I have a long history with “nonconformity.” First of all, I grew up in a Mennonite community where this word was never heard, but then, as a ninth grader, I was sent to Hesston Academy for my high school years, and I soon discovered that at Hesston, “nonconformity” was a big word. All academies run by what was then known as the “Old Mennonite Church,” were having conferences on “nonconformity” in the early fifties, because the church leaders feared that their young folks were losing their commitment to nonconformity.

So, as a brand new ninth grader I was introduced to the fact that it was a sin for girls to wear panty hose that did not have a seam running up the back of their legs because the sheer kind of panty hose, without the seam, made it difficult to know whether their legs were covered. I can tell you with no hesitation whatsoever that “checking out their legs” became a matter of spiritual discernment among us Kansas Mennonite farm boys.

We heard about those Pennsylvania “black bumper” people who bought nice Buicks and Pontiacs, but then painted all of the exposed chrome parts black so that the cars wouldn’t be “showy.”

Probably most or all of that stuff I inherited from the roaring fifties is gone by now, although I don’t think the “black bumper Mennonites” are having any problems with the chrome trim on their new cars. That’s because the auto designers have done away with the chrome anyway. I know that the auto designers did this to make their cars “nonconformed” to the world so that Mennonites would be more comfortable buying them.

Anyway, the Mennonite journey on nonconformity is like so many other journeys we have taken. Just about the time something becomes relevant, we discard it. Just about the time it becomes painfully obvious that being conformed to the world is a recipe for disaster, we give upon nonconformity and throw it in the trash bin of history. We now live in a time when a recovery of nonconformity is desperately needed. We need to become clear on how the culture in which we exist has acquired such subtle and effective tools for squeezing us into it mold. I happen to like J.B. Phillips’ translation of Romans 12: 2. “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold.”  We are assaulted, besieged and squeezed by our culture in ways that our grandparents could not have imagined. Our grandparents never worried about the invasive effects of television. Whenever they got worried about losing the barriers they had created to keep themselves separated from the world around them, they pulled up their roots and moved to some other country or further into the wilderness.

Now there is no wilderness and there is also not “some other country” to which we can migrate, because it matters not where we go, cyber technology is there already.

When I candidated to become the pastor of this congregation back in 1993, I was assured by a member of the search committee that I should have no hesitation about Hyattsville Mennonite because the devisiveness on issues of nonconformity had been done away with. “Women in this church don’t wear prayer coverings and we have no men who wear plain coats,” he said. I did not rejoice, not because I think women should wear prayer coverings and men should wear plain coats. In fact, I believe the prayer coverings had to go because women were carrying too much of the burden of nonconformity while the men went scot free. Men didn’t have to look nonconformed. Just women.

H. Richard Neibuhr, the thinker and writer on cultural issues in the church  several generations ago, wrote that culture is merely the clothing of our faith and culture is always an expression of our faith. So if we are afraid of being different from the culture in which we live, the death knell already tolls for us because Christians have always lived in a world that is burning itself up and going the broad way to destruction. Christians have always known that they must be the beacon of hope in a world of despair. That means that Christians must set themselves apart.

This is nothing new. In fact, it is a theme running all the way through the Bible, as we have learned already from the few scripture verses that were read. I found an interesting quote recently, which reads as follows:

“Contemporary history displays our society suicidally eating up its own mighty resources. Let it be noted how the moral rot started, how standards were gradually sapped, then crumbled more and more ominously.”

No, that quote is not from Billy Graham, nor is it from any of the contemporary environmental thinkers. The quote comes from a Roman historian, Livy, almost two thousand years ago. The dying of culture has always been a part of the human trip. I am sure that some primitive cave dweller in the Pleistocene Era stared into his dying campfire and bemoaned the collapse of the old values. We are caught, as he was, in an age when the old system which seemed to be working for us, is destroying itself, and the future, if there is to be one, cannot be seen. Whatever the future brings, if it is a redemptive future, it will not be built by those who attach themselves too closely to “things as they are.”

Surely a part of having hope for the future is found within a word that we have been so busy trying to forget: nonconformity. It is a sign of hope to be nonconformed to a world that is bent on destroying itself. It is a sign of hope to be nonconformed to moral apathy, spiritual cynicism, sexual infidelity, financial opportunism and yes, even consumerism. In a word, it is a sign of radical hope these days to be nonconformed to the “business as usual” world in which we find ourselves.

The Bible is shot through and saturated with a nonconforming hope. Each and every time the people of Israel sinned, it was because they were trying to be too much like their neighbors. Each and every time God called them back to righteousness and integrity, God was at the same time calling them to be “a peculiar people, a chosen priesthood, God’s own people.” There is no way to be God’s chosen ones without being nonconformed. We have become apologetic about the only thing that can make us a truly hopeful people, and that is an unapologetic lack of adjustment to the world which the prophet Isaiah describes as “sick from head to foot, with no health in it, but with bruises and sores and bleeding wounds that are not pressed out or bound up.”

I wish that Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher born in Copenhagen in 1813 could come and talk with us. Kierkegaard decried the efforts of the church of his day to become adjusted and well regarded in the wider society of his day. In 1849 he wrote a book entitled Sickness Unto Death in which he diagnoses the sickness of his world like a physician describing a terminal illness. We can say what we want about those long cold Danish winters, but in my opinion Kierkegaard’s analytical statements on modern despair are still the most accurate to be found, and his antidote is nothing more or less than a radical nonconformism to despair. If you are a Christian, you don’t adjust to the despair of the world. For the believer, God is always the God of possibility, not determinism. The educational efforts of the church must always be away from conformism and adjustment, because adjustment to the ways of a dying world is to become a part of the dying.

The apostle Paul, in laying out the issue of nonconformity to the world, did not see the necessity of making a case for it like I have tried to do, and like Kierkegaard did. Paul just wrote, “Let’s not be like the rest of the world, and here’s how.” Then the rest of chapter twelve is a laundry list of behaviors that strike me as being nonconformist. They are the behaviours that the world does not affirm or reward, such as: “Be constant in prayer, patient in tribulation, contribute to the needs of the saints, practice hospitality, bless those who curse you, repay no one evil for evil.”  As we have seen from the example of a certain governor of New Jersey who bears not just one, but two names referencing Christ, repayment is what the political system is all about, and most of the time the politicians do it more competently than he did.

But it’s not just Chris Christi. It’s the name of the game in the economy of the world, where uniformity and “falling in line” is required and enforced, sometimes legally, and sometimes not legally. It’s the way things work. When you walk into a McDonald’s, you know what you’ll get, and you want it that way. I had a lunch with a member in one of the churches I previously served. He went into a rant about a certain manager of a certain Pizza Hut he owned in North Carolina. It seems this manager got creative, and served collard greens on his salad bar along with the other green things. My friend went into a rant about his manager. “I guess I’m going to have to fly out to North Carolina and straighten him out,” he said. “This guy just doesn’t get it. He thinks when you walk into a Pizza Hut, you expect creativity at the salad bar. He doesn’t seem to understand that when you walk into a Pizza Hut whether it’s in Alaska or Alabama, you’re getting the same thing at the salad bar.”

But that’s not the way things work in the church. In fact, the first thing that Paul does upon explaining how the church is to be different from the world is that he makes diversity, not uniformity, the hallmark of the church. “Having gifts that differ, let us use them; if prophesy, let us prophesy, if service, let us serve; those who teach, let them teach; those who exhort, in exhortation; those who contribute, in liberality; those who give aid, in the zeal of helping the needy; those who do acts of mercy, in cheerfulness of giving mercy.”

So we have this wonderful paradox, where in the church we are different from the world precisely because we allow each one of us to be different from the others. Our nonconformity to the world is that we don’t impose uniformity on each other. And yes, let us recognize here that practicing hospitality is another way in which we are conformed to the world. “Extending hospitality to the strangers,” as Paul puts it, means that we welcome and embrace those who are “not like us.” We have seen how embracing those who are not like us works out in our relationships with our conference.

Here we come upon the clue as to why nonconformity became such anathema to Mennonite people. When we turned our need to be different from the world into a need to be the same with each other, we lost the vision of nonconformity itself. The plain clothes and prayer coverings had to go because the church is really not in the business of creating uniforms, even for the army of Christ.

Gyula Simonyi was born in Hungary in 1953, and as a fifteen year old boy, he saw his country being taken over by the communists in the revolution of 1968. He studied economics, mathematics, software engineering and religion, receiving degrees in all those fields of study. Then he disappeared, entering the underground Catholic priesthood. But he was apprehended and had to serve time in jail because of his refusal to serve in the military. With the breakup of the Soviet Union he was released from prison.

Simonyi had never heard of Mennonites until someone introduced him to the European Mennonite Central Committee director. He ended up being invited to tour Mennonite Churches in the United States. He visited our church on February 23, 2,000. Guess what he talked about with us. That’s right—it was nonconformity. Simonyi has been forming underground cell churches all across the Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Romania. He organizes church cell groups around three principles: 1) a study and application of the teachings of Jesus; 2) a community of believers who support each other; 3) an environmental ethic that confronts materialism and consumerism. Sounds pretty Anabaptist to me. Simonyi told us that the world desperately needs the nonconformist message that Mennonites have been believing and practicing for generations.

A biography of John Greenleaf Whittier reports that Whittier was greatly inspired by a tale that his father told him, concerning how native American tribal people used to have drinking orgies. One Indian brave was always chosen by the tribe to stay sober while they were having their orgy. I have no idea whether this story speaks the truth about native Americans, but I do know that one of the great preachers of the past, whose voice I used to hear blaring forth from our radio in the kitchen of our Kansas farm home was Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of the Riverside Baptist Church in New York city. Fosdick used the Indian story to make the case for American Christians to stay sober at a time when we were all being swept up in the war hysteria of the late thirties and early forties. Fosdick kept preaching that there are other ways to deal with Hitler than going to war with him. But Harry Emerson Fosdick had to pay the price for his nonconformism. He was hooted and hollered at for being so unpatriotic.

Let us stop apologizing for being misfits even if we are misunderstood. Let us explore those areas in our lives where being misfits is indeed our holy mission. Amen.