Grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The text on which this morning's message is based comes from our Epistle lesson (Romans 12: 1-8) read earlier, especially verses 1-2. "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God-- this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-- his good, pleasing and perfect will".

Paul has just spent 11 chapters, 315 verses, describing to the Roman Christians the will of God, that God so loved the world that despite our sin and enmity against Him, He sent his Son to be a sacrifice for us. Because of what Jesus Christ has done, the Holy Spirit has called us to trust in Him and we can stand in the presence of the Holy God because of the riches showered upon us in his mercy and love. Paul has passionately described how we are connected to this God, now through Baptism and how we need to stay connected to Him because of our preponderance toward sin, sin that Paul himself still struggles with. After 11 chapters of this proclamation of the Christian Gospel, faith alone, by grace alone, through Christ alone, Paul now turns to our human response to this Gospel. He starts with what you need to recognize as a very big THEREFORE. "THEREFORE, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices." What does that mean? How am I to offer myself as a living sacrifice? The first image of a living sacrifice that came to my mind was from the classic 1933 version of King Kong, replayed on TV throughout the years. You all remember the basic story. Modern explorers visit a primitive island with tribal people who have built an enormous wall. During the course of their adventure, the tribespeople capture Fay Wray and tie her to an altar on the other side of the wall. Soon the 40-foot tall gorilla Kong comes bursting through the trees to take her. The tribespeople had placed her there as a sacrifice to the great beast that they fear. She is a sacrifice, one they all expect will be a dead sacrifice very soon in his hands, but one that becomes a living sacrifice through the rest of the movie. "Romans 12:1 Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God-- this is your spiritual act of worship." What? What does that mean? Offer our bodies as living sacrifices? Can you imagine yourself as Fay Wray being held in the hand of King Kong as a living sacrifice? Not a pretty picture. But if we change that image, remove the hulking, powerful, angry beast of Kong, and replace it with the larger and more powerful, but loving and sacrificing image of our Lord Jesus Christ holding us in his hand, perhaps its not a bad mental picture after all. He sacrificed his life for us, then his resurrection renewed that life for us. We now respond to his sacrifice and his resurrected life with baptized lives of our own, not dead, but living, functional, mirroring his life for us. How do we do that? That is where Paul goes next.

My family and I recently "inherited" a used computer from my in-laws. They had had it for several years, hooked into the Internet, but it eventually quit working for them and they had replaced it with a new computer. Knowing that we were looking for a computer, they offered this one, thinking that we could perhaps use the monitor or the keyboard or some other piece of it. When we got it I asked a friend (Sonny) who knows computers very well to look at it and tell me if there were any pieces of it that were salvageable. He did, and called me to say, "there's nothing really wrong with this computer except that the previous owners had no virus protection on it. Every virus that came through the Internet to this computer was still in it! He had counted more than 50 distinct viruses, and their proliferation had simply rewritten the programming of the computer to the point that it ceased functioning at all. He went and wiped out all the memory, including the viruses, and replaced it with the original, uninfected software and now the computer works fine. We're not yet on the Internet with this new-used computer, nor will we be until we have put a virus protection program on it. Computer viruses are ugly, but much less so than the virus of sin, death and the power of the devil which fights to infect us in our innermost parts on a daily basis. Our text says: "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world (this age), but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." This world, this age we live in, this culture produces many spiritual viruses that try to modify our Christ-given programming. You can simply walk through the commandments to hear how frequently, how incessantly Christians are pressured to conform to the pattern of this age. 1st Commandment: The culture presses us to believe that Christ is simply one of a smorgasbord of religious options to follow. 2nd Commandment: Taking God's name in vain is a common occurrence on the street or in the media. 3rd Commandment: The world pressures us to believe that hearing God's word on a regular basis is unimportant. 4th commandment: The world coerces children and adults to overly focus on their freedoms, rather than submitting to the parents and other authorities God has put into our lives. 5th commandment: The protection of human life pales in comparison to American freedom. Tens of millions of pre-birth infants lose their lives at the altar of "choice." 6th commandment: The world subtly conforms even Christians to believe that sexuality apart from marriage is fine, even to be encouraged. Divorce is viewed as a culturally acceptable option, even for Christians who want to look away from God's Scriptural guidelines about divorce. 7th Commandment: CEO's at billion dollar companies commit insider trading and steal, sometimes under a legal guise, steal millions for their personal bank accounts while thousands of dollars are drained from employee retirement accounts.

8th commandment: We all struggle with the way of the world in gossip. We are too often tempted to gossip about our friends and neighbors than we are to "put the best construction on everything." 9th and 10th commandments: Our culture teaches us that "greed is good" (key line by Michael Douglas from the movie "Wall Street.").

We are constantly being bombarded with spiritual viruses that want to force us into conformity with the world rather than being transformed by Christ. Luther, speaking well before the day humans had discovered viruses or created computers spoke in a similar vein: "After baptism original sin is like a wound which has begun to heal. It is really a wound, yet it is becoming better and is constantly in the process of healing, although it is still festering, is painful, etc. So original sin remains in the baptized until their death, although it is in the process of being rooted out. It is rendered harmless, and so it cannot accuse or damn us." (Table Talk, # 138)

The only virus protection we have in this life, the only salve for the wound of original sin, is the Word of our God and the Sacraments with which he empowers us. That protection may not sound like much, words and water and bread and wine. But that virus protection is stronger than anything Norton or Microsoft or any other software manufacturer could ever develop. Through His Word we learn of how our sinful human minds are reprogrammed, protected from the attack of the devil's errors and viruses. "This 're-programming' of the mind does not take place overnight but is a lifelong process by which our way of thinking is to resemble more and more the way God wants us to think" (Doug Moo, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 1996, p. 757).   The devil, the world and our sinful flesh are always trying to write new viruses into Christ's programming. My virus protection program on my computer in the office comes on everyday at 11:30 am, and runs itself through every file on my computer, looking to see if any new viruses have started attacking. In the same way we need God's Word as taught by His prophets and His Apostles to daily and richly protect us from conformity with this world and to transform us by the renewing of our minds.

This little slice of Paul's letter to the Romans has a big therefore, but then relatively little in specifics. How are we to be transformed? What would a transformed life look like? In verses 3-8 we hear him say that we should not think of ourselves as individuals but as a whole unit, each using the gifts God has given to us. Then Paul goes on for another 4 chapters to describe what that transformed like would look like. I could go on for another hour emphasizing the specifics Paul urges, chief of which is "Love one another." As part of your transforming, I encourage you, by the mercies of God, to read those last four chapters for their specifics. They are given there to help form you into a living sacrifice for God, a transformed, not conformed, child of God.

The peace of God which surpasses all understanding (transform and) keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. (Modified from Philippians 4: 7)