 When my husband and I first got to know the Mennonite Church, one of the things that we noticed and valued was the sense of community. So the church wasn't only the building, the church wasn't only the pastors and leaders. The church was the whole congregation, a community, working and worshiping together. I had that sense this morning as I logged on during the gathering music for the first session. On my Zoom screen, the chairs and the chapel were already full, voices were already raised in song, and I thought, this is not just gathering. This is the community already gathered in together. When it comes to reimagining ministry for the church, we also need to do that together. That's why I was drawn to our text from Romans 12 because it was addressed to the whole church. Let me just share the first verse here. I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God's mercy to present your bodies plural as a living sacrifice. We are not isolated beings, but we are in this together. These words were given to the whole church. And this key verse does not exist in isolation either. It's connected by the word, therefore, to everything that comes before it in the book of Romans and connected also with everything that comes after it. If we look at the first chapters of Romans, we know that it was written as a letter from the apostle Paul to the early church in the city of Rome. It was a real letter to a real body of believers. It begins with the apostles' customary greeting of grace and peace with a prayer of thanks. And then for the first 11 chapters, the letter reviews what we believe. So before our text from Romans are the first 11 chapters of the book. I used to think of these chapters as hard to read because they seemed so heavy, so densely packed with theology. And they are. But another way to think about those chapters is that they also highlight God's mercy. So Romans 116. The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith. 5 verse 1. Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 8 verse 1. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. These are theological statements, but they are also statements of God's mercy. In the original Greek, the word mercy here is actually plural on the basis of God's mercies. I love that detail because it reminds me that God's mercy is never just one thing for one time. But God's mercies are many and various and forever. I especially love the King James version of Lamentations 3 verses 22 and 23. It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed because his compassion's fail not. They are new every morning. Great is by faithfulness. Whatever happens in our lives when we feel overwhelmed by too much bad news in the world, where there's too much upheaval in our personal lives, or the swirl of our anxiety over things real or things imagined, get so great. In a time of coronavirus and at all times, we will not be consumed by these things. For God's mercies never fail. We can depend on God's mercy to sustain us. The word therefore also connects with everything that comes after it in the rest of the book of Romans that focuses more on how we are to live. So Romans 12-10, be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. 13 verse 8, oh no one anything except to love one another. 15-2, each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor. This is just a rough overview, but it's one way of understanding the book of Romans. The first chapters focused more on what we believe about God's mercy than the last chapters focused more on how we are to live on the basis of God's mercy to us. Our text is the hinge connecting these two parts of the book of Romans together. Therefore, present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God. Do that on the basis of God's mercy and then live it out in your daily life. In the Jewish sacrificial system, it was understood that when a person presented an animal to God as a sacrifice, that animal became God's property. It didn't belong to the person anymore, it belonged to God. Our text uses that same sacrificial language. So present your bodies as a living sacrifice that comes from the sacrificial system. So when we offer our bodies to God, in a sense they don't belong to us anymore. Instead, we are given to God. Our bodies, our minds, the way we worship, the way we live each day. When we live by the mercy of God, it's more than good intentions. It includes concrete actions because it's through our bodies that we live out what we believe and feel and think. So our text calls us to present our bodies to God. Eugene Peterson puts it this way in the message, Take your everyday, ordinary life. You're sleeping, eating, going to work and walking around life and place it before God as an offering. That's our act of worship, the verse continues. Just as much worship as when we pray, when we celebrate communion, when we read scripture, when we gather over zoom or worship in person. Whatever we do, brothers and sisters, we are given to God. Then the rest of the book of Romans sets this out in more detail. So for example, Romans 12 verses 9 to 17. On the basis of God's mercy and presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice given to God, this is how we are to live. Let love be genuine. Hate what is evil. Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal. Be ardent in spirit. Serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope. Be patient in affliction. Persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints. Pursue hospitality to strangers. Rejoice with those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be arrogant, but associate with the lowly. Do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil over evil. Evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. All this and more is what it means to be a living sacrifice given to God. It's a big vision. One that addresses love and prayer and hospitality and how to treat our enemies. It might seem like a stream of consciousness, a laundry list of different ideas thrown together. Some scholars have tried to give this list some order by dividing up the different instructions with some instructions directed to relationships within the Christian community like having mutual affection, honoring one another, living in harmony. These things express our relationships as part of the body of Christ. We who are many are one body in Christ and individually we are members one of another. We're not simply random individuals, but brothers and sisters with diverse gifts who belong to one another, who care for one another. Our texts list some of these various gifts, prophesying, serving, teaching, encouraging, giving, leading, showing mercy. This is just one list of gifts in Scripture, so it's not exhaustive. It's not meant to highlight a division of labor as if whoever we might identify as the head of the body should do all of the reimagining for the rest of us. In our physical bodies, sometimes we have a gut feeling about something, or we're under stress and we get a migraine. We need to listen to the whole body, so in the body of Christ. We need one another. We need to listen to one another. We are gifts to one another. We might say that we are given to one another in the body of Christ. We are to treat one another as precious gifts with honor and living in harmony together. Other instructions in Romans might seem to relate more to relationships beyond the Christian community, blessing those who persecute you, seeking revenge but overcoming evil by doing good. Yet I don't know that we can divide the instructions in Romans quite so cleanly. It seems to me that genuine love for others applies both to relationships within the Christian community and beyond. Having respect for others, honoring one another, applies both within our Christian communities and beyond. Living out what we believe, living on the basis of God's mercy, embraces both our personal and our public life, both our family and church circles and the wider circle of the community and the world. So we might say we are first given to God, given to one another in the body of Christ and also given to the broader community. So Romans 12-14, bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse. 12 verses 18 and 19, if it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge but leave room for God's wrath. 12-21, do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good. Throughout Romans 12 and following, there is this counter-cultural, non-conforming way to live. When voices in our wider culture say if it feels good, do it. Romans says, hold fast to what is good. When our wider culture says, make sure you take credit for everything you do, Romans says, don't be conceited. Honor one another. When voices in our culture and even in our own heads say get even, Romans says, do not repay anyone evil for evil. Do not take revenge, overcome evil with good. This counter-cultural, non-conforming way of living means that people are valued and honored. There is sincere love with compassion and forgiveness in the church. People live together in peace, rejoicing together, crying together, praying together. Strangers are welcomed. Even enemies outside the church are treated as human beings. In these ways, we are given to one another within the body of Christ and we are given to one another in the broader community. All of that is possible because we are first given to God, offering our bodies as a living sacrifice to the one who renews our minds and transforms us. In his earthly ministry, Jesus called all people to himself. Fisher folk, tax collectors, prostitutes, a Roman centurion, a man who was mentally ill, people who were crippled, people of all walks of life and all ages, and each person was transformed. No one stayed the same. Simon and Andrew left their boats to follow Jesus. Levi left his tax-collecting booth. A woman was healed from a chronic illness and restored to her community. Those who were lame were healed. Sins were forgiven. By the mercy of God, part of God's community meant being transformed. For the church in Rome, part of this transformation is described in the first eight verses of Romans 12 that we heard earlier. Instead of thinking of yourself more highly than you ought to, think of yourself with sober judgment. Instead of looking out for yourself as number one, remember that you are members of one body and this is not only a new way of thinking and remembering, it's a new way of living. By the grace of God, the believers in the Roman church could live this new life of transformation and we can too, transformed from the world's indifference to a life of compassion, transformed from being concerned only about themselves to considering the needs of others. After I had pastored at my former church for about 20 years, I was feeling a little restless. Everything seemed to be going well. The church had recovered from the abrupt pastoral departure years ago. There was both stability and energy for the work of ministry. The church was growing with new people. The church had always been a strong supporter of the wider Mennonite church and overseas mission, and they still were. But I wondered about doing something more locally. Not only supporting mission around the world, I could see we wanted to continue to do that. But what about in our own community? So as part of my regular pastoral review at the time, I shared this with our personnel committee. I said to them, I know that reviews often focus on how things have been going leading up to this point and where are we now? But this is what I'm feeling. And for this review, I'm interested more in where are we going and are we going there together? So they added a few questions to the usual review to test that idea of greater community engagement as a church. I mean, maybe it was just me and maybe I needed to find a way to volunteer and be more engaged in the community. Or was this something for us as a church to reimagine together? In that review, we confirmed that the church also seemed ready to move in the direction of more community involvement. As we imagined what that might look like, we were presented with two opportunities from our immediate context. The first came to us from a member of our church who worked for a community organization. She told us that our city was looking for churches willing to open their buildings for overnight shelter in extreme weather. Now, Abbotshire doesn't get the kind of extreme weather that some of you might get, but when the temperature drops below freezing and because the winters here are so humid, it's cold and wet and miserable to be living on the street at night. So we put out a call for whoever might be interested in exploring this idea. We had a gym. We had a large meeting room and soon we had willing volunteers who signed up for training, who signed up for overnight shifts, who were willing to organize and provide food and to pray. A second opportunity came from a Vietnamese Mennonite church in Vancouver, which was a little over an hour's drive away from Abbotsford. They said there's no Vietnamese church in Abbotsford of any denomination, but there are about a thousand Vietnamese people in the city. So they asked if we might partner with them and with our regional church to start a new work. The Vancouver Vietnamese pastor would commute out to Abbotsford to provide some leadership. Our church would provide meeting space. Our regional church would provide some seed money and all of us together would partner on a steering committee for this new work. By the time I left the church, we had a vibrant Vietnamese ministry of some 30 people, about half children and youth. They operated as a church within our larger church with a Vietnamese pastor who functioned as part of our church staff. That small group would host outreach events, banquets for up to 100 Vietnamese people from the community, and they supported the work of the Vietnamese church in Cambodia. This is just a small picture of reimagining ministry together as a body. That included our congregation, our regional church, and the wider community. You quite likely have examples of your own and will go on to live out that kind of reimagining together in many different forms. In view of God's mercies then, let us be transformed and live transformed lives. Come let us reimagine together, for we are given to God and given to one another in the church and in the wider community.