We often talk about change like it’s something we can avoid. It’s not. It is literally how the world (and faith) works.
Episode 18 of the Make Saints podcast: “Changed”
You have probably seen the meme that goes like this: tell me you’ve never read the Bible without telling me you’ve never read the Bible.
That goes through my head whenever I hear a person of faith say: “I don’t have to change.”
What? Seriously? Like, what do you think a life of faith is?
Changed
Our major faith traditions are something of a paradox. Each of them represents both stability and an avenue through which we are bound to change.
Their stable sides offer elements of certainty that can often result in deep rigidity. They offer particular answers to thorny questions and can appeal to our need for something predictable. This is the reason our institutions are often confused for being naturally conservative.
The underlying theologies of Chrisitianity, Judaism, and Islam, on the other hand, are predicated on the human need to change our ways, become something new and different, and display an extremely open sense of relationship to the world around us.
Our desire to define the divine as unchanging defies our understanding of nature, which is always changing.
Even when we look at the base material of the cosmos, we can see that all things are always changing; there literally is no such thing as stasis. Life is growing or declining. For life, unchanging is never an option.
Our central theological conviction is that God changes things.
For Christians, the main story, the one we call the Passion, that we’ll hear on Good Friday and will be completed with the resurrection on Easter, that story is about God changing things.
God changing the world. Changing what life and death means.
Our main story is about change. And every time I hear a Christian say “I hate change,” I think of the death and resurrection. You hate the death and resurrection of Jesus? And baptism, into which we are forever changed? How about confession and reconciliation of the penitent? What other sacraments do you hate? How about the Eucharist! When bread and wine is changed somehow into something new.
Hating change means hating everything about our tradition. Because the whole thing is about change.
Including faith itself.
I know that this isn’t what we all mean when we say “I hate change.” But I’ve got to tell you, it is starting to strike me like when a parent says they hate kids or a police officer has a Punisher skull on their car. You can say you mean something else, but it really doesn’t make sense at the base level.
Because you might want to lean into the certainty bit or be grumpy about having to do this thing. That for sure makes sense. But it’s also not the kind of thing you broadcast. It’s like you’re telling us, Yeah, I love my faith. Just not when it tells me I have to be a halfway decent human being. It’s only one step removed from asking Can’t I just keep being a terrible person?
The act of faith is reaching out to be changed. Over and over. Reaching out to help others change. Over and over. Reaching out to change the world. Over and over.
We are to prepare to be changed.
For Chrisitians, the season of Lent isn’t just the time before Easter. It is a time in which we prepare new members for baptism. And we prepare notorious sinners, who have repented of their sin, to return to the faith community. In other words, as a community, this is the time we prepare people to be changed.
And for the community to do that, we also have to prepare to be changed.
I don’t know how to say it any more directly: being changed is our work. And Lent is the season we literally wrap our heads around that fact.
We are supposed to change.
And specifically, we are supposed to be changed by welcoming newcomers. New people. Not just people like us. People who look like us and talk like us. People with backgrounds like ours. Who like the same TV shows and vote for the same priorities. We are to be changed by our radical welcome of strangers who become friends.
We also are supposed to be changed by welcoming the reconciled. People who may have hurt us. Who definitely hurt the community. People we don’t want to forgive, but God has already forgiven.
We are going to be changed by this. Every time. Which is itself an act of grace. Toward us!
We’re changed already.
Living through a global pandemic has changed us. There is no going back. Even if we wanted to. That time, that way, who we were, is gone forever.
And it is OK to mourn that. Just like it is OK to mourn the loss of our youth as we age or the growing of our children as they age. We can mourn what no longer is, for sure. We just can’t stay there. Or think that is the heart of life.
We are changed.
And at the heart of change is choice. We can choose to see it as opportunity; and so render our fear as merely the temptation of nostalgia. Let us not be seduced by what was or tempted by what seems too difficult. But to recognize what is.
That, at this point, the changing has already taken place.
I used to hate coffee.
I couldn’t stand the stuff. For years I’d show up to things with a bucket of Diet Coke. That was my speed.
Then I gave up sweeteners for Lent. No sweets, of course. But also, no sweetened drinks. Which pretty much meant water, coffee, and tea.
I started making a pot of coffee and putting cream in it. The first week was pretty terrible.
The second, however, far less so.
By the third week, I was actually enjoying coffee.
So I took another leap. I started drinking it black. Which took a week of gulping it down.
By Holy Week, I was drinking black coffee, iced tea, and water. Easter came and went. And that’s what I wanted to drink.
Three weeks later, I tried a Diet Coke. It was sickeningly sweet. I couldn’t finish it. After two months without sweets, I didn’t even like them.
We always talk about change as something we can avoid or begrudgingly accept or hate or consider a nuisance. And similarly, we treat the discipline of abstaining as something we do before getting back to normal.
But there is no normal to go back to.
And we can choose to acknowledge what good thing that is.
Stasis doesn’t exist in nature. We’re either growing or declining. We’re learning or losing knowledge. We’re opening our doors or we’re burying our own. Life is learning and changing and becoming something new or it is dying.
The irony of this, of course, is that for Christians, some of whom are (ironically) afraid of death, our promise is resurrection. That in death, we become something new. So we can’t even avoid change by dying!
That’s what my discipline of drinking coffee taught me. That being changed brought opportunity I never dreamed was possible. Before I couldn’t go 24 hours without a Diet Coke. Until I went two months. And then another month. I was changed before I could even see it.
And I haven’t sweetened my coffee in ten years.
It’s not up for debate. We’re changed. The real question is this: what’s next?