February 2, 2003
“How My Mind Has Changed”
Riley E. Jensen

In a few minutes you are going to hear a long list of questions addressed to a group of church officers who are about to be ordained and installed as leaders in this church.  From the perspective of the pew I can only imagine that there must be a sense of holy exhaustion as the questions go on-and-on seeming to never end as they extract promises that appear so unattainable.

But you will know that we are getting near the end when you hear the eighth vow being asked, “Will you seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?”  One friend of mine seemed to capture the feelings of many of us who reach the eighth vow after having made so many other high and holy promises when he said, “I’ll sure try!”

I want to submit this morning that the eighth vow summarizes not only what is required of our church officers but of all of us who seek to serve Christ and the Church as his faithful disciples.  Even more narrowly, I believe the key is found in that word, “imagination”.  It hasn’t always been that way, but I think that I have come to this conclusion as a result of a lifetime of meditation on Paul’s words in Romans 12.

I first memorized that verse in the King James Version as, “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.”  However, over time I have come to much prefer the clarity of the J.B. Phillips Bible, “By your new attitude of mind, be transformed so that you can find out what God’s will is.”  For leaders in the church (as well as everyday garden variety Christians) it is all about finding the will of God, and that requires minds that are not so fixed and rigid that they cannot absorb new light.  More simply put it requires leaders whose minds are not so made up that they cannot change them.  And that’s a scary thought to folks like most of us who rely on predictability and consistency.

However, before I can talk to others about the virtue of having the kind of imagination that will allow them to change their minds upon occasion, I am driven to some serious personal reflection about how my mind has changed over the years.

I.  I Have Changed My Mind About Changing My Mind

The first thought that occurs to me is that I have changed my mind about changing my mind.  Someone said that, “If you still believe at 60 what you believed at 30, something is wrong.”  Well, what did I believe at 30.  Certainly faith seemed to be a simpler thing then – you found a few fixed and absolute convictions and held onto them for dear life.

It may surprise you to know that I actually made some judgments about people based upon geographical location and life circumstances not to mention such things as race, gender, or sexual orientation.  I won’t tell you what I thought of mid-westerners for fear you will think I haven’t changed my mind.  But happily I have had the privilege of living in different parts of the country, and pastorly have been able to encounter people in ways that reinforce our common humanity.  We are one human family and I am so grateful that my mind has been transformed (if not completely) at least enough to begin to understand that.

As strange as it may seem to some of you, there are those of us who have grown up in a religious environment based upon the fear of changing our minds.  There were certain core convictions that you could never let go of or even allow to be questioned or you would lose that precious thing called “your faith”.  That fear of losing our faith kept us close to home.  It kept us only reading those books that reinforced that particular version of faith.  It even kept us from going to certain schools where we might “lose our faith” if we were exposed to atheistic professors.

So I have indeed changed my mind about changing my mind.  I no longer consider it a sign of weakness but rather of strength to be able to listen with the heart as well as the mind to those ways in which God may be speaking God’s truth that I have never heard before.  By the way I don’t need to worry about changing my mind at the drop of a hat like a chameleon changes colors, because basically I know myself to be a person who resists change.  I like things the way they are.

But more than being a personal testimony this is a value that we expect our church officers to take seriously, “Will you serve the people with energy, intelligence, IMAGINATION, and love?”  You see, the cultivation of an active imagination in the church is nothing less than trying to imagine the will of God.

One of the most misunderstood things about leadership in the church has to do with who the constituency is.  Because we live in a democracy that has a representative form of government, it is natural to assume that leadership in the church functions the same way -- to try to ascertain the will of the people in its decision-making.  But if that were the case, our church leaders would be doing what our politicians do -- they would constantly have their ear to the ground, take informal polls, and try to determine which special interests carry the most weight.  They would look at the church as just a bunch of special interests trying to create their kingdoms rather than ministry units working for the well-being of the whole.

You see, the role of leadership in the church is not to balance the special interests, but rather to possess the kind of imagination to be able to discern the will of God -- what Paul calls “the renewing of the mind” or in more common parlance, the ability to change your mind.  Leadership in the church is not about advocacy.  Leadership in the church is about discerning the will of God.  When one changes his or her mind to bring it into conformity with the will of God, that is not weakness but strength.

II.  The Relationship Between the Rational and the Sacramental

A second way in which my mind has changed over the years has been about the relationship between the rational and the sacramental.  Now I realize that I have to be very careful here because this is the church of John Calvin.  This is the church where ministers wear academic robes.  This is the church where the pulpit is central (if not literally, at least figuratively) and where a sermon has been defined as a 20-minute “sustained public utterance”.

Some of you will remember how our worship co-ordination broke down a bit last fall (my fault because I am ultimately responsible for such things), when we tried to get a bit imaginative and creative with the sermon two Sundays in a row.  One Sunday of creativity was enough for some of you because that meant that we were messing with your expectations, but two Sundays was over-the-top because then we were messing with your minds.  And what was it that we were messing with?  We were messing with the Presbyterian predisposition to declare truth through words.  We can’t help it.  We are children of Calvin who defined a sermon as a two-hour “sustained public utterance”.

Of course, here is one of those places where we have put Calvin into a box and made out of him a straw man.  The fact of the matter is that the symbol of Calvinism is a flaming heart.  John Calvin recognized the relationship between the rational and the sacramental more than most of us.  He would have agreed with Emerson that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.

As children of the Reformation we got caught up in that wave of reaction that threw out the baby with the bath water.  We wanted nothing to do with the Mass, and incense, and all of the hocus pocus that had developed in the form of church ritual.  The pendulum was swinging back to the Bible and we became proudly Puritan and intensely intellectual in an Age of Reason.  In doing so we lost sight of the sacramental emphasis of our own forbearer who believed that the word proclaimed through sermon and the word enacted around the Table should be celebrated together every Sunday.

While Calvin respected the mind, he also understood that the presence of the Holy is apprehended in mysterious ways beyond the ability of the mind to define.  Modern neuro-psychology is helping us to understand this as the relationship between the right brain and the left brain.  The left brain is that part of us that apprehends reality in linear, analytical, and rational ways while the right brain brings us into contact with the depths of the world around us through impressions, feelings, art, irony, and paradox.

Most of us are left brain people.  We can’t help it.  That is the way we have been trained and programmed.  But if that is the way we stay admitting no other reality than “just the facts” and what can be apprehended through the scientific method, we will be like the horse running the race with blinders on able to see only what is in front of him.

Therefore, when I say that my mind has changed about the relationship between the rational and the sacramental, it means that I have come to a place where I have placed a higher value on the importance of imagination in my life.  I don’t want to worship an explanation; I want to worship an experience.

Peter Gomes who is no stranger to the world of the mind from his perch at Harvard University says it well, “Rationality is a poor substitute for religion; I want religion that has room for the transcendent, the sacramental, the mystery, and at death’s door I do not want my biological functions explained or my philosophical quandaries deconstructed, or my language reconstructed.  I want to be wrapped in the bosom of Abraham and taken home to my mothers and my fathers.  I no longer have to understand everything in order to believe something.”

III.  About the Nature of God

Finally, my mind has changed not only about changing my mind, and about the relationship of the rational to the sacramental but also about the nature of God.  This last point is worthy of much fuller discussion than I am able to give it now.  But let me say that I began my religious pilgrimage with a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.  Nothing wrong with that because it is still the under girding reality of my life.

But unfortunately the language of a personal relationship led me into talking and thinking about this God as “my God” not unlike what Jonah must have felt as he sulked that day under the Banyan tree.  Jonah saw himself as an emissary of “his” God to proclaim judgment upon the sinful Ninevahites.  When God is “my” God, that God does what is expected; thereby, giving me security and a certain amount of power.

Of course, that is not what happened to Jonah.  In his mind Yahweh violated the tacit agreement and changed her mind in light of the declared repentance of the people of Nineveh.  This is such a radical biblical story because it shows a God who changes God’s mind, who doesn’t always act according to my expectations, who in truth is not just my God or even just the God of the Christian religion.

Frankly, I have found that I don’t want a God who is limited to the reach of my small mind, but I need a God who can only be approached through the powers of an expansive imagination.  Therefore, I believe that there is a message here for leaders who need to use imagination to search the depths of the will of God for this congregation.

I also believe that there is a message here for a congregation that regularly comes into a sacramental relationship with the living God.  You see this table is a metaphor for change.  You cannot eat without being changed (though some wish we could).  You can’t be in community without being changed.  And you certainly can’t be in the presence of God without being changed.  Let it be as God has promised and let us all be people who seek to serve God with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.