Faith is a tricky thing – we often find ourselves coming up short when we need it the most. This was no less true for so-called heroes of faith, Abraham and Sarah. Despite tangible (even audible) promises from God, they had broken faith more than once to try to conjure up for themselves what God had told them He would provide. And yet when they found themselves nearly 100 and still without a child together, God came into their age and weariness and intermittent faith and gave them just what He said He would give. The key to our lives is not perfect faith, but it is faith – that ultimate willingness not to count our circumstances, even the longest and hardest ones, as proof that God is not coming.

Disruption is not a bad thing. In fact, I would suggest the world needs more disruptors. Ordinary people like you and me willing to forge new paths and help birth new truths.

Drawing from Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, Paul closes Romans 12 by discussing the way Christians should respond to enemies.  This radical ethic of enemy love not only eschews vengeance, but also mandates an active pursuit forgiveness doing good for those who are hostile towards us.

Paul follows his discussion of the many gifts that are manifest in the Body by identifying sincere love as the root of all relationships within the Church. Understanding what it means to love one another, both when it’s natural and easy and when it requires sacrifice and discomfort, is essential to shared life together in the Church.

The beauty and joy we celebrate on Easter are the heart of faith in Jesus. Yet no matter how hard we try to set aside even a single day for such a celebration, we are confronted by the ongoing presence of pain, struggle, suffering, and sin in our own lives and in the world around us. If Jesus beat death when he walked out of a tomb, why do we continue to see evidence of death all around us? Can the resurrection actually make sense of the continued presence of death and difficulty, pointing us toward the best story possible – the one where the flames of our sorrow do not consume us, but become part of our path to new life, allowing us to join Jesus in his resurrection?

When we begin to take seriously true biblical community, we discover that it is both a tremendous gift and a never-ending challenge. The opportunities and temptations to feel forgotten, left out, misunderstood, and injured are almost constant. Our only hope for ongoing healthy connection with one another is an abiding memory that Jesus must be the center of all of our relationships. The rhythms of that memory remove me and my needs from the center of my efforts toward community, level the ground between us, and makes grace and love the foundation of our relationships.

If Romans 12 is, in many ways, the flesh and blood of the “life that is really life” Jesus promises, the first two verses are the soul of that life. In verse 2, Paul urges us to resist the pressures to conform to the spirit of this age, calling us instead to allow the mind and Way of Jesus to set our life’s course. This is the kind of transformation that enables each of us, individually and as church communities, to grow into exactly who God intends us to be.

If Romans 12 is, in many ways, the flesh and blood of the “life that is really life” Jesus promises, the first two verses are the soul of that life. Paul begins by reminding us that the deep mercies of God enable us to freely give ourselves, individually and communally, to the revolutionary, grace-filled way of living that God created his people to experience.

In Romans 12, Paul casts a vision for the communion of God’s people that stands in stark contrast to most of how we see people relating to one another in the world. The Church has the opportunity to live into a story of revolutionary kindness, grace, and love and to invite the world into that story.