Whatever Happened to Conversion? John M, Buchanan
John 3:1-15 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
May 15, 1977 Columbus, Ohio

There are two ideas that are notoriously hard to sell in the contemporary
church: One, the notion that there is something wrong with humanity, corporately,
and each of us individually: that it is responsible for evil and injustice histor-
ically, and unhappiness and estrangement, personally: the idea, that is to say, of
Sin; Two, the notion that salvation is a gift of God and not the prize given for
many accomplishments on the day of our graduation: the idea, that is to say, of
Grace, The difficulty we experience with those two ideas, plus the fact that we
live two thousand years in time away from those people who first decided to follow
Jesus Christ is what has happened to conversion,

Two weeks ago we began to look at the topic through the experience of Simon
Peter, I suggested that Peter became a new man when, after the resurrection, he
looked honestly at his own failures and the miracle of Christ's love which was not,
apparently, effected by those failures, I suggested that Jesus saw more in Peter
than Peter even dared see in himself and that his rebirth was, in part, his catch-
ing this new and bigger vision of himself.

Next Sunday I hope ‘to trace the experience of another person in the Gospels,
the fascinating story of Mary of Magdala, known as Mary Magdalene, This morning I
invite you to consider the case of an intriguing old man, Nicodemus by name,

The incident recorded in the third chapter of the Gospel according to John is
actually the first of three appearances by Nicodemus in the record, His was a re~
markable pilgrimage. Later he would defend Jesus in the Sanhedrin, And after the
crucifixion he would accompany Joseph of Arimathea in claiming the body and provid-~-
ing an appropriate burial, He was an altogether admirable man,

His interest in Jesus of Nazareth began early. One time he came to Jesus at
night, apparently to avoid being seen. He wanted to talk: Jesus told him that if he
was looking for the Kingdom of God he would have to be "born anew", Now that, frankly,
perplexed the old man. He was, after all, a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin,

He was, that is, a good man; honest, generous, fair. His life was ordered by the
Holy Law of Moses. His style was set: even if he wanted to, he didn't know if he
could become a new person, And obviously it was ridiculous for an old man to con-
sider the possibility of actual, physical rebirth. Nicodemus wanted to know two
things: Why it was necessary for him to be born anew, and How it was possible: the
same questions which we would ask were we in that situation,

Let's begin with the "why?", at the point where we seem to have the most con~-
sistent difficulty, The Gospel of Jesus Christ begins, philosophically, on the
premise that there is something radically wrong with the human condition: that the
instincts for survival, preservation and self-enhancement which are so healthy and
necessary a part of the cnimal kingdom become, in the human community, selfishness,
greed and violence. ‘Tne New Testament calls it Sin, with a capital §, and suggests
that to be human is to be afflicted by it. The Protestant Reformers wrote a lot
about it, Luther taught that the human heart "curves in upon itself". John Calvin
submitted that everything we do, even good things, are tainted by self interest and
pride, In the 1920's Walter Lippman in his very popular, A Preface to Morals,
scandalized that very optimistic generation by doubting that "natural" humanity was
capable of moral behavior, He wrote, ",.,the unregenerate man can only muddle into
muddle," And Dr, Karl Menninger, even more recently, suggested that the healthiest
thing we could do for Western Civilization would be to reintroduce it to the old
Christian idea of original sin,

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There is, admittedly, a very fine line between the honest confrontation of the
human condition, and a grim and manipulative concentration on what St. Paul called
our "Lower nature", Too frequently, the church has ended up on the wrong side of
the line, convicting people for their sinfulness, making people feel bad. about
themselves, loading guilt upon guilt, But even though that is true, I would submit
that the church which ignores the idea of sin, and restricts its Gospel to the power
of positive thinking and the potential of the human personality does you no favor at
all, Everyone who is honest knows what Paul meant when he confessed: "The good I
would do, I leave undone: that which I would not do, I do: there is no health in
me," Everyone knows how selfishness can hurt others - even when we don't intend it:
how easy it is, for instance, to be isolated by the walls of our own egos, even from
those we want and need and to end up estranged from the very persons we deeply love,

The Gospel of Jesus Christ begins on the premise that we are separated from
our true identity: that in Jesus Christ God has done something to set things ~ cht:
that we are invited - as was the case with a son who strayed to a far country - to
come to our senses, turn around, return home, and be reunited with our father, our
brothers and sisters and our true selves,

That idea, I said earlier, is hard to sell, But social scientists, particular-
ly psychi:.rists and psychologists, do not discount it. I included on the bulletin
cover a smai” quote from a scholarly essay on Sigmund Freud about the s*>.:ficance
of a change that makes people see things in a difficult way. The late’ +. ‘oberts,
whose book on the relationship between psychology and religion is stil. .equ.red
reading for theological students, observed in a good, but difficult sentiment, "Since
the obstacles to ethical and religious insight are not merely intellectual, but in-
clude those emotional conflicts which prevent a person from living the truth that
he sees, they can be removed only by dynamic transformation of the whole self and
the center of motivation." (Psychotherapy and a Christian View of Man, p.68).

Nicodemus would have wondered, as we do, why it was necessary to talk about
rebirth and conversion. The answer of the New Testament to that question is, simply,
the reality of sin. Conversion, in the New Testament idiom, is the turning of the
self to God so that Jesus Christ becomes Lord: He becomes judge and companion and
motivator, His will, not self interest, becomes the behavioral standard by which we
live: His love and forgiveness become the new experience of grace out of which we
are enabled to live a new life. We may not be altogether comfortable with that, but
one thing is clear, the New Testament makes no sense whatever without it.

The lingering and real problem, I have always felt, however, is not what the
New Testament teaches but the stereotyped definition of conversion - which is so
very popular in our culture, The very words "conversion" and "rebirth" as they are
currently used, aie embarassing to Presbyterians, If I were asked if I am a Chris-
tian, my answer would te "yes", If, on the other hand, someone asks if I am born
again I'm likely to ch ge the subject. It does not ordinarily occur to us that the
two are one and the seme: that to be a Christian is to be involved in a process of
becoming that may be described as new birth, Of course, people who ask don't know
what we mean by "process" either. Evangelism, unfortunately, has come to be the
sole property of the salesmen and manipulators who would market Jesus Christ like
soap powder to the end of creating something called a “conversion experience"; in
which the individual undergoes a complete emotional upheaval at a certain time and
place,

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Everything in a good Presbyterian reacts negatively to all of that. We don't
like to be manipulated: we don't like emotions to rule our reason: we don't care for
the superficiality of a campaign which employs bumper stickers and celebrity en-
dorsements, But most of all we feel - and if we are more than casually acquainted
with the New Testament - we know, that conversion or rebirth is a process and not
an event, Nicodemus, himself, is illustrative. Apparently it began intellectually
for him: he came to Jesus with a question. The account includes no mention of an
immediate response; the clear inference is that Nicodemus went away from the en-
counter still wondering, asking, disturbed, Later he was moved to say a good word
for Jesus in the council: and finally, in coming forward to claim the crucified
body, he made his public commitment,

In the recent edition of Theology Today, Eric Routley writes, "Most of the mw
great conversions were preceded by arguing and protest: Paul, Augustine, Wesley:
and those converted did not cease to wrestle once they had been," (Theology Today,
April 1977, p.23). And Charles Colson in the book everyone is talking about, Korn
Again, makes very clear that his conversion story has many chapters and was net a
one time event,

Can't we, who stand so proudly in the theologically integrity of the Reformed
tradition, sxy that conversion is always a process? Can't we allow for the validity
of the occasivnal dramatic upheaval, without ignoring the best of our owa tradition
which is that rebirth is punctuated by many decisions: that for everyone tiexe is
a time when a first, faltering step is made, but that the journey takes a lifetime?

I think we can and must. I think we make a serious error when we retreat into
the theological labyrinth of our tradition. Christianity is certainly more than an
emotional high: but just as certainly it is more than the sum total of its intellec-
tual insights. Again, David Roberts is instructive. He wrote, "At the worst, the
Churches have acted as though Christianity could be transmitted by getting people to
say 'yes' to dogmas," (op.,city. p.69). The sad truth is that no one gets very ex-
cited about doctrine except theologians and preachers, No one commits his or her
life to a creed, Somewhere between the emotional upheaval model and a lifetime of
listening to sermons on the classic doctrines of incarnation and atonement, is the
honest position, Finding it and claiming it is, I believe, the most urgent task
we face today,

Conversion is the answer to what the New Testament calls sin. It is a process.
It is also a changing of the whole person, The revivalistic approach risks changing
emotions alone, The intellectual approach aims at the mind, Neither deals very
adequately with the whole person.

The story is told of the Barbarian Tribes of Northern Europe who were con-
verted to Christianity at the point of a sword, It was their custom, as they strode
into the water to be |. ; tized, to hold their battle axes high above their heads,
making certain that these weapons and the life style they represented, were not
altered by this magic rite. I like that little vignette, even if it is not true,
because it is precisely what continues to happen. We're always holding something
out of the water: our wallets and check books for instance; "sure I believe, but
that doesn't mean I have to make financial sacrifices, does it?": or our social
attitudes; "of course I'm a Christian, but that doesn't mean I have to love
everyone, does it?" Conversion means the turning of the whole person, or, to be

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consistent metaphorically, the emersion of the whole person, It has to do with the
entirety of our personhood: our moncy, our time, our life goals, our politics, our
economics, our relationships,

Elton Truecblood said one time, "..,the conversion which is important is not
conversion from sheer paganism to nominal Christianity, not conversion from the cold
to warm, but conversion from luke-warm to hot, from a mild religion to one in which
a person's whole life is taken up and filled and compelled." (Robert Raines, New
Life in the Church, p, 27-28),

That, frankly, is the conversion in which I am most intensely interested, We
do not live in a culture that is pagan, The early Christian missionaries had to
begin, literally, from scratch, Christian missionaries and fraternal workers in
some places in the world today, must do the same. But this is a culture born out of
a deep rooting in the fundamentals of Christianity, a culture whose institutions
bear the marks of that profound influence. The Gospel of Jesus Christ has been a
dominant motif in the American experience since the beginning. A recent U.S,News
and World Report feature on religion repeated the familiar, and still astounding
data: 94% of our population believe in God. 56% regard religion as a "very
important" part of their lives,

The ce~version which ought to be claiming our attention therefore is not, as
Trueblood nuted, from paganism - but from nominal Christianity. Or as every study
group which ever looked at this or any local church, has observed bluntly: "the
evangelistic responsibility of the church begins in its own congregation," We
need new members - new Christians: but more than that we need old members to warm
up a bit, and to begin to act as if Jesus Christ and His Church really do matter,
In his little classic, The Screwtape Letters, C,S,Lewis has the devil discussing a
recent convert with his nephew and lieutenant, Wormwood, "In a week or two you will
be making him doubt whether the first days of his Christianity were not, perhaps, a
little excessive, Talk to him about ‘moderation in all things’. If you can once
get him to the point of thinking that religion is all very well up to a point; you
can feel quite happy about his soul, A moderated religion is as good for us as no
religion at all - and more amusing." (p.51).

How? Nicodemus mused about the unlikely image of an old man being born again,
And Jesus, in one of the most hauntingly beautiful sentences in the New Testament
said, "The wind blows where it will, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not
know whence it comes or whither it goes," It is significant that in both Greek and
Hebrew "breath" and "wind" and "spirit" is the same word. Jesus was saying, I
believe, that, like the wind, the breath or spirit of God moves mysteriously, in-
conspicuously, to draw men and women to Himself: that conversion, finally, is God's
doing, not ours, ‘Yuat means we don't have to push, We don't have to be frantic in
our promotion of the G ¢pel, It means that, in their anxiety about success the
evangelists who count » conversions are doing more than our Lord Himself did, He
was content, apparently, to present His case with integrity and let God take it
from there, I think that is the most important understanding of all. The evangel-
istic task of the church is to afimounce the Gospel and invite men and women to
discipleship and then give God time and space in which to work, It is not to badser
and cajole and argue people into being born again, In fact, if the Gospel record
is to be trusted, the result of badgering, cajoling, arguing, manipulating, plead-
ing and frightening are not conversions at all, but simply badgered, cajoled, man-
ipulated, frightened statistics on someone's church roll,

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How to do it? I've talked with many people who have been made to feel bad‘
because they don't have a sense of salvation; assaulted verbally by others who can
tell the time and place when they were horn again, these folks fcecl inadequate and
wonder at times if they are really Christians, The word of Scripture is simple.
The wind blows where it will: stand in it: step worrying about it long enouth to
give God an opportunity to touch your life: let yourself go: Let God love you,

We are here this morning for as many different reasons as there are different
individuals seated in the Sanctuary, Something stirred us once: something once
prompted us to ask a question: or something motivated us to get up from where we
were sitting and move to a place vhere we saw the wind blowinz. God, I choose to
believe, began a conversation with us and something in us responded,

The really important thing is that the conversation continue. God may be
trusted, He will keep moving in and out of our lives, pushine us here, prodding us
there, calling us up short over here, challenging us to reexamine over there, And
when we respond, when cur Lives continue to change dramatically, or as imperceptably
as the growth of a child, we are, in fact, in the midst of conversion,

That is the miracle of grace, That is the Goed News of the Gospel, that in
Jesus Christ, God can take your Life and mine and make something of worth and
value and sipuificance,

Whatever happened to conversion? Wot a thing. The fact is that God, right
now, is working at it - and succeeding,
Amen,

Our Father, we erect so many barriers: walls of pride and selfishness and
the status quo. Break them down: draw us to you and to one another, through

Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,