“Back to a Transformed Future”
Isaiah 51:1-6
Romans 12:1-2
A presidential-candidate debate in which six of the eight candidates said they would support the nomination of the only former president in history to face criminal indictment—on 91 separate charges—even if he is convicted.
A local debate over the school district’s handling of harassment of trans students at the middle school in which several hired and elected pubic servants have resigned, some of them saying they can no longer tolerate the personal attacks and character assassination that seem to come with the job.
A nation so inundated with guns and so resistant to controlling them that parents preparing to send their kids back to school must also strategize about how to keep them safe in the classroom.
An economic system that would have us believe that caring for our planet and future generations is incompatible with having sufficient jobs, profits, and stuff.
A worldview that insists—often citing religion—that women be controlled, gender be binary, immigrants be kept away, books be banned, and the fullness of African American history not be taught.
A work ethic that tells us our worth is based on what we accomplish, how much stuff we have, and how good we look.
An entire industry built on the myth that the only help we need is from ourselves—that we can diet, exercise, organize, socialize, and think our way to happiness and fulfillment, and what is more important than that?
A nation in which loneliness and isolation has been declared a public-health epidemic, but churches close every day for lack of members.
I could go on, but you get the idea: These are elements of the culture we live in, the culture that often seems to ignore the fundamental values of respect, kindness, justice, compassion, and community—the culture our children are growing up in. This is the air we breathe, the ocean we swim in, made all the more invisible and dangerous because we sometimes fail to notice it.
And, . . . says the apostle Paul, this is the world to which we must not be conformed. Or, to put it another way, as Eugene Peterson did in The Message, this is the culture we need to be sure to not fit into.
Paul goes on about this in his letter to the church in Rome, but—interestingly—he does not tell the Christians there to oppose their culture. He does not call them to enlist in the so-called culture “wars.” He does not even tell them to be intentionally counter-cultural.
Instead, he tells them to keep their eyes on the prize, which is the God who is love, the God of grace and mercy, deliverance and restoration, justice and peace healing, abundance, and joy, the God who took on flesh and lived among us, the Spirit who lives within us and through us, the God who seems to have a particularly tender and passionate heart for the lost and the left out, the poor and the marginalized.
Give your life over to this God, Paul says, and you and your life will be utterly transformed by the healing of your heart and the renewing of your mind. You will be changed from the inside out—delivered from the lies that tell you it’s you against the world and that you have to measure up to an ungodly standard. Let yourself be transformed, that you might be healed and inspired by a Love greater than you ever imagined.
That all sounds great, Paul, but we’re pretty sure that this inner, spiritual transformation is no overnight thing. It sounds straightforward enough, but, meantime Paul, how do we go about our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, finding love, raising-a-family, living in a world on fire, speaking our truth without getting cancelled, walking-around life?
How do we keep from drowning in the firehose of news, information, disinformation, and social media? How do we keep from getting so caught up in the political blame game that we lose sight of the marginalized and vulnerable people who need our support? How do we love our neighbors and this world that God so loves without conforming to all of its nonsense and hateful, alienating, oppressive, and destructive ways? How can we spare even a moment for faith formation and spiritual transformation when we’re so busy, even with church stuff? And how do we not conform to the fear of the world amid random disasters, tragedies, losses, and devastating diagnoses?
Well, I don’t know exactly how the apostle Paul would answer those questions, but—like Jesus—he did seem to put a lot of stock in love, lifting each other up, and freely sharing our particular gifts and passions. He rejected all manner of human categories and divisions, insisting that we’re all one in Christ. He put away all his privileges and devoted his life to sharing the love of the One who met him on the road to hell and turned his life around.
If we go beyond Paul to consider the life and teachings of Jesus and the words of the prophets, we find still more guidance for the transformative journey. More encouragement for how to live in this world but be different from it. More hope that the God who is love is doing a great and mighty thing, even now, even in and through all divisiveness and destruction that we see. More trust that God’s deliverance, God’s transformation, never ends but is ever at work, bringing comfort and growth, turning wastelands into gardens, inspiring joyful singing.
Listen, says prophet Isaiah, not to me but to the God who has never left you and will never leave you.
Look to this God, and to the rock from which you were hewn and to the quarry from which you were dug.
In other words, remember the amazing things God’s love has done. Remember how far God’s love has brought you.
For the exiled and discouraged people of God, this meant remembering Abraham and Sarah—a couple of regular people, very, very old and long past childbearing age or even the age of making much of a difference any more. And yet God blessed them, and they trusted God, and through these old, washed-up, deeply flawed people—the story goes—came the entire nation of God’s chosen people.
Isaiah seems to be sending us back to the future, saying that remembering where we come from and how far God has brought us will give us the hope and strength to live into a transformed future.
Look to the rock from which you were hewn and to the quarry from which you were dug.
What does that mean for you?
There may be no better current example of this “back to the future” transformation than this weekend’s observations of the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.
Amid the whitewashing of Black history, the illegal gerrymandering of Black votes, and—as we saw in Florida yesterday—ongoing racist violence, multitudes of people in Washington and across the country are recommitting themselves to the dream—and it was God’s dream before it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s—of a nation and a world in which all people are beloved, all people have equal rights, justice, and privileges, and all people look to the best in others.
This hope, this solidarity, this commitment is part of the rock from which we were hewn, a big chunk of the quarry from which you and I were dug.
Look to our ancestors in this church, and to their ever-deepening, ever-transforming faith—a living, listening, watchful, un-conformed faith that has brought us from the Tory, slave-holding leanings of our original pastor and members to the open and affirming, just peace, anti-racism, Earth covenant, sanctuary, and new-things commitments of our recent past and present.
Look, too, to the youth in Montana who sued their state government for violating their constitutional rights to the enjoyment and endurance of beautiful places through its promotion of fossil fuels—and won.
Look to the multiracial movement of mostly young people in red Tennessee that restored to office the two young Black men who had been expelled from the Tennessee legislature for their passionate insistence on gun control.
Look even to Amherst, where—despite our cultural tendency to attack and write off those who’ve made mistakes or haven’t acted quickly or decisively enough—there is no doubt that we care about our children, and we will not stand for the marginalization and mistreatment of queer kids.
Dr. King said that we, as Christians, have a mandate to be transformed nonconformists. That if we are to be conformed to anything, it must be to the ways of Jesus, to God and God’s realm of love and justice.
“Only though an inner spiritual transformation,” he said, “do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in”—and this is key—“a humble and loving spirit.”
May we, by God’s grace, allow ourselves to be changed from the inside out so that we might be God’s faithful partners in loving and changing the world.
