"Changed From the Inside Out”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Hilary J. Barrett

Pleasantville UCC, July 24, 2011

Romans 12:1-8

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't 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.”
(Romans 12:1-2)

            One of the new adult education offerings here at Pleasantville has been a summer film series held on Tuesday nights in our fellowship hall.  This past Tuesday about a dozen of us gathered to watch the film, Amazing Grace.  Amazing Grace is based on the life of antislavery pioneer William Wilberforce, who was elected to the House of Commons at the age of 21 and devoted his political life to ending the slave trade in the British Empire.  It’s an inspiring story about the power of faith to change the world.

            The film takes its name from the hymn, “Amazing Grace” -- the words of which were penned by the Rev. John Newton late in his life. John Newton was the captain of a slave ship who experienced a religious conversion during a violent storm at sea. His conversion led him to become an Anglican clergyman and, eventually, a prominent supporter of the abolition of slavery.  The hymn, “Amazing Grace,” is his confessional statement. 

            John Newton was a friend and an ally of William Wilberforce.  Thirty four years after he had retired from the slave trade, Newton published a pamphlet called "Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade."  There, he described the horrific conditions of the slave ships during the Middle Passage and he apologized for "a confession, which ... comes too late ... It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders."[1]  Eventually, both men shared the victory of the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, ending the slave trade in the British Empire. 

            The focus of our biblical studies this summer has been upon Paul’s letters to the early church.  But before we began to study Paul’s letters, Pastor Amelie brought you the story of Paul’s dramatic conversion to Christianity, experienced along the road to Damascus.  Paul described his former identity in this way: “⁵circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; ⁶as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”[2]  That same Paul, formerly an enemy and persecutor of the early Christian Church, was led by God's grace to become one of its chief spokesmen.

            Amazing Grace: from the captain of a slave ship to an activist in the abolition of slavery.  Amazing Grace: from an enemy and persecutor of the early Christian Church, to one of its chief spokesmen.  It’s that kind of amazing grace that is our focus this day as we turn our attention to Paul’s magnum opus: his Letter to the Romans.

            Paul’s letter to the Christians at Rome is the first of the Pauline epistles to appear in the New Testament; it is also the longest and most theologically significant.[3] It is unusual because Paul was not the founder of Christianity there, nor had he ever been there.  “The church in Rome had been established by Christians who had moved to the imperial city from a diversity of places where belief in Christ had been introduced by Paul and others.  Consequently, he knew quite a few particular members of the Roman congregations.”[4]

            The church in Rome was composed of “numerous house churches, under the leadership of both men and women.  Some of the Christians there were converted Jews, and some were Gentiles.”[5]  Paul wrote a careful letter to encourage these various house churches to build unity among the Christians there.  We believe the letter was written toward the end of Paul’s ministry, sometime between A.D. 55 and A.D. 64, perhaps while Paul was in Northern and Southern Greece.[6]

            “Romans is not history or narrative.  Romans is early Christian education…”  It is theology.  It is “Paul’s desire…to explain…what has happened in human lives…through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and through the establishment of the church.”[7] 

The whole book of Romans emphasizes the doctrine that by faith persons can live in a right relationship with God and, consequently, with each other.  Because God’s love for us depends entirely upon his character and not ours, everyone stands before him equally.  No human being can do the slightest thing to earn God’s attention. The fact that we keep choosing to make ourselves our own gods and masters separates us from him.

Yet God freely chooses to love each one of us.[8]

It is God’s own free and gracious love – God’s amazing grace -- that causes us to respond “by loving him, but also by seeking to become more loving toward others…”[9]  Romans 12, the passage I have chosen for this morning, teaches us how to do that.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your 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 good and acceptable and perfect.  (Romans 12:1-2)

Or, as Eugene Petersen renders it in The Message (found on the inside cover of your bulletin):

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't 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.

            Romans 12 focuses upon the way Christians are to conduct their daily lives.  We are to offer our whole selves to God – like an offering placed upon an altar. We are “to put our whole selves into our relationship with God and, consequently, with each other.”[10]  We cannot give mere intellectual assent to Christianity.  We must respond to God’s love “by loving him with our words and attitudes, our emotions and actions.”[11] 

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.

            There are two parts to the text we are focusing on today: the part that reminds us that we have to do more than talk the talk; we have to “put legs on our prayers.”[12]  But then there’s this:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is good and acceptable and perfect. 

There are plenty of things in this world which seek to conform us to their perspective and values every day. Paul is arguing that, as Christians, it is our responsibility to be alert to those things and to fight against them.  More than that: he’s saying that Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people. He is saying that, when God gets finished with us, we’re likely to feel like foreigners in our own culture.  But that’s what the life of faith requires. It requires a willingness to submit ourselves to transformation; we willingly surrender to a relationship with the Holy One knowing it will, without a doubt, change us.  Paul is saying that it is the work of every Christian to live a life which is so open to God that transformation is the natural outcome.

A life which is so open to God, that transformation is the natural outcome.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

The truth is transformation is not an easy thing.  It means dying to the old and coming alive to something new.  That’s the only way that transformation can occur – when some part of us has died.  Chances are it won’t feel very good at first.  We get used to our old routines – even if they aren’t terribly satisfying. We get used to our old circle of friends – even if they aren’t very healthy for us.  We get used to our old ways of doing things – even if those ways now do a kind of violence to our spirits.  To allow ourselves to be transformed is to allow ourselves to be completely changed.

            The Greek word for repentance is metanoia.  It is a word that means turning around – a complete reversal of direction, the total transformation of one’s life.  Paul is calling us to the kind of repentance that leads to transformation, the repentance that frees us from our old habits, the repentance that invites us to begin life again as a new person.  It is not something we do by ourselves but we have a responsibility in it.  It isn’t accomplished by sheer force of will but it is hard work nonetheless.  This transformation of our souls is accomplished by the saving work of Christ; it is accomplished by that grace which is amazing -- and yet we must consent to it. 

Don't 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.

            Paul’s transformation began on the Road to Damascus: it was sudden, dramatic, and life-changing.  John Newton’s conversion began on a storm-tossed sea.  It took John Newton another six years before he gave up his slave trading activities.  Being changed from the inside out can be a very gradual process. This past week, 13 youth and 4 adults spent the better part of their week engaged in service-learning at Heifer Project’s Overlook Farm.  There’s no telling the kind of transformation that God may have begun in those individuals. There’s no telling in what ways God has begun to change them from the inside out.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t 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.

Trust me.  It’ll be amazing.  Amen.