Because Formation Does Not Happen By Accident - Sermon Transcript

Good morning, friends.

Thank you, choir.

Beautiful.

Tara, beautiful.

Thank you.

Very grateful for the offering.

A reminder, it's easy to think we indeed are alone.

And I'm grateful that I'm not alone this morning.

I'm glad y'all are here.

So thank you.

Thank you for the laugh.

 If you're a guest worshiping with us this morning, I'm particularly grateful for you finding your way here.

I hope you come back and worship with us again in the future.

Lucky for you, we're in week three of our stewardship series.

And no, I do not expect guests to fill out a pledge card.

 We'll take it, but we're not expecting you to participate.

But we are hopeful that you find a place of belonging in our midst, and we're really working to sort of answer this question honestly, authentically for ourselves, and as a body, why church?

It's been a series that has, I think, prompted us to think about the real reasons that we're connected to a faith community.

 And this week, in particular, I've been thinking about a lot.

And it's this idea of formation, the idea of spiritual formation of who we are, of our hearts.

And it's sort of been the essence, I think, for the whole series.

At least that was the idea six months ago when I first started working on this.

 I've been rather preoccupied with this idea, not only why church, but how does formation happen to us?

How are we indeed formed?

Simply put, I think the thesis of today is that formation doesn't just happen by accident.

 Something in our life is always shaping us.

That's the truth.

Something in our life is always at work shaping us.

Always.

It doesn't matter what it is.

It could be our neighborhood, our work.

It could be political worldviews or politics.

 corresponding PAC-funded advertisements on television, Instagram algorithms or TikTok trends, our family history, our faith stories, our marriages, our friendships, our fears, the anxieties we go to bed with each night.

We're always being shaped and formed by something.

 And in my weekly email that I sent out on Friday, I wrote about running into a grocery store to buy a gallon of milk.

Now, the grocery store of choice is Albertsons, for when I have to do this, because Albertsons is often too expensive for me to find any enjoyment in grocery shopping.

I just...

 So Albertson's in Costa Linda.

It's very expensive, but it's very convenient.

I can get there in two minutes.

And so I walked in.

We drink a lot of milk.

I don't know what's going on.

It's an unfortunate thing because we spend a lot of money on milk.

But I went in to get one gallon of milk.

And 20 minutes later, the milk's at the back, right?

20 minutes later, I walk out with a bag of chips.

 some fancy cheese, I can't even pronounce the name of it, and a very strange bottle of barbecue sauce that has never been opened, and it's still in the pantry, just sitting there.

And this wandering in a grocery store, it actually, it has a real name.

It's called the Gruen Transfer.

 The list in your head just sort of disappears.

You stop being a person who came in just for a gallon of milk and become a person who's wandering and curious and eager to find the next purchase.

Design and organize to do that, right?

This is how stores are, and it's named after Victor Gruen,

 who was an architect, hence why I have this unopened bottle of barbecue sauce in my pantry.

And I think one of the deepest American myths that exists is that each day starts sort of on neutral ground.

We're free.

We live in the land of the free.

And our day is unshaped, and we get to sort of decide for ourselves what the day will become or who we will become

 But what if there is no neutral ground?

What if there's no neutral ground?

 What if the question was never whether we would be formed, but what is doing the forming?

Paul knew that, I think.

Paul knew that we were not just free to make decisions about how we'll be formed, that there's always a world and social pressure that is constantly pressing in on us, that is forming us, that is vying for our attention.

And 2,000 years later, Paul's words are,

 our important reminder of this so i invite you to actually hear these words from romans will be in the 12th chapter and i know what's printed in the bulletin says verses one through two but i made a decision late to extend to verse eight so verses one through eight here's what paul says

 I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God's mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and well-pleasing to God.

 which is your reasonable act of worship.

Reasonable act of worship.

Do not be conformed to this age, Paul says, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind so that you may discern what is the will of God and what is good and well-pleasing and perfect.

For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, which is rather rich coming from Paul, but to think with sober judgment,

 each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

Paul goes on to say, for as in one body we have many members, and not all members have the same function.

 So we who are many are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.

We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, prophecy in proportion to faith, ministry in ministering, the teacher in teaching, the exhorter in exhortation, the giver in sincerity, the leader in diligence, the compassionate in cheerfulness.

For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

 Thanks be to God.

Will you pray with me?

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer.

For you are the one who is always renewing us, even when we do not notice.

Amen.

Now, it does matter

 the context in which Paul is writing this letter, I think it's very easy for us to fall into this habit of reading the New Testament, especially the epistles, and we sort of lose sight of the original audience in which the letter was penned.

So it's important to note that this letter is written to the church, the Christian church in Rome, and

 Rome was the capital of the most carefully designed world anyone had ever seen.

It was arranged, the entire city of Rome,

 was arranged down to the smallest detail to teach people who mattered and who did not matter.

There were temples on nearly every corner.

There were festivals and processions and even games organizing society and pointing to the truth that the Roman Empire was claiming.

Even the coins in the pockets of Roman citizens carried the

 image of Caesar, along with the words that were calling him the son of God.

And every time you bought bread, then essentially you had a mini sermon in your pocket.

And Rome did not need to actually convince you to be loyal.

That wasn't really Rome's style.

They didn't go out of their way to convince many people of anything.

It just surrounded individuals, surrounded communities.

 And so Rome surrounds this early church, and Paul is writing to a few small house churches that are tucked into that city, writing to people who are being formed every single day, whether they were aware of it or not.

In Romans, in the first 11 chapters, which is some of the most beautiful writing in the entire Scriptures, the first 11 chapters are all about the nature of God,

 and grace in which God gives the world.

Paul writes about grace arrives before we deserve it and God's love is being unyielding, reminding us that nothing can separate us from that love in chapter eight.

Then in chapter 12, so the first 11 chapters are all about who God is and how much God loves us and grace and all that.

 And then we pick up here in chapter 12.

And the chapter begins, therefore.

 Everything Paul is about to ask is built on what God has already done on behalf of creation.

Grace comes first.

The invitation to live differently comes after a recognition that God's love is being poured out upon creation.

But grace, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us, can become a cheap commodity.

 that the church peddles, or it can be truly transformational.

But for grace to be transformational, it must be costly.

 This is the essence of today's text.

Paul uses actually two verbs to describe this formation and this forming happening to people.

Do not be conformed and be transformed.

In verse two, these are the two verbs.

And the first verb comes from the Greek word schema, which means shape or pattern or an outward form.

It's used primarily to describe clothing.

So think of

 a garment that has a pattern pressed upon it from the outside.

And below that meaning is a more simple meaning of like an image of a mold pressing something into its likeness.

Print.

Print.

 Paul says, do not be conformed then to this age.

And notice that he doesn't say this world or this place.

He says this age.

Every age has a shape.

Every age has a culture.

And every age and culture and shape has a mold.

And while we are centuries removed from the place and the

 world that Paul knew, we know this feeling, I believe, of being pressed in on, being impacted, being formed by the culture in which we live in.

The second verb that Paul uses is metamorpho, the word where we get metamorphous.

 Change.

It's the same word that actually shows up in the Gospels.

It talks about Jesus' transfiguration when he's on top of a mountain.

Face begins to shine like the sun, which seems that that would be very jarring.

It's not a change that's pressed in from the outside like schema.

It's a change that rises from within.

And both of these verbs in Paul's writing, here's the point, both of these verbs in Paul's writing are

 passive.

They're things that happen to us.

That is why I think Paul's words are so important for us today.

 Paul doesn't say do not conform yourself or go transform yourself.

He says do not be conformed and be transformed.

And both things are things that happen to you and they are happening continually right now every day.

And Paul does not offer a third option.

There is no verb here for staying neutral.

You're going to be shaped by something.

 Something is going to shape you.

The only question is, what will you allow to shape you?

That is why Paul's first instructions here seem so strange.

He says, present bodies, present your bodies as a living sacrifice.

In Rome, a sacrifice was something dead.

 on an altar.

Paul says to bring your living body, your hands, your calendar, your habits, your bank account.

This, he says, is a reasonable act of worship to live as a sacrifice day in and day out.

Essentially, Paul is saying that Rome has its worship in you as an early church in the

 Rome has a liturgy, so church, you better have yours.

There's a philosopher professor out of the Reformed tradition.

I don't hold that against him.

 James K.A.

Smith talks about this image, this sort of thought exercise in a book called Desiring the Kingdom.

He asked the reader to imagine walking into a shopping mall as an anthropologist from like another planet.

And when I think of walking into a shopping mall, I think of walking into North Park.

I don't know why I think of walking into North Park because as a kid, we weren't really North Park people.

 We're townies folks, you know?

But let's go through this imagination together, this little thought exercise.

Let's think about walking into a mall.

You would actually, if you walk into a mall, you would see a sacred space.

Carefully lit.

The weather actually never changes in a mall, much like a casino.

 You would see crowds making pilgrimages on the weekends.

You'd see a liturgical calendar, tax-free shopping, back-to-school weekend, Black Friday, Christmas sales after the holiday season.

You would see icons on every wall.

 showing you what a good life looks like and what you have to do to get it.

And underneath it all, you would hear a gospel.

It essentially says you're lacking something, but this can make you whole.

Here's Smith's insight.

He says that the mall never argues with you.

 It never asks you to believe anything.

It just asks you to just practice it.

Just practice going to the mall.

Walk here.

Look over here.

Reach for this, he says.

And practices repeated over time form what we love.

And we become what we love.

And we learn to love through we love.

 through what we repeatedly do.

So the practice is really, in essence, all that matters.

The mall now has gone virtual, obviously, as online commerce spaces never close.

Algorithms know our name.

It remembers what we looked at at two in the morning on a Thursday night.

It is waiting with something new when we wake up.

How convenient.

And the liturgy that once happened on weekends now happens every hour in our pocket.

And it is preaching the same sermon that Rome preached.

 never enough your worth is measured by what you produce and what you own what is mine is mine security is something you build alone and guard carefully we hear that sermon so often that it actually no longer sounds like a sermon it just sounds like the way things are

 Now, I am absolutely not immune to this just because I think about it.

I am the guy with the barbecue sauce in my pantry.

I know the particular liturgy of when the next iPhone upgrade is available to me through Verizon.

I know when the next lens for my camera comes out or the next record I'm going to buy or when the next set of baseball cards is coming out.

I can tell you with a straight face that I am free and I am a thoughtful person and then catch myself scrolling the same three apps you do,

 before my feet ever hit the floor on a Tuesday morning.

The mold doesn't feel like a mold when you're inside of it.

It just feels like your life, which brings us back to Victor Gruen.

Gruen was actually a Jewish architect from Vienna who fled when the Nazis took over.

He arrived in New York with almost nothing.

And what he missed about home were the old city centers, like the city plaza,

 Where there were cafes and walkable streets where people gathered and argued and lingered and all that good stuff And when he looked at the suburbs in America, he saw people isolated They're in their cars in their houses and nowhere to be together So he designed something in 1956 outside of Minneapolis He opened the first fully enclosed shopping center in the country.

He imagined it as a town square and

 There would be gardens and fountains and places to sit.

I imagine it was a lot like North Park.

And around it, he planned apartments and schools and medical offices and civic buildings.

And it was meant to be a place where their community could happen.

And developers loved the idea so much, they took his idea, they took the stores and the parking lots and left out the rest.

 And within 20 years, his town squares have become machines built for one single purpose, keep people walking around for as long as they can to buy more stuff.

And in 1978, Gruen stood before an audience in London and had a very colorful speech in which he essentially disowned the whole thing.

He designed it for community, and it formed people and consumers because the intention didn't matter, because the practices ultimately won out.

 And one of my greatest fears as your pastor is that this could be the church.

It could become our church in pursuit of growth.

We could continue to build something beautiful with the best music in the city, great programs for our kids, and sermons that fit well or tidy, and regardless of the Catholic church bells, fit well within an hour.

 People could come here the way they go to a mall, shopping for the spiritual experience that suits their preferences and simply leaving when a better one opens up.

And while great music and impactful programming isn't inherently bad, if that is all we are, then the Gruen transfer can happen in this sanctuary too.

 John Wesley actually saw this coming in 1786, near the end of his life.

He wrote that he was not afraid, get this, very timely, he was not afraid that the people called Methodists would ever stop existing.

He was afraid they would exist only as a dead sect.

That was John Wesley's greatest concern, that the Methodists would become a dead sect, having the form, catch it, form of religion without the power.

 Wesley's nightmare was not Methodist leaving.

It was Methodist staying, comfortable and respected and well-resourced with the shape of faith and none of the transformation.

Because we can, trust me, we can become obsessed with who is staying and who is leaving, but our main focus should be on how we are faithfully transforming people.

And Wesley warned, wealth and money slowly forms people into a love of the world.

 His answer was not to stop working or stop saving.

His answer was a practice.

Gain all you can, save all you can, and then give all you can.

For Wesley, generosity was not a fundraising strategy.

He wasn't very good at that.

But he was very good at writing counter-cultural liturgies.

That is what Wesley understood generosity.

 That is why Wesley was so focused on transformation.

And friends, we are a historic, downtown, well-resourced Methodist church.

We're not going anywhere.

That is a gift.

But it means that Wesley's warning is, it isn't about some other congregation out there,

 It's about us.

Our danger is not disappearing.

Our danger is having the form without the power.

So then why church?

Why even give to a well-resourced church?

Why should you sacrificially give to this work?

Because beyond budgets, they are important, and rising costs, and paying staff, and keeping the lights on, generosity is a spiritual practice that properly aligns and sustains

 The church is spiritual trajectory.

Paul, right after he says be transformed, immediately starts talking about a body.

We who are many are one body in Christ.

Paul knows something that we keep forgetting.

You cannot live out a...

 counter-cultural liturgy alone.

No one resists the mold of an entire age through personal discipline, regardless of what app you have on your phone.

The spiritual formation Paul talks about doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen in isolation either.

It takes a different type of community like ours to tell a different story to the world.

Stanley Hauerwas once said the church does not have a social ethic.

 There is no social ethic that the church has to distribute to people to help them live a better life.

The church does not have a social ethic.

The church is a social ethic.

The church is here to be a living alternative, a place where another way of being human is practiced.

Practiced.

 Think about what we actually do in this room.

We sing songs that we didn't choose.

Sometimes we even sing songs we don't even like because someone else needs them.

 We sit next to people, no algorithm would ever put us beside.

We confess together that we've not loved the way we should.

We greet friends, family, strangers, all within the same space.

We come to a table where the bread is free and everyone gets the exact same amount.

And we give away money in a world that lives, that thrives on a myth of scarcity.

And none of that is efficient.

None of it maximizes our preferences.

And that is exactly the point.

 These are our liturgies.

They are how God reshapes the love.

God reshapes the loves that the world has bent out of shape.

Paul encourages us to be a giver in sincerity.

That is the opposite of consumerism.

We are scattered and restless, always wanting.

Generosity is a place where a different story is told.

 And long before we noticed the mold, before we ever thought about it, our habits, our pledge cards, the Spirit was already at work in us before we even recognized it.

And that is the transformation.

God is working in us.

 Transformation is not God making us into something else.

It's God revealing within us the imago Dei, the image of God.

And that's why we gather.

That's the reason.

To become more like Christ.

That is why we sing.

That is why we come to this table for communion and baptize infants.

That is why we invest in our children and youth.

 And that's why we strive to be a church with music and art that inspires a sacred encounter with the divine.

It's why we seek to magnify God's love for all people.

That is why church.

And so every year I tell you what our family pledges.

I am one of the only few people on our staff who sees what you give.

So it is only right, I believe.

It is only right.

 You know what we give as a family.

And so as long as I serve as a senior minister of this church, I will be honest and transparent about it.

And so last year, Eli and I pledged $18,600 to the operating budget.

 And this year, Eli and I are raising our pledge to $20,000.

It's a 7.5% increase.

And I'm not telling you that because we've figured anything out, okay?

I'm not telling you that so you can look at me and think, oh my gosh, Mitchell is so pious.

Because our defaults pull at us too.

Well, definitely more me than Eli.

But I still am the one who walks out of the grocery store with weird barbecue sauce, right?

 But giving is one of the few places where we get to pick up the pen.

It is our small counter liturgy in a world that is telling us to consume more, that there isn't enough to go around.

Giving, sacrificially giving, is the one small counter liturgy that we practice every single day.

So next Sunday, we'll bring our commitment cards forward.

 I want you to spend this week thinking about it and praying about it, really being intentional about that number that you write down on your card.

But as you do that this week, know this, long before you even noticed, before you even thought about stewardship campaigns and pledge cards, long before you were even aware God was already at work in you,

 God was already at work in your life, and God was patient and merciful, slowly at times bringing the image of God back to the surface.

And the great news, the good news of the gospel is that you do not have to make that happen.

You only have to let it happen.

 So may we as a church, may we do that work together.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.