In what community is your faith embodied?

Again, this is a portion of this past week's sermon. I was preaching on Rom 12.1-8 and, as I was studying the text, became acutely aware that this familiar text (vv. 1-2) is situated in a very specific context--Paul teaching on the gifts given to the church and the unity of the body of Christ. It is also dense with the language of grace.

But let us also notice something in this text that is extremely significant for understanding what this sort of thing looks like. Paul writes that we should present our bodies, plural, as a living sacrifice, singular. I’m not sure how many bodies you have, but as for me, I only have one! Paul is talking here to the church! To the gathered body of believers who, together, are called to offer their bodies as one sacrifice, he is making his appeal. He is not asking you to make one herculean effort alone to be the most pious person you can be so that your body can be a living sacrifice, but he is rather requiring that together as the church, as the community of God’s people gathered together, our lives are to be offered to God. There is no room here for the solitary individual standing holy before God. There is only room for the community, for the body of believers, for the real, tangible, gathered assembly of Christians that we have come to call the church.

And this is just where Paul goes in the following verses of our text for this afternoon. Verse 4 reads, “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 we are members one of another.” In this sense when Paul writes of a sacrifice , he writes of one sacrifice, to which we are to add our bodies, that is our lives. We are to live our lives together as one sacrifice to God. What this makes problematic is those lives of Christians that have no reference to any particular, local, community of believers. It makes problematic the assertion that “I like Jesus, but not the church.” It makes no sense of the claim that “I am a follower of Jesus but not the church.” It drives us to ask the question, “In which community of Christians—that is, local and particular—is your faith embodied?”