Called to Transformation

This is the sermon I gave on May 5, 2013, to which some have responded favorably.

Called to Transformation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 5, 2013

Scripture:  Acts 16:9-15;  Revelation 21:10, 22-26, 22:1-5

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.   Amen.

Some of you already know this from Facebook, but last Sunday after we got back from Wenatchee, Jane and I got a dog.  He’s a new dog to us although he’s almost eight years old.  He lived right around the corner from the church, and he needed a new home.  He wasn’t being abused or neglected by the woman who owned him, who was also his breeder; but she couldn’t keep him and needed to find a good place for him.  I got to talking to her a couple of weeks ago as I was walking up to 7-11 to get something to drink, and Jane and I ended up adopting the dog.  Some of you have seen his picture on Facebook.  He’s a Pembroke Welsh Corgi—that’s the kind without a tail.  His name is Ringo, because he has a ring of white fur around his neck.  He’s a sweetheart, and we’re delighted to have him.  Especially Jane, who’s the world’s biggest dog sap—but that’s a story for another day.

Ringo probably doesn’t know it yet, but he just landed in a bed of roses.  I don’t like to brag, but Jane and I are really good dog owners.  We love dogs.  We know what they need, and we make sure our dog has it.  We walk our dog at least twice a day.  We make sure his diet is healthy.  We take him to the vet regularly for checkups and vaccinations and whenever something might be wrong.  We pet him and play with him a lot.  We’re even having our little back yard fenced so Ringo can go outside by himself when he wants.  Mostly, we love our dog.  Ringo probably doesn’t know it yet, but his world just got pretty much completely transformed for the better. 

Ringo is experiencing transformation into a world that will be really good for him, yet of course he’s still a bit stressed by it all.  He knows he’s in a new place with new people, but he doesn’t know why.  He’s a dog, and you can’t really explain those things to a dog.  So he’s still a bit nervous, a bit edgy.  He hasn’t really settled into his new environment yet.  He doesn’t yet fully know our routines and patterns, and that makes him a bit uneasy.  The transformation that he’s experiencing will be really good for him, but he’s resisting it a bit.  Just a bit, not a lot; but he’s still resisting it a little, and he’s still a little uncomfortable with it.  That’s to be expected, and it will pass; but for now Ringo is finding transformation a bit difficult.

Ringo’s a dog, but he’s not the only creature who finds transformation difficult.  We humans find transformation difficult too.  We resist change.  We resist renewal.  In my line of work we call the phrase “We’ve never done it that way before” the seven last words of a dying church, but people in churches say it all the time because they don’t like change.  Institutions like churches, and governments, and just about every other kind of human institution, resist change, but so do we individually.  Psychologists tells us that things like changes in primary relationships, changes of employment, moving from one home to another or from one town to another, are among that most stressful events in a human life.  They’re stressful because we don’t like change.  We like things to stay the way they are.  Of course, not all change is beneficial, but we pretty much resist all change, even change that is beneficial.  In other words, we resist transformation.  We find change and even true transformation frightening.  They make us nervous.  They make us tense.  So we resist them.  Staying where we are is almost always more comfortable for us than is any kind of change, any kind of transformation.

We resist transformation, and that’s unfortunate.  It’s unfortunate especially for us Christians because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing if not a call to radical transformation.  In our Gospels Jesus more than anything else calls us to transformation.  He calls us to transform our hearts and minds.  He calls us to transform our lives.  Then he calls us to transform our world.  Jesus calls us to build the Kingdom of God.  He calls us to build it from the inside out, starting with a transformation of our hearts and ending with the Kingdom of God fully realized on earth.  That is transformation writ large, and Jesus calls us to do it.

In our two scripture readings this morning we have images of transformation.  In our story from Acts Lydia is transformed.  Her transformation is symbolized by her baptism, which comes after she accepts Paul’s teaching about Jesus Christ.  She brings the Apostle and his teaching into her home and into her life.  She is transformed.  Our reading from Revelation is an even clearer picture of transformation.  It is a vision of a world living in immediate, direct relationship with God and Jesus Christ.  In what Revelation calls the new Jerusalem there is no need, metaphorically speaking of course, of sun, moon, or lamp because everyone lives in the light of God, so close is God to all the people and all the nations.  Revelation gives us a vision of a world transformed from living apart from God to a world living intimately with God.  If that transformation were ever really to happen, the world would be a very different, a radically transformed, place indeed.

Jesus Christ calls us to transformation.  He calls us to live the life of the Kingdom of God even now when that Kingdom is so incompletely realized here on earth.  He calls us to live lives that reject violence, lift up the lowly, include the excluded, and live in tight communion with God.  He calls us to live the life of the Kingdom of God as if God’s Kingdom were already fully a reality among us.  He says the Kingdom is among us, and he calls to live the way of the Kingdom rather than the ways of the world.  In Christ we are in the world, but we are called to be of the Kingdom.  We are called to a new way of being that turns the world’s ways of being completely on their heads.  We are, in other words, called to radical transformation. 

We are called to radical transformation, and most of the time we say no.  Most of the time the thought of changing nearly everything about the way we live is too uncomfortable.  It is too scary.  We think we’d lose too much.  Most of us here are pretty satisfied with our lives the way they are.  We’ve accepted the way the world is.  We support candidates who take our country to war and spend nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world put together.  We don’t want to pay taxes for social programs that benefit people we don’t know.  We consume at a higher level than any other people in the world, eating up much more than our fair share of the world’s resources.  We like all of those things.  We don’t want to change them.  We so don’t want to change them that we mostly don’t even hear Jesus’ call to us to change them.  We think he’s talking about how we get to heaven, not about how God wants us to live on earth.  He isn’t, or at least he isn’t primarily.  The Kingdom of God that he proclaimed is not an earthly kingdom, but it is on the earth not in heaven; and God calls us to the transformation that is necessary to make it an earthly reality.

Ringo will get used to his new home.  I think he will be very happy in his new home.  It’ll take some time, but he’ll get there.  Will we ever get used to the new home to which God calls us?  Will we ever truly become Kingdom people in the midst of the world?  I’m afraid that’s a lot less likely than Ringo coming to like living with Jane and me.  We humans are a lot more resistant to transformation than dogs are.  We’re so good at thinking up all the reasons why we can’t and don’t have to follow God’s call.  What we think are reasons are however really only excuses, and God’s call is still there.  It still pains God that we respond to it so weakly.  We are called to transformation.  Do we hear?  Will we follow?  Amen.