Transformed Nonconformity
Week of July 5, 2004
Lectionary Readings
Exodus
1:8-2:10
Psalms
124 and 138
Isaiah
51:1-6
Romans
12:1-8
Matthew
16:13-20
Reading a sermon is no match for hearing a sermon. When I was in graduate school I wrote a seminar paper on the preaching of Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and read several collections of his sermons, but however great a wordsmith he was, the written word of the book seemed somehow secondary to what I imagined it was like to hear Tillich from the pulpit. So I was surprised to learn recently that Strength to Love, a book of sermons by Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), is a current bestseller for Fortress Press, despite the fact that they first published it in 1986 and other publishers even much earlier. The King book brings back memories for a number of reasons.
Fresh out of grad school, I taught a course on contemporary cultural issues—CCI as the students called it—and for a brief section that I did on racism I had the class read a favorite sermon of mine by King. Our college, William Tyndale College, had been founded in inner city Detroit in 1945, and when I was there could boast a black student enrollment of 35%. King’s sermon is based on one of the readings for this week, Romans 12:1–2: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (NIV). With typical eloquence and brilliance, King captured this powerful text in just two unforgettable words that I have co-opted for my essay title: transformed nonconformity.
King acknowledges that the pressures for cultural conformity, to “condition our minds and feet to move to the rhythmic drumbeat of the status quo,” are intense. Still, the follower of Jesus has a higher loyalty than conformity to social respectability. Living in time and for eternity, believers somehow need to discover ways to live very much in the world, not to abandon it but to embrace it, and yet at the very same time to avoid becoming a worldly person. We must make history, says King, and not merely be shaped by history or passively drift along the current of history.
Most people, and Christians are no exception, “are thermometers that record or register the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats that transform and regulate the temperature of society.” Social scientists tell us, for example, that believers divorce at about the same rate as the general population, we watch the same films and read the same books, we give about the same percentage of our income to charity as others, our teenagers have pre-marital sex at about the same rate as other kids, and so forth. The church, King reminds us, has defended slavery and racial discrimination, wars and economic exploitation. We participated in the Holocaust.
But even for those who choose the path less traveled, we should note that non-conformity by itself is nothing special. Here in California where I live non-conformists are everywhere, riding funny bikes, experimenting with alternative energy, eating organic foods, dressing down instead of dressing up, and so on. Sometimes, says King, non-conformity is little more than exhibitionism. The non-conformity that Paul describes has a specific direction, which is Christ likeness through what he calls a “renewed mind.”
The French sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) spent significant time working with the beatniks and street people in Bordeaux, France, in the 1950s and 1960s. His goal, he said, was not at all to make these marginalized and disenfranchised kids “adjust” to the normal canons of society. Rather, Ellul insisted that his goal was to help the kids to move from being “negatively maladjusted” to society to becoming “positively maladjusted,” non-conformists if you will. So too King: “There are some things in our world to which men [sic] of goodwill must be maladjusted. I confess that I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men [sic] of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.” Christian non-conformity, then, has a specific direction.
The hope for our world rests in such creatively and positively maladjusted believers, says King. This week’s text from Exodus 1:8–2:10 gives us a perfect example of nonconformity to the powers of this world in favor of God’s redemptive purposes. The Israelites were in Egyptian bondage, increasing in number and power, when the Pharaoh gave the order for infanticide—to terminate all the male Hebrew births. But the midwives defied the state authorities because, the text says, “they feared God” rather than Caesar (Exodus 1:17). Later, when asked what had happened, they covered up their civil disobedience by lying (v. 19).
Non-conformity is not an easy choice. King, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, paid the ultimate price when James Earl Ray assassinated him as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis hotel. When I suggested King’s sermon to a small group Bible study from my church, one couple took a cursory look at what King had to say, judged correctly that they had no interest in his message, and promptly quit the group. But Paul is clear about the general direction of the journey with Jesus: transformed non-conformity.
