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 the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness (Romans 12:1-8).
Conform to Boring Grown-Ups?
Classify me as a late baby boomer. I turned 13 in late 1970, meaning that I spent my tender childhood years in the 1960s. Like children of every generation, I found grown ups quite out of touch. Granted, my parents made life seem relatively stable and actually quite boring in a nice, restful way. When inevitable restlessness for drama set in, one needed only turn on the TV. Join the Roadrunner escaping Wily Coyote’s traps. Or watch the Man from Uncle gather intelligence from thugs with thick accents who wanted to kill him as he carried on a romance with a sexy double agent.
Real life at home bore no resemblance to those shows. Dad came home from his job at the bank shortly after five with his characteristic gravity as if he spent the day balancing the scales of justice. Mom had a hot, delicious meal ready and kept things reasonably pleasant. Despite a pretty predictable daily life, the grown ups seemed duty bound to worry. To help with that, Dad turned on the TV for the Huntley and Brinkley report on the day’s serious, obscure news. I learned anxiety over who-knows-what. It remains with me to this day.
Conform to Hippies?
Yet, I found older kids more perplexing. You see, they were hippies. The Viet Nam War raged. I vaguely sensed the tension between the older kids who just might have to fight and the grown-ups who thought we should obey the President. The older kids took an eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die attitude. It played out in anti-war protests, tie-dye tee-shirts, ratty jeans, experimentation with drugs and sex, and – most to the horror of the grown-ups – boys with long hair.
The slogans “Peace and Love,” “Make love, not war,” and “Do your own thing” took hold. Caught between boring grown-ups and scary older kids, I found in those slogans some solace about the youth culture. Certainly war, especially this one, seemed an absurd sacrifice of precious lives for the opaque aims of boring grown ups. Certainly peace seemed a more wholesome objective than containing communists halfway around the world.
Heschel: Doing Your Own Thing With Care and Wisdom
Over against conformity to the deadly dealings of “the establishment” (which I interpreted as boring grown-ups with nice offices), one could find one’s own voice, choose one’s own lifestyle, do one’s own thing. In school, I learned that spirit sprang from quintessentially American roots. Think Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman, not to mention the founding fathers who fought for liberation from stuffy Anglicans.
During that era, in a TV interview shortly before his death, Hasidic rabbi, philosopher, mystic, and social justice activist Abraham Joshua Heschel gave this advice to the younger generation:
Let them remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every deed counts, that every word has power, and that we all can do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments. And above all, remember….to build a life as if it were a work of art.
Heschel offered the best of that do-your-own-thing spirit. He couched it in a genuine care for the messed up world and invited existential creativity.
Discerning Your Vocation
In our epistle lesson today, Paul too affirms the gifts and unique contribution of each individual. He encourages the exercise of those gifts in gratitude for God’s saving grace. He affirms whatever gift you and I offer as valuable functions in the Body of Christ, the church’s existence as an embodied witness to God’s love in the world. Mature discipleship involves listening to your heart to find your voice. Then assess your talents to create a lifestyle that praises God through service and just being who you are.
We call this “discerning your vocation.” “Discernment” means to separate and distinguish. “Vocation” derives from the Latin, vocare, or voice. You discern, or separate and distinguish, the voice of God from the cacophony of voices that try to drown out the one you need to hear and heed. Furthermore, you discern your own God-given voice from voices that discourage you from a life based on loving God and neighbor.
Discerning Vocation With the Community
The church should give you a school for discernment. We should be a community of friends who support each others’ vocations with prayers, conversations, and shared ministry amid pressures to conform to lesser spirits. Discerning our unique vocations does not happen in a social vacuum. Discernment can happen in a private session with the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit much more often employs our friends. Faithful friends compose Christ’s body, the church, and the body itself has its own discernment to do. Your personal discernment is bound to that.
Paul uses the Greek for “y’all,” the second person plural, in discussing discernment. As Fred Craddock and Eugene Boring observe, “We must decide for ourselves, but not by ourselves.” We partner with God and fellow pilgrims. In a community where fellow pilgrims engage in conversation about heeding Christ’s call, you find a healthy church. Healthy churches complement rituals in the nave with spiritual conversations over coffee.
Paul counsels, “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” (v.2). Even as you share and listen to fellow pilgrims, do not conform to herd mentalities. Spiritualities of commercialism, status, political tribalism, and outright vanity seep through church walls and coax us from Christ. It takes prayer and single-minded focus on Christ to discern God’s voice outside church and within.
So Why Not Become a Hippie?
Which brings me to the reason I did not become a hippie: Paul also implies not to conform to a lifestyle that escapes boredom and fear through drugs and sex rather than waiting for God’s answer to your need. Ape neither a bohemian nor bourgeois lifestyle in search of identity when your identity is already secure with Christ. If you live to be “hip” or “cool” or “in the in crowd,” you only leave one false identity to conform to another.
Moreover, Paul challenges the notion that you can be a romantic hero, a self-styled individual, not to mention a self-made man or woman. His, “Do not be conformed to this world,” does not translate, “Be a nonconformist.” Like every respectable social psychologist two millennia hence, Paul knows that the question is not whether we conform, but to whom we conform. And following Christ means conforming to his pattern of life.
That does not annul Heschel’s dictum to live creatively as if one’s life is a work of art. God bestowed your gifts, fearfully and wonderfully made you, and delights in your self-expression. But living a Christlike life sets parameters designed to keep you authentic. Living outside those parameters, the do-your-own-thing hippie culture became a cult of peer pressure. When Madison Avenue co-opted them to make bohemianism chic and offer upscale flower child accessories, it all came clear.
Discern With Humility
But the parameters set by following Christ include humility like his. Ironically, Paul does not offer partial lists of spiritual gifts to get us to sign up for our favorite. He bids us mind our limits, recognizing that you, the individual, cannot do everything, that others have gifts unlike yours that God values equally. Do not get puffed up and competitive about your gifts. Stay in your lane and enjoy the convoy.
Humility frees you to love as Christ loves. This maxim immediately following our text makes me smile: “Outdo each other in showing honor!” Do not think yourself above others; in fact, honor those less abled, more challenged. Conformity to the world or this age involves climbing ladders and competing. Conforming to the example of Christ means freedom from that rat race, embracing lowliness, and building up the other, just as Christ descended to the lowest place on the cross to raise us up to eternal life.
Becoming a Living Sacrifice
In other words, “present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” He does not mean masochistic asceticism. To the contrary. The term, “sacrifice,” derives from the Latin, sacer, meaning “sacred,” and facere, meaning “to make or to do.” “Sacrifice” means “to make sacred.” Christ does not accept half of us, one part conforming to this world and the other to him. Christ only accepts all of us. When we give all of ourselves, we make ourselves sacred.
Fortunately, we do not have to get it right all at once. That takes an eternity, and thank God Christ supplies that. But presenting your whole self as a living sacrifice recommends a disciplined willingness to let Christ lead you and the Holy Spirit shape you as you offer your life as a work of art, given in gratitude. Only in that humble, freely given love can we discern our gifts and discern Christ’s voice calling us amid all the noise of the world.
It Is Never Too Late
It has been 55 years since I was 13 caught between boring adults and scary older kids. Since then, some folks found me scary and others found me boring. All children of God. All wrong about me as I was about the grown-ups and hippies because we are all children of God.
We find ourselves torn between conforming to this world and living our lives as a work of art in communion with God and fellow pilgrims. How easy just to conform, but how tragic to settle. Many of us are older. But it is never too late to discern, never too late to pray for a way to make ourselves sacred, never too late to join a friend for a cup of coffee and talk about our souls of all things and about what to do for God in this beautiful and wretched world that God loves so much. It is never too late to present our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God.
Related Posts
Sacrifice: Making Yourself Sacred
Discernment: The Art of Really Living Your Faith
Power to the Sheeple: Sermon on John 10:1-10 & RCL Readings
Ignatius Dreams: A Young Man Learns Discernment and Teaches the World
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God (Matthew 5:8).
Image by VirgoStudio from Pixabay. Public Domain.
Most needed this morning as I go forward into this day. Paul’s words have often echoed in my thoughts with verse 2. My daughter tattooed Rom 12:2 on her. May Jesus use each of us as we follow his way and present Him to this world.
May His perfect peace keep you and yours.