3 things
The church is still working us through Paul’s letter to the Romans, a long, solemn and weighty theological tome on which many faithful readers give up long before half, lay it aside soothing self that they’ll come back to it. Too bad, because it’s Paul’s last and most comprehensive extant letter, the best for understanding Paul’s mind as the Holy Spirit has evolved his thinking. And also, as I remember telling my New Testament professor at seminary, it’s chock full of quotations from the Book of Common Prayer. Sunday’s lectionary reading for instance, which Paul lifted directly from Cranmer’s prayer of consecration, “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee.”
That was during the conversation after class one morning, in which the professor, for the faculty and administration, invited and encouraged me to consider ordination as a Lutheran pastor. Which was flattering, but which I thought somewhat rubbed against their role as my host seminary and the trust of my bishop, who had arranged for me to study there. It was the second time of being invited to leave the Episcopal Church, the first when we were living in Ann Arbor and attended the Presbyterian Church in the next block a two-minute walk from our student housing project. We were Presbyterians there because money was short, and the nearest Episcopal parish was a few miles away, and at some twenty-two cents a gallon, gasoline was expensive. For perspective, sometimes there wasn’t an extra quarter for the Sunday newspaper.
After graduating with an MBA, we had PCS orders to Japan for three years, arriving in Yokohama early July 1963, just in time for bright 4th of July fireworks over the harbor across the street from our hotel.
We seemed to fit beautifully there, both into Navy life and into the beautiful and charming Japanese culture. The culture so much so that I remember, landing in San Francisco late evening July 5, 1966 (after watching fireworks again from the same hotel and over the same harbor as three years earlier), phoning my mother and telling her that we were back in America as she told me my sister Gina had just given birth to a baby girl, going to Hertz for our rental car to drive across country (a brand new 2-tone blue Dodge Monaco 500 sedan) and then heading to the nearest grocery store to buy milk.
Three more things in memory and retrospect, cultural. One, suddenly being confronted with the need to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road. Two, my shock, hesitation and reluctance at going into an enormous, overwhelming American supermarket after years in Japan of shopping at a small commissary store and in the tiny Japanese shops in our Yokohama neighborhood. Three, the fresh, whole milk tasted overly rich, thick and heavy after three years in Japan, where our choice had been either thin, tasteless reconstituted milk from the commissary or, from the local Japanese market, milk from cows who had thrived on fish meal, lending a seafood essence to its taste.
Romans 12:1-8 (KJV)
1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. 2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. 3 For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. 4 For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: 5 so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. 6 Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith; 7 or ministry, let us wait on our ministering: or he that teacheth, on teaching; 8 or he that exhorteth, on exhortation: he that giveth, let him do it with simplicity; he that ruleth, with diligence; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness.