I love Martin Luther-King's sermons for their passion and depth of thought. In this sermon he takes the first couple of verses of Romans 12 as inspiration. (forgive his exclusive language; a product of his time). I think this is a message for our time as well in relation to a Christian stance on asylum seekers, global poverty and war.
"Men are afraid to stand alone for their convictions. There are those who have high and noble ideals, but they never reveal them because they are afraid of being nonconformist I have seen many white people who sincerely oppose segregation and discrimination, but they never took a real stand against it because of fear of standing alone I have seen many young people and older people alike develop undesirable habits not because they wanted to do i t in the beginning, not even because they enjoyed it, but because they were ashamed of saying “no” when the rest of the group was saying “yes” Even the Christian church has often been afraid to stand up for what is right because the majority didn't sanction it. The church has too often been an institution seeming to crystallize and conserve the patterns of the crowd. The mere fact that slavery, segregation, war, and economic exploitation have been sanctioned by the church is a fit testimony to the fact that the church has too often conformed to the authority of the world rather than conforming to the authority of God.
Even we preachers have manifested our fear of being nonconformist. So many of us turn into showman and even clowns, distorting the real meaning of the gospel, in an attempt to conform to the crowd. How many minister’s of Jesus Christ have sacrificed their precious ideals and cherished convictions on the altar of the crowd? How many people today are caught in the shackles of the crowd? Many of us think we find a sort of security in conforming to the ideas of the mob?
But my friends it is the nonconformists that have made history, Not those who always look to see which way the majority is going before they make a decision not those who are afraid to say no when everybody else is saying yes, but history has been made by those who could stand up before the crowd and not bow The great creative insights have come from men who were in a minority It was the minority that fought for religious liberty, it was the minority that brought about the freedom of scientific research In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist Now let us make it clear that nonconformity in itself might not be good There is a type of bad nonconformity. There is no virtue in being a nonconformist just to be a nonconformist. Some people are nonconformist just to get attention and to be different. So Paul gives us a formula for constructive nonconformity which is found in the second half of the text. In order to discern the true will of God and become constructive nonconformist we must accept a new mental outlook. We must be transformed Jesus’ phrase for this experience was the new birth. And so only when we have been born again can we be true nonconformist. We are called upon to be transformed nonconformists. This is our eternal challenge as Christians.
The spiritual strength and moral courage of Jesus amid the temptation in the wilderness is our eternal challenge. Jesus was born at a time when the majority of people thought of the Kingdom as a political kingdom and thought of the Messiah as the one who would restore this political kingdom with all of his power and pomp and riches And all of the temptations that Satan offered Christ were temptations to
fall in line with this type of material political kingdom. In other words he was urging Christ to conform to wishes of the mob.
Who will take the attitude of Jesus and be a sincere nonconformist? Today we stand on the brink of moral and physical destruction and the great need of the hour is sincere nonconformist men who will stand amid a world of materialism and treat all men as brothers, men who will stand up in a world that attempts to
solve its problems by war and declare that he who lives by the sword will die by the sword"."
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