Transformed
Romans 12:1-2
14th Sunday After Pentecost
21 August 2005
A few years back, I heard Marvin Bell, Iowa’s Poet Laureate, talking on
NPR about the free-spirited radicalism that certain maverick university
towns seem to generate. He singled out Madison, Wisconsin,
Berkley, California, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the prototypes of the
kind of offbeat, unconventional places he was referring to.
He went on at length about the quirky nature of these three towns, and
finally he finished by saying, “Those towns are the only place in the
world where a man can rob a bank dressed in an orange clown wig, a
woman’s skirt, striped tights, and combat boots, and escape in broad
daylight by blending in with the crowd.”
I heard his interview not long before Paul and I moved up here, and it
certainly gave me a very clear impression about the place we wer
headed. To be perfectly honest, it sounded like my kind of
place! Once we got settled in here though, I discovered that the
nonconformity to which Bell was referring was really not so much about
the way people dressed as it was about the overall ethos of this
place. Ann Arborites are peculiar. We are not like other
people, and we’re proud of it. The rest of the state mocks us,
saying we are “25 square miles surrounded by reality” and we take it
not as a criticism but as an indication that their own view of reality
is far too small. We think of ourselves as a little outpost of
progressivism, a colony of rebellion against the norms and assumptions
that others follow so blindly.
Emerson, in his essay “Self-Reliance” wrote, “Whoso would be a man must
be a nonconformist.” To which the inclusivity-minded people of
Ann Arbor might respond, “Whoso would be a person must be a
nonconformist.”
“Do not be conformed,” Paul told the Roman Christians. And the
people of Ann Arbor – with our Hash Bash and our Art Fairs, our Student
Democratic Society and our cultural edginess and our general flair and
our ability to assemble a protest anywhere any time for any reason – we
in Ann Arbor say to Paul, “Yeah, man. We get it. We are not
conformists!”
But I’m not sure we are what he meant. Unconventionality is not
exactly what Paul was urging. Nonconformity itself is not the
goal, it is not an unqualified good, and it is not the perfect measure
of the rightness of our behavior. When nonconformity becomes the
primary goal, we miss the point and risk becoming just as stuck as any
conformist.
We’ve all known people whose motivating force seemed to be doing
whatever was contrary to the prevailing mood or fashion. Some of
us – maybe most or all of us – have been those people at one time or
another. This is generally what adolescence is about:
defining oneself against one’s family and previous assumptions.
Typically, when we go through that stage, we find a peer group that
supports our nonconformity and expresses their own similarly. And
then we conform to them. “Nonconformists travel as a rule in
bunches,” wrote social philosopher Eric Hoffer. “You rarely find
a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a
nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.”
As it turns out, everyone conforms to something. Some people –
the ones we disdainfully call “conformists” - are just more obvious
about it, with their anxious need to fit in and their blind willingness
to follow the majority in all situations. But deep down, we all
have this need and sometimes we let it drive us.
“Do not be conformed,” Paul said. And with those four words, he
challenged one of our most basic impulses and the dominant trend of our
society. The temptation is huge and nearly unavoidable. It
is the constant pressure to fit in, to make oneself acceptable, to
approve of and accept the status quo, and to allow one’s life to be
governed and shaped by it.
When Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world,” what he really
says in the Greek is “Do not be conformed to this eon.” The
distinction is important – for Paul the temptation isn’t about being
shaped by our place, the world, the cosmos God created; it is about
being shaped by our times, this age, the old order, which is passing
away. According to Paul, we belong to another eon entirely – the
eon of eternity. “You are a colony of heaven” he wrote to the
Philippians. They knew what it meant to be a colony; their city,
Philippi, was in fact a colony of Rome. What this meant was that
even though they did not actually live in Rome, they lived by Roman
customs, Roman values, Roman law, and their allegiance was to
Rome. So when he told them, “You are a colony of heaven,” they
knew what he meant. Though in a foreign land, you live by
Christian customs, Christian values, the Christian law, which is love,
and your allegiance is to Christ alone.
Now he tells the Romans something similar. Do not be conformed to
this eon. You belong to another eon, which is eternity, God’s
time, which is a whole new day. Paul understands that as
Christians, we are living in an “overlap of time.” There is the
old order, which is this present age. And there is God’s time,
eternity, a new age, which, in Jesus, cracked through our old order and
shined its light of hope on us. That new day of justice and peace
and love has not fully dawned. We are not yet living in it.
But we belong to it and we live by its truth. In this “overlap of
time,” we remain a colony of heaven.
But the temptation to be conformed to this eon is real and it is
pervasive. This eon, this old order in which we live, is,
according to Paul, corrupt. This is no less true in our own time
than it was when Paul first wrote it. To be conformed to such an
age as this means to accept and participate in its corruptness.
That is the real danger of conformism – not that we will become some
bland carbon copy of everyone else, but that we would grow to accept
the unacceptable, and to participate in and be shaped by that which has
been corrupted.
None of this is to say that there are not good things going on in our
world, in our times. Of course there are. The problem is
that this eon is just like our hearts – the good and the bad are all
mixed up together. Theologian Paul Tillich writes: "If the
corruption of this eon were obvious, very few would be tempted to be
conformed to it. Not many people, in reality or in literature,
make a pact with the devil. But there are many who are lured by
elements of goodness, indeed of real goodness, into a pact with this
eon, into the state of being conformed to it."¹
It is the promise of so much good that lures us into conformity.
Success, belonging, security. None of these is bad in and of
itself. But what happens is these things beckon and we respond
with everything in us. How could we not? We want
them. Bad. And it’s more than merely wanting them; we feel
we need them. And on a very deep level, our commitment is made
firm. These things we will seek. And degree by degree, our
lives are shaped by this eon as we pursue what it promises.
Success. Belonging. Security.
There are so many ways this eon offers these things, and so many ways
to conform in our seeking. The way that stands out most
strikingly in our culture is through consumerism. At no other
time in the history of the world have people been able to acquire,
consume, and dispose of so much stuff as we are able to now, here in
the United States. Only under the corrupt present order could the
people of one nation use and waste so much while the people of another
starve to death.
The rampant consumerism that has become an inextricable part of the
fabric of our culture promises all the things we think we need.
The accumulation of things – the nice house, the nice car – proves us
as a success. The accumulation of things – the right wardrobe, the
right gadgets – helps us fit in, belong. The accumulation of
things – the well-stocked pantry, the well-funded retirement account -
provides a sense of security. And so, day by day, little by
little, we are conformed to the habits of consumerism.
There are many other ways to conform of course – political, social,
ideological, religious – but few are as potent or as insidious as the
prevailing consumerism that slithers into our lives and seduces us with
its promises of success, belonging, and security. The needs it
offers to fill are so basic and so primal. And this particular
invitation to conformity is, as Tillich said it would be, not all
bad. That’s what makes it so hard to resist. We do need
things, after all. Buying and using things is a necessary part of
living and, except for a few hermits and radicals, there is no way to
outright reject it.
The problem is a matter of allegiance. To which eon do you belong
– to the old order or the new day? If you are part of the colony
of heaven and your allegiance is to Christ, then that alters
everything. Material things must still be bought and consumed and
disposed of, but things and the accumulation of things no longer holds
a place of primacy and purpose. Acquistion does not drive our
behavior. We become free not to conform. The same holds
true in other arenas as well. Our allegiance to Christ means he
holds the primary and ultimate place in our lives. We refuse to
buy into a political or even a religious system as some kind of
ultimate good. No social group, no ideology, no system, not even
our families hold the place of our ultimate allegiance.
On this point, Tillich writes, “Here we see what non-conformity
ultimately is – the resistance to idolatry, to making ultimates of
ourselves and our world, our civilization and our church. And
this resistance is the most difficult thing demanded of a (person).”²
This resistance to idolatry is difficult and would be impossible if it
were not for one thing – the mercies of God. Paul makes it clear
that this is the foundation of what he is now urging us to do. “I
appeal to you to do this by the mercies of God,” he begins in this
chapter. And he does not stop with the instruction “Do not be
conformed to this eon.” That is not enough. Telling us what
not to do is never enough. “Do not be conformed to this eon,” he
writes, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
Be transformed. This is the only way to resist the siren call of
conformism without taking the equally futile road of rigid,
self-satisfied non-conformity. To be transformed is to go beyond
mere rebellion against prevailing norms. It is to open our selves
– our minds, our hearts, our bodies, our whole lives – to the renewing,
transforming mercies of God. God who is bringing about a new day
also wants to transform us into new people living a new kind of life.
Paul started this portion of his letter with an appeal – present your
bodies as a living sacrifice. What he means by bodies is not just
our physical selves but our whole beings in all our concreteness and
particularity, within this space and this time. He urges us to
present our whole selves to God. And so we see that the road to
transformation, which is the renewing of our minds, begins with
sacrifice. Paul does not say, “Transform yourself. Change
yourself. Turn over a new leaf.” He says instead,
“Sacrifice yourself. Give yourself – and be transformed.”
That one little word – be – changes everything. We do not need to
do it. We simply need to be it, to be transformed, to present
ourselves and let it happen. It is God who does the transforming,
God who does the renewing. Our only call is to yield. This
is such a gentler invitation than the hard call to resist idolatry and
conformity. Caught between the nearly impossible call not to be
conformed and the toxic temptation to conform completely, here is the
one life-giving choice we have: yield. Yield to God’s
mercies. Just lay it all down: your tired body, your
conflicted heart, your overloaded mind. Lay it down once and lay
it down daily. And be transformed.
If this sounds an awful lot like what I said last week about giving our
hearts to Jesus because we cannot fix them ourselves, don’t blame
me. This is the gospel in a nutshell – that there is nothing we
can do to save ourselves, to change our lives. It is God’s work,
not ours, and all we are asked to do is to let him do it. I could
preach it 52 Sundays in a row, and it would still be just as true and
would still bear repeating for 52 more. We cannot do what we are
called to do otherwise. Simply being nonconformists doesn’t mean
much and if we want to help change this corrupted world, we have to let
God keep changing us.
This is how we become what Martin Luther King Jr. called “transformed nonconformists,”³
who have the strength and the humility and the love to help God
transform the whole world. This is how we do it: By giving
up, giving in, giving over, to God, who is making all things new,
including us.
¹ Paul Tillich. “Do Not be Conformed.” The Eternal Now. 138-139.
² Ibid. 144.
³ Martin Luther King, Jr. “Transformed Nonconformist.” Strength to Love. 16.
