my brothers and sisters in a way that promotes health in the body, or will I espouse an attitude and speak and act in ways that tear the body down and foster division?

“The future of the church depends on whether it develops true community,” writes author and speaker Larry Crabb.  “We can get by for a while on size, skilled communication, and programs to meet every need, but unless we sense that we belong to each other, with masks off, the vibrant church of today will become the powerless church of tomorrow.”

Let’s hear that last part again: Unless we sense that we belong to each other, with masks off, the vibrant church of today will become the powerless church of tomorrow.

And so Paul tells us: For as in one body we have many members, and not all members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.

And all God’s people said: “Amen!”