Decay and Transformation

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
08.24.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Romans 12:1-8

There are just so many things to love about going to the beach. There are the waves that pound youth pastors and there’s the sand that makes amazing castles and the cleanness of air that has swept thousands of miles across open water. There are those great buckets of salty greasy fries as big as your head, each bucket containing enough empty carbohydrate calories to add at least a full half-inch to the diameter of your midsection.

But of all of the reasons that I enjoy going to the beach every year, one of the most significant has very little to do with the beach at all. It’s time to read. Yeah, I can read just about anytime during the year, and I do. When the family gets down to the beach, though, suddenly there’s the time to just disappear into a book. I can lay down hour after hour of nonconstructive downtime to travel deep down that wormhole of a good novel, only resurfacing to go get a big bucket of fries.

Every year at the beach, I read pretty much at random, and this year, I picked out a nice little bit of beach fluff written by a woman named Mary Roach. The book was entitled Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. The entire focus of this strange little nonfiction piece was a journalistic exploration of all of the interesting things that happen to our bodies after we die. It was a celebration of all the many ways corpses spend their time, from the process of decaying underground to how cremation works to organ transplantation and medical experimentation and practice surgeries and crash testing. There was also, as I recall, a lovely chapter on the history of cannibalism. Though my family often will read books together in the evenings for story time, for some reason I kept this book to myself.

Of all of the entertaining facts about the recently deceased that were described in the book, one of the things that struck me as most interesting was a chapter in which the author tagged along with a forensic scientist whose entire job was determining time of death by the degree to which a body had begun to decay. The author witnesses the human form in all stages of maggoty rot and collapse, and while I’d love to describe all the various oozings and outgassings and other narstyness from the book, they seem..well...not very churchy. Maybe for my sermon at Halloween...

What was striking, though, is this: After life has left us, all of those things that keep us from just becoming part of the world around us shut down. We no longer excrete. We no longer digest. We no longer breathe. Our body ceases to defend itself against the bazillion teeny little critters that live in our guts. At death, the world around a body rushes in and reclaims it. In fact, that’s not a bad way to understand death...it’s that point at which a body stops trying to define itself as something separate from the world, and instead yields to everything else.

It’s been said that life is change and death is not. But that isn’t true. A dead body is not inert. It doesn’t just become stiff and unchanging like a rock or another inanimate object. The reality is that dead bodies change a great deal. That change is driven not by the drives of the life within, but by everything outside. Having lost it’s life, it’s purpose, it’s self, a cadaver just gives in to the world around it. It’s change is driven by devouring bacteria and chomping larvae, by heat and sun and water. Or it yields passively to the dissecting blades of surgeons as they learn their art, separating the bones and organs from the top round and tenderloin, opened up layer by layer, until there’s nothing left but a meticulously disassembled mess of human being bits.

Whichever way, the body is consumed by the world. It doesn’t care. It has no purpose of it’s own.

This is exactly the opposite sort of of transformation the Apostle Paul was describing as he wrote his letter to the Church at Rome. As we roll in to the twelfth chapter of Romans, Paul is talking about bodies, and he’s talking about change. When Paul refers to bodies, he’s talking about two things.

First, as we get to Romans 12:4-8, talking about the body as a deep metaphor for the nature of how we participate in Christ, with each of us contributing our gifts towards the good of the church. Our purpose as Christians is to serve the broader good, just as every part of the body serves the good of the whole. Some lead, some praise, some give, some show mercy and kindness. But all Christians have as their purpose the business of contributing to the joy of all, each part of the other, each serving in their own way as agents of God’s love. This is an important image for Paul, because he presents exactly the same image of the church as the body of Christ at for two whole chapters of another letter, in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.

But before we reach Romans 12:4-8, the Apostle makes another statement about the body. He suggests that we need to present ourselves as “living sacrifices,” giving ourselves over to the reason for which God created us. Our minds are to be transformed, and the purpose given to our lives is not one that comes from the pattern of this world, but from the pattern of the love that is the Holy Spirit of the living God.

Throughout the letter to the Romans, this is a important distinction. Paul makes constant reference to the battle within us between the Spirit of God and our desire to conform ourselves to the world around us. All of Romans chapter eight is dedicated to this battle between the Spirit and the flesh.

But how does that struggle play out in our day to day lives? What are the patterns of this world that try to turn us from our purpose? Those patterns are many, but they’re all the same. Most familiar to us is the pattern of consumption, where we allow ourselves to look at everything outside of us as an object to be devoured. Our lives revolve around the pursuit of fast cars and cute shoes, as we are overtaken with a hunger for things that can never be satisfied, a hunger that consumes us as we consume. That desire to consume is also a desire for power, as we seek to control or possess. It defines our relationships with other children of God, who become objects to be used or means to an end.

When we let our lives be ruled by that desire for power or consumption, we might think we’re livin’ large and in charge. But Paul would argue that in the eyes of God, we are no longer living at all. We are little more a maggot-filled corpse or a decaying cadaver. Unlike a living being, we no longer live according to our God-given purpose. We no longer are defined by the gifts God has given us. We are, instead, consumed by the world that we seek to consume. We may move and our lives may seem to change. But for all intents and purposes, we are already dead.

So look at the thing that you call life. Every day of that life brings something new. Every day of your life brings change. What each of us has to ask ourselves is what kind of change it is. Are you transforming, growing and changing, every day made new and alive for the purpose for which you were made? Or are you already decaying away, devoured by the very world you seek to devour?

Live as the living, not as the dead. Don’t decay. Be transformed.