Meg Peery McLaughlin
Grounded: Ground Rules
September 22, 2024
Romans 12: 9-21
Prayer of Illumination
By your Holy Spirit
Ground us in the Word
Overcome everything else we brought in here with grace.
We pray in Christ, Amen.
Scripture
9 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good;
10 love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.
11 Do not lag in zeal; be ardent in spirit; serve the Lord. 1
2 Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; persevere in prayer.
13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; pursue hospitality to strangers.
14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.
15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.
16 Live in harmony with one another;
do not be arrogant, but associate with the lowly;[b]
do not claim to be wiser than you are.
17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil,
but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.
18 If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God,
for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.”20
Instead, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them;
if they are thirsty, give them something to drink,
for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.”
21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Sermon
This is a long list of rules–the whole passage is rules–
in Romans–
a densely theological letter, wherein the Apostle Paul tells the church
that rules do not save us.
Romans bends over backwards to tell us
that the only thing that saves us is the grace of God.
We are justified by grace through faith.
And in chapter 12 here, every sentence I read has an imperative.
And some of the commands are not easy for us to heed:
Do not be overcome by evil (have you read the news this week?)
Be patient in affliction (would being patient 5% of the time be sufficient?)
Outdo one another in showing honor (we can outdo each other in being busy)
Live in harmony (all we see around us is discord and division).
This is a steep ethical mandate,
a mandate that I actually think we need an earlier verse to fully understand.
The first verse of this chapter, has what scholars call the great therefore,
is this huge hinge from all of Paul’s good reformed theology to this long list of rules.
Paul writes,
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship.
Some translations say
present your bodies as an offering which is your true and proper worship.
Since God is grace and salvation is gift
surrender into that great love-– in worship—
and in doing that you can then live like this.
Karl Barth, said
worship is our primary ethical act.
Worship renders all other ethics possible.
I think the point is that our ability to act right
is because we are shaped by this
this telling the story of grace
and remembering it at the table
and claiming it at the font.
So, hey, church, it’s good that you’re here.
Step one: our bodies are here in worship,
now . . . how are they supposed to be,
what are they supposed to do out in the world?
What of these ground rules for Christian living?
Paul writes them all down.
It’s a good thing he does, because,
first, there are so many of them,
and second, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I forget the rules,
or get confused about them.
This week there was an evening where Jarrett was out at a meeting and
I’d already put the twins to bed and Naomi asked if I wanted to play a game.
We got out the classic Parker Brothers board game, Sorry.
As you may remember,
the goal is to move four pawns around the margin of the board to get home safe.
But there are these arrow spaces that begin a little colorful segment of the spaces, called a slide. And if you land on one, and your opponent is somewhere in the middle of the slide, you can knock them right off.
In our house that happens with a bit of flair, and a very sarcastic “sorry!”
Well Naomi and I had a disagreement. Naomi was blue and she landed on a blue arrow to start a slide, and she tried to send me packing, but I said,
Wait! I don’t think you can slide on your own color! She thought that was bogus.
So we had to go back to the rules. Thank goodness they were written down.
I pulled them out of the box. They were actually quite emphatic,
“Under no circumstances can a pawn slide on their own color.”
We may not always like them, they may not always be easy, but rules guide our play.
Undoubtedly because of that particular game with Naomi and this sermon,
I kept thinking about this, how this happens quite a lot:
how before we start a game,
we have to double check that everyone is playing by the same rules.
When we play UNO as a family,
we have to decide if we are going to play the rule where
“if you play a Draw 2 card
can I play a Draw 2 card on top of that
it becomes a Draw 4 for the next person”
Is that how we’ll play, you know, because some families play different rules with UNO.
And before you start, you really have to agree.
I decided that I should definitely ask Tristan,
UPC’s youth director, about other games
where understanding the ground rules was crucial.
I went into his office to ask,
assuming he’d need to think about it and come back at me,
with a perfectly packaged sermon illustration.
Ha! Boy was I wrong.
He immediately started spewing off all manner of games and rules in rapid succession.
Well yes, he said, with four square you have to decide if you’re going to play with
Bus Stop, Black Magic, Pac-Man, and snake eyes.
And in Spud you have to know if you’re allowed to throw overhand or under hand, and what the punishment is for Spud, and if you can throw the ball far away or only straight up?
To tell you the truth, I didn’t understand half of the rules he mentioned,
but I was a hundred percent sure we’d hired the right youth director,
and it indeed confirmed that
ground rules help us know how to behave—
They are essential for the church, too.
When the Apostle pens these into this letter,
he does so for the whole church, not for the individual
in the Church – nobody plays solitaire.
These are collective expectations—
this is how we do life as a community.
If you opened your pew bible to read along this morning
you saw that the header to this section read Marks of a True Christian.
No offense to the editors of the New Revised Standard Version who added those,
but it should actually read: Marks of a True Church.
Because these are the ground rules for the church.
This is what we agree to
as those who are saved by grace.
These are the behaviors of our common life;
this is the shape and texture and substance of our particular way in the world.
It’s what makes us, us.
Because the church is not a cause,
It is a community. A community that chooses to live in a certain way.
The church is not a shelter from the big, bad world around us,
nor is it a political action committee.
It’s not a non-profit competing for airtime and money amidst other non-profits.
At her best, the church is a group of
grateful recipients of grace who agree to some ground rules.
Yes, we are grateful recipients of grace who agree to some ground rules.
You can stack draw twos in uno,
Slide only on the other colors in Sorry . . . .
And you can hold fast to what is good
And Weep with those who weep
You can refuse arrogance and revenge
And care for the lowly.
That’s how we play, church. That’s who we are.
Now, trust me, I see—
Just as clearly as you do that these are not the rules others are playing by.
Right now, we have a front row seat right now to those who
play by the rules of fear mongering and prejudice;
who play by the rules of selfishness and greed;
those who say they are playing by one set of rules
and then do the absolute opposite.
Turn on the news and it is so disorienting that it
doesn’t even feel like we are playing the same game,
we’re nowhere near the same board.
That’s why we wanted to offer this sermon series.
How do we stay grounded right now?
I tell you what, church,
for me, it’s this, it’s you.
It is this community that practices this primary ethical act,
It’s this worship that reminds me that the only thing that saves is grace.
The only thing.
It’s these friends, on both sides of the aisle,
of different ages and stages and backgrounds,
who don’t always get it right,
but who agree on the ground rules—
these ground rules— love, hope, weeping, prayer, perseverance.
This week, in my study on this text, I was reading David Bartlett,
a long time professor at Yale; he was a Baptist, but the Presbyterians claimed him.
Bartlett noted that in this section of Romans
there are twenty three separate imperatives.
He then said that “Even the most enthusiastic preacher would probably not dare spend twenty three Sundays discussing the implications of Paul’s ground rules.”
Now, it is true that I won’t be preaching this text until March.
And it is also true that I may not be as enthusiastic as my husband
who preaches on the burning bush and then has the fire alarms go off.
But I do live in Chapel Hill; the epicenter of Carolina basketball.
I do know the shoes that some of you are likely wearing on your feet right
this very minute.
And if I had Jordans of my own, you bet I’d be wearing them right now.
Michael Jordan #23
#23 imperatives.
David Bartlett is now in heaven,
but how I wish I could tell him.
In this town, that number means something.
We are grounded in God’s grace,
and so this is how we live–
We hold fast to the good.
We don’t quit in hard times, but pray all the harder.
We bless enemies. Make friends with nobodies.
We do not insist on getting even.
We love. We love. We love.
Thanks be to God. Amen.