The Transformed Life 2014-08-24-YearA-Pentecost11 Garrison Keillor has a book of essays called We Are Still Married which includes a favorite essay of mine called Pool Table. He begins it by writing; Our decision to buy a pool table and put it in the dining room and haul the dining-room table upstairs and use it to pile stuff on was the sort of swift, intuitive decision that top family management makes when it is clicking on all eight cylinders. Keillor and his family wanted a pool table, but had no traditional game room in which to put it. When their fourteen-year-old came home and saw it, he said, You ve got to be kidding. And Keillor writes; In fact, I had been kidding a few months before when I said, sitting at the dining-room table, this d make a good poolroom. She and he both laughed. Obviously the room was a dining room, being near the kitchen and having a chandelier. Its long table was where we sat with a stack of bills and wrote checks. We did income tax returns there. We laid towels on it and spread out wet woolens to dry. And occasionally we sat there with company and put away big dinners, which were not bad pretty good and yet, considering the levels of fun experienced in nearby living areas, did not meet the performance standards we had in mind. the dining room table was too much like other long tables I ve spent time at, attending meetings. In those meetings, a major proposal such as dining-room conversion would be discussed at great length and considerably amended, the pool-table component would be set aside pending further study, and we would wind up with a long-term program of dinner enrichment, with new guidelines for guest selection. 1
When it came to household room usage, Garrison Keillor and his family weren t going to conform to the standards of the world, but in fact, were prepared to transform their house by thinking in new ways about what they wanted and what the space in the house could provide. Today we heard read a part of the twelfth chapter of Paul s letter to the Romans. As we have heard over the last several months, Paul has spent earlier chapters building his case that these early followers of Jesus were a people who had been changed and not changed in small ways, like someone with a new pair of glasses or a different hair style. No, they were a people radically and dramatically transformed. In chapter 6 Paul begins with the question, What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? He s sarcastically wondering if more sin would equal more grace, either as a benefit to the people or as a witness to others about the good news. But, as Paul often does, he answers his own question, By no means! Then he goes on to explain that people who have died to sin just can t go on living in it. That s just not an option. The metaphor is the butterfly, an image I have shared a couple of times. I used to think the butterfly was just a caterpillar who had used its time in the chrysalis to grow wings. But I learned instead that the caterpillar really just about dissolves itself with its own enzymes, and from that so-called caterpillar soup emerges and entirely new creation. The butterfly is the caterpillar entirely and completely transformed into a new creation. Paul writes, Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 2
For Paul, baptism is a sign of a changed life. We die to what came before. We die to the struggles of the past which threaten to define us for all of the future. We die to the brokenness and sin of yesterday. And we are raised up to new life, raised up to forgiveness and a clean slate, raised up to the claim that God makes on us a claim that says we are each a beloved child of God. In this congregation, we are sprinklers when it comes to baptismal water. When I came to RLC, the baptismal font that you were using was a lovely, but shallow, ceramic dish sized to fit under the fairly flat lid of the font. I could get a small handful of water from it when it came time to baptize someone, but that s about it. But the altar guild is wonderfully adaptable, and they were willing to swap that small ceramic dish for this larger, clear plastic bowl. Now I can make sure the person being baptized gets pretty wet. And we can have before us a visible reminder of God s watery promise. Unlike some of our Christian brothers and sisters, though, we don t immerse the one being baptized in the water. Now mind you, God can work with whatever quantity of water is used. God s power to bring new life and saving hope is made visible in a sprinkle or in a dunking. But the metaphor of an immersion for the one being baptized, and those witnessing the baptism, is powerful. Being lowered all the way into the water can bring a powerful sense of drowning and death, and so then being lifted from the water especially gives a sense of new life and resurrection. I remember talking about this in confirmation, and Rachel Jones agreed to be my volunteer. I pretended to dunk her down in the water and asked how that felt. Scary, she said. Then I lifted her out and asked how that felt, Good, she said. Rachel has a gift for getting to the point. 3
United by baptism into Jesus death, we are raised in baptism to new life. We are made new. We are a new creation. And in today s reading, Paul describes what it means to live new. For Paul, we are called not to conform to the standards of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds to seek and to live into God s will for us. And part of what that means is that the world no longer has the power to tell us who we are or how we should live. Our culture can t claim us and name us. People around us can t tell us that were only worthwhile if we live in a certain place, do a certain kind of job or participate in certain activities. And we don t have to live by the standards of the world. We don t have to make someone else s notion of who we are or what we should be doing a guiding principle in our own lives. We are called to a new way of living and a new standard. We have a new guiding principle in our lives the guiding principle that is God s unconditional, unmerited, undeserved love of each of us. God s claim of each of us as a special, unique and intentional creation. God s call that we share that love with others that we live that love each day, wherever we are. Amen? But here s the other part of Paul s message. We re not made into a new creation to live a life loved by God and loving others For. Our. Own. Sake. This isn t a personal and exclusive blessing. This isn t all so that we can feel good about ourselves or so that we can sit back and admire our shiny new transformed life. Paul makes the point quite clearly that we are called to live a transformed life as community together. We are called into the community that is the body of Christ with Christ as 4
the head and each one of us called to live as a part of the body using the particular and special gifts that God has given us. We are members, one of another. We each have gifts. Paul says as much in his letter to the Corinthians in a passage that we use when we install leaders of the congregation. There are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit gives them. There are different ways of serving, but the same Lord is served. There are different abilities to perform service, but the same God gives to everyone ability for particular service. The Spirit's presence is shown in some way in each person, for the good of all. We can experience our neighbor in a lot of ways. As someone who we like, respect and appreciate. As someone who rubs us the wrong way. As someone who is strange, but also kind of funny. As somebody we have seen going in and out of their garage, but who we don t really know. Even as someone who we maybe have at times considered an enemy. Look around at each other. And then think about those other neighbors here in Ankeny, in our workplaces at our schools, in this country and throughout the world. Paul is giving us a different way to see our neighbor, whoever they might be. That other person is a different part of the same whole. They are, with us, part of the body of Christ. They are, with us, called to use their particular gifts to make God known in our community. They are with us, God s love for the world. Together we are members, one of another, made new, transformed and sent by God with a new guiding principle, a principle of grace-filled love. 5