F. Harry Daniel
Second Presbyterian Church
Sermons: September 17, 2006

"Be Transformed by the Renewing of Your Mind"

On April 3, 1974 a devastating tornado struck the city of Louisville, KY, severely damaging the eastern side of the city. Second Presbyterian had $250,000 damage. As Bill Rudd, vice president of 1st National Bank, said during worship on the next Sunday, all he could think of as he looked out of the bank tower and saw it moving toward the area where his home was located, was whether his family was safe or not. Their home lost its second story, but his family was safe. Bill was transformed; he didn't look at life the same way any more. That experience changed the way he lived, yes, even more important, it transformed his mind. He no longer assessed life on the same terms.

Many people in the hospital recovering from a serious illness have shared with me the fact that they have undergone a similar metamorphosis. Life looks different to them, and they can never be the same. Everything has a different context. Their inner orientation has changed. They become aware in powerful ways of the total situation of their lives, as a result life and the universe look different. There is for them a kind of qualitative newness about the future.

There have been times during my years of teaching in the church when I knew that an extraordinary experience was occurring: the moment was filled with awesome, energetic power, insight was being born, ideas were being communicated and received. The light turned on and it was compelling. Those moments make teaching worthwhile.

"Be transformed by the renewing of your minds." The human mind reasons, broods, remembers, classifies, describes, lurches into generalizations, solves problems, and at night dreams (daytime, too!). Our minds consist of values, attitudes, fears, hopes, ambitions, patterns of behavior, prejudices and perceptions. The mind is developed by procedures which stimulate thought, supply information, analyze experience, place human events into patterns of meaning and so on. But it also needs something else: a continuing process of transformation that renews life. Tornadoes, medical crises, and even Bible study can do that. Rather they can become such by God's Spirit.

Transformation means getting our head changed. Christian faith is a specific response of our minds and bodies to the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth in history. It is getting Christ into our heads. In practical terms this means bringing our beliefs, opinions, patterns, attitudes to conscious awareness so that we may receive a new perspective that creates new possibilities, so that we may be renamed, reshaped, and redirected. In 1988 when I was given the privilege of going to the Middle East, that happened to me. Ancient texts came alive, my call, commitments and theology came alive. Whatever benefit you draw from my sermons is the gift of that transformation, that renewing. I don't preach like I used to.

There is a lot of religiosity in our society now. It is a revolt against scientific dogmas and technological controls and excessive materialism. It is a revolt against mind control that says, "Consume." "Consume." It is a revolt against a view of life that places such a low ceiling on the quality of human life that the hunger for fulfillment and transcendence goes unsatisfied. But this religiosity is not getting the head changed. It only wants to feel good.

That is like concentrating on the development of the human body without feeding the mind. If the mind doesn't grow what good is it? If human beings are not transformed by the renewing of their minds, then they will live a life shaped by poverty of the self.

Some Christians look at the church and its worship the same way. They expect it to sustain their soul, not stretch their mind. They want to feel good, but they don't expect to learn anything. Thus, when God offers transforming moments, they don't take and nothing changes. That is an addiction that maintains poverty of the human self, the human person. Paul is talking about total transformation, rather than partial correction; conversion, not simply improvement.

If we have Christ in the heart, we have Christ in only part of life, and life doesn't change like it must. Only when Christ is in the mind, can we be transformed. Otherwise, we seek only the comfort and sustaining power of faith. In such a situation we know there is something missing.

If the head isn't changed, then we will appropriate only those dimensions of scripture and tradition that confirm our prior values and commitments. That makes us susceptible to false teaching, or, at the least, generates in us a sense of complacency in which the ideas formed in early life are never challenged or deepened. How did that popular book put it, "Everything I need to know I learned in Kindergarten" Yeah, and we learned a whole lot more that was destructive. Yeah, we become anxious consumers of whatever the world, or for that matter, our peers tell us we ought to be doing.

Without transformation Christians expect the church to reflect the values they learned elsewhere. Christians can't pay attention only to those Christian ideas and scriptures that agree with their views. That prevents transformation. On PBS a couple of years ago, I was watching the program on the Eisenhower presidency. He didn't want to send those troops to Little Rock. But he did. Why? He said that he could not simply support the court when it only agreed with his views. Christians are called to deal with scripture in its totality, not just to its tones that echo our own convictions. Scripture speaks over against and beyond our experience as well. It offers fresh and fuller understanding; it tests our personal experience; it offers transformation. If we hear only what we want to hear how will we be transformed by the renewing of our minds? If only our needs define what we expect from church and life, doesn't that bless the identity we have formed elsewhere? That allows us to stay the same and not go through the process of transformation. Being born again does not guarantee personal happiness, inner peace, and worldly success, nor does it enhance the emotional life. No, it's about transformation in the head! And that's risky as it can be.

Sincerity, kindness, feeling good are no substitute for intelligent understanding. An enormous danger to the church is an unthinking Christianity that slips into society's patterns of living without investigating their validity. We should fear bandwagons that draw in participants who haven't really thought through the significance and meaning of a particular movement in their lives. We've got to use our minds! God's renewing process through the scriptures can open up the most powerful transformation that challenges sloppy thinking and warm hearts. God wants us to be transformed. If we start with that, we will be set free from the fear of trying. We may trust the God the grace-giver to work through God's gifts to us.

Getting our heads changed, we think clearly and see the absolute priority of the gospel. We do not make absolute our understanding or confuse that understanding with the gospel itself. Aware of the richness of faith, we realize that we have not captured it, exhausted it, explored it. We can enter the future in humility and a willingness to listen to see what we may learn. We will be changed by the encounter. The Bible presents a possible world in which we could live and realize our God-given possibilities. But for that possible world to be a reality, we have to be transformed. That process unlocks and liberates our spirit. The Sistine is a mediocre chapel, but look what Michelangelo did with it.

There is in us a longing for such transformation that is awakened by Jesus. That is God's amazing grace at work. We long to become more than we are. Transformation enables us to discover our real, essential selfhood. It changes what we are, so that we can become what God intends us to be. Truths not yet understood, insights not yet perceived can be ours. But if we are spiritual infants or adolescents and content to be so, then whole realms of human reality will simply escape us.

As we grow in Christian faith, we are always becoming what we are meant to be. That continual process, however, gets aborted when we allow ourselves to employ filters that block out transforming grace. These filters allow us to build life on our terms: planning, protecting, aggrandizing. But such lives, Christian or not, are limited by selfishness, shrunk by hatred, twisted and contorted by envy, and compressed by this world until they are small and mean enough to survive.

Filters tell us we have arrived, but we haven't. Filters tell us we don't need to change, but we do. Filters comfort us telling us we have got life figured out, but we haven't, have we? Filters tell us we don't need to be taught, we have learned it all; we haven't. Filters lie!

Think back in your own experience. Do you remember your reaction to that marvelous book that transformed you? I'll bet it went something like this: "Why did I wait so long to read it?" Remember that experience that you weren't so sure you wanted to have, but when you did, you were transformed. And what did you say, "Why did I wait so long?"

God’s expectations are large. And the need of the world is so urgent because we live in a society where the human project is being reduced to economics, where human beings are reduced to objects, where human life is reduced to making and spending money to get what we want, where communication is reduced to electronics. We are transformed not to make the church look like the world: a place of power struggles and control and money. No, we become transformed so that the world, including all of us, may have access to the good truth of God who creates, redeems and consummates human life. The church is a community of believers connected to each other, loving and serving and honoring God together.