Transformation: will we be real?

My personal theologian in residence, Vaughn Delano McDevitt, was playing with his Tonka garbage truck as he rode to Asilomar with his parents for Annual Gathering.  He was making the vroom vroom sounds, entering into solicitous dialogue with his truck, researching its construction, tucking it in for its nap. Then he called upon his parents for some information.  “When my truck gets bigger, will it be real?”

When my truck gets bigger, will it be real?  Will the process of growing up-which for me as a 2-and-a-half year old is expressed as “getting bigger”-work its wonder on this toy and transform it into an actual, noisy, gasoline powered, on the street, trash-toting sanitation vehicle?  Will this replica of a garbage truck, somehow, someday, become what it seems for all the world it is meant to be?

There is in that question an understanding of the theological take on transformation.  “Transformation,” as we use the term in church, is not a mutation or a corruption of the original so much as it is a clearer, deeper, truer rendering of that flashing morsel of starlight that screeches into the universe at the birth of every human being.

Transformation.  It’s not just growth.  Or change.  Transformation of lives, of churches, of communities demands the courage to traverse vast and intimidating distances, to skate across the predictable and wind up at “beyond” for the sake of becoming who we are called to be, dreamed to be, desired to be, not in a cacophonous tumult of individual melody lines, but in the joyous improvisation of a wonderful harmony in the Creator’s symphony of life.  Transformation does not occur in isolation. 

We read in Deuteronomy [26: 1a, 11], “When you have come into the land that the Holy One your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess…..Then you, together with the foreigners who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty That the Holy One your God has given to you and to your house.”

Shoved beyond our fascination with our own experience,
We spin and tumble,
Into a future more grand and compelling
Than anything we’d pictured
With our squinty and suspicious imaginations,
While huddled, narrow-hearted,
By the narrow hearth of the habitual.
Celebrate!
With the foreigners who abide among you,
With the outsiders and outcasts,
All the bounty.

Transformation is big.  It makes us real.  So when we are bigger, will we be that real beloved community?

When our compassion is so big that starvation hovers only as a horrific memory and health care is a human right, will we be real?  When our kick-it-into-gear reaction to injustice is so big that we shift into prophetic mode the moment we hear of the murder of a religious worker in the Philippines by masked men on motorcycles fading fearlessly into governmental cover, will we be real?

Real.  Committed to the teaching of the apostles, the life together, the common meal, and the prayers. Celebrating, with the foreigners who live among us, [it’s right there in Scripture, in Deuteronomy-Gloria a Dios!]  with the outcasts and the outsiders, all the bounty of creation. 

Those who were “them” yesterday are “us” today and “we” are forever changed.  Transformed.