8/5/51

Scripture: Romans 12

Text: Romans 12: 2; “Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your soul.”

Have you ever thought how hard it is to advise someone not to conform? Or how hard it is for a person to accept such advice? The kind of life we live seems to demand conformity. To live differently, not to identify oneself with one’s group, is an awful experience.

A man who was making his own beginning in the world of business once said to me that leadership involves loneliness. He thought that being a leader involved not just finding out what the crowd wanted to do but to try to find out which way people ought to go and then try to persuade them of that direction. But to be such a leader involved, he thought, a loneliness that might well increase in proportion to the greatness of the leader’s position.

Certainly the conscientious Christian may often find himself in a position of differing with those who set little store by the teaching and spirit of Christ. When that occurs, he must decide between the comfort of crowd approval or the comfort of a clear Christian conscience. One of the hard injunctions of Scripture is that to “come apart and be separate.” We don’t want, usually, to be separate. We want to be in the swim of group approval. That seems normal to us. We want to identify ourselves with our social and business associates.

Yet we know from bitter experience that our society is not in any sense completely Christian. No one needs to tell us that selfishness and hatred, prejudice and war, are a part of our culture. Paul was well aware of this when he urged the Christians of Rome not to be conformed to their world but to be transformed by the renewing of the mind.

One kind of conformity has been unhappily underlined and headlined in recent weeks. The Cicero race riot was a sad commentary on the vicious determination of many people to live among people they consider to be their own kind and to keep others away. During this vacation period, our family was approached at a picnic by a woman who proffered her card advertising for rent lakeside cottages which she owned. She said that she preferred individual contacts to general advertising because she didn’t want people of the wrong color to apply. I think she might have added “or the wrong religious background.” We were not interested in such exclusiveness.

Cicero, Illinois, has long been notable for various kinds of violence, or accessory to violence. Jutting into the Chicago area, and yet a separate municipality, it could, and did, harbor the infamous Al Capone and his gang. They could carry on their gangland activities in Chicago and then whisk themselves out of the reach of Chicago authorities by racing a short distance over the city limits into Cicero. Now that city gets a new headline for its recent race riot which municipal authorities knew was brewing and did little to prevent.

One of the gravest features of the rioting was that the actual rioters (though stirred up by adults) were youngsters -- boys and girls in their teens, many of them wearing their high school sweaters and scarves. Reporters referred to them as “the young ones; the scuffed-up shoe set; the pool room punks and the goons.” News photos showed their age. Kids - the hope of America’s future - looking around for excitement, going along with the crowd, brought this disgrace on our country! They are the same kind of youth who could as well have been stirred to crusading idealism but for the pressure of the crowd, the bitterness of their adults, and the venture of their own set.

The Negro family who were victims of their frenzy happen to have been a rather good sort. There are Negroes next to whose conduct and ideals I would dislike to live and rear my family. There are Caucasian families in the same classification! There are also both Caucasian and Negro families -- and Orientals and Polynesians as well -- who would make good neighbors anywhere.

This particular family appears to have some culture. The father and the mother are both graduates of Fisk University, one of the Congregational-related colleges of the south. The children, aged 6 and 8, are reported to be well-mannered. The father won the rank of captain in the air force during the war and is a member of the American Legion. Reporters roaming through the litter of their wrecked house noted several children’s’ music books amid the rubble. Also a copy of “House Beautiful.”

The whole incident of rioting against that family who tried to escape from the cooped-up quarters of a horribly overcrowded Chicago Negro area into the decency of a more roomy apartment is a disgraceful commentary on group conformity. But the pressure of the herd is on us all in many ways. The tantalizing little rhythms of style change in clothes sway men and women across the world. “Men of distinction” advertisements urge beverage conformity on increasing numbers of people. Fad follows fad, largely because of the impression that “everybody is doing it.” We tend to conform. We do conform. We feel so made that we almost have to conform!

How then dare a man be different, or advise others to be different! How could Paul urge people to bring on themselves the disapproval, and even dangers, of non-conformity when he wrote to his friends, “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”?

Much of social psychology is still theory; but there is no doubt that our personalities are greatly affected by our society. Some of our sociologists seem to go so far as to tell us that all morality is only group consensus; that there is little difference between folkways and morals. You tell the difference between right and wrong by a sort of Gallup poll to find out what the majority wishes to do.

The answer given by some consultants to the problems of maladjusted people seems to be to learn to conform to this world. Dress and act and think like other people and you will be happy, according to this point of view. Well, it is important to understand this tendency in our human nature. But Paul apparently disagreed with it as a guide to salvation, or even to happiness; and so do I. He had forsaken the viewpoint and actions of his own Hebrew Phariseeical group toward the Christians, for instance. And he had found a greater peace and enthusiasm than he had ever known in his comfortable crowd, when he espoused the unpopular Christian belief with all his soul.

But why, Paul, must we go through the awful rigor of living differently if we are to be Christian? Paul seems to answer unhesitatingly: “Because it is the very nature of our Christian faith.” Christianity is a religion of revelation. God has taken the initiative to redeem us. Christianity did not develop through the feeble laborious searching of people, but God has reached man and has revealed Himself and His way to man.

God’s revelation has been going on for thousands of years. It was going on 2800 years ago when Amos left his herds in Tekoa the tell people that God is not interested in having people conform to the social pattern of fasts and feasts and sacrifices, but that God wants “justice to roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” [Amos 5: 24]. God was revealing Himself through Hosea when Hosea, victim of unhappy home and unfaithful spouse, told people that the living God is a God of love and compassion. The revelation was coming through Jeremiah who, though his society threw him in prison, proclaimed his message that man’s ultimate security, and his real meaning in life, are found only in inward, spiritual relationship with the living God. God was in Jeremiah!

And at length, in the fullness of time, God revealed Himself supremely in Jesus of Nazareth. Much of the society of Jesus’ time sneered at him. Most of the leaders hated him and finally had their part in beating and crucifying him. Yet to these facts Paul would answer: “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” [II Corinthians 5: 19]. The very God who created the world shows in the face of Jesus. This same Jesus, whom the Roman empire liquidated for fear his influence might challenge the power of Caesar, Paul declares to be “the image of the invisible God.” [Colossians 1: 15].

Because of the revelation of God, the seeking of God after us, the very nature of our Christian faith bids us not to conform to the world’s ways. Remember the God of love and compassion who took the initiative in revealing Himself to us because he loves and cares for us.

This means not conformity to, but tension with, much of our culture. If every influence of our culture tells us that the way to be happy is to have a big house, a big car, and a hundred gadgets, Jesus tells us that a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of those things that he possesses. If newscasts and popular magazines slant our thinking to the notion that the ultimate in international morality is “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Jesus tells us to love an enemy and pray for those who despitefully use us. [Matthew 5: 38-44]. It is not consistent to follow all the ways of the unChristianized world and yet to believe that the God of the Universe is revealing Himself to us through Jesus Christ.

The more basic reality at the heart of the universe, to which Christians want to conform, is what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. This is the realm of our loving relationship (1) first to God, and then (2) to all people.

Of course we can wholeheartedly accept Paul’s direction “Be not conformed to the world;” and yet still have vital questions clamoring to be answered. We have some very revolting nonconformists in whom it is hard to see any of the love and redemptive concern of God. We have no use for a lot of Marx-like reformers. Nor for the demagogues of our own time and country. Non-conformity, there, becomes only a greater evil that the conformity from which people ought to escape.

Where can we find the dynamic strength to overcome the pull of our culture and yet be humble, loving and redemptive? Paul’s penetrating answer is this: “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Simply refusing to conform helps not at all unless we be transformed. God is not calling us, through Paul, to grit our teeth and be hard-headed moralists. He calls us to be loving redemptive witnesses of His love; servants of His children.

One of the Christian groups that conspicuously obeys Paul’s direction and yet has rendered remarkable, loving and humble service to humanity is the Quakers. Thomas Kelly says that the heart of their spiritual power is this: “The energizing, dynamic center is not in us, but in the Divine Presence in which we share. Religion is not our concern, it is God’s concern.”

There is a difference between Paul’s kind of non-conformist and the kind some of us have seen who grits his teeth and, perhaps out of anxiety for himself or perhaps for his society, refuses to conform to the sins of this world. Sometimes the efforts of the latter to live the perfect life of Christian precept becomes pretty rigid and cold. Such people can speak of the love of God in a particularly hateful way. Their anxiety for religious security loses them from the very thing that Paul was talking about. And in seeking to save their lives, they continue to lose them.

We are set free to love only through God’s love. It is natural for us to know anxiety. We can surmount it only through the infinite love of God as revealed by a Man on the Cross; failing; and yet triumphant in his non-conformity to the sins of the world.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, August 5, 1951.