(56) Transformers

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Transformers, originally shared on October 15, 2020. It was the fifty-sixth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

    “Character” was defined by the speaker at the Eagle Scout award ceremony for one of the members of the church I served in San Dimas as, “what we do when there is no reward for doing the right thing and no punishment for doing the wrong thing.” Today, we’re going to consider the character of our culture in these times, and how we can be a transformative influence within it.

   Sally and I celebrated our 37^th wedding anniversary yesterday in typical pandemic fashion: low-key and at home. Our thanks to all who sent their greetings and congratulations.

   Things have certainly been interesting during the pandemic. Of course, there is a Chinese curse that goes, “May you live in interesting times.” And, 2020 has certainly been interesting.

   I posted a meme yesterday that showed a panel with a deity-like figure holding a stone tablet with the words “Love Thy Neighbor” written on it and a group of people pushing each other away. In the second panel, the deity had written-in another word so that the tablet said, “Love Thy Neighbor Challenge” and the same group was loving and hugging one another.

   Would the proclamation of Jesus be more successful if it was presented as a game? A goal to be accomplished by us?

   Has Social Media, particularly in this pandemic, become a more real arena than reality itself?

   Will people not act upon God’s call to live the good news of Jesus Christ, but will eagerly act in response to the latest fad? Is being up to the moment more important than being prepared for eternity?

   Has the community of social media become more real to us than Reality itself?

   We’re at a point where an increasing number of people live only in their own created reality, rather than the world as it is.

   What do you think about where we are today in terms our world view? Have we Christians become conformed to this world, or transformed by the Holy Spirit? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

   We’re at a point in the Coronavirus pandemic where LA may be moving down a level in scale of readiness for reopening in California. The majority of states in our nation are experiencing spikes of coronavirus cases, just as they are in Europe. There is talk of a second wave, of another round of shut-downs, and that things will only get worse has we move into flu season and the rain and cold and snow starts moving groups of people back indoors, unless those indoor activities are closed.

   And the backlash has already begin, with people calling for everyone but those currently believed to be a greatest risk to congregate, get sick, and establish a heard immunity, as if we didn’t live in an actual community of all kinds of real people.

   As they were invulnerable to sickness and death. Or, as if they didn’t care either way.

   How do we make a difference in a world where many prefer a virtual world to a real one, where people think only about what is good for themselves, and that is becoming more and more secular?

   That would actually be an odd question for most Christians today, and for almost all Christians throughout history. The long stretch of influence and peace for Christians in the United State, and even in Europe, is weirdly exceptional in world history.

   Jesus said, in the very next words after the Beatitudes, in the Sermon on the Mount,

*Matthew 5:13-16

and a few chapters later,

*Matthew 13:33

   We are the agents of the Kingdom of God. We are small, in and of ourselves, but we make a huge difference in what is around us. Huge. Salt, and Light, and Leaven. If we maintain our character. What is character but our true self, who we are when there is no reward for doing the right thing and no punishment for doing the wrong thing, only who we truly are in the power of the Holy Spirit, the streams of living water that shape and nourish us from within.

   Actually lived Christianity has been in a minority among almost all of the nations and cultures of the world from its beginning.

   The world is constantly working to make-over the Church into its own image: to be more tolerant of other beliefs for the sake of cultural unity, to be more focused on contributing social services that supplement the culture’s public policy and saves it money, to be more docile, more entertaining, more like the world.

   I was watching the news on Channel 5 this morning where entertainment reporter Sam Rubin was interviewing an actress about in a show she was in about a society where people take tests to find their “soul mates”, like online dating on steroids. He said that he was once on a flight with a senior executive from E-harmony who said, “people basically want to date themselves.” Sam Rubin and the actress agreed that it was a bad idea. “Why would I want to date myself?”, the actress said. “I’m with myself all day.”

   Isn’t that the temptation in all relationships? To try to make the other into someone just like myself? To have no where to grow, nothing to argue about, nothing to learn, nowhere that iron sharpens iron?

   Isn’t that what the world tries to do to the Church, to make it into something just like itself? And doesn’t it suffer as a result?

Paul wrote:

*Romans 12:1-2

   We don’t want to make the world to be just like the Church. God reigns through two kingdoms. This world and the Church. We want this world to be just what God wants the world to be, a place that provides for the common good in a Sinful world. And, we want the Church to be the Church, a place that points to the living relationship with the living God for which human beings were created, who seek to make the world more like the already but not yet Kingdom of God that will be brought to perfection only in the world to come.

   Now, when the Bible speaks of “the world” it usually means the people who have not yet received a living faith, a living relationship with the one true living God. When we speak of this world, we generally mean the world that ministers outside the already but not yet Kingdom of God, such as governments.

   We are called to be transformers of people and societies into what God has created them to be.

   Jesus didn’t come to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

   That is our purpose, to be transformers in the world and in the Church, to be God’s transformed and transforming agents of change to something more like what the world was and is intended to be.