By David Bartlett, Retired Academic Dean, Yale Divinity School, Guest Preacher

St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church

Carmel by the Sea, May 1, 2010

Romans 12:1-18

John 15:9-16

I.

Two of the most subtle and persuasive authors of the twentieth century were Saul Bellow, who wrote mostly about urban Jews, and John Cheever who wrote mostly about suburban Episcopalians.

A couple of weeks ago some of their correspondence was published including these lines from Bellow to Cheever:

“You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself.  When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page.  There’s nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul. “ [i]

II.

I don’t think that St. Paul would have said that “nothing really counts except the transforming action of the soul,” but he does think that transformation counts for a great deal.

Coming toward the conclusion of his letter to the Romans, a letter of introduction to a church he has not yet visited, he sums up his instructions to them with these words: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds that you may discern what is the will of God.”

Between St. Paul’s words in the book of Romans and our Lord’s words in the Gospel of John we begin to understand what that kind of Christian transformation looks like.

III.

Notice first of all where we are transformed.  We are transformed in church; we are transformed as part of the community of faith; we are transformed as members of the body of Christ.

No sooner has Paul finished reminding the Roman Christians that they are called to transformation than he tells them whose company they’re in; they are not transformed all by themselves, alone.

“For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ.”

As Americans we often live by the myth that we are self-made, self-sustained and self-transformed.  But Paul reminds us of a deep we are made, sustained and transformed by God—but always in the company of others; in the body of Christ; in church.

A third great author of twentieth century America was John Updike, who died just a few months ago.  In one of his last short stories Updike meditates on what spiritual transformation might look like in America, in our time.  The title of the story is “Varieties of Religious Experience.”

One variety of religious experience is the experience of Dan who is sixty four years old and an active Episcopalian and who has always thought that the Christian faith was about right when he thought about it at all and who thought that his faith was pretty much a matter of his own thoughtful self.

Until on September 11, 2001 he stood on a balcony in New Jersey and watched the Twin Towers go down.  And in that moment faith and understanding suffer a great divorce.

Here’s Updike:  “No hand of God had intervened because there was none.  God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything.”

For a long time Dan lives with his abiding anxiety and his passing atheism.  What brings him back toward faith is not his mind, but his spirit, the Spirit: the small acts of community and obedience that finally..the signs of church that ultimately transform the mind as well.

“Dan’s conversion to atheism had not lasted.” Updike writes, “His church pledge needed to be delivered in its weekly envelopes; a minor committee of which he was a member continued to meet.  The church provided a string of words in which his mind could lose itself.

“(Unless he wandered back to church) he would miss the Sunday morning congregation, the smell of waxed pews and musty kneeling cushions, the radiators that knocked on winter Sunday mornings after a week of cool disuse, the taste of the tasteless wafer in his mouth.

“He was alive, and a shadowy God with him, behind him.”[ii]

Transformed by God, of course; but transformed in community.  Transformed in church.

But a footnote, too, members of St. Dunstan’s: notice that in community, in the Body of Christ, each of us brings particular gifts.

I don’t know about Episcopal priests, but I’m an American Baptists and when we look for a new pastor the job description often sounds as if we want her to be all the members of the Body of Christ at once.  He should be a great preacher, an insightful teacher, an astonishingly clever manager, a fund-raiser, a care giver, and the nicest person who ever lived.

You are installing a beloved friend and student as your priest, a man with many gifts; but you are a people with many gifts.  Take from him but share with him as well.

He will transform you, but you will transform him.  Or put differently Christ will transform you all as you share and grow in love with one another.  Transformed and transforming.

IV.

As you share and grow and love.   That of course is the next thing Paul says. “Let love be genuine.”

And in John’s Gospel Jesus himself tells us what genuine love looks like: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

That is how Christ transforms us, by growing us in love.  Maybe at the farthest reach of love we will be asked to lay down our lives for one another.

More often, day after day, we will be asked to lay down some of our privileges, some of our preferences, some of our bragging rights for the sake of other Christians, for the sake of the body.  Transformed.

Let one simple story serve to point the larger truth.

Sunday after Sunday at the worship of the Congregational Church of New Canaan, Connecticut–  As in many churches– the congregation joins together in a shared prayer of thanksgiving.  In the third pew just to the left sits Janet Roberts.  Janet turned one hundred two weeks ago, and she does not see very well or hear very well. Like many of us who do not hear very well she sometimes speaks rather loudly;  like many of us who do not see very well she usually reads rather slowly.  So however slowly and deliberately the congregation says the words of the unison prayer Janet is always slower and more deliberate still.

Week after week communal prayer ends something like this:

Minister and almost all the people.  “Therefore with grateful hearts we come again into your presence, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

And then everyone sits absolutely still while Janet says alone and aloud: “Therefore with grateful hearts we come again into your presence through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Then everyone says: “Amen.”

Take that giving, take that waiting, take that reticence, that counting the other’s needs above one’s own; that is how love begins and grows and transforms and is transformed.

V.

But then St. Paul and Jesus,  in John’s Gospel say one more thing.  Where are we transformed? In church.  How are we transformed?  Through love.  Who transforms us—Christ himself.

So Paul says to the Romans: “We are one body—in Christ.”

So Jesus says to the disciples: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.  Abide in my love.”

All of us, priest and people alike: Christ’s body.  All of us, people and priest alike, abiding in Christ’s love.
Here is what I promise you; by Christ’s power, through love, in the body of the church you will transform and be transformed.

What Saul Bellow said to John Cheever you will be able to say to Rob, transforming you, transformed with you.

“There’s nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul.”

So for this day, for this installation, let the transformation of the priest signal and supplement the transformation of the people.  George Herbert, Anglican priest of the seventeenth century, wrote what it was for a believer, for a priest, to be transformed by the loving power of Christ.

He talked about the first priest, Moses’ brother Aaron,

And then he talked about himself.

AARON.

HOLINESS on the head,
Light and perfection on the breast,
Harmonious bells below raising the dead
To lead them unto life and rest.
Thus are true Aarons drest.*

Profaneness in my head,
Defects and darkness in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest :
Poor priest ! thus am I drest.

Only another head
I have another heart and breast,
Another music, making live, not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest :
In Him I am well drest.

Christ is my only head,
My alone only heart and breast,
My only music, striking me e’en dead ;
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in Him new drest.

So holy in my Head,
Perfect and light in my dear Breast,
My doctrine tuned by Christ (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest),
Come, people ; Aaron’s drest. [iii]

(1)  letter of Dec. 9, 1981. New Yorker: April 26, 2010.p.59)

[ii] in My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, Knopf, New York, 2009.

[iii] George Herbert, Works, Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1970 ed., p. 174.