[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the Collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties Scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast. So we're glad your here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Welcome. Good morning. My name is Jason. For those of you who don't know, I'm the co lead minister here alongside Janelle. We've been working through a series, a teaching series called the Spirit of Action.
Most of the series has been taken from the Book of Acts, which is Luke's extension of the Gospel of Luke, where he really explores how the church grows in the first few decades of its existence. Today we're going to deviate a little bit from that pattern by jumping into Paul's letter to the Roman Church. We're going to dip right into the middle here in Romans chapter 12, verse 3 through 8.
What I'm going to do is read the passage like we usually do, and then I have some observations to share with you and hopefully that sparks you to maybe consider your own observations from this passage. So It's Romans, chapter 12, verses 3 through 8 says this 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 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 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.
Fairly well known passage. Paul actually writes a similar passage in his letters to the Corinthian Church.
This is of course about gifting and what I want to talk to you today is about the Spirit as a giver. We have talked about the Spirit of action and how the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit as we sometimes refer to it, is active in the world, taking action on behalf of God's goodness and righteousness and peace. And this is no different. So I want to talk a little bit about the idea of the Spirit as one who gives. But first I want to ask that you pray with me.
God, we thank you again for today. We thank you for this opportunity for us to gather.
We thank you for the Edwards family and for the impact that they've had on this church for nearly a decade and the good impact that they have had in every community they've inhabited and how they brought their gifts to all of those communities and how full of faith we are that they bring those gifts to a new community.
So we're grateful for them and we ask that you would inspire us to be filled with a sense of what it means to be and to pursue your giftedness.
We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
Listen, I have three brothers and sometimes I refer to Tina as my sister because I maybe have never met another human being who doesn't feel more like my sibling.
And so I've never really known what it was like to have a sister.
And I still don't because she beats me up like she's one of my brothers.
That's what she meant when she said, somebody here after I leave needs to whisper in Jason's ear and remind him. What did you say? Remind him that he's mortal.
Yeah, that's a good word.
There are really two things that I need in life to keep going. One is coffee, and the other is just a steady supply of sarcasm and I'm not sure where I'm gonna get it.
Thank you. Appreciate that, Kevin.
That was close.
Listen, being a preacher means that you get to share incessantly stories about your children, or in my case, now your grandchildren. I'm sorry, you're just gonna hear more about Otis today, who is my three and a half year old grandson.
Otis is very, very much into superheroes. Not a day goes by that he isn't wearing a T shirt or with Thor or Spider man on it. Spider man is his favorite superhero and he is convinced that he is Spider Man. Sometimes he prefers to be referred to as Peter Parker. He understands that there are more than one Spider man character in the MCU multiverse. He just happens to be Peter Parker. And he's so kind and helpful and generous about it because whatever you're doing, if he sees that you're laboring in some fashion, you know, doing the dishes or moving a chair from A to B, he will offer to help with his webs and he'll, you know, like, come alongside you like this and offer a little help with his webs. A few weeks ago, he came home from school. I say home, but he came to our home because we have him a couple afternoons a week. And I always ask him, how was school, Buddy, how did you do today? He's three and a half. He Goes to preschool, and he'll go, you know, several days a week.
And I want to hear, you know, like, what he did at school, who he's hanging out with, what his friends, you know, are up to. And so I said, as usual, how was school? Buddy said, oh, it's good.
I said, well, what did you do? Like, who did you play with? And he named off a couple of his friends that he plays with pretty regular. I said, oh, that sounds great. What did you guys do today at school with your friends? And he said, oh, we solved crimes.
You solved crimes?
Oh, yeah.
I said, what kind of crimes? He said, oh, you know, crimes around the schoolyard.
Don't judge Otis too much. He's three and a half years old. He's only currently in Kohlberg's first stage of moral development, which is all about punishments, following the rules. He hasn't yet reached the stage of moral development where he's like, you know, abolish prisons, anti carceral state. So I haven't yet tried to explain that to him. It's going to maybe be a few years before.
But one of the things that he does that I actually think is pretty brilliant is he and his friends have come up with this thing. They're all some version of superhero. He's Spider Man. One of his friends is Thor. One of his friends is Captain America. One of his friends is the Hulk, which makes sense, I think.
And he has this thing that he and his friends have come up with where when they're solving a crime or they're trying to, like, deal with a bad guy, if their powers aren't sufficient, if his ability to, like, spin webs and climb walls can't quite get the job done, he can borrow powers from some of his friends.
So, like, you know, we'll be like, playing, and he'll be like, oh, you know, I gotta chase the bad guy out of the kayak. We have a kayak in our backyard. It's a long story. Anyway, we got to chase the bad guy out of the kayak, and I need your powers, Hulk. And I'll be like.
And he'll be like, thanks. And then he'll go like, crush the bad guys with his powers.
And I think that's actually pretty brilliant. You know, that, like, they recognize that whatever superpowers they have, maybe they're not quite adequate for the job, that they need to be borrow from each other a little bit.
Okay, fun times over. Let's talk about the Bible. So the.
The context of this passage, Romans, chapter 12, is this Paul is hoping to make a trip to visit Christians in Rome. Now, Paul didn't found the Roman churches.
They spread there through, probably through migration.
There was a large Jewish population in Rome, and as we often like to remind ourselves, Jesus was a Jew Rabbi.
So what we call Christianity was really a movement of Judaism for the first several decades at least.
And so there were lots of Jewish followers of Jesus in Rome, lots of churches. They appear to have been like a house church network, not one congregation that came together.
Paul had the intention of traveling to Rome at some point to visit with these churches to encourage them.
There was a period of disruption. In 49 AD, Claudius, the Roman Emperor died, or excuse me, he banished all the Jews from Rome.
So all the Jews that were living there had to leave. And then five years later he died. And then all of the Jews who were from Rome went back there and sort of reinhabited the place. And something interesting happened. And that was that the returning Jewish followers of Jesus found that in that five year period that had ensued between their banishment and Claudius death, that the churches changed. They took on a very different cultural character.
They were no longer Jewish communities, they were Roman communities.
So they were full of people, for example, whose men were not circumcised and they were full of people who didn't eat kosher.
And they were full of people who didn't practice Jewish holidays, like, you know, the Feast of Booths or the Day of Atonements.
And these were critical practices for ancient Jews, just like they're critical practices for Jews today.
It was their culture to circumcise their men, to celebrate certain holidays, to eat kosher. In fact, if you think about it, this is very much how culture works.
What we eat, what holidays we practice, what bodily practices we engage in, very much are features of our culture too.
So these Jewish followers of Jesus returned to Rome and found these churches that were no longer Jewish, they were now Gentile communities. And they felt foreign to them.
And their natural response was to judge that, to say, wait a minute, if you're going to be a good Jew, you need to be circumcised, you need to eat kosher, you need to practice the Day of Atonement. And that created a lot of strife in those communities, a lot of conflict.
And so the whole purpose of Paul writing to Christians in Rome, at least the sort of obvious purpose, was for him to address these divisions, was for him to say, how do Jews and Gentiles, as followers of Jesus, get along with each other? So if you've read Romans if you spent any time studying it, the first 11 chapters are Paul essentially unpacking his theology.
How it is that he understands that people who come from entirely different cultures with completely different practices, practices that they each find to be repugnant of the other, how they exist together in community.
And Paul's. Not that this is great oversimplification of the first 11 chapters of Romans, but basically Paul's theology is this. The Law is good.
The Law has the intention of helping you to live good lives, to protect you from harm, to help you to flourish. But Christ fulfilled the obligations of the Law as the Messiah. Therefore, you do not have to follow the law. You simply have to follow the Spirit that exists within you. And if you follow the Spirit in everything you do, you will automatically fulfill the requirements of the law.
And what this move does theologically is it eradicates the need for culture, at least as a justification.
So your culture may be good, somebody else's culture may be good, your culture may be bad in some ways, somebody else's culture may be bad in some ways. That doesn't matter. What matters is that the Spirit of God inhabits you and guides you to decide what is good and what is right and what is true in every situation.
That is a very powerful concept.
It's really powerful if you think about it, that Paul is insinuating that God's Spirit can reliably guide you in every situation to know what's right and what's wrong, no matter where you find yourself.
That you don't have to know the rules to do what's right and what's wrong. You just have to be guided by the Spirit of goodness and righteousness and truth.
That levels the playing field culturally as well.
Okay, so back to the passage. Right, so that's like the context. Paul's trying to reconcile Jewish and Gentile believers with each other.
And in chapter 12, he sort of hinges over to much more practical conversations.
And here we have this conversation about the Spirit of God. He begins in chapter 12, actually, first by saying this. Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, for this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so you will know what is good and pleasing and perfect in God's sight. I don't have tattoos, but if I had one, that would be.
Would be hard to overstate how formative that two passage, that two verse passage has shaped my thinking as a Christian.
Basically, what Paul's saying, if I could take some liberties, is this because the spirit of God has transformed your mind.
Your body is now an instrument of righteousness.
Because the spirit of God has changed your mind, your body is now an instrument of goodness, of peace, of love.
In a very real sense, what Paul's saying is, your body is not your own.
Now, I want to be careful.
I'm not saying that your body is mine.
Usually when a guy who looks like me stands up in a place like this and says, your body is not your own, what he is trying to say is you have to do what I say.
That's not what Paul's saying.
Paul's saying you have agency.
You get to decide what to do with your body. But what you need to understand is that because you now know what's good, you have an ethical obligation to do what is good.
With great power comes what right you have great power.
It's not to spin webs, it's not to smash.
It's to do righteousness and justice and peace, not just for yourself, but for others.
Okay, I'm preaching like six sermons today, so bear with me.
I've been on vacation for two weeks. I've got a lot to say. Let it lose, let alone.
Janelle mentioned this earlier, but we spent a fair amount of time in a Pentecostal tradition. And I'm always a little bit reluctant to visit passages like Romans chapter 12, 3, 8, because in those spaces and in those traditions, boy, were we obsessed with gifting because we read passages like this and we were like, oh, we are so powerful. We have spiritual gifts.
And that's true.
The problem is we have a deep need to feel powerful.
I don't know if anybody here has read Wendy Snyder's book. She's a member of the congregation, wrote a book recently called Fresh Start yout Family. One of the really great insights that she taps into in that book, I would encourage you to get it if you're a parent or grandparent, is that children have a deep innate desire to feel like they're powerful.
Because, of course, they're kids.
My three and a half year old grandson wants to feel like he can spin webs because he's so limited by his three and a half year old body.
His whole life is directed by these giant humans who are constantly telling him what he can and cannot do.
So of course he wants power.
I think the bigger observation is that we all want power.
Like Otis thinks that there are bigger people telling him what to do. Wait till he gets to adulthood and discovers all of the big people that exist in the world who have so much more power than we do, whose decisions affect so many people that we love, whose policies are crushing people and tearing families and communities apart.
We all want to feel powerful. And so one of the allures of Pentecostalism is that it tells you that you're powerful.
And so we fixate on passages just like this, and we try to figure out, which of these gifts do I have so that I can inhabit my bodily power of being a teacher or a preacher or a prophet, that's one everybody wants, or an evangelist or a pastor or whatever it might be. Please, somebody tell me what my gifts are so that I can finally feel like a supernatural superhero.
And there's a cottage industry in Christianity for discovering what your gifts are and for encouraging each other in those gifts and performing bodily ways in very weird and bizarre ways, sometimes as a way of reinforcing those beliefs, those constructs.
And I just think, like, in addition to being really problematic because of how ripe that is for abuse and for how easily it is to strip people of their autonomy, I also just think that that misses the point entirely of Romans chapter 12, really the whole letter.
Because Paul's point here In Romans chapter 12, verses 3 through 8 is not that you are powerful.
Again, his whole purpose here is to join together people who are judging each other and dividing against each other because of their differences.
Paul's purpose here is not to convince Christians that they're supernatural superheroes. His purpose is to bring people together across those differences.
So let's look at it again. Romans, chapter 12, verse 3. For by the grace given to me, I say to every one of 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. Verse 3. Be humble.
Yes, you have the spirit of God. Yes, you know what's right and what's wrong. Yes, you recognize injustice when you see it. And you have a hunger and a thirst for righteousness sake.
Be humble about it.
Consider for a moment the possibility that at any time when you're exercising that judgment, you might be wrong.
Be humble.
Number two, verse four.
For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function.
So first, be humble. Second, you have differences.
You're like a body.
Uses this metaphor when he writes to the Corinthians 2. You're like a body. Some of you are like fingers, and some of you are like toes, and some of you are like ears and some of you are like noses. And let's not take this too far before this becomes a very inappropriate speech.
He kind of says that, too, in Corinthians.
The point is, is that you're all different. You're all very different.
And those differences exist for a reason.
Those differences are, in fact, not a bad thing. They're a good thing. In fact, they're a necessary thing.
Verse 5. Those differences exist. So we who are many are one body in Christ. And individually, we are members of one another. We belong to each other, and we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us. Some of you are prophets, some of you are ministers, some of you are teachers, some of you are givers, some of you are exhorters. These differences aren't bad things to be judged, they're good things to be embraced.
Because together, we're more powerful.
Together, we're more powerful.
It's kind of a funny way of sneaking humility back in there again while telling us that we're more than we realize, that we're more than we could possibly imagine.
Listen, some of you know that I don't talk about this very much because it feels extraordinarily privileged and pretentious. But, like, I'm in the fourth year of a PhD program that's turning out to be the longest PhD in human history.
It hurts every time somebody's like, what's your PhD about? And I'm like, nothing right now.
But my PhD research is social science, right? It's multidisciplinary. It's anthropology of Christianity, it's intercultural theology, it's decolonial theory. All of that falls under social sciences. And there's something really fascinating that happens in social science research. Some of you know this better than I do, but I have a point to make. I swear.
In social science, there are different methodologies, right? One of those methodologies is something that in anthropology, we call bracketing.
And bracketing is the method of setting aside very conscientiously and intentionally setting aside your judgments, your biases, your preconceived ideas about the world, what is good, what is right, what is true.
Understanding what your biases and commitments are and then bracketing them off and setting them aside so that when you are observing other human beings, doing whatever it is that they do, you can enter into their world so you can observe it, so you can see it, so you can understand who they are and what they think and why they think it and how they inhabit the worlds that they live in.
It's really just a methodological version of empathy.
It's a real social science technique for measuring social realities in the hard sciences. What some people like Tina might call real science in the hard sciences. That was supposed to be a joke.
In the hard sciences, their instruments of measurement are microscopes and telescopes and barometers and thermometers and oscilloscopes. And you get the picture, right?
These are instruments of measurement in biology and astronomy and all of those sciences that actually look at stuff and use tools to measure it. In social science, you are the tool of measurement.
You are the instrument of measurement.
You immerse yourself in somebody else's world to see it from their perspective, to truly understand it.
And here's kind of the amazing thing about it.
As soon as you measure somebody else's world using your body as an instrument, you change it, and you're changed by it.
Because if and when, to whatever extent you set aside, you bracket off your biases so that you can truly understand another human being, many of those biases are exposed for what they really are.
And that's just plain judgment.
This is a.
This is a reality that exists in any healthy human relationship.
That when you hear somebody else describe their inner world to you, when they tell you what they're really thinking and feeling, when they're vulnerable with you about their fears, their anger, their frustration, and your immediate reaction is to judge it or react to it or to fix it, you haven't really seen them.
You haven't inhabited their world.
And that's what we want.
I mean, I don't want that, but that's because I'm really screwed up.
There's a deep human need to be truly seen for somebody to see who you are, to experience your inner world and to say to you, oh, I get it.
I get why you were mad. I get why you're hurting.
That is human intimacy.
And it changes you.
It's really hard to judge a human being that you truly see, that you truly understand.
That's bracketing.
If you're really nerdy, you can look up Edmund Husserl. It's loosely based in his phenomenology.
But the idea here is that we set aside our preconceived ideas so that we can genuinely encounter another human being. And I think Paul is not trying to tell us that as individuals, we are supernatural superheroes.
I think Paul is inviting us to bracket ourselves enough to recognize the gifts in each other.
He's not just saying, you're a teacher.
He's saying, she's a teacher?
Can you set aside your biases long enough to see it?
Can you connect with her as a person?
I think this is a deep human need.
Like, I think without this, we spiritually starve.
And if I'm being completely honest, I think it's the reason you're here.
Whatever religion has done to you, good or bad, I think the reason you keep coming back here, and I know most of you are like, why do I keep going back there? But the reason we keep coming back here is because of this deep desire to be really seen and known and understood.
And in spite of all of that, accepted included.
Tina preached it better than I could a few moments ago, like, being completely authentic.
I think that's what Paul is trying to accomplish here.
Paul is saying that the real gift of the Holy Spirit is not that you get your little superpowers.
The real gift of the Holy Spirit is that we get a community where we get to be who God made us.
The good, the bad and the ugly.
And we accept each other.
We love each other in spite of those differences, because of those differences.
And I gotta tell you, there is nothing I want more than that.
And there is nothing I fear more than that.
And that's just me being real.
It's much easier for me to stand up here and act like I know what I'm talking about than to be really seen, to be really known.
And I suspect that for some of you, it's easier for you to sit there and listen than to be really seen.
Really none.
And I wonder if that's something that we can get past as a congregation.
I wonder if we have the courage to really learn how to be there for each other, to have the kind of community that Paul describes later in Romans chapter 12, which is a community of love.
Amen.
Would you pray with me, God? We thank you again for today. We thank you for how these old words and old stories somehow still have a way to provoke us and challenge us.
We thank you for how your spirit is at work connecting us to each
[00:32:17] Speaker A: other,
[00:32:20] Speaker B: whether we realize it or not.
And in every encounter, every moment in church or out of church, that we are meeting other human beings who are just asking to be seen while also trying not to be seen.
And it's our prayer today that you would give us the courage to open up, to be vulnerable, to have genuine connection with each other, because we have been transformed by your goodness and your grace.
We pray all this in Jesus name.
[00:33:07] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching. No matter when or where you're tuning in.
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