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Bible Study - ELCA Assembly 2001 

"Making Christ Known: Sharing Faith in a New Century"
Romans 12: 1-8

Jose Ramon Alcantara-Mejia

I would like to express my appreciation for the honor of your invitation to lead a reflection on a scriptural passage that is very dear to me. I just hope that by the Grace of God I will be able to convey to you some of the profound meanings it has for me. I will focus on the first two verses, since verses 3 to 8 seem to be the practical application of the theological reflection that is found in the first verses, or rather in the first eleven chapters.

I would like to begin by raising some questions that I think our text will help us to clarify. First: Why do we want to make Christ known in the new Century? Second: What kind of faith do we want to share?

We all know that in the Letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul develops a theological reflection from the Old Testament Scriptures about what God has done through Christ in human history. This reflection, which occupies the first eleven chapters of the letter, is the theological basis for what follows: a call to action.

However, Paul begins Chapter 12 neither appealing to his apostolic authority, nor to our obedience, but with an appeal to our understanding of the work of God in our lives as: "Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God". It seems that the Apostle asks us to stop for a moment to recognize that the mercy of God revealed in human history has reached our personal lives through Christ. Thus, he urges us to examine our lives to rediscover what God in His mercy has done for us, for our response to his request has to come from our experience of the presence of God in our lives and not by blind obedience.

What, then, are the mercies of God? Let me try to summarize what I understand them to be. In Christ our lives acquire a new meaning because we began to recognize ourselves as children of God. This means that the same character of Christ is being formed in us in order to become the person we were meant to be: God's image and likeness. This truly is the gift of a new life, a life in which step by step, we experience daily the mercies of God. It is a life that seeks forgiveness and to forgive, building a new relationship through reconciliation with God, with oneself, with our neighbor and with Creation.

If this is true for you, and you can recognize this process in concrete moments of your life, then you know what the mercies of God are. And most probably that is the reason why you are part of a worshiping community.

But now Paul is urging you to understand that what you have received has a purpose that goes beyond yourself and even beyond your projects in your local church. He wants you to realize that the Grace you have received, and continue to receive, has a larger meaning. Paul calls this purpose transformation. It is the transformation of the World, from what it is to what it is meant to be: the Kingdom of God. A reality where the criteria for true living are justice, compassion, reconciliation, and peace.

Thus, Paul is inviting you to respond to the process of transformation that God began in you through Jesus Christ, by carrying it to the next step: to let Christ become incarnated in you.

In fact, if you have truly experienced the mercies of God, you cannot help but to desire to do what Jesus himself did: to offer your body as a living sacrifice. But what is the meaning of this? You may think that Paul is using a metaphor to refer to your inner being, to your spiritual self. However, the way the Apostle uses the word "body" allows us to understand it in two senses. One is referring to your physical body, not your spiritual commitment, but your real flesh, the body that hurts, that gets tired, that experiences sorrow and joy.

Thus, just as you experience the mercies of God with your body, now God asks you to let Him use your body so that Christ can be incarnated in you. Therefore, to offer your body as a living sacrifice means to use your body to experience the suffering and the joy of the world. To offer your body is to be physically present where there is hurting, injustice, lack of compassion, and to get involved in the struggle to bring consolation, forgiveness, reconciliation, justice, compassion, peace.

The other Pauline sense of body is "community". To offer your body as a living sacrifice is not an individualistic trip, but a way to create true community with those who are also offering their bodies to form the Body of Christ. In this process you begin to recognize that the community of Christ is not primarily a religious group, but people who offer themselves for the growth of others, even to the point of offering their own life for the sake of others, especially those who suffer the most and are marginalized.

Both senses of "Body" acquire a deeper meaning when we realize that Paul is linking offering our bodies to "true worship". For Paul, worship can only be the logical consequence of being a body. Being a body is not something that happens in worship, but something that occurs everyday in our lives. Thus, Worship does not create a body, a community: that would be just religion. Rather, it is the fact that we are actually a body that leads us naturally into the experience of worship, where we are united with Christ's Body in the sacraments.

Thus, beginning with the recognition of the Mercies of God in our lives, we move into a giving of ourselves and the gifts we have received for the benefit of others, especially those who are dispossessed; and together we create a new kind of community where the practice of justice, compassion, forgiveness, consolation, reconciliation, and peace is its character, and the sacraments its sign.

This is not, however, a perfect community. Rather it is a community that tries to live the Good News of the Kingdom of God. A community that is aware that by the mercy of God, there is a real process of transformation going on, both in its members and in the whole body. Transformation is then something that occurs through Christ, it is a gift through which God is reconciling us with Him, with ourselves, with our neighbor and with Creation, by forming Christ in us both as individuals and as community.

This is the Christ we want to make known.

Now, the forming of this community is the creation of a historical reality in which the Kingdom of God is being manifested. And this has consequences. Paul begins his second verse pointing out to one of the most important results. "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world"

Allow me to digress a little to reflect on what seems to be the pattern in the world of the 21st century. The world Paul was addressing was not very different from ours. Keeping in mind a sense of proportions, the Roman Empire was a global political, economical and social structure built on a hedonistic and individualistic way of life. The satisfaction of the self had become the driving force in all areas of social life.

Today we find ourselves under the same predicament, although to tell the truth, this is not something new, for it has been the same way since the beginning of human history. It is just that at the beginning of the 21st century humankind has developed the technological, economical and political tools that make it possible not only to satisfy our most sophisticated desires, but even to create new desires that require a never-ending satisfaction. We feel the need for more space, more time, more emotions, more sensations, more feelings, more information, and more knowledge. So, we have redirected our science, our arts, our economic and political priorities, and, yes, even our religious practices, to this aim: to satisfy our wants.

It should not be a surprise then that even religion has acquired the form of our desires. Today we are moving towards a form of faith without theological content. A kind of faith whose only purpose seems to be to satisfy an increasing spiritual egotism. A faith, which expresses itself in the form of bigger churches, more entertaining styles of worship, and a type of pastoral care tailored to personal needs rather than to questioning materialistic lifestyles and the lack of commitment to social justice. In fact, it is a kind of faith that has discarded justice and compassion from its vocabulary because these are concepts that disturbs the self interest of its believers, or they are used in a rhetorical sense to justify actions that in fact have as final purpose the same self interest.

Thus, we live in a world in which the predominant belief is that the meaning of life is self-satisfaction. We have transcended the "me" generation, and we have entered the era in which egotism has become the way of life. And this is the belief not only of the ones that have the resources to satisfy this life style, but it is also the aspiration of those who do not have the means.

What we do not seem to understand is that these situations are fostered by a structure created by humankind itself. Our individual and collective lives, our desires, our feelings, our interests, are manipulated by the forces of a global market and global economy, and people agree with this because for them it is the only remaining reality. It is a web that humankind has spun and now it is trapped by it. The absurdity of all this is that there is no apparent way out, not because humankind is unable to leave, but because it has come to believe there is nothing more beyond this form of reality it has created.

If this is the only way to go, and the media, politics and economics seem to confirm that, it is no surprise that churches are following the same pattern. Christianity is becoming a kind of religion that, as any other human enterprise, responds and adjusts itself to the needs of the market, watering down its message to its most simplistic formula.

But then, it is no longer what Paul is talking about. In our age, just like in his, there are life styles, values, and ways of doing things that give "form" to our lives and mold our conduct. Thus, without thinking, we acquire and take for granted, and "conform" to it. Paul challenges us to not to conform to the pattern of this world, but to be "transformed" by the renewal of our understanding of what we are in Christ and to what purpose we have been made free from the world we live in. He is not asking us to separate ourselves from the world, to stop participating in the world, but that we do not allow ourselves to be carried along with the world's way of doing things.

To recognize the mercies of God in our lives is to reject the prevalent idea that what we have is because we earned it and, therefore, we deserve to be satisfied and we owe to ourselves to be concerned about us first.

To recognize the mercies of God in our lives means to find the true meaning of life in offering ourselves freely for the sake of others, to form a different kind of community in which relationships are based in love, justice, and reconciliation.

To recognize the mercies of God in our lives is the beginning of a process that transforms us, and enables us to transform our immediate surroundings into a more just and compassionate environment in which a different kind of people can be formed: children, families, friends, the marginalized.

To recognize the mercies of God is to understand that the character of Christ is being formed in us, both as individuals and as community, to create a space in which the Kingdom of God may be manifested, as a sign of a new society and a new humanity.

The following verses of our text speak clearly about this type community, a community in which the different members support each other with what God has given them, thinking first about the other rather than the self. I would like you to imagine what kind of society there would be if it were structured around some of these principles.

For now, I would like to end returning to our original questions to answer them with other questions. We had asked, Why do we want to make Christ known in the new Century? We can respond saying: Is there another hope for the New Century? Naturally, this rhetorical question suggests the enormous responsibility of the Church for proclaiming the message of transformation. Which leads us into the second question: What kind of faith do we want to share? And there is a similar answer: Is there a faith other than the faith in the mercies of God that would really make a difference in the World? For the Apostle, there was not, and it was this conviction that make him go into the World to make Christ known among all peoples through the ages, for he, just as Christ, wanted the world to be what God intended it to be.