Please Click Here For Sermon Video
You folks are probably going to think I’m stupid, but I think the movie Conan the Barbarian has as profound a message to it. It first came out in 1982 with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the lead role of Conan. It was the movie that gave Arnold his entry into Hollywood and the rest is history. I never would have thought that he would grow up to be Governor of California.
Conan’s story begins with him as a small boy watching as his village is raided and destroyed by the Snake King played by James Earl Jones (so the movie wasn’t a complete loss.). The children of the village were carried away as slaves. Conan grew up to be a gladiator under the tutelage of the Snake King so there’s a bit of a relationship there. He eventually won his freedom and you would think that would be great. But unfortunately, Conan grew up hating the Snake King and he rather lived for the day when he could take his vengeance. The day comes and Conan catches the Snake King undefended while he’s leading something like a political rally. Conan sneaks up and stands behind him, sword drawn, poised for victory but the Snake King turns and with the wisdom of Darth Vader (also played by Jones) he causes Conan to pause and ponder. He says something to the effect of “My son. I made you who you are. I gave you the will to live. When I am gone what will you have to live for? What will you become without me, my Son?” The implied answer to that last question is that if he takes his vengeance, Conan will become just like the Snake King. Conan snaps out of it and does the deed. Vengeance won.
I call the movie Conan the Barbarian profound for the way it portrays hate and vengeance. You’ve likely heard it said that love and hate are the two sides of the same coin. Love for another shapes us whether it be for parents, spouses, friends, etc. It pretty much goes without saying that we tend to become a lot like those people whom we love and admire, one could even say idolize. This is one of the reasons we need to tell our young people to be careful whom they choose as friends and to be mindful of who their heroes are and engage them as to why. Love and adoration for someone or something can give us drive and shape our personalities and what we pursue in life; what we’re minded on. Idolization will guide what we orient ourselves towards. For example, I taught myself to play guitar when I was eleven because I wanted to be like Paul Stanley from the iconic rock band KISS.
Well, as it goes with love, so also it goes with hate. Just like love, hate for another person or persons can and will shape who we are as persons and what we pursue in life. Moreover, hate and revenge, hate’s counterpart to adoration, can take us over and destroy us. There’s been some really interesting brain studies done in the last ten years showing that the desire for, seeking of, and attaining of revenge work the same areas of the brain addictions do. Grudging and revenge seeking is an addiction. Seeking and taking revenge is as harmful to ourselves and everyone around as are substance abuse disorders.
What we love and adore we will worship, meaning we will devote our lives and efforts to serving them or it. Just as love and adoration are at the heart of worship so also hate and vengeance are a form of worship. Hate has the power to change and mold who we are. We will become powerless over it if we do not seek to forgive.
Anyway, all that to say we must choose carefully who or what we worship for it will change us. I think that maxim is at the heart of what Paul is saying to us in the first two verses here: “in accordance with God’s compassion, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of what you’re minded on…” These two verses are a strangely worded way of saying that the way we are to worship the true God is to live like Jesus, the true Son of God, in accordance with his nature of sacrificial, self-giving love and in so doing we will be transformed by the Holy Spirit to be like him.
At the beginning of Romans Paul pointed out that the basic human problem is idolatry – the worship of things other than God. He says that though it is obvious from nature there is a God, we choose to make our own gods from the things of nature and worship them so that we might pursue baser things for the simple reason of pleasure. The Greeks and Romans had gods for just about every facet of life and they were obligated to worship them by some sort of sacrifice in the hopes of keeping them pleased. We would call them superstitious and ritualized, but we’re not much different. We may not worship golden statues (as does happen at certain golf courses) but we do devote our lives to things like gaining power, wealth, success, fertility, nation, family, immortality. We even still worship stones and brooms, and even sticks and pucks. Lord, have mercy on us. Our devoting our lives to things other than God – Whoops. I forgot the unholy trinity of me, myself, and I – that false worship of false gods makes us subhuman.
The Jews had sacrifices too, but the Old Testament sacrifices were not attempts to buy God off or keep God appeased. Speaking simplistically, the Old Testament sacrifices were of two types. One was simply giving a portion of God’s provision for us back to God as a means of giving thanks. The other was basically a means of removing the stain of sin from us and restoring union between God and the people. Sorry, I don’t have time to explain that fully. Jesus’ death and resurrection and God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to us is the fulfillment of that sacrificial system rendering it no longer necessary. In love, Jesus gave himself as the once and for all sacrifice in order to heal humanity of the disease of sin and restore union between God and humanity forevermore. The Holy Spirit, God’s personal presence with us is making this healing union real in us as we, in thanks, live as Jesus’ faithful disciples. We don’t conform to the world to our own demise. We conform rather to Jesus and yield to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.
Paul writes that our presenting ourselves as living sacrifices is our reasonable act of worship. Some translations say spiritual which doesn’t work because it creates a false dichotomy between rationality and spirituality. I think what Paul is saying is simply that in accordance with God’s compassion (shown in Jesus), the only reasonable response is to offer ourselves as living sacrifices, meaning to serve one another selflessly in love as Jesus did. Jesus said, “the greatest among you will be servant of all.” So, Paul tells us l to let our love be genuine. Be sincere in selfless love for one another. Not a mess of obsequious, transactional, back scratching which would have been the Roman way. No favour went unanswered. If it did it would be cause for revenge. We love with mutual affection, mutual love, we put each other first, out of love for Jesus.
To live in selfless love requires a lot of humility. Paul pushes us to not think more highly of ourselves than we ought. There is such a thing as healthy boundaries and we need to be careful that in our efforts to love that we not get walked on and taken advantage of. Regardless, self-giving, sacrificial love will seem wasteful; like there’s nothing in it for me.
Paul also encourages us to act according to sober judgement. I know from my time in a former life that alcohol can make you selfish, reckless, and foolish in judgement. Paul wasn’t talking about drunkenness or anything like that; though it’s a good example. Rather, Paul’s definition of sober judgement is acting according to the measure of faith given to us. What he means is that we must judge our own actions and our motives by where they fit into our loyalty to Jesus. To varying degrees, we all have a sense of loyalty to Jesus, I hope, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. We must let that loyalty guide our actions.
Summing up, do unto each other, unto all people, as you would do unto Jesus. Paul states that we are all members of one body. In First Corinthians, he picks up on that by saying we are all members of one body, His body, Jesus’ body. He lives in us and we live in him. To love one another is to love him. That is being a living sacrifice, that is our reasonable worship. In loving one another the Holy Spirit works to transform our mindedness, our orientation in life from the self-destroying serving of false gods to life-giving serving of the true God.
So, be careful what you worship, be careful what you devote yourselves to. If it is not loving Jesus by loving one another in self-giving love, then it is idolatry. The first thing that happens when we worship something other than God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is we lose our sense of compassion and empathy and become focused on ourselves and suddenly hate and revenge become our nature. Be careful what you worship for you will become just like it. Amen.
