Hilton Head Island, SC - May 19, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Romans 12:1-8; 12:9-21
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:2 (RSV)
The Roman-dominated society of the first century was a society which was starting to decay. The complete collapse did not occur until three centuries later, but already at the time of the apostle Paul there were signs that the wheels were beginning to fall off.
After having addressed the Christians in Rome with some of the loftiest theological prose ever ascribed to the written page, Paul suddenly shifted from great theology to very practical ethics. How are people who believe the right things to do the right things: that was the focus of Paul's concern in Romans, Chapter 12. He began by urging them to live their lives in such a way that they would become examples of the worship of God every minute of every day. "I appeal to you therefore by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." If you live as Christians ought to live, Paul told the Romans, it will be as though daily you offer the best sacrifice to God of which you are capable.
Then Paul suggested a particular kind of stance Christians might consider on how to relate to a pagan and fallen social order. "Do not be conformed to the world," he said, "but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." You can't look to the culture around you for guidance, said Paul, because it has lost its way. If you conform yourself to the world, it's all over, so you must be transformed, allowing God to enter into your mind and heart and will. Then, and only then, shall you be able to live as you ought to live.
To illustrate, what kind of world is it in which children are now living? For one thing, the percentage of divorces among their parents more than twice as high today as it was fifty years ago. Nearly 40% of all the children born in this country today are born out of wedlock, and that is five times as high a percentage as it was fifty years ago. More than half of American children will live in a single-parent household sometime before they are eighteen years of age.
Those statistics, of course, refer not to the behavior of children but to adults. And here are some other numbers which are even more depressing. The National Victims Center, an organization designed to help rape victims, came out with some statistics that illustrate a nation that is in severe decline. Among rape victims, of whom there are twelve million in this country each year, only 13% are 25 or older, and 61%, nearly two-thirds of all females who are subjected to this terrible trauma, are 17 or under; 29.3% of the total are 11 or under, which is shocking beyond description. Clearly the older you are, the safer you are. Only 22% of all rapes are committed by total strangers. The perpetrators in 11% of all cases are fathers or stepfathers, 9% are husbands or ex-husbands, 10% are boyfriends, 16% are other relatives, and 29% are other acquaintances. What those numbers tell us is that a girl or woman is four times safer on the streets of an unfamiliar city than she is in her own home or school or workplace.
Furthermore, we are consigned to a time in which profanity and vulgarity are commonplace throughout society among adults, teenagers, and even children. Profanity comes from a root word which means “desecration.” It takes good words that often describe natural functions and turns them into desecrated words. Vulgarity is a word that connotes words that the lowest of the common people, the vulgar people, use. Decades ago, well-educated and refined people simply did not use those words. Now teachers and professors use them, talk show hosts use them, and they are used in profusion in movies to assure at least an R rating in order to attract more viewers.
You know the expression, “Talk is cheap?” Well nowadays, talk is really cheap. Much of it is worthless, and completely without any meaning at all, except as an indictment on its users. Culture is the summation of all the factors that contribute to the unique essence of every society of people everywhere on earth. Culture doesn’t have to be fine china, linen napkins, or discussions about Socrates, Shakespeare, or Schumann. But if four-lettered words are used every fourth or fifth word, language is rapidly deteriorating into jingoistic oblivion.
Pornography is much more out in the open than in previous generations. When a former president and would-again-be-president is on trial for trying to prevent his election from being damaged by his brief encounter with a porn queen, it becomes evident that who many Americans have thought we have always been isn’t who we are.
As if all of the above were not bad enough, the impediments to successful and fruitful child-rearing are not only negative factors; many of them are positives as well., but there may be far too many of them. (You give a grumpy social observer such as yours truly enough time, and I can find an absolute torrent of social decline in American behavior.)
It is a sad reality that there are many very worthwhile activities for youth which may render childhood and youth an almost impossible challenge. I'm talking about after-school sports and yearbook staff and Spanish Club and the Save-the-Planet Society and Brownies and Cubs and Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and ballet and gymnastics and fund-raising programs and jogging and tennis and golf and competitive or non-competitive bike riding and heaven knows what else. I'm also talking about homework and studying and the Boys and Girls Club and youth fellowship and Sunday School. Any of these things by itself is excellent, but if you add all of them together -- and it is amazing at how many parents and their children try to put them all together -- you can have some very strung-out young people. Nobody can successfully do all of that, and most can't even do most of it. The demands on energy and stamina are simply too great. Nonetheless millions of American youth, especially middle and upper-middle class white ones, are on that fast track to collapse.
I just read about a retired professor of neurology at the University of Cincinnati who was recounting his childhood in a book he has written. His father deserted his mother before she died at an early age, and he was raised in a German Lutheran orphanage. Of that experience he writes, "Religious training, which was wholly by rote learning, occupied almost the whole of Sunday. The children were marched to the neighboring German Evangelical Lutheran Church in a long line, just as they were marched to school. It was there that I was fortunate enough to be assigned to the best teacher of my early years. Somehow she led me to appreciate the Bible as literature. But the appalling sermons in English or German, like the other religious exercises routinely performed at the orphanage, guaranteed my agnostic outlook as an adult. The vaccination, so to speak, took." (The Understanding Physician by Charles D. Aring)
As bad as that professor believes his exposure was to Christianity as a child, nevertheless he was exposed. For many children today, there is almost no Christian exposure, either because the parents feel they are too busy to teach their children Christian values or to go to church where they are taught, or because they feel the children are too busy with other things fully to benefit from a Christian worldview. All of us are well past this situation personally, but our children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren may be painfully confronted by it.
Being a parent today is a tough assignment, but I am convinced it is a piece of cake compared to being a child. Young people have had so many things stacked against them by the kind of society into which the older generations have stumbled, but there should be two things they can always count on: the love and support of God and of their parents. And if their parents don't know or don't reflect the former themselves, they may be unable to exhibit the latter.
In an election year politicians appear to be gravitating to the extremes on the political right and left, causing considerable polarization. It also seems certain that the two major parties and the primary voters will select two old and unpopular candidates for president. We are complicit in that to a very limited degree. We don’t speak up enough to insist on a change of course.
Old fogeys say certain kinds of old fogey things, and one of the best bromides of old fogitude is that we should get back to basics. Well, there are some basics we probably would be well served by getting back to. Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, once observed that marriage is "a contract between a man and a woman which allows each the use of the other's genital organs for life." You'd have to say that is not the most wildly romantic description of holy matrimony ever given semantic birth, nor is it likely to evoke bursts of poetry or impassioned prose. But old Immanuel, a bit of an old fogey, I suppose, had something there. If parents would pay more attention to one another, they might then pay more attention to their children, and that would be a great leap forward. We are all far too busy with other people and things for our own good, even with things which in themselves are good. Adults can't do it all, and if they try, their children may be ruined in the process.
Back when I graduated from college in 1961, the Counter-Culture of the Sixties was just springing into being. It was represented by the beatniks and then the hippies and the grass smokers and lotus eaters and glue sniffers. They said the main culture, the one which previously had prized a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage and a house in the suburbs and later showed widespread support for a war that was going to become increasingly unpopular, was a culture that had to be exterminated by a Counter-Culture. Love and peace and a kind of blissful anomie would somehow evolve without any accompanying anarchy. Things didn’t worked out as they hoped, but it all seems to be coming around again in quite a different way. This spring college campuses have illustrated their own brand of collegiate unrest.
Now the world could use another Counter-Culture, a Christian Counter-Culture, one which recognizes that where we are isn’t where we want to be, that the kind of world we have created is inimical to children and other humans, that if we continue on in the direction we have been following we will have guaranteed that only miracles will enable the world to be what God wants it to be
Fairly frequently it appears as though the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Paul lived in such a time. When he was young he literally thought the world was going to end. When he got older he became upset that it wouldn’t. So he told the Christians in Rome, none of whom he had yet met, that he and they and everyone needed get their acts together.
“Do not be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is good and acceptable and perfect….Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; he who teaches, in his teaching; he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who contributes, in liberality; he who gives aid, with zeal; he who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness…. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12; selected verses.)
In and beyond this world God alone is of ultimate importance, but in this world there is nothing more important for the future of this world than the process by which Christians establish a counter-culture to the sordid culture all of us have allowed to come into being. Nothing is fixed; all is in flux; each of us alone decides. We neither are forced to go with the flow or to buck the tide; we are the ones who set the agenda --- unless we meekly surrender, thinking we are powerless to do anything.
I know what many of you are thinking. You're thinking, "But tell me, specifically, what I should do!" Typical Americans. We want a How-to rather than a Do-It-Yourself instruction book.
We are neither unintelligent nor uninformed, so we must do what we have always known we should do. Lead more often than follow. Tell more often than ask. Be more and talk less. Show what to do more than tell what to do. Don’t be conformed to the world, especially this world. Be transformed. Each of us can make a difference. So be different.