“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Romans 12: 1-2
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., did a lot of bold and brave things in his all too short life. One of them was to give a speech to professors, practitioners and students of psychology and psychiatry at Western Michigan University, in 1963. I’d call that courageous, because, were I speaking to such an audience, I’d be worrying that they were analyzing me and my mental condition with every word I said, that, when I was done speaking, they wouldn’t give me an applause, but a diagnosis and a bill. Even more courageously, Dr. King took them gently to task for a very common buzzword of theirs at the time, the phrase, “maladjusted,” and its opposite, “well-adjusted.” The whole point of psychology back then seemed to be to help the “maladjusted” become “well-adjusted,” well-adjusted to school, to work, to business and industry, to society, to family and to life in general.
Here’s how Dr. King tweaked their noses in a gentle, friendly manner.
In effect, Dr. King posed the question that too many in his audience had failed to ask: What makes our society, our economy, our schools, our workplaces, our communities, our countries and their policies so well-adjusted and worth adjusting to in the first place? Don’t the prevalence and persistence of militarism, racism, segregation, and more mean that the world to which you’re trying to make us “well-adjusted” is itself “maladjusted?” Like when millions of people in Hawaii yesterday got the message that ballistic missiles were on the way to destroy them, how well should anyone adjust to that? If we become so “well-adjusted” to such a maladjusted world, wouldn’t that just make us all the more maladjusted?
But that left hanging another question that Dr. King did not address in that speech: What is a society, a community, a culture, an economy worth adjusting well to? What would it be like? I don’t fault Dr. King for that omission. He was speaking at a university, not a church. But if he had been speaking to a church, this is where I think Dr. King would have gone to describe his “International Association For The Advancement of Creative Maladjustment:” Romans 12.
I recommend that passage as a description of a well-adjusted society, and as a blueprint for Dr. King’s “International Association For The Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.” For one thing, in it the author, Paul the Apostle, was also dealing with racialized segregation, estrangement and discrimination, and religious bigotry.
The racism, segregation and religious bigotry that Paul dealt with was between Jew and Gentile. In the Roman Empire, Jews and Gentiles were caught in a vicious cycle of mutual antagonism and provocation that finally broke out in war just a few years after Paul wrote these words. That led to the destruction of the Jewish temple, and the exile of Jews throughout the empire.
Before Christ laid hold of him on the road to Damascus, Paul had himself been a most militant Jewish nationalist, a segregationist and a separationist against Gentiles. But after Christ laid ahold of him, forming and growing new communities of reconciliation between Jew and Gentile around the Messiah Jesus was Paul’s heartfelt mission. These communities of racial reconciliation were called “churches.” Paul came to understand that such reconciliation was the mission of Jesus Christ himself, and before that, of his own people, the Hebrews. Under the influence of “the mercies of God,” with which Paul begins these words, for both Jew and Gentile, Paul shed his old sense of “us” versus “them” for a new sense of “we” and “us.” We must do so, too, if we are to be that “International Association For The Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.”
In the sixteen verses we heard from Romans 12, Paul describes what a well-adjusted society, and that “International Association For The Advancement of Creative Maladjustment” looks like in practical terms. In this “International Association For The Advancement of Creative Maladjustment,” we understand that everyone is gifted in some way, and we offer our giftedness for each other’s benefit, not just our own. In fact, we welcome and encourage each other’s giftedness, and not just our own. We “hate what is evil,” and “cling to what is good.” We strive to show honor rather than just to get honor. We associate willingly with those whom the world considers “beneath” our social status. We share with the Lord’s people who are in need, [Jew or Gentile].” And when Paul says, “Practice hospitality,” he’s not just saying, “learn where to place the silverware and in what order on the dinner table.” He’s saying, “Jewish and Gentile believers, slaves and free: worship together as brothers and sisters; pray together, visit each other, share with each other, honor each other, even eat together as brothers and sisters,” however “maladjusted” that looks to our maladjusted world.
And why would we do all that? Hopefully, not just to be “maladjusted” to what is evil. For to be maladjusted just for maladjustment’s sake is itself a kind of maladjustment, a knee-jerk moral and spiritual oppositional defiance disorder that has nothing creative to say, only that if they are for something, then we’re against it. Doesn’t that sound like today’s hyper-tribalism and identity politics of the left and the right gone to seed and run amok?
To be “creatively maladjusted,” we must be on the path to becoming well-adjusted to our Creator, and to all that is creative, good and godly. For example, if we should “conform to this world” and act on the principle that violence is power, vengeance is sweet, and “I don’t get mad, I get even,” then all our creative options go out the window. Then we are trapped with only one of two choices: resignation or retaliation. But when Dr. King organized, inspired and led nonviolent actions for reform and reconciliation, like the bus boycott of Montgomery, Alabama, that took a lot more creativity and imagination, more time, more patience, discipline and thought than planting bombs or firing off guns. But the goal of that nonviolent action was not the destruction of their opponents, but the reconciliation and the liberation of their opponents. Then, the options and the opportunities for succeeding generations of Montgomery’s citizens multiplied.
Being creatively maladjusted to this world can only happen as we are adjusting well to a different world, a better world. That’s how I understand the main, opening verses on which I focus this morning: “Do not be conformed to this world but let yourselves be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Let me suggest a different possible translation of those words that might help us know what world we are to adjust to. Now I never made history in basic entry level New Testament Greek 101 in any of the three times I took that class. So I can’t weigh in with any authority on the grammatical merits of this translation that at least one Bible scholar has offered on Romans 12:2. Let’s see what you think of it. That version says, “Do not be conformed to this world but to the transformed [world] by the renewing of your minds.”
What do you think of that translation? I like it because it because now we know better what it is to which we are to be conformed, or well-adjusted: to the transformed world that is yet coming, rather than the deformed world in which we now live.
That transformed world to which we are to be adjusted and conformed is the one that prophets like Isaiah foresaw, when he said, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” The “transformed world” is the one that Jesus had in mind when he first preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” This transformed world is what John the Revelator saw as a city, descending to reunite heaven and earth, where, “the dwelling place of God is with humanity, and God will live with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And the One seated on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.’”
These are just some of the ways in which the Bible describes “the transformed world,” if that translation is correct. And that’s the world to which Paul calls us to be “conformed,” or, “well-adjusted.” I know that’s not easy. It will make us look maladjusted to this world. It means adjusting ourselves to a world many others cannot see, which is not yet here in its fullness, a world for which we only long and labor and pray and live and die, and yet which is still beyond our capacity to achieve or to engineer on our own. Yet if we are to be Dr. King’s “International Association For The Advancement of Creative Maladjustment,” we must let God’s Spirit adjust us to the world which God is creating for us, and for which God has created us.
That means that another name for Dr. King’s “International Association For The Advancement of Creative Maladjustment,” is simply… the church of Jesus Christ. And the Christian life itself is simply our journey of adjustment to the world as God is transforming it by his mercies, through his reconciling love in Jesus Christ.