From page 26 of Leonard Sweet’s book Carpe Manana:
God was willing to submit the Godhead to cultural conditions — that’s the incarnation.
And we aren’t?
God so loved the world.
And we don’t?
The church is trying to get out of what God is trying to get into — the world… Doris Lessing relates her thematic thread throughout her novels to a Sufi admonition: “Be in the world, not of it.” Actually it is a Jesus admonition, one that Paul and other early Christian leaders upheld by not withdrawing into the desert, but staying in the cities and countryside and incarnating the gospel in their everyday lives. In order for the church to change the world, there must be a change in the way the church sees the world. The church must love what Jesus loves. The Incarnation is not over. It continues today, and the body of Christ is a historical community that is God’s continuing incarnation.
To be conformed to this age is to live from the outside in. to be transformed is to live inside out. Christ reworks us from the inside out. That is true metamorphosis or transformation.
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