Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. [Romans 12:2]
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
In the collect for today, we have asked God to grant us a transformation of vision. We need this if we are to see with his eyes – if we are both to perceive and to know what we ought to do. We have also asked for his grace and power to do what we ought to do fully and faithfully. In other words, we have asked God to enable us to present ourselves as a living sacrifice.
Always remember something about the Christian doctrine of sacrifice: What we offer to God in sacrifice comes back to us – and then some. (Our English word “sacrifice” itself indicates that: It comes from the Latin sacrificium: sacra (holy) + ficium (make) = “to make holy.”) That which is offered in sacrifice is made holy. What we offer – “our selves, our souls and bodies” – God takes, fills with his life and returns to us so that we might have fellowship with him.
We do not offer sacrifice because God needs what we offer. We offer sacrifice because that is the only way we can receive and possess what we offer to its proper purpose. Everything God gives us, he gives that we may ourselves give. It is a little bit like our giving something to a small child that he may give it to another child at a birthday party. We choose the gift, we buy and pay for it, then give it to him that he may give it away. (Sometimes he doesn’t want to give it away; he wants to keep it. All too often that is what we do with what God gives us.) In the end, however, the only sure way of keeping what we have is to offer it to God as a sacrifice. “He who would save his life shall lose it; he who gives his life for my sake and the Gospel’s shall keep it.”
In today’s Epistle,
Paul’s contemporary Saint James would refer to this condition as “double-mindedness.” It is exactly the sort of thing that Jesus persistently condemned as hypocrisy in those scribes and Pharisees whose behavior was not up to the standard they proclaimed. Paul says that this way of living is senseless and irrational. As a Jew who was well-schooled not only in his own faith but who was familiar as well with the best of Greek philosophy, Paul believed that any disjuncture between what the lips affirm and how the person behaves is a symptom of the sickness of soul that is the common affliction of mankind. This disease is curable only by bringing the patient to participate in the abundant life exhibited and secured in Jesus Christ. Reasonable service – rational worship – both flows out of and is nourished by the unity of belief and behavior seen in Jesus Christ and made available to us by him. Paul’s message, then, can be put succinctly as, “live as you pray.”
Doing this involves our undergoing a change that we cannot effect, but to which we must consent. “Do not be conformed to this world,” says Paul. The word we translate as “conformed” [suscheymatidzesthe] means “with the scheme.” Thus, being “conformed to this world [Gk. aion]” means getting with the world’s program, which is the “spirit of the age.” Doing this, however, only makes us cogs in a machine which is going to a place much worse than nowhere.
Mere nonconformity is not the solution to this, however, because it is only the mirror image of conformity. If nonconformity becomes stylish, then it is a new conformity. If you have any doubt of this, look at any fad.
The way to avoid conformity to this world is not nonconformity but transformation. If we are to be full and real people, we must be transformed by the renewing of our mind. The word translated here as “transformed” – metamorphousthe – means getting “through and beyond the form.” (The same word lies behind the word “metamorphosis,” which is used in biology to describe the process by which something that may be interesting but not very attractive, such as a caterpillar, goes into chrysalis – a deathlike state – and emerges as something of great beauty, such as a butterfly.) Transformation does not consist in our getting with a competing program that is on the same level as that pushed by the spirit of the age, but in our being changed – the best word is “converted” – by and through and into something that is on a level so far above what we are offered by the world that the world cannot comprehend it – nor can we, if we do not allow ourselves to be changed. The word Paul uses here for “mind” [Gk. nous] specifically refers to that through which we interpret reality – the lens of the eye of the soul, if you will.
Our natural condition is to see things from our own shortsighted perspective and through the distortion of the spiritual cataracts with which we are born. Because of this, we cannot on our own either perceive or respond to reality as it truly is. So we must consent to have what amounts to spiritual cataract surgery and to have the lens with which we were born renewed by the mind of Christ. It is even less likely that we could do this for ourselves than it is that we could perform cataract surgery on ourselves. This is especially true since, while cataract surgery involves the replacement of the lens, this “surgery” involves not the replacement but the renewal and transformation of the existing lens. It is as if the divine ophthalmologist removes the lens and corrects its defects, then puts it back, thus avoiding the risk of its being rejected as foreign tissue.
Only by God is God known, and only by him are his ways made plain to us, for his ways are not our ways, nor are his thoughts ours. It may be said that it is our calling to think God’s thoughts after him, to see things as he sees them. However, this does not involve our becoming interchangeable ciphers in a machine – “cookie-cutter Christians,” as someone once called it. This is evident in Paul’s contrast of the kingdom of the world with the kingdom of God: The world, because in the end it is only concerned with power and control, demands conformity to its agenda, while the Lord, because he brings the knowledge of the Truth that sets us free, offers transformation into his likeness.
His understanding of this is the reason that Paul always describes the Church as an organism – the Body of Christ – and never as an organization. The fundamental drive of an organization is to survive, but the fundamental drive of an organism is to grow. The world is replete with organizations, but there is only one Body of Christ with many members, each with his own unique role, dependent upon the other members who are both dependent upon him and also as dependent as is he on Christ, who is the Head of the Body.
Those who are of this present world and not merely in it cannot really wrap themselves around this, because their lenses remain distorted. Thus, they cannot understand why it is that, try as they might from time to time to erase the Church, they cannot ever seem to do it. This world’s agents are perplexed that killing off Christians doesn’t kill the Church because they cannot comprehend that the Gospel is not dependent upon its messengers, but that its messengers depend upon the Gospel.
He who sacrificed himself for us that we might be able to offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice now abides with us and in us and among us by the Spirit which he has given us. May he grant us eyes to see his light and direct our footsteps to himself to offer our treasures and our talents and the days of our lives as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our reasonable worship. May he return to us from that sacrifice a renewal of vision, both for each of us and for all of us as a congregation, that leaving behind the speech and the understanding and the thoughts and behaviors of childhood and putting away childish things, we may grow into holy temple of living stones dedicated to his glory and to the sharing of his light.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Fr Samuel L. Edwards
Saint Stephen’s Church, Franklin
January 11, 2009
