Conversion: The Family Story

Gospel reading: Luke 14.25-33
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

"The word 'conversion' comes from the Latin for 'to turn around.' Thus it denotes a change of perspective but not of essence: a change of view but not of location." (from Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris)

I've been reading a book called Imagining Redemption by David Kelsey. And in it he takes issue with the notion (or cliche really) of a 'point of view.' He writes, "No human person can live on a point. No one can really occupy some one point for viewing the world...The phrase 'point of view'...is abstracted from the messiness, contingency, and oddity of everyday life."

That's a lot of quoting in the first two paragraphs in a blog. Seems like cheating. But the two quotes are helpful to me as I imagine conversion. And what I come away with is even if or when or while I'm converted, I'm still here. More to the point, I'm still here with all of you fools among the "messiness, contingency, and oddity of everyday life."

I think this sentiment might have been part of what led Kathleen Norris to call conversion a family story. Usually we think of conversion in individual terms. And we're inclined to think of it as a delivery from the world's troubles. Maybe you've known a convert who suddenly had no use for you and your unenlightened view of the world.

But that's not how it goes in the Bible at least. Even that quintessential convert, St. Paul, would tell us about his struggles. He does the things he doesn't want to do, and doesn't do the things he wants to do. And this is life after the blinding flash on the Damascus road.

And so it is with us. But the difference may be a newfound faith that the entanglements of life are not something to be delivered from. Conversion renames them incarnation and suspects that if God works at all, God works in our life together.

Calling conversion a family affair seems to defy what we read from the gospel of Luke on Sunday. Jesus said that his disciples had to hate mother and father, brother and sister, even life itself to be his disciple. We have to be ready to walk away from everything. But what he asks is that we follow. And the rest of the New Testament seems to be telling us that if we follow he will lead us right back into relationship with the same old people of the world. In fact he says things like the law comes down to loving God and loving neighbor, and he even suggests that there might me less difference between the two kinds of loving than we think.

Perhaps the call to conversion, drastic as it can be, is good news. It's bad news if we are converted into someone who loses their love for and connection with this world. But that's not conversion at all. When we think we inhabit a different plane of existence from the rest of the world, we think there's been a change of location, not perspective. Life-giving conversion "...is seeing ourselves, and the ordinary people in our families, our classrooms, and on the job, in a new light. Can it be that these very people-even the difficult, unbearable ones-are the ones God has given us, so that together we might find salvation?" When we believe that they can, we're being converted.