Romans 6.12-23; Matthew 10.40-42
“Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life.”
St Paul is the great New Testament preacher of the grace of God and the life of God in Jesus Christ. These themes of life and grace stand out particularly in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Our second reading this summer is taking us through this New Testament letter. In it, Paul lays out the centrality of Jesus Christ for us and the work of the Holy Spirit in us. In one place he says, “The gospel is the power of salvation to everyone who has faith.” In another, “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…the Spirit helps us in our weakness” Near the end of the letter he says, “The kingdom of God is justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.”
All through Romans, Paul reminds us that God’s faithfulness, not our faithfulness, makes us who we are as Christians. We have, as Paul says today, “been brought [by God] from death to life.” Our faith then is an echoing response to God’s faithfulness to us; our life given purpose and direction in Jesus Christ. “Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life.”
The first hearers and readers of Romans, the people Paul originally wrote to, had experienced this move from death to life in a dramatic way. They were new Christians whose old life had been filled with sins they’re now ashamed of and embarrassed by; they were “slaves to impurity,” to use Paul’s words today.
As anyone who carries guilt from the past knows, however, old faults and failings are hard to leave behind. ‘Guilt,’ as they say, ‘is the gift that keeps on giving.’ So at the start of today’s reading, Paul points these new Christians away from their old life of sin, guilt included, to focus on what God has done to make their life new. It’s a fresh start as dramatic as Jesus’ resurrection on Easter: you “ have been brought from death to life.”
Yet not every one of us has had a change in life as dramatic as those early Roman Christians. You may, for instance, have grown up in a home where faith was a steady, ongoing reality—like Jesus’ parable of seeds planted, growing slowly, and bearing fruit over time. Yet even for those of us whose faith isn’t dramatic—for us devout, undemonstrative Episcopalians, for example—Paul invites us also to look at our life in the light of God’s grace and be open to ways that God transforms and renews us as people given a fresh start.
“Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life.” Christians are no longer defined by the power of sin, guilt, and death. It is true, of course, that for as long as we live, we will live with them, experience them. (Add sin and guilt to death and taxes as things that are unavoidable.) But the defining factor in our lives is who we are in Jesus Christ.
For us, then, that life and identity provide purpose and direction for how we live day in and day out. It means viewing our life from the perspective of someone who has survived a life-altering moment, one that permanently changes what someone believes and how they live. It might be a personal crisis where you realize that unless things change, unless you change and are changed, you’ll lose everything you thought you had. It could be a health scare: bypass surgery, cardiac rehab, a new way of living because you’ve gotten your life back. Having made it through you take every opportunity to live and enjoy life from a new perspective. How much more, then, to look at who you are as “brought from death to life” in Jesus Christ and presenting every moment of your life as an offering to God, a loving response to God’s love for you, open and available for God’s purposes in the world.
“Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life.” What, then, might it look like to put the whole of our life—mind, body, talents, and daily actions—into God’s service?
Today’s gospel is the conclusion of a chapter’s worth of instructions that Jesus gives to the disciples as he sends them out in God’s service to the world. At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus chooses the twelve and entrusts them with astonishing authority: to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. Now if that is what it means to put our lives into God’s service I, at least, have some catching up to do! Those works are remarkable. The high calling Jesus sets for his followers continues when he tells them to give freely, travel lightly, and be people of peace. That, at least, is within our reach. Then today our Lord points us toward acts that are even more accessible. “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me…Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”
Now that is all very ordinary: a warm welcome; hospitality to the easily overlooked; offering a drink to someone thirsty. These acts are so ordinary that we might dismiss them as barely mattering at all. Jesus, however, places such daily acts of service at the center of life in God’s kingdom. The God who notices small details like sparrows, as Jesus says in one place, is also the God who notices small acts done in Jesus’ name.
Here is a wonderful vision for our life as Jesus’ followers. Few of us live in a way that will attract public attention; yet every day offers ongoing opportunity to put the whole of our life—mind, body, talents, and daily actions—into God’s service. We welcome strangers rather than ignore them because, in them, we encounter the presence of Jesus who said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Instead of rushing past the people we meet, we see their value as children of God; James says, “Hold the faith of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ without acts of favoritism.” Or we simply tend to a need that no one else notices and do it without being noticed ourselves, acts of mercy done with cheerfulness.
None of this is especially remarkable. But neither is a cup of cold water. And that, I believe, is precisely Jesus’ point. The greatness of these actions doesn’t depend on their scope and scale but on their source—the love of God in Jesus Christ as their source. Rather than comparing ourselves with saints in stained glass windows who have done remarkable things and knowing we will never measure up, or rather than thinking that our own quiet lives have accomplished very little, we devout, undemonstrative Episcopalians can make our daily lives an offering—mind, body, talents, and daily actions—in God’s service and do the works God has given us to.
When Paul says today, “Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life,” he isn’t saying you must present your life to God in order to receive life from God. Rather, you have received life. Your life as an offering is echoing response to that first word of grace. As Paul says in another place, “The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
This life, and the fresh perspective it gives to your life, is the reward that Jesus talks about in the gospel: the reward of the righteous, and prophets, and of people who offer a cup of cold water. It is not a reward as compensation to which you might be entitled but participation in the life of God as its own reward, every opportunity taken to live and enjoy life with a new outlook as you go to work, prepare meals, answer emails, care for children or aging parents, greet neighbors, and move through a hundred small encounters that rarely seem worthy of notice but can be a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name.
We too often assume that if God’s kingdom is coming among us, it must be large, grand. Yet the God who sent the Son into the world, born in a manger, continues to come among us through ordinary people in ordinary acts of love, accompanying and sustaining our lives and every moment. “Am I not a God close at hand,” says the Lord through Jeremiah. In response to God’s steadfast love, we then make Paul’s word the guiding principle of our life. “Present yourself to God as one who has been brought from death to life.”
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