I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God… (Romans 12:1)
St. Paul begins today’s beautiful call to the true Christian life, to the truly human life, by grounding every one of his apostolic commands deep in the manifold mercies of God. For Paul, the central fact of human existence—the one thing all men must know—is the manifestation of God’s righteousness through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This ultimate revelation of who God is, a revelation Paul has spent 11 chapters joyfully conveying, has enormous ramifications for what it means to be a creature made in the image and likeness of this just and loving God. We don’t have to sit around and wonder what it looks like to operate within the blessed path of human fulfillment; we don’t have to blindly guess what God wants from us or be somehow comforted by the little god of our imaginations who always seems to want what our sinful hearts desire; no, we can follow in the well-worn path God the Son has already walked for us; a path which leads to the victory over death He publicly revealed to the world. In such a world, in a world which contains this repudiation of death, in a world which contains Christ’s resurrection from the darkness, there are no neutral parties—no wisely disengaged onlookers: there are only loyal subjects or mad rebels.
The problem for the 21st century Western Christian is that it is really easy to forget the mercy of God altogether. It is easy to forget that every breath we take, every joy in our life, and our only hope in the judgment to come is a gift from the merciful God who died on a cross to save us idolatrous rebels from ourselves. When we read in God’s Word that we are fragile creatures who live in a fragile world where, at any moment, our relative comfort can come crashing down on top of us, the terrible temptation is to ignore this obvious reality in favor of the lies politicians and salesmen and talking heads tells us in order to get us to buy into their view of reality—a reality in which we must trust in their mercy and love and live accordingly. But, my God, the sacrifices they demand from us are truly horrible, truly dehumanizing. Do we even need to list these sacrifices out? It suffices to say that whenever we hear God’s Holy Scriptures tell us to live one way, and we choose to live in another way, we are simply making our reasonable sacrifice to the gods we actually think are saving us. There is nothing complicated about this decision; although, I think we like to pretend it’s complicated or that we are special or uniquely burdened.
For decades, American and European churches have recognized that Western people no longer cling to the mercy of God as if their whole lives depended upon on it and have moved in two directions to convince people to stay in the pews. Some church bodies developed liturgies of entertainment whose primary goal is to engage audience members in the same way a concert or movie engages them. Others have simply changed their beliefs into mirror images of the political movements people think will actually save the world. For example, why does the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, and the Presbyterian Church USA need to pay for abortions in Africa? What does that have to do with reflecting the mercy of God to a confused and dying world? It doesn’t. This is the sacrifice our worldly masters demand of us: they demand that our worship and hope be centered, not on God, but on ourselves and on their political projects. This choice is not unreasonable; it is not an unthinking, irrational decision somehow foisted upon us; people are not powerless victims of Western Christianity’s assimilation and decline. In ways small and great, men have presented their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to the world’s darkness, and we need to ask for forgiveness every day of our lives for our own part we have played in this morbid drama. If we don’t believe that then the rest of Paul’s letter isn’t going to make any sense to us; it will simply be a list of moral things to do—if we feel like it—rather than the means by which we evangelize ourselves and the world to the divine mercy which is our only true hope.
Again, Christian moral effort has nothing do with either the pathetic attempt to gain moralistic power over another, as one sees in the now ritualized public shaming of people over their failure to be sufficiently politically engaged or “woke,” nor are we being called to somehow put God in our debt through self-righteous legalism; rather, all of our moral effort is centered on our daily renewed status as souls whose ransom has been paid in full by our Savior Jesus Christ. If we are saved, if we are washed in the blood of the lamb, if we are a member of the holy elect, then we are owned by God. Truly, the human condition is to be either owned by God or to be hopeless slaves owned by our desires and passions and those who provide them for us. This reality makes more sense once we recognize the analogy St. Paul is using today, perhaps a bit less clear to us than the original audience.
The apostle, while referring to our logical or reasonable worship, is using the same technical words for a sacrifice in the Old Testament Temple. It was there that a live animal was brought to the priests to become holy and set apart for God and from the world: a sacrifice acceptable or well-pleasing to God. To be holy is to be offered and owned by God, and if we desire holiness, if we desire sanctification, then we must look to become more and more the possession of the God whose property is always to have mercy. The alternative is not some kind of radical freedom; it is merely to sacrifice ourselves to the dying gods of this world. St. Paul is keenly aware that all men have a god to whom they sacrifice, the only question becomes, “Who is that God?” And, perhaps more importantly, “Can that God save me?” The scope of the human problem only becomes truly visible when we recognize how many people, despite all the empirical evidence, still choose to worship sex or money or power as their god—even as it fails generation after generation.
It is for this reason that the apostle’s next command rings through the ages, calling us back from the brink of idolatry. He writes, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).
This verse should dispel any lingering ideas about listening to our inner child or living authentically as the highest good (advice as bad for Charles Manson as it is for us). No, the Christian must be daily renewed by freely and joyously and painfully presenting his life as a sacrifice to our Lord, so that our very minds reflect the image of the Living God rather than that of a slowly decaying beast—which is what we truly are without His mercy. This reality, blocked from our view by forces both natural and supernatural, may help us to understand what Jesus means when he says things like, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (St. Mark 8:35). The closer our fallen mind is to the world’s idolatrous perspective, the more these types of phrases will make no sense to us whatsoever, but the closer we get to the renewed mind of the reasonable and enlightened Christian, the more we can understand how self-denial is a necessary part of self-discovery. Or, perhaps differently put, the denial of our wants and desires for the benefit of God’s truth and our neighbors is the blessed means by which Christ’s divine love lives and grows and thrives in this evil world. It is in this way that the life of sacrificial love, which to the outside world seems to be life-fulfillment suicide, is in fact the only logical response for a human being living on the planet upon which the universe’s Creator showed us how to live and die and rise.
Blessedly, the further we renew our minds, the more we are able to act as the adult heirs of the kingdom of God. The more we imbibe of Word and Sacrament and the lived out sacrificial love of Christ, the more able we are to go boldly into the night and not fear what we cannot see. And in this way, determining God’s will for our lives becomes easier and easier, not because we have gotten smarter, but because we will have been living for that which is real and eternal rather than the fake and temporary. We are called, today and everyday, to follow Christ and offer our lives as a loving sacrifice to our merciful Father. Not as one calling among many, but as the calling which gives meaning to every step we take in the world. May we always see the execution of this life-long calling as the only reasonable response to a divine mercy within which we must live and die to ever truly know.