Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 24, 2008

Scripture:

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.

From the very beginning Christians have had a terrible time figuring out what to do with the world. Christians have had immense difficulty figuring out how to relate to the world, and they have come up with a wide variety of solutions to the problem. One early solution was that of the so-called Desert Fathers, those first Christian monks who, starting in the fourth century CE fled the world into the deserts of Egypt to live isolated and solitary lives of prayer as remote from the world as they could get. Other Christians have tried to rule the world, either as supposedly Christian Emperors or as supposedly Christian Popes. Some Christians have tried to transform the world, the pioneers of Christian liberalism in the Social Gospel movement of the early twentieth century prominent among them. Still other Christians have almost completely capitulated to the world and conflated Christian and worldly values. Think of indications we see all the time that significant numbers of Christians can’t tell the difference between Christian faith and American patriotism. Or think of Joel Osteen and the “God wants you to be rich” movement that attracts so many followers today. And, of course, popular Christianity has come to be about nothing so much as escaping from the world altogether into a blissful life somewhere else after death. All of these responses to the question of how Christians are to relate to the world have been advanced in the name of Jesus Christ and claimed to be Christian.

How we as Christians are to relate to the world is an important question. Obviously, we live in the world. We confess that God created us to live in the world. There’s no escaping the world short of death. Even the astronauts and cosmonauts who have left it temporarily have had to take some of it with them when they left and had to return to it. Even while they were in outer space they were still very much creatures of the earth. Yet while we live in the world, as people of faith we have committed ourselves to allegiance to a reality that utterly transcends the world. God is of course immanent in the world, but the world is not God. God is the source and the power behind and beyond all that is. We worship nothing earthly. Although Jesus was earthly, we do not worship his earthly aspect but the divine reality that we see in and through him. So as Christians we live in a built-in tension between the world for which God created us and where we necessarily life on the one hand and that transcendent, ultimate reality beyond the world to which we owe ultimate allegiance that we most commonly call God.

How are we to answer the question of our relationship to the world? As Protestant Christians the first place we look for answers to this or any other faith question is the Bible. It’s not that we think of the Bible the way literalist Christians do, but it is still our primary religious text and the primary source of our faith. When we turn to the Bible for help in answering the question of how we are to relate to the world we find, among other resources, the Apostle Paul. How we are to relate to the world was a major issue for Paul. He considered the world to be a highly problematic place. He saw the world as it was in his time and place, the Roman Empire of the first century CE, as hopelessly corrupt and sinful. It wasn’t ordered the way God wants human life to be ordered. Its values were all wrong. It seduced people into lives of physical excess and debauchery. Yet while the world as it was seemed hopeless to him, he did not consider the world as it was to be the way it would always be. He expected it to be radically transformed one day when Christ would return and set things right. He also knew that the world is where we do and must live. He’s often misunderstood, but Paul’s message was about transformation and eventual salvation in this world, not about how we escape this world into heaven.

We see Paul wrestling with the issue of how Christians are to relate to the world in our passage from Romans this morning. At Romans 12:2 he says: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Let’s take a closer look at what Paul says here and see if it gives us any help with our question of how we are to relate to the world.

In this verse Paul gives us both a negative exhortation and a positive one. The negative one is: “Do not be conformed to this world.” That’s what we’re not supposed to do, but just exactly what is Paul getting at? What precisely is it that we aren’t supposed to do? To me, to be “conformed to the world” means to adopt the values of the world, to live according to the ways of the world, to make the world’s way of being our way of being. But again we have to ask: Just what does that mean? What are the values and the ways of the world that we are not supposed to adopt? Paul doesn’t say here, but it’s not hard to figure out what he means. The way of the world is first of all the way of violence. As the great contemporary theologian of nonviolence Walter Wink says, the world as it is presently constituted is addicted to violence. It is in particular addicted to what Wink calls “the myth of redemptive violence,” that is, to the idea that violence can save us, that violence can set things right with the world, when the truth is that violence only begets more violence and perpetuates oppression. Beyond that, the world values material success—wealth, prestige, and power. The world orders life such that some people have domination over other people, men over women, free men over slaves, whites over blacks, the wealthy over the poor, and so on. The world worships idols, in Paul’s day statues of marble and bronze, in our day military heroes, pop culture icons, and those worldly values of wealth and power. These are all ways of the world that Jesus preached against as contrary to the will of God. These are ways of being that Paul is telling us not to adopt.

Then he says: “be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God….” This is the positive exhortation, and if anything it is even vaguer than the negative one not to be conformed to this world. To understand it, recall that Paul is writing here to a community of newly converted Christians in Rome. They, like Paul, have come fairly recently to faith in Jesus as the Christ. That conversion to faith in Christ is, I think, what Paul is referring to when he says “the renewing of your minds.” The minds of his audience have been renewed through their conversion to faith in Jesus Christ.

The renewal of the mind through faith in Jesus Christ should, Paul says, lead to transformation. Transformation here is more than a new way of thinking. It is a new way of being. It is a change not only of thought, though a change of thought is important. It is a change in how we live. More than that even, it is a change in how we see the world. It is a change in our values. Transformation is a radical reordering of our lives and of our very being. Conversion to faith in Christ should, Paul is saying, involve nothing short of such a radical remaking of who we are as human beings.

Then Paul says that the consequence of the radical reordering of our very selves through the Christian faith must be that we can and will discern the very will of God. And, Paul believes (as do I) that the will of God is precisely the opposite of those values of the world that we are not to adopt. The will of God is not violence but nonviolence. Jesus taught radical nonviolent resistance to evil, all of the Christian tradition’s efforts to avoid that teaching to the contrary notwithstanding. The will of God is liberation for all people, not the domination of some people over others that so characterizes the way of the world. The will of God is that we live in the Spirit, with spiritual values of peace, love, forgiveness, and joy and not with the world’s values of riches and power. These are the things that we are to discern with our minds transformed by faith in Jesus Christ. That’s Paul’s lesson for his audience almost two thousand years ago, and it is his lesson for us today.

So what is our relationship to the world to be? One of being conformed not to the world but to God. One of rejecting the way of the world, but not one of rejecting the world itself. Paul’s message here has nothing to do with escaping the world into heaven. It has to do with lives transformed by faith here and now, in the world, living in the world as it is without conforming to it, without being compromised by it. Living the transformed life of the Kingdom of God here and now, in this place and in this time. That is Paul’s challenge to us, just as it was Jesus’ challenge to us some thirty-five years or so before Paul wrote Romans. It’s a difficult task, but it isn’t an impossible one. With God’s help, we can do it, and our faith as Christians requires us to do nothing less. Amen.