329 Transformed, Not Conformed

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Transformed, Not Conformed” originally shared on September 21, 2024. It was the 329^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Everybody likes the stories of Jesus and the children, but what are they intended to teach us? Nothing. They are meant to transform us. Today, we’re going to find out why.

   I was in a locker room after a workout a few years ago and one of the guys near me said to his buddy, “You know, I had this dream last night that I was back in school, and it was finals week, and I hadn’t been to class all semester, and I didn’t know where the final exam was, and I hadn’t studied, and I was running around campus looking for the exam room so I could take the test for which I hadn’t studied…”

   And someone else nearby said, “Well, I’ve had that dream.” And someone else said, "I’ve had that dream.” And I said, “I’ve had that dream, too!” 😊 And so did several other people around us.

   It turns out that it’s a fairly common dream, common enough that its cause has a name, “performance anxiety”. It may mean that you have too much to do. It may mean that there is something in your life for which you don’t feel adequately prepared or for which you haven’t adequately planned. It may just mean that you are conscientious. It’s fairly common

   Have you ever been in a class where you wanted to ask the teacher a question, but you were afraid to ask it? “Maybe,” you think, “the teacher already covered that and I was daydreaming. Or the answer was in the assigned reading and I missed it, or I didn’t read it.  Or I forgot.”

   Maybe you don’t want to stand out as the only person who doesn’t know, or that you think for whatever reason, that you should know, but you don’t. So, you’re afraid to ask the question.

   I think that that too is fairly common. In fact, I think we see it in the Bible.

   One day, in a part of the Gospel of Mark that will be read in the vast majority of churches around the world this coming Sunday, Mark 9:30-37, this happened, in verses 30-32.

³⁰ They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it; ³¹ for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” ³² But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.

   Why didn’t they understand what he was saying?

   I think that it was because much of what Jesus was doing, and most of what he was saying, was so unexpected. Many people expected that when the Messiah, the anointed deliverer, came, the one they’d been waiting for for 1,000 years, that he would be a great military and political leader like King David. On the other hand, people like St. Peter were beginning to believe that Jesus was God in human form.

   Now he was telling them that he was going to be betrayed, killed, and then rise from the dead. They had heard all of this before, we read it last week from Mark 8, the chapter before this one, and it still made no sense to them.

   And they were afraid to ask about it. We can understand that, right? 😊

   Teachers used to say that, if you have a question, ask it. Most likely someone else in the class doesn’t understand either. That there are no stupid questions.

   I once taught a class for 3^rd Graders receiving their first Bible where they and their parents came and highlighted one verse from each book of the Bible that they would receive from the church. One year, I had them highlight Titus 3:9,

⁹ But avoid stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.

   And when I read the verse, including the word “stupid”, one of the little girls leaned over to her mother and said quietly, “He said a bad word.” 😊

   So, I’m guessing that teachers don’t say that anymore, at least not in that way.

   It’s not hard to imagine why the disciples didn’t want to raise the question, though.

   Jesus had been explaining for years who he was and what he was there to do, and they still didn’t get it. And not one of them wanted to be the one to look, well…, out of the loop. 😊

   And, instead of asking Jesus about it, they were concerned with their personal status.

   At this point, if this Gospel reading were clickbait, you would see the words,

“What happened next will shock you!” 😊

   The reading concludes with Mark 9:33-37,

³³ Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” ³⁴ But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. ³⁵ He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” ³⁶ Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ³⁷ “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

   I have served on our synod council (a synod is a group of over 100 churches in our denomination) and on the executive committee of the synod council. One of the things that impressed me during those years was how synod council members would say, “We don’t have any power, the executive committee has the power.” The executive committee would say, “We don’t have any power, the bishop has the power.” And the bishop would say, “I don’t have the power. The synod council has the power.”

   Sometimes who you think has “the power” is totally a matter of your own perspective.

   Most children, especially older children, can’t wait until they get to be the adults in charge. Many adults would like to go back to a time when they were children.

   I don’t think that there were many of them in Jesus’ day. Children were at the bottom of the pile.

   But what do Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel reading tell us today? In the end, nothing. They are not meant to teach us, they are meant to transform us.

   It’s been said that growing old is required; growing-up is optional. Is there something we can learn about growing-up from being a child? How do we receive the gift of faith as a child without being spiritually childish? A lot depends on who we think has the power, at least the kind of power we want.

   We think of young children as young people who need to be protected and cared for, whose each stage of life is precious, who are treasured and who parents sometimes wish could “stay that way forever.”

   This is not at all how children have been regarded in most places for most of human history.

   Have you ever visited a museum, like the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Gardens in San Marino? Or some other place where they show Early American art? Children are portrayed in adult clothing, only they are smaller. They are not cute.

   Children were portrayed as they were perceived, as incompetent adults. To be seen but not to be heard. Drags on the family finances until they could do some income-generating work.

   At the time of Jesus, women were not allowed to learn or to worship at synagogue services, their testimony was not admissible in a court of law, and children’s status was seen as even lower than that of women’s. They were not worthy of the time of a respected teacher like Jesus.

   So, when Jesus brought children into the midst of the disciples, and told the disciples that the greatest must be the servant of all and, ³⁷ “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”,

this was shocking!

   Children are human beings, and all people are created by and belong to God. Children have a faith that is appropriate to their spiritual age that is still genuine faith. They too are recipients of the inbreaking Reign of God.

   The Kingdom of God is a rejection of the old order and the power of this world. It’s not about conforming to the world, but about being transformed in the presence of the one, true, living God.

   Sometimes, when Jesus talks about little ones, he is talking about new (spiritually young) Christians, as in Mark 9:42,

⁴² “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.

   Jesus uses exaggeration as a rhetorical device to emphasize the importance of not obstructing the work of God in new Christians.

    But here in today’s reading from Mark 9, I think that Jesus is teaching that salvation is not something we achieve because it is coming through Jesus at the cross. Salvation is something we receive in the transformational gift of faith, the living relationship of faith in God.

   We can’t earn it. We can’t do anything to deserve it. We are totally dependent upon God for it, like a little child is dependent for everything on their loving parents.

   We all must enter the Reign of God the same way, as dependents. As recipients of God’s grace. As little children.

   In this, we do not to come into a childish faith. When we think of someone being childish, we maybe think of being irresponsible, selfish, or immature. We receive a child-like faith.

   A child-like faith knows of its dependence, is open to the presence of God in the Word of God and the Sacraments, and trusts in God for guidance in a living relationship with God. It is given for all people.

   Richard Halverson, former Chaplain of the United States Senate, once said,

“In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.”

   Would it be better for the Church today to re-focus, to be “a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ”?

   Near the end of his book, Bad Religion, Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, observes that the Christian Church has been in decline several times in its history and two things have brought it back: holy living and the arts.

   We can see the great music, literature, dance, painting and sculpture that has conveyed the Christian message through inspiration and patronage over the centuries. We can do it again, today with a child-like faith. How do we do that?

   I remember when our son came home with a letter from his grade-school saying that they would be having an active shooter drill.  “What a world!”, I thought, when children have to prepare for the possibility that somebody might come into their school or onto their playground with a gun and start shooting people.

   Then I thought of when I was about the same age. We had nuclear war drills. You know, where you don’t look at the windows, you get under your desks, or go downstairs to the hallway without windows, or into the basement where food and water were stored in case there was so much destruction outside that we couldn’t get to our parents and they couldn’t get to us. Yes, that was a bit traumatic. But, as I remember it, we were kids and we didn’t show much trauma.

   It’s often said that we are in the world, but we are not of the world. We are in-between. We belong to God. We are God’s dependents, and we need have no anxiety about anything, and no fear, but just to be Whose we are. How?

   By holy living that is not just being nice but is living our lives transformed by God.

   By worship that is not just checking the boxes but is focused and engaged and directed toward the one true living God.

   By doing justice that is not defined by political attachments but by the Bible’s definition of justice: doing God’s will.

   How do we talk about that with a world of people who are often, at best, indifferent?

   Not by pandering to the world by looking like a bland version of it, but by looking like a people whose lives are expression s of the holy and for common ground to communicate,

   Not by being a community that is based on smug self-righteousness, or being a social service agency using religious language, but by being a community of people that loves Jesus as our Savior above everything else and acts on that transformational love.

   Not by appealing for popularity while at the same time pretending to have an outsider status, but by being a people who knows it is set apart, a people who provide clear differences and superior alternatives to being of the world,

   Paul writes, in Romans 12:2,

2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

   We are a new creation. We are a transformed people. We are the died-for on the cross, the dependent children of God.