A Living Sacrifice
Pastor Mathew Magera – 8/27/17 – Sermon 242
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
When I was in seminary, one
of my classmates told a story in class one day about a rural tribal community
in one of the central African countries. This was a community that had been in
existence for a long, long time, like many of the tribal communities in Africa.
These tribal communities looked just as you might expect. There is not much
there. Their homes are nothing like we would call homes. Their diet was
extremely basic. They were more of a hunter/gatherer type of community that
tended to survive on its own without any interaction with the outside world.
They had no running water and they had no bathrooms. In fact, their
"bathroom" was just an area few hundred yards outside of their
village in a small gathering of trees and shrubs. Well, one day, a wealthy
businessman from North America happened upon this small community. He had
compassion on this community immediately. He saw their poor living conditions.
He saw their poor diet. He saw their lack of running water. He saw them walk a
few hundred yards outside to relieve themselves. He saw all of this and he knew
he had to do something about it.
Within weeks of going back
home to the western world, he took some of his own money, set it aside and
gathered up a team to build portable toilets just outside their village. He
knew that if he could help somewhere it would have to be in a way that would
take away this very unsanitary means of living. And so that is just what he
did. Workers arrived on site in this little tribal village and they built a
community of portable toilets for these less fortunate people. At first they
were apprehensive about using them but slowly things began to change and the
community no longer had to walk a few hundred yards outside of town into
unsanitary conditions just to use the bathroom. I'm going to come back to this
story later and tell you a bit how this community was changed by this self-less
act but in the meantime, I want you to think about what this act represented.
Paul, in the beginning of
Romans 12 is talking about being a living sacrifice. Giving one’s self for the
neighbor. Risking what you have for the benefit of someone else. You might
think to yourself about this story and say, wow, for one man to have compassion
on one insignificant tribal community in central Africa was definitely an
example of being a living sacrifice. What I want to show you today is that as
much as we want to consider this act as a living sacrifice, it had very little
signs of life within it.
This morning, we watched Christ
claim another one of his own through the drowning and rebirth of Holy Baptism.
Baptism is a drowning. And a rebirth. Being born again as Jesus once told
Nicodemus. Born anew. One of the many ways in which we live out our baptism is
by being a living sacrifice for the sake of the neighbor. As we are thinking
about the baptism this morning, we might be reminded of our baptism as
well and how we can become a living sacrifice for others by living out our
baptism no matter how long it has been since we have been claimed by Christ in
those life-giving waters.
Paul writes,
"Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to
offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your
true and proper worship." A living sacrifice includes three important
components, direction, action, and relationship. Paul is calling for a major
transformation here. He's calling for new life. He's calling for a change in direction.
I'm talking specifically about the word sacrifice right now and what it means
to Paul's readers. In the time up until Jesus died on the cross, there were
many sacrifices that were made for many different reasons in the Jewish
religion. In the burning up of the animal, the smoke would rise into the air.
That smoke represented an appeal to God as a way to please him by the
sacrifice. This was the practice for hundreds of years. You went through the
rituals for the purpose of giving offerings, as a means of worship or making
atonement for your life. But, that stopped at Jesus. Jesus was the one and
final sacrifice that was necessary to cover the sins of the entire world past,
present and future. Animal sacrifices were no longer necessary. This is what
Paul means when he says “in view of God’s mercy” as a precursor to being a
living sacrifice. We can’t be a living sacrifice without God’s mercy and his
mercy allows us to change direction.
Nothing we do can meet God's
standards anyway but that was all taken care of by Christ on the cross. In this
time after the resurrection, the effects of our sacrifice need not go into the
air like smoke from a fire. Instead, our sacrifice, our living sacrifices
spread side to side, to our neighbor. Not vertical where God is being appeased
and satisfied but horizontal through which in the light of God's mercy and
grace we turn to one another and say 'what can I do?' or 'how can I help?'
God’s mercy frees us to live wholly for the neighbor. This is the action
involved in a living sacrifice.
This is where the power of
the Gospel comes into play. Our minds are all about, "I have to meet God's
standards doing this. I have to meet God's standards doing that. I have to meet
God's standards saying these things." It's all I, I, I. That does not work.
God’s standards are too high. Jesus tells us, I have taken care of it. I have
met all the standards. I have done it for you so that you don't have to. Focus
your efforts not on meeting God's standards but on serving your neighbor. Jesus
took care of your salvation, now go and serve. When you are transformed from
the inside by this, your entire attitude is changed and a new opportunity is
given. But there’s more thing left to think about.
Relationships are a
by-product of the Gospel, of that promise, and also within a living sacrifice.
God says your salvation is taken care of, now go out and live for your
neighbor. A dead sacrifice thrives on me, myself and I. A living sacrifice
thrives in relationships and in the needs of others. As we are freed to do
that, God's will becomes clearer to us because we are opened up through
relationships with others as to what their needs are them, not what my needs
are for them. The key to becoming that living sacrifice is to take a step back,
let the promise of the Gospel remove you from thinking of what you can do alone
but what we can do together and let those relationships tell you what the best
need is and how to take care of it.
Let's revisit the tribal
community in Africa and see what changes have taken place since the portable
toilets were built. Would you believe it if I told you that this community
began to die off rapidly? One by one, people in the community began to die of
malnutrition and this once thriving tribal community was reduced to something
much less in a matter of months. How could this plan have gone wrong? A problem
was noticed. Direction and action were present. Yes, but relationship was
missing. You see, the reason the community had thrived for so long was because
of how it operated. It got into its own system after several generations and
everything worked perfectly. Those portable toilets interrupted the flow of
this community in such an abrupt way that it caused it to die off. This
businessman who came into this community thought he needed to help in this way
but he did not see what the results of his actions would accomplish. If he had
taken the time to nurture relationships with these people he would have noticed
something. Remember the need he was trying to meet? What he didn't know is that
the matriarch of the community would walk a few hundred yards out of the
community each day and sorted through what was there. By doing this, she was
able to learn what the people in the community were eating. She was able to see
what was lacking in their diet and as a result she was able to prepare meals
for her people that would benefit their survival. This place a few hundred
yards away from the community, while horrifying to us, was a necessity for this
community's survival and it was taken away in a flash by one person who thought
they were meeting a need.
This is why Paul talks about
being a living sacrifice. It's easy to be a dead sacrifice. To do what we think
needs to be done just for the sake of doing something. God wants us to live
outside of ourselves and through relationships discern God's will. We can become living sacrifices to our
neighbor, we can live out our baptism in service to others, we can embrace the
gift of the church and being fed with God's Word so that we might be
transformed by the renewing power of the Gospel message that Christ has died
for our sins and that we are free. We can do this only by allowing that saving work
of Jesus to penetrate out hearts. And he gives you that chance right now. A
clean slate.
Jesus claimed each and every
one of us in our Baptism. He reached out to us and said, you are mine now. We
have been pulled out of that water new, fresh and ready to be living sacrifices
through the transforming power of that promise that we are his. Jesus changes
our direction. Jesus calls us to action. And Jesus provides relationships. Let
that promise of new life transform you this day into a living sacrifice for the
sake of Jesus Christ whose mercy gives you that opportunity to truly live for
others and to share that redeeming love to all people just as it was shown to
you. To God be the glory now and always. Amen.