Lent: Call to an Altared/Altered Life
Romans 12:1-2
12 1-2 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.
Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the
culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God
brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (The Message)
Sixth Sunday in Lent
Unlike the culture around you, always
dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you,
develops well-formed maturity in you.
What is this “culture” Paul warns
about here? Misunderstanding and mischief follow not getting this right. “Culture”
or “world” carries many meanings in scripture. Here it is counter-pointed by
Paul’s insistence on fixing our attention on God and responding promptly to
what he calls us to do. World, then means that constellation of forces, inducements,
allures, and temptations that do their best to distance, distract, and dilute
what Paul calls for.
-This is NOT the world as our physical habitat. God
created it good, even very good, and even though it has been misused and
damaged by sin, it remains good in God’s valuation.
-This is NOT a total understanding of the setting in
which we live. The whole of the world, its ideas, artifacts, achievements, and hopes,
are not uniformly evil and to be rejected. There are many things noble and
worthwhile for Christians to value and share in in our culture. See Paul in
Phil.4:8 for confirmation.
-This is NOT a call to abandon the evil world to its
destruction. Paul says in 1 Cor.5:10 that it’s not even possible to avoid the
evildoers of the world. Easter, with Christ’s resurrection in a more than
physical (but not less) body means God’s eternal embrace of this world as the
physical, material reality it is.
Were we to take any of these things
our culture and our world are NOT seriously, we would fall into the immaturity
Paul wants us to avoid. Rather he wants our “well-formed maturity.” Surely he
means an approach to our lives in the world that cares for what is going
on it and careful in discerning the places and ways we want to respond.
For my part, the recent calls for a
boycott of the movie Beauty and the Beast
seem rather undiscerning. In the first place, even if you are morally opposed
to homosexuality, is this a place you want to fight? I confess, I missed the “gay”
part of the movie and I was looking for it! Should that slight “offense”
outweigh the overall excellence of the film and the number of opportunities it
opened for reflection on biblical themes? Why not celebrate that? And are we
wanting to suggest that minority sexuality persons should not be hired for
roles in films?
Americans, perhaps because of the
Puritan strain in our national DNA are prone to purity syndromes. It’s all of
nothing if you’re on our side. If you don’t affirm a pro-life position
(narrowly construed) you cannot be conservative or evangelical. If you’re not
pro-gay you can’t really be progressive. No matter how else you share with
those in the respective groups. You’re not pure. And can’t be really trusted.
And I wonder what Paul’s willingness
to become all things to all people for Christ’s sake might have to say to this inability
to discern more “maturely”?
Lent, especially deep in Lent, we near
Jesus’ cross.
-The
cross which alone enables us to see people and things as God sees them. -The cross, the criterion of all things
Christian. -The
cross, foolish in all ways except wisdom. -The
cross, the unimaginable made visible. -The
cross, where love trumps sin. -The
cross, the maturity of God well-formed in us.
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