Ash Wednesday

Beyond Barriers:  Conformity/Transformation

Romans 12:1-2, 9-13

Rev. Monte Marshall

 

   The season of Lent begins today and I don’t mind telling you:  I’m a little bit anxious.  I’m a little bit anxious because I know where we’re headed over these next 6 ½ weeks leading up to Easter.  The theme is Beyond Barriers.  

Now I like the idea of moving beyond barriers—at least in theory.  What gives me pause is actually making the changes in my life that are required to move beyond the barriers. 

But what really makes me anxious is the prospect of actually having to confront these barriers before I can move beyond them.  I know from personal experience that this can be a painful process requiring a hard look at myself and brutal honesty about who I really am.  This is the part that I don’t look forward to, even though I know that the barriers I’ll be confronting work against me; they squeeze the life out of me—they drain me dry—they sap my energy—they wear me out.  And yet, in so many ways, I cling to these barriers that are killing me. 

I even make all kinds of excuses to avoid dealing with the barriers:  “This will be too hard,” I say.  “This will take too much energy,” I say.  And when I’m really honest with myself, this is what I say:  “I’m too afraid to do this.” 

But’s here’s the paradox:  While I cling to the barriers in my life that are killing me, at the same time, I desperately long to move beyond the barriers! 

Now the barriers I’m talking about are barriers that I think Paul would understand.  They’re barriers that keep us conformed to this age.  They’re barriers that obstruct the kind of transformation that God is working to accomplish within us.

Listen again to Paul in the second verse of today’s text.  Let the words, and some of the nuances of how the words appear in different translations, sink in.  The Inclusive Bible:  “Don’t conform yourselves to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds.”  The Contemporary English Bible:  “Don’t be like the people of this world, but let God change the way you think.”  The biblical scholar, Walter Wink:  “Don’t be conformed to this Domination Epoch…but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”[1]  The Message:  “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit in without even thinking.  Instead, fix your attention on God.  You’ll be changed from the inside out.”

When we look at the next 6 ½ weeks through this lens, can we see where we’re heading? We’re moving from conformity to transformation. 

To speak of this process, Paul uses the language of sacrifice.  Paul begs us to “offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.”  Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan point out that this “is an image of dying—of giving up one’s life as in a sacrifice, offering one’s life as a gift to God.”[2]  Eugene Peterson’s translation of the passage puts it this way:  “Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.”[3]  It’s “through the mercy of God,” or, in other words, it’s with God’s help that we are able to make this kind of radical offering of ourselves. 

And this is what Paul calls worship!  It’s so much more than spending an hour a week in what we call a worship service.  For Paul, worship is a lifestyle!

But here’s the deal:  We can’t worship like this and be conformed to the culture, because cultural conformity demands too much of us.  We can’t offer our lives to God as “a living sacrifice” while we continue to surrender so much of ourselves to what Borg and Crossan call this “humanly created world of imperial normalcy with its conventions of domination, injustice, division, and violence.”[4]  It doesn’t work!  To put it another way:  How can we offer ourselves as “a living sacrifice” to God and still resort to violence, or acquiesce to injustice, or dominate others, or give-in to the prejudices that divide us?  It doesn’t work!

In fact, it’s simply impossible to embrace fully Paul’s vision of life in the way of Christ and be culturally conformed.  When we’re up to our eyeballs in the culture, it’s difficult to love genuinely, to hate what is evil, to cling to what is good, to outdo one another in showing respect.  When we’re stuck in the status quo, it’s so hard to maintain our fervor of spirit, to rejoice in hope, to be patient under trial, to persevere in prayer, to look upon the needs of God people as our own, and to be generous in offering hospitality.

 Isn’t it true that to get along in our culture, we are expected—even encouraged—to compromise these values?  The culture doesn’t mind if we love the homeless and show them hospitality just as long as we keep them away from local businesses and don’t let them get too close to the “normal” folks.  The culture doesn’t mind if we preach non-violence just as long as we “get real,” fall in line, and give our blessing when the nation makes war.  The culture doesn’t mind if we read stories about Jesus overcoming divisions by welcoming outsiders just as long as we don’t push too hard for the full inclusion of LGBTQ persons in the church and the larger society.       

And if we don’t yield to these cultural expectations, there is a price to pay!  The culture will try to force conformity upon us by deriding us, or ostracizing us, or marginalizing us, or by taking away some of our cultural privileges, or even by persecuting us in one way or another.

E. Glen Hinson writes:  “Sometimes our culture does too good a job on us.  It beats, hammers, molds, engraves until we become its captives.”  Hinson says:  “This molding process begins in our earliest years and continues throughout the rest of our lives.”[5] 

And isn’t it true?  Our culture has certainly done a good job on us as the followers of Jesus.  In 1981, in a book entitled, The Call to Conversion, author Jim Wallis made this observation about the influence of American culture on the church:  “No one is asking why we live the way we do.  Why? Because most people already know the answer.  Christians live the way they do for the same reasons that everybody else lives the way they do.  The life of North American Christians has become utterly predictable on sociological grounds.  Factors of race, class, sex, and national identity shape and define the lives of Christians just like everybody else.  No one expects anything different from Christians.”[6]

Wallis also noted one consequence of our capitulation to the culture:   The cultural conformity of the church “has made the fullness of the teaching of Jesus incomprehensible to many.”[7]

So I wonder:  Is there a way out of our predicament?  Is there a way forward?  Is there a way beyond the barriers?  Well, Paul points way:  “be transformed by the renewal of your minds.”  Paul is talking about something more than our intellect here.  He’s talking about a transformed way of seeing this world that we’ve created—this culture that includes us, which we help to create, and that shapes us.

This transformation enables us to discern God’s vision for us.  Paul talks about it as the ability to “judge what God’s will is—what is good, pleasing and perfect.”

And this transformation is for everyone.  As Walter Wink points out, for those
“born to privilege and wealth,” and “installed at the center of a universe revolving around their own desires,” transformation will move them beyond the barriers of their egocentricity.  For those “born to merciless poverty and the contempt of the ruling class,” who “may miss life by never feeling really human at all,” transformation will move them beyond the barriers of “hopelessness, fatalism, and acquiescence to their own despoiling.”[8]  Transformation is for everyone!    

Now as anxious as I am about confronting the barriers, and changing enough to move beyond the barriers, it is God’s vision for us that keeps me engaged.  In fact, I’m drawn to Paul’s vision of the transformed life beyond the barriers.  He speaks of love, respect, fervor, hope, patience, perseverance, and generous hospitality.  This is the kind of life I want.  I long to resist what is evil and hold fast to what is good.  I yearn for the gift to look upon the needs of God’s people as my own.  I desire to serve Christ by offering everything I am and everything I have to God.

Does this prospect scare me?  You know that it does!  But I don’t want my life to be determined by that which I fear.  I want to move beyond every barrier that keeps me stuck in the status quo, even if means taking one step at a time to confront those barriers.  And most of all, I want to be open to transformation! 

So I want you to know that I’ll be taking full advantage of the opportunities available to us during this holy season to move beyond the barriers of conformity and toward transformation.  I’ll be participating in all three aspects of the Lenten Experiments in Transformation that are described in your bulletin insert.  I’ll be practicing the Core Commitments.  I’ll be sharing in the Weekly Reflection/Action Experiments.  And I’ll be keeping the Daily Appointments with the Scriptures.  I invite you to do the same.

In The Call to Conversion, Jim Wallis wrote several lines that have sustained me through the years, especially when I’ve felt like giving up.  He wrote:  “Many of us tend to underestimate the hunger in the churches for something different, some new vision and focus and power.  I often sense in the churches an underlying uneasiness about feeling so at home in this culture.  There are people scattered throughout the churches who sense that their commitment to Jesus Christ ought to mean more than it does.  There is a desire and fragile hope for something new….In most churches I have visited, a small flame flickers that invites rekindling.”[9]

This flame flickers in me.  Does it also flicker in you?  If it does, then let’s begin now, in this moment, to rekindle the flame.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.