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Phil Blackwell

“Creative Maladjustment”

Romans 12:1-8, Matthew 16:13-20

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Jim Winkler is the General Secretary of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. His father, Gene, was the senior minister here at the Chicago Temple until his retirement in the autumn of 2001. Last month Jim began a speech delivered to the International Association of Methodist Schools, Colleges, and Universities with this account:

In 1870 a bishop of the church, Bishop Milton Wright, presided at an annual conference on the campus of a small Methodist college in Indiana. The president of the college, in his exuberant welcome of the gathered church leaders, declared, “We’re living in an exciting age. I think that we’re going to see things happen in our lifetime that right now are just unbelievable!”

Bishop Wright asked him, “What do you see? What kinds of things do you mean?”

“Well, all kinds of things, Bishop,” the president replied. “I believe we’re coming into a time of great inventions. Why, I believe, for example, that one day we’ll be able to fly through the air like birds!”

“You what?” exclaimed the bishop. “You believe that one day we’ll be able to fly?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” said the college president.

“Why, that’s heresy! Just heresy,” the bishop responded. “The Bible says flight is reserved for the angels and for the angels alone. We’ll have no such talk here.”

When the conference was over Bishop Wright went home to his wife and children, including two young sons, Wilbur and Orville.

Sometimes our lack of imagination keeps us from soaring with the creativity God has granted us. Sometimes conforming to conventional wisdom leaves us hopelessly grounded.

Jim picks up his story by fast-forwarding from 1870 to 1903. Orville and Wilbur sent a telegram from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where they were conducting experiments in getting a flying machine up into the air. The message to their sister back in Dayton, Ohio, read, “First sustained flight today, 59 seconds. Home for Christmas.”

Their sister took the telegram reporting this historic advancement to the Dayton newspaper. The next morning there was a small news item under the headline, “Popular local bicycle merchants will be home for the holidays.”

Jim Winkler’s lament is that we still have church leaders like Bishop Wright today, and we still have people who miss the biggest story because they have adjusted their vision to see only the mundane. And then, Jim very helpfully ties this story to a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed non-conformists. The saving of our world from pending doom will come not from the actions of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a dedicated minority.”

In these words from Dr. King we hear echoed Paul’s plea to the Christians in Rome, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.” The need for a dedicated circle of transformed non-conformists.

That is what we are called to be as the church, transformed non-conformists faithfully engaged in creative maladjustment.

It is possible to contend that in the 1940’s and 1950’s many people came to First Church here at the Chicago Temple because it was “the thing to do,” where to be seen. This was true in that era for a lot of First Churches of various denominations. It was a way of conforming to the norm of being a good American citizen, and there was a sort of graduation process. When Baptists became rich, they moved from First Baptist to First Methodist. And then, if things improved, it was on to First Presbyterian. And when real wealth was involved, it was off to First Episcopal. Conformity of a socially acceptable kind.

But social change seldom has come from First Church anywhere of any kind. The desegregation of American society did not start at First Church downtown but with a few brave and faithful souls who were willing to sit in the front of the bus, eat in at Woolworth’s, and wade in at Rainbow Beach.

The movement for women’s right to vote did not start on the steps of First Church but in a small Wesleyan chapel in upstate Seneca Falls, New York when a devoted group of women and men vowed to undertake what was a long and arduous journey that led to the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In today’s world the impetus for the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in our daily lives and institutions has not been a majoritarian effort championed by the churches of our society, but rather provided by the brave few who have been willing to share their full personhood with us, ready or not, because they believed what the Bible said, that we all are children of God.

Saving the world does not come from conforming to the world but being transformed by God. Martin Luther back in the 16th Century, the Catholic monk who nailed his 95 complaints against the Roman Church on the door of the cathedral, appeared before the tribunal charging him with heresy. He is reported to have said, “Here I stand; I can do no other.” If, instead, he had said, “Here I stand, but if you would like, I will stand over there,” there would have been no Protestant Reformation.

It takes people who have been transformed by the renewal of their minds to discern the will of God and to have the courage to work for it, risking being seen as “maladjusted” by the general population, in order to create a better world.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s second sentence seems so timely for us. “The saving of our world from pending doom,” ( how much that feels like the headlines of today as the world’s economic crisis threatens to undo us and so many other cultures), “The saving of our world from pending doom will come not from the actions of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a dedicated minority.”

Now, I have no idea what changes can be made in the financial world to make things better, but we of the Christian faith have all the scriptural warrant we need to reject an economic system that is based on unending consumption driven by anxiety and fear. It is a system that has gotten us this far, but it will not carry us much farther.

If we want to be seen as maladjusted by our neighbors, let us go around affirming the biblical vision that this is a world of plenty, not scarcity. Instead of bowing before the throne of the pharaoh of Genesis who preached scarcity in order to hoard, thereby creating a monopoly and grabbing power over the lives of others, we talk about loaves and fish and sharing and discovering a surprising abundance. Walter Brueggemann, a highly regarded Old Testament professor, insists that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing to do with sexual misbehavior but with the rich overeating while the poor went hungry. We who yearn to be transformed so that we will see beyond the commonplace must risk being creative, even if it makes us appear weird to the world. That is what it means, in Paul’s terms, to be “in” the world but not “of” it.

Each Saturday morning we offer breakfast to 130 people, with take-away meals available to others. There is nothing terribly weird about that; a lot of well-meaning people feed the poor. But as I sat and talked with a food company executive at a wedding reception the other night, we lamented that food production companies and restaurants throw away enough food to feed all the hungry people. Many are trying, but we have not broken through the conformity that makes such waste, such sinful waste, acceptable. One of my greatest disappointments in my eleven years of ministry here in the heart of Chicago is that so many well-meaning groups are trying to feed the famished, but the sum is less than the parts. What can we imagine doing, what creative approaches can we devise, to change this aspect of our world?

That is a challenge for people of good faith everywhere, including here at First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple. You see, times have changed in America since the 1950’s. The norm has shifted so that today not going to church is the expected pattern. These days for us to get up and go to church is seen as a little bit weird by our neighbors. We clearly are in the minority as we meet here this morning. These days when people come to worship here it is not because it is “the thing to do,” but because God has made some undeniable claim on our lives that we cannot shrug off, no matter how hard we try. And to come here to this church, with its constituency representing every zip code of the city and about fifty suburbs, with a wide range of cultures, ethnicities, and races included, with the full spectrum of economic, religious, and political possibilities seated side-by-side, we begin to look like that dedicated circle of transformed non-conformists. Now the question is, how creatively maladjusted can we be?

In the gospel account for today Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Here Jesus adopts an ancient term for the messiah found in the writings of Daniel to describe himself, The Son of Man.

The disciples give the conventional answers to the question. “Some say that you come in the spirit of John the Baptist. Others say that you are the second Elijah. Still others see in you the reappearance of Jeremiah.” There is nothing new here, just uninspired responses conforming to the accepted expectations.

But then Jesus asks them directly, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter blurts out, “You are the messiah, the Son of the living God!” He sees something new. His faithful imagination carries him beyond the expected to profess something new. Jesus is a new kind of messiah, not what the people who were wedded to traditional ideas could see. The transformed mind discerning what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Now, next week we will see that not even Peter captures the full extent to which Jesus refuses to conform to the peoples’ categories. When Jesus begins to tell the disciples about his impending suffering and death, Peter cannot believe it. And Jesus says, “You’d better believe it or you will be working against me, not with me.”

But what would it look like if we here at good old First Church, Chicago, pursued the things that are good and acceptable and perfect with such intensity that others around us would think that we are a bit strange, maladjusted?

What would that look like when we become the public advocates for the poor in a society that wrings its hands in despair as it writes them off?

What would it look like when we lovingly engage children and parents and teachers and principals and administrators to transform an educational system that is so earnest, yet so fragile?

What would it look like when we say that this is a church where everyone is included as a child of God, and then live it out in practical ways . . . the poor and the rich, the conservatives and the liberals, males and females, gays and straight, of all races and cultures, of the religiously sophisticated and those just holding on to one last hope of faith?

What would it look like when we not only talk about how wonderfully accessible the reconfiguring of the sanctuary is, but that we demonstrate it with an intentional embrace of those for whom accessibility is an issue?

What would it look like to turn First Church inside out, wear our bleeding heart on our sleeve, and in addition to inviting people in we take our ministry out to the sidewalks?

Frankly, I do not know the answers to these questions, but together we might find the answers as we follow a messiah who breaks all social and religious conventions in order to save the world.

The saving of our world from pending doom will come . . . through the creative maladjustment of a dedicated minority. Is that who we are? Is that who God calls this First Church to become?

Philip L. Blackwell
The Chicago Temple
August 21, 2011