Sermons

 Work in Progress

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
August 24, 2008	Psalm 96/ Romans 12:1-8

In the town where I grew up, children could ride their bikes safely and freely. During the summer months, I would ride my bike each day for seemingly hours on end. One time I remember riding in the rain, and I hit a patch of gravel and ended up in the emergency room with stitches. I remember my sister and brother being happy, not about the stitches so much, but about the fact that the doctor gave them each a quarter for showing up with me at the emergency room.

I remember another time riding down a big, grassy hill on a field next to where we lived. I was going extremely fast. This was before helmets and much safety of any kind. I hit a bump, and my bicycle did a somersault, with me on it for a bit of the time anyway. I fell head over heels down that hill. And when I got up, I said, “Wow. I probably shouldn’t do that anymore.” [laughter] But, had I known that all these years later that riding a bike recklessly and crashing on it would become an Olympic sport called BMX, [laughter] I might have kept at it.

As Becky has intimated, I feel like I should get an Olympic gold medal for Olympics watching. And like many of you, each morning when I wake up I’m walking around in a daze, having stayed up much too late watching the excitement unfold in Beijing. Like you, I have been entranced by the headline performers; the ubiquitous presence of Michael Phelps, including his arms raised high and his mouth wide open, unable to comprehend fully the achievement of his swimming accomplishment. Or the very young Chinese gymnasts, who are either older or younger than somebody says they are. Or Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh, and their nearly equally ubiquitous presence, including the rearrangement of their beach volleyball “uniforms” from time to time. [chuckles] Or Usain Bolt running amazingly quickly and then posturing afterwards. Though I guess if you set three world records, a bit of posturing is allowed. And then, of course, there’s been the extraordinary diver Laura Wilkinson, who is not my cousin or sister, but let’s keep that to ourselves for the time being, shall we?

But there have been others. They have impressed me even more, and in fact they’ve even inspired me by their success, and more so by their spirits, and by the non-conformist nature of their stories.

There’s been Lopez Lomong, who began life as a Sudanese walking boy, an easy label we’ve affixed to those who’ve lived in incomprehensible horror and tragedy and hardship, and who walked across their country to avoid warfare and famine. Lopez Lomong was recently sworn in as a US citizen. And rightly so, his Olympic teammates elected him to be the flag bearer last Friday night. He runs the 1,500. He didn’t even qualify for the finals, but in my humble opinion, he won simply by surviving and competing and showing up.

And then there is wrestler named Henry Cejudo. He is the son of illegal Mexican immigrants who found their way to Southern California, and is the product of a much challenged family situation. I cannot begin to imagine the hurdles he has overcome, personally and athletically to become a world-class, gold medal wrestler. Not to be overly political about it, but he did so wearing the uniform of this nation, a nation that offered him, somehow, sanctuary.

And there was Natalie du Toit, a South African long distance swimmer. She’s 24 now. At the age of 17 she lost a leg in a horrific automobile accident. And still, in this Olympics, with one leg, she swam a 10K long distance race --- that’s a little more than six miles. “Swimming makes me whole again,” she said. And if you weren’t touched by that story, I don’t know what touches you.

World-class athletes, to be sure, all of them. But they would be world class if they were not athletic at all, or Olympians at all. But they got to where they did by refusing to cave in to the pressures of the way things usually are done. How could a Sudanese walking boy avoid famine and warfare? How could a young family avoid the challenges of immigration policy? How could a young woman refuse to cave in to the pressures of physical hardship and challenge? All of them doing so by refusing to conform.

We all face this, every moment of every day. It’s the pressure to fit in culturally or politically or economically or religiously.

But the apostle Paul would have none of it. “Do not be conformed to the world,” he wrote to that little church in Rome as it was just starting out and trying to figure out who it was going to be. Do not be conformed to the world.

New Testament scholar N. T. Wright reminds us that the pressure to conform on that little church was great. “Be like us. Fit in,” the Roman culture was telling these new Christians. But Paul believed that a new age had dawned, with the appearance of Christ, and that Christians, according to Wright, living at the point of overlap between the old culture and this new Christian reality, needed constantly to reject the pressures of the present age, and to be open to the life of the new. Wright writes that if you are in Christ, new modes of behavior are not only possible, but are commanded.

We are reminded of that wonderful and famous translation of J. B. Phillips of this very same passage. “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold.” Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold.

It’s a constant tension --- is it not? --- responding to the pressure that the world puts on you, trying to squeeze you into the mold of the world. The pressure to conform.

The church has always faced it. We are now part of the Reformed theological tradition because our forebears, John Calvin and John Knox, especially, did not like what the church had become. They believed it had conformed too much to the world’s values, especially around money. Calvin and Knox never set out to found a new church. They sought to reform the one of which they were a part. But we now live fully and thankfully in what is called the Reformed tradition. Reformed and always being reformed by the spirit of God.

And the church continues to face that very pressure. One can’t think about the word formation without remembering Richard Niebuhr’s classic formula in a book from 60 years ago now called Christ and Culture. Niebuhr believed that the church, all of us, were called to “transform culture,” that we were presented many choices and many decisions to make. And the faithful choice was neither to reject the world’s way, to shun and set the world aside, nor to adopt and conform to the ways of the world, but rather to jump in with both feet (kind of like an Olympic diver) and to change and to reform and to transform. To make a difference in the world without either pushing it away or being swallowed by it. Christ transforming culture. You and I transforming culture.

It’s certainly true for the church, but Paul didn’t have the church only in mind when he was writing to those early Romans. It matters also on the everyday level of how we live our lives, and the constant pressure you and I face to conform to the world’s ways.

The New Testament scholar Katherine Grieb reminds us that for Paul, the implications of being in Christ, of following Christ, were life changing. To order, and to reorder our lives according to this new vision, this new set of values. Grieb uses the civil rights movement as an example of how non-conformity happens. She writes: “What we do with our own lives, our embodied existence, and the materiality of daily decision making inevitably reveals the extent of the lordship of Jesus Christ in our lives.” Which is worth repeating. What we do with our own lives, our embodied existence, and the materiality of daily decision making inevitably reveals the extent of the lordship of Jesus Christ in our lives.

That means everyday this matters. That means if you are a child, being yourself, being her or himself in the face of great pressure, to think or to talk or to dress or to act or to believe like everyone else does, the great pressure to fit in. Or if you are a youth, facing extraordinary pressure to conform to culture, whether it’s drugs or drinking or sex or cynicism. Whether it’s the pressure to include those who should be included and exclude those who are not. Or for us adults, the pressure never ceases. The constant pressure to fit in at work, where we live, in what we believe and the way that we behave.

In the face of all that enormous pressure, here’s good news. The good news is that we are formed by love and we are formed in love. And that we are re-formed in grace, and we are transformed by hope. And then we are conformed, conformed not to the world, but to a vision of how things may be --- not how they are --- but how they may be.

And here is some more good news: that we are a work in progress, never formed finally until we have been fully reformed and transformed and conformed to this magnificent vision of how things might be.

Here’s more good news: the possibility for such new formations is always with us and with us as a gift, so that every breath we take, every decision we make, every choice we face, every dollar we spend, every vote we cast, every word we utter reflect that transformed vision of who God is, and who God would have us to be.

Until our hearts and our spirits are healed and whole, until the church reflects who Jesus is and what he says and does.

Until the world --- because of who Jesus is and what he calls us to do --- is transformed, if only by a little, in our brief lifetimes, until the dawning of a perfect day, transformed by grace and love and hope.

AMEN.