Transform!

"Autobots, TRANSFORM!"
Okay, enough of that. Wait, just one more; "ROLL OUT!"
Man, sometime I wonder what it would be like to do an animated movie about Jesus with Peter Cullen doing the voice of Christ... how unbelievably cool would that be? (Well, maybe its just me ... but I bet a month's pay Dave agrees)

Anywho, as I'm watching the movie the other night (the new one, ick. Don't take your kids is all I can say. Or yourself, for that matter) I'm thinking of the possibilities of human transformation (you'd know what sparked this if you saw the movie, but like I say, don't). What does it mean to transform? What does it mean to change so completely that you are a new creation? And what is the "all-spark" that would cause such change? Turns out the Transformers movie is rife with Christian symbolism, though I'm pretty sure it's unintentional.

Some brothers of ours have put it very nicely, even if they use the more obvious Christianese, "conversion" instead of "transform." But then again, they point out that "conversion" has a rather bad taste to it for many people, but I'll grapple that a bit after the jump.

"It's a shame that a few conservative evangelicals have had a monopoly on the word conversion. Some of us shiver at the word. But conversion means to change, to alter, to make something look different than it did before [see? like transform. get it now?] - like conversion vans or converted currency. We need conversion in the best sense of the word - people who are marked by the renewing of their minds and imaginations, who no longer conform to the pattern that is destroying our world. Otherwise we have only believers, not converts. And believers are a dime a dozen nowadays. What the world needs is people who believe so much in another world that they cannot help but enact it." Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, Jesus for President, Zondervan p.308

If you don't know who our brothers Shane and Chris are, they might shock you at first. Because they truly live what they preach. In fact, they don't really preach much, they just live it. In very much the passion of 'prophetic imagination' that Shane likes to talk about (a phrase coined by Walter Brueggemann in his book by the same name - a book I HIGHLY recommend. Link at right.
There is a link to the bottom right under our bookshelf for the "Jesus for President" book if you are interested. That is a good read too, though many of you may find it fanatical. But I like fanatical: God is a fanatic. It's the fanatics that get things done. Anyway, we are talking about transforming our lives, converting to a new way, being reborn.)

I figure there is a large part of the unbelieving world that winces when we say conversion or transformation because they identify the death to self as a death of self without the rebirth of self. Much of the language we use seems to well up in people a vision of one's personality being all together replaced with something other. And though that is true, it is an other in the sense of a bulb into a flower, a seed into a tree, a caterpillar into a butterfly. The thing we are now must undergo death in order that we may change into what we are truly meant to be. Did Christ not say that unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it produces no fruit? I think none of us want to die because we imagine the thing we turn into won't be 'we' at all.

Let me ask this: if God originally made you (cause you sure didn't make yourself) and the world around you has squashed you, hurt you, hardened you, or conversely, you have squashed, hurt and hardened others, do you not see that it is the fallen nature of the world that has shaped you? Whether by your own idea of what you want to be in order to survive, or like the stone in the river having been slowly shaped and rounded by the flow and rocks around you, that though loved, you shape has ... lost its shape? What God seeks to do is take the beautiful person He originally made and give you back more of your true, original self, to fill back in the places that have been rubbed out or to sand back down the callouses that have formed. He doesn't want to take 'you' out of you, He isn't into making robots (sorry Optimus); He wants real people, not stones in the river or over-calcified bones. And that requires transformation, renewal, conversion, rebirth. God seeks to make you more you. Which will look very Christ-like, god-like. That's what happens when we are reborn into a Holy Family, we take on the divine shape. After all, we are made in His image.

So, instead of the overused revival jargon, 'Be reborn and Go forth!' I can hear in Cullen's deep voice, "TRANSFORM AND ROLLOUT!"