Tag Archives: Empire

How Jesus does “Don’t be conformed; be transformed” (August 23, AD 2026; Proper 16)

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Readings (Track 1)

We could easily give all our attention to any one of these texts—but how do we hear them together?

Our first reading describes a situation of brutal oppression. There’s a new king who lies, stokes fear, demonizes a minority (the Israelites). It all sounds uncomfortably familiar. Over the centuries these early chapters of Exodus have helped many oppressed peoples recognize that the same God who cared about the Israelites cared about them.

The situation Jesus and Paul encounter is different, but oppressive in its own way. Empires survive/prosper by extracting resources from the periphery to the center; Rome was no different. Recall the listing in Revelation: “gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron, and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves” (18:12-13).

In today’s Gospel Peter confesses Jesus to be the Messiah. That sounds like good news: oppression is the sort of thing the Messiah is supposed to deal with, right?

Unfortunately, the Gospel reading stops just before Jesus explains what he understands being the Messiah to be about: “From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised” (16:21). To pick up Paul’s language from our second reading, being the Messiah is about presenting one’s body “as a living sacrifice.”

So the oppression doesn’t matter? It matters. But to get at the roots of the oppression it’s no good focusing on the Pharaoh or the Emperor. A bit later in Matthew’s Gospel we’ll hear Jesus say “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave” (20:25-27). It’s this unending competition for dominance that’s the root, a competition that expresses itself in oppression as soon as we have sufficient power. So here the Messiah must take the lead, take a different path.

Recall Paul in our second reading, who moves immediately from “Do not be conformed…but be transformed” to “I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think.” At this point he’s working the same issue Jesus was working.

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” Of course that’s multidimensional, but one of the dimensions—as shown by the following verses—is abandoning this unending competition for dominance. That, of course, is risky, which is why Paul started the paragraph with “present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” Not being conformed, being transformed: it doesn’t stay in the head, but embraces the whole body. “A living sacrifice”—including the many situations in which not competing for dominance will involve turning the other cheek (recall Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount).

In the context of today’s readings, the complementary dimension of “be transformed” is love of the enemy, which Paul addresses later in this chapter—and which we also encountered in the Sermon on the Mount. In situations of oppression or perceived oppression, hatred comes so easily, so naturally.

“You are the Messiah.” Being the Messiah: bearing witness to God’s reign, even when the consequences are predictably lethal. God’s reign: a reign in which we’re free to disengage from the unending competition for dominance, from the ensuing oppression, free to love our enemies. This freedom means more options. As Paul will put it at the end of this chapter, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (12:21).

We might summarize the conversation between our readings from Romans and Matthew like this: Paul can exhort “present your bodies as a living sacrifice…Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds” because that’s we’ve heard Jesus describe as his job description. In fact, it’s hard to think of a clearer example of “Do not be conformed…but be transformed” than what Jesus does with the popular expectations of what the Messiah will do. And, obviously, “Do not be conformed…but be transformed” doesn’t stay in Jesus’ head, but shapes his entire life. Conversely, Jesus’ words help us bring into focus the sort of reorientation of life that Paul’s encouraging.

As I said earlier, not being conformed, being transformed is multidimensional. The dimensions I’ve focused on, abandoning the competition for domination and love of enemy, come from wondering what this Messiah’s doing about oppression. To flesh this out, the testimony of one of the Messiah’s 20th century servants, Martin Luther King Jr:[1]

Nonviolent resistance “does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding.…The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”

Again, nonviolent resistance “avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit.…The nonviolent resister would contend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. To retaliate in kind would do nothing but intensify the existence of hate in the universe. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. [] Parenthetically, that’s not a bad description of the Cross.This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.”

Now, having given Romans and Matthew the lion’s share of attention, where does that leave our first reading and psalm?

That standoff between God and Pharaoh that today’s first reading anticipates, isn’t it a competition for dominance? Of course. On the one hand, that’s one of the things God reserves for God’s self. On the other hand, even for God it’s more a stopgap measure than a long-term solution. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” works no better for God than it does for us.

It’s also worth noticing that the behavior of the two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, as well as the behavior of Moses’ mother and sister, are textbook examples of nonviolent resistance.

What of Psalm 124? If we’ve been listening to Jesus, we recognize that the fundamental danger (“swallowed us up alive…prey for their teeth”) is not our physical death, but that we become indistinguishable from our enemies. Then again, Jesus’ story plays out differently. He is swallowed up, becomes prey for their teeth—and Death (capital D) develops a fatal case of indigestion. As the psalmist rightly concludes “Our help is in the Name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.”

But back to Jesus, his servants Paul and Martin Luther King Jr., and the contemporary kings so skilled at oppression and stoking fear. We prayed in today’s collect, “Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power among all peoples, to the glory of your Name.” What might that “show forth your power” look like today?

[1] From “An Experiment in Love” (1958) in A Testament of Hope pp.18-19.

“The wolf shall live with the lamb”–and Paul’s readers in Rome struggle to make that work! Second Sunday of Advent, 12/7/2025

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Readings

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” So Paul to the Romans in our second reading. Hope: today’s readings flesh that out in some encouraging ways. Let’s dive in.

Whatever else it is, our reading from Isaiah, an exercise in hope.” A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse…” “Stump of Jesse:” that assumes that things have not gone well. Just a few chapters back we heard Isaiah warning Ahaz “If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all” (7:9), but Ahaz is showing no sign of that faith; he’s putting his faith in the king of Assyria! Nevertheless, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse…” The faithlessness of Ahaz—of most of the kings of Judah—will not get the last word. And what a shoot! “With righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”“The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together…” And what is happening in Jerusalem will get international attention: “On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him…” It sounds like what we heard last week from Isaiah (“Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths’” [Isa 2:3]). Hope.

This hope for what God will do through the shoot drives today’s psalm in more general terms: what God will do through any king. Prosperity, international security: yes. The surprise is that what the king is doing focuses almost entirely on defending the needy, rescuing the poor. From the part the lectionary omitted:

For he shall deliver the poor who cries out in distress, *
and the oppressed who has no helper.
He shall have pity on the lowly and poor; *
he shall preserve the lives of the needy.
He shall redeem their lives from oppression and violence, *
and dear shall their blood be in his sight.

God to the king: you worry about the poor; I’ll worry about prosperity and the other nations. The tragedy of Israel’s history: like Ahaz, most of the kings worried about prosperity and the other nations, with the poor toward the bottom of the to-do list. Gentile rulers—to whom the offer is implicitly extended—have tended to do no better. So the hand-copying of Psalm 72 in the centuries before Gutenberg, also an exercise in hope that someone will take it seriously.

So when John the Baptist proclaims “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” that does encourage the hope that God is doing something about those words from Isaiah and the psalm. He’s baptizing at the Jordan, that river that Joshua and Israel crossed to enter the land. It’s a powerful promise: we can begin again. At the same time, there’s that word “repent.” The problem isn’t “those people.” John’s right there with Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That image of wheat and chaff with which our reading ends? The wheat: not those who don’t need to repent, but those who are doing so. So the first of our brother Martin Luther’s 95 theses: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Which brings us to our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. “Abound in hope:” particularly a challenge in the capital of the Roman Empire, whose legions, architecture, and stories had no intention of going anywhere! Virgil, the Empire’s poet, has Jupiter, king of the gods, saying this of the Romans:

“On them I set no limits, space or time:
I have granted them power, empire without end.” (Aeneid i.333-334)

Living among competing narratives is nothing new! So Paul “May the God of hope–not to be confused with Jupiter–fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” How does Paul think this works, particularly “believing”? Our reading is at the end of a section in which he’s dealing with the challenge of Jewish and Gentile believers living together. Some, in faith, keep kosher and observe particular days; some, also in faith, eat whatever they want and treat all days equally. All are tempted to judge, to enlighten the others. While Paul talks about the groups as the strong and the weak, each group would have seen itself as strong and faithful in contrast to the other groups.

Paul: “Welcome one another…just as Christ has welcomed you.” It’s not a call to toleration (too often simply a temporary ceasefire until one of the groups feels strong enough to resume hostiliities), but to actively supporting each other’s different understandings of faithfulness.

Isaiah: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid.” Lovely words, but Isaiah didn’t have to figure out how that actually works. Paul—and the Romans—do. Wolves, lambs, leopards, kids: in God’s faithfulness all thrown together in Rome’s various house churches. Potlucks are going to stay complicated. (With increased awareness of food intolerances in our congregations, we should be able to sympathize!)

And this welcoming one another, encouraging one another, wolves as wolves and lambs as lambs, is a powerful sign that Isaiah’s words aren’t just words, but a world that God is birthing in their midst. So there’s reason for hope. But it’s a hope that doesn’t come cheap. It means the repenting, the turning, that John the Baptist proclaimed, repenting of the natural assumption that our group’s right, that they’re the ones who need to change, that they’re not sufficiently grateful for our tolerance.

Let’s step back for a minute. To the first century Romans Paul writes “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (14:17). But despite the presence of this section in his letter (14:1-15:13) we Christians have been really proficient at finding equivalents to food and drink over which to divide. Within the Anglican tradition, even over the presence or absence of candles on the altar! The problem is that if we’ve got “Welcome one another,” we also have (from Paul’s letter to the Galatians) “if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!” (1:9). Discerning which is applicable in any given situation has never been easy. Nevertheless, this section from Romans is a standing challenge to our tendency to build walls when we should be building bridges.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Not because hope in itself is a good thing; it depends on what we’re hoping for. Our hope centers in prayers like “Your kingdom come” or “Come, Lord Jesus.” How do we “abound in hope”? As our believing shapes our behavior so that our common life offers glimpses of what we’re hoping for, of Jesus’ presence, of Isaiah’s vision: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”