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Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church
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Becoming a New Person |
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New People in a New Culture Romans 12:1-12 First Sunday after
Epiphany January 13, 2008 Many people believe Christianity is only about being forgiven of our sins so we can go to Heaven when the time comes. Actually, Christianity is about much more. Christianity is about the restoration of the whole person into the person and way of life God intended us to have in the first place. Eventually, it is also about the restoration of the culture in which we live. The culture, which the Bible calls, “the world,” is broken. It no longer operates on the principles of goodness and justice and righteousness. It operates on mangled perversions of those principles, often twisted into actions and ways of life that are in complete opposition to the principles for which it was made. God is going to restore the culture one day. He will recreate everything and restore it so completely it will be called the New Heavens and the New Earth. Meanwhile, God is at work restoring lives to His original pattern. Being a Christian is about being one of God’s “works in progress.” Its about being “under construction.” Its about God working in your life to restore you to the kind of thinking and living and relating He intended all of us to have before we threw it away in that tragic event we call the Fall of Man. In Romans 12, St. Paul, referring to this process, calls it being transformed, and he puts it into two parts.
First, he says “be not
conformed to this world.” “This world” is the mass of ideas, values, and morals on which people and culture operate. It is also the culture built upon those ideas and values. Those values and that culture are broken. Evidence of this is everywhere, and is so prevalent as to be self-evident. We have great hopes of peace and justice, of a nation and a world where everyone is free and safe and happy. But the reality falls far short of the ideal, and often, the solutions we attempt cause more problems than they solve. This brokenness extends to every area of culture. Its ideas are warped. Its values are warped. It often calls good evil and evil good. Its morals are warped so much that calling sin “sin” is considered immoral today. And man is broken. Not just Mankind, but each of us personally. Our intellect is broken, so we have trouble thinking right thoughts. Our will is broken so that we have trouble making ourselves want to do good. Often we know what we should do, but don’t want to do it. Our emotions are broken, so that we sometimes find pleasure in things we should abhor. Our values are broken, so that we often value the wrong things and devalue good things. That’s why the world is broken. We broke it by seeking to run it on our broken views. This brokenness is what the Bible calls “sin.” And this shows us why it is sin. It is sin because it breaks people and it breaks culture. But
something has happened to us as Christians.
We have met God, and we have been forgiven of our brokenness, our
sins. We have been treated by God as friends, and accounted as righteous
by Him through the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.
And now we face an issue. Will
we continue in the same broken ideas and values and morals that were so
much apart of us before we came to Christ?
Or will we adopt new ones? Will
we be the same kind of people we were before?
Or will we become new people?
Will we take our ideas and values and morals from the surrounding
culture, This is what Paul is talking about in our reading from Romans this morning. “Be not conformed to this world.” Do not shape your life as a Christian on the broken values and vain philosophies of a broken world.
Second, he says, “be ye transformed.” Not long ago the “cool” word for change was “morph.” I notice that all the presidential candidates are trying to show younger voters how “cool” they are and how much they want to change America. I suppose that if they really want to be cool they should talk about morphing this country and government. Morph is a shortened form of the word you all remember from high school biology, “metamorphosis.” It’s a Greek word used to describe the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly. As you know, the New Testament was written in Greek, and “metamorphosis” is the very word used in Romans 12 to describe the change that takes place when a person becomes a Christian. We are metamorphosised into a completely new kind of being. This transformation is first an inner transformation. God gives us new values, new morals, new intellect, new emotions, new will. He doesn’t just “fix” our old ones. He doesn’t just put a patch here and a patch there. He replaces the old with new, which is a complete new kind. He causes us to begin to think God’s thoughts, to feel God’s feelings, and value what God values. One of the great problems Christians have today is trying to be Christians while clinging to their old values and ideas, and culture, and it just doesn’t work, as we see in their lives and in their churches. This transformation is also an outer transformation. It causes us to begin to identify with new people who share our new views and values. In other words, we are “saved” not only out of our former broken selves and views, but also out of the culture that is built upon them. And we are brought into a new culture built on the new values. This culture is called by many names in the Bible; the family of God, the temple of the Holy Spirit, but usually we call it simply, “the Church.” Let us pray. O God our Saviour, we confess our brokenness before you this day, and humbly ask that, by your unbounded grace, we may no longer be conformed to this world, but be transformed into new people and a new culture. In the name of Christ we ask it. Amen. The Rev. Dr. R. Dennis Campbell, Vicar, Holy Trinity Anglican Church,
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