Conversion: Can I Be Different?
“Jesus came into Galilee…saying, ‘The kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.’”
August 23, 1981
In Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find", a cranky grandmother is the main character. She lives with her son, his wife, and their two small children. Things never go to suit her: she never feels good, the children make her nervous, she always has advice for her daughter-in-law, who as you can imagine does not want it, and she keeps her son somewhere between guilt and anger because nothing ever pleases her. The story has the family going on their summer vacation. Mom and Dad are in the front seat and the kids and Granny are in the backseat. From her backseat vantage point, the grandmother complains and hands out advice, as well as pouts about their not going where she wanted to go on vacation. To make a short story shorter, they wind up having car trouble on a deserted road. As fate and the author would have it, some escaped, armed convicts come upon them. A strange senario of events takes place as one by one the family members are taken over a little hill and shot. All during this time, the grandmother talks and pleads with the convict leader called The Misfit. She becomes a totally different person. She is calm and gentle. She talks tenderly to The Misfit about the terrible things in life that must have happened to him to bring him to a life of crime. Her compassion touches the hardened criminal, his voice cracks for a moment, and his face looks as if he is about to cry. In a caring, motherly way, she reaches out to him saying he is like "one of my babies. You're one of my children!" Suddenly, the Misfit is jarred back to reality, jumps back and shoots her dead. You can almost see him blowing the smoke off his barrel as The Misfit says: "She would have been a good woman... if somebody had been there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
What does it take to make you and me different? What can jar me out of my moodiness and feeling that I have received a raw deal from life? What can break me out of my circle of self-absorption with what I want, so that I can respond a bit to what others need? Does it take losing or almost losing someone to know how much they mean to us? Maybe Flannery O'Connor was right. Perhaps we all need some gun to our head to turn us around, change us, make us different.
Bible scholars tell us that the Gospels, and particularly the Gospel of Mark, are lean, efficient documents. That is, nothing is in them without a purpose. In a way, then, Mark has presented us with a distilled, no-nonsense version of the content of Jesus' message: "The kingdom of God is at hand, repent, and believe in the gospel.” A not so far off paraphrase of this is: "God is making his move in the world. Let your lives be turned inside out and upside down; trust God with your living and dying, and act like it!"
The English word "repent" comes from the New Testament Greek word "metanoia". “Meta” means change; "noia" comes from a constellation of words related to mind and thinking. Way back there, our English word "knowledge" got its start from some form of "noia". (You can hear the similarity.) "Metanoia" - change of mind. We really don't do justice to the "metanoia" Jesus and Mark proclaimed unless we scratch below its surface.
First of all, the change of mind of "metanoia" is not like deciding you would rather have a hamburger instead of a bowl of soup for lunch. It is a wrenching – gun at the head Flannery O'Connor – change of one's whole outlook on life, one's entire direction of life. The change of mind of "metanoia" is like a combination brain, heart, and spirit transplant. Second, a better English translation for "metanoia" and the one sometimes used is "conversion." "Repent" seems to imply something active we do for ourselves. The "repentance" or "conversion" of Jesus' "metanoia", like what happened to Paul in our reading from Acts, is something in which the person is more passive, acted upon from without. Like Paul, for most of us, that which really makes us different, converts us, turns us around with ourselves, each other, and God happens usually with our fighting against it. We may fight it kicking and screaming or like most simply with just good excuses always ready.
Today, I would like to say some things about that gun-at-the-head matter of Christian conversion which turns our lives around, changes us, and gets more love into and out of us than we ever thought possible. What happens is that somehow, some way we become convinced even with our questions and doubts that God is for real, that God is the loving dynamic behind life, and that we will never really have a moment's peace in life until we live in his way. Here are some rotions about "metanoia" for your consideration.
First of all, I want to speak about a special area of metanoia-conversion which may seem like a contradiction in terms. That is, sometimes God's movement in our lives does not change us into another person. THE CONVERSION HERE IS A RADICAL ACCEPTANCE OF WHAT CANNOT OR SHOULD NOT BE CHANGED ABOUT US.
Not long ago, I read something written by Gloria Maxson. She writes about her lifelong struggle to come to terms with her physical problems which confine her to a wheelchair. With humor and insight, she tells of bewailing her homeliness until her fourth grade teacher said: 'Well, stop talking about it and your insides will never know; then you will grow up just gorgeous.” She also remembers with appreciation another teacher. Gloria was sad because she wanted to be a dancing fairy in the school pageant but had to be a sitting brownie. The teacher that time said: "The fairies are pretty little things...but so silly, while the brownies have the brains and laugh and sing....". In her teens, Gloria lost sight in one of her eyes and almost gave up on herself until her Aunt Grace told her that she needed only one eye to see the outside world, that she should use the other one to see inside herself. She humorously says that instead of lamenting her now 44-44-44 figure she reflects upon "...how the sight of a perfectly square torso would have inflamed the passions of (the ancient mathematician) Euclid."
Few of us have the limitations of a Gloria Maxson. Yet all of us often limit ourselves not so much by our limitations but because of our attitude toward our limitations. Indeed, we often turn our particular situation into a limitation. If I decide that only 6 feet 2 inch men with a lot of hair are any good, then I am going to be in for a lot of grief in my life. If I decide that only people who are in the upper ten percent of economic wealth in society have enough to be happy, then I will probably never be happy. If I decide that preachers don't do much good in life, that only missionary doctors in the jungle really help people, then I am going to feel forever frustrated. But if God or a person who God uses can convince me that 5 feet 10, thin-haired preachers can really be special givers and receivers of love, then look out, I'm on my way! The conversion is not of who I am but of how I feel about who I am.
Perhaps, the unpardonable sin that a lot of people wonder about is the sin of rejecting the particular person God created in our own skin. When we sell ourselves short, we are just a step short of telling God he is no good at his work of making people. Certainly, there are parts of all of us that need drastic change and redirection. We know more than we admit about what we need to change. Yet, how we need the converting love of God to put the gun to our head and show us the people in our network of relationships who we alone can touch. For Gloria Maxson it was her aunt and schoolteachers. For someone close to you, it may be you.
SECOND, IT NEEDS TO BE SAID THAT "METANOIA"-CONVERSION TAKES TIME AND HAPPENS IN TIME. We read the story of Paul's conversion today (Acts 1:1-19). On his way to Damascus, Saul is a militant Pharisee out to punish those whose belief in God did not meet his standards. Something happened. Exactly what, we will probably never know. He fell off or was knocked off his animal, a flash of light, words from Jesus?, then three days of blindness, a visit from Ananias. It sounds dramatic. It is. But it can be misleading if we are not careful. If we are not careful, it looks like time is interrupted and in an instant Paul's life is totally turned around unrelated to what happened before or after. The truth is that Paul's entire prior life of religious searching led up to and prepared him for that moment on the Damascus road. Everything that followed that event in his missionary journeys on behalf of the Christ he had once cursed built upon and proved out the validity of what happened in those crazy three days. Even with Paul, the gun at the head change happened in time and it took time.
Today, with pop religion's razzle dazzle about being born again as if it is magic, we forget that the Christian belief is that we are not just born again but that we are born again...and again...and again. Sometimes the rebirths are almost imperceptible and we only realize the changes as we look back over the past months or years. One theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr, said that "metanoia" means "permanent revolution" of one's life. Continual self examination, persistent growing in what it means to love God and love others in his name. Christians as much as anyone need continual conversion. Paul himself was not a man without faith becoming a man of faith. He was a man whose faith was transformed into a purer faith. Oh, how we need today many Christians of the pharisaical, judgmental type converted into the Christians of the loving, forgiving, and compassionate type.
It needs to be clear that this Christian way of life, this conversion, which begins in conflict and resistance continues that way. There is always that part of us that continues to want to be left alone, that doesn't want to get that involved with God and all those strange people he calls us to love, feed, and live with in peace. What's more, even when we find some disturbing peace in our life with Christ, there is almost always outside resistance. It always makes me suspicious when people tell how becoming a Christian took all the pain and problems out of their life, gave them financial successes and children who don't get cavities. I wonder if they are talking about the same faith of Jesus, Paul, Mary, Martha, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King, who had more doors slammed in their faces than opened.
THIRD, CONVERSION STARTS IN THE HEART, BUT IT NEVER STOPS UNTIL IT COVERS EVERY CORNER OF LIFE. For this sermon, I used the book The Transforming Moment by James Loder who is a theologian and psychologist at Princeton as well as a committed Christian. In his book Loder does an in-depth study of conversion and transformation in human experience, particularly as conversion-metanoia relates to God, the ultimate source of all human change. Loder speaks of what he calls "the transposition of transformation." That is, he argues that transformation or conversion because of Christ in one's life is probably not real unless the person permits that internal change to be transported or "transposed" to all areas of life.
John Woolman lived in the America of the 1700's. He was a Quaker Christian and is a powerful example of how faith in Christ who bid love of God and others without limit let that faith permeate everything he did. Because he objected to the use of slaves in the ships which brought fabric dyes from the West Indies, he wore only white, undyed clothes. He walked instead of riding horses because of the mistreatment of the boys used to train horses. He would not use silverware eating utensils because of the cruel conditions miners worked in to get the silver. Early, a prosperous grocer, he gave away most of his money. Eccentric, yes. More effective ways to change bad conditions, perhaps. Yet here was a man whose love of God was transposed and transported to all of his relations with God's children.
What I am getting at is this. It is impossible to have Christ in your heart or even in your church if you do not let him go with you to the bank, the courthouse, your business, your office, your school, the hospital, and to your house. He goes with us all the way or not at all. It torments me to question how we who claim kin to the Jesus who fed the five thousand and who blessed peacemakers and bid us to turn the cheek, how we can be silent with the mood and move in our country today to do less and less for people in need and more and more in stockpiling the weapons that will deny life to if not our children, our grandchildren. When God makes a move in your life, it begins in our heart and wrenches into every nook and cranny of our guts and earth.
Today, I offer to you not a gun at your head, but a Christ on a cross. I offer to you not a flash of light on the Damascus road, but the light of day which comes every day to show you the beauty of the earth God has created. I offer you not a spirit which will throw you down and blind you but a God whose spirit will break your heart, enable you to see the beautiful person he means you to be, whose spirit will go with you through the journey of your life to push and prod you to let more love out of you and into you than you in your wildest dreams ever imagined. God is out to make you different. Sooner or later, he will. Why not sooner?
Mystery, we have named you God.
Some portray you as a heavenly hangman out to get those who do not meet their standards. Others are embarrassed at the mention of your name and find belief in your reality as
quaint and old fashioned.
Although in different ways we have feared both possibilities or pipedream,
We have found you to be neither.
It has happened in different ways to us.
For some it is the breathtaking beauty of nature...
For some the mind-exploding in intricacy and complexity of the universe...
For some there was a face, a touch, at the very right moment...
For others of us it was sheer strength bubbling up from God only knows where within to
keep going on when there seemed no reason to go on...
Or in ways too special and particular to mention...
Yet it happened.
We have felt your movement in our lives and have found you neither inflicter or fantasy
But a caring, nourishing, to be sure correcting, and above all heavenly Father.
You surprise us by the good you can get out of us,
You astound us with the bad about us that you can get us to face and convince us that
you forgive us.
You give us joys uncountable.
Yet you never let us get away long with talking about happiness while turning our
backs on the hungry,
You are the clammy echo that jars us when we do fast talking about peace while preparing
more instruments of war,
Most of all you are the never quite shakeable gut feeling that things don't have to
be the way they are,
That your kingdom will come and is coming on earth as it is in heaven.
Not fantasy or executioner but Father
Break our hearts and reach out our arms
Today.
Amen.