Anyone who has ever participated in a bible study on Saint Paul is likely aware that the Letter to the Romans is considered Paul’s most complete letter, the closest thing he wrote to a theological treatise, his most mature thought, his magnum opus. Some say that all Christian theology for the past two thousand years is really just a response to the Letter to the Romans, and I mostly agree with that conclusion. Romans is a beautiful and brilliant letter, and today we read its crescendo, its great “therefore,” the final hope Paul expresses for his audience. Paul says, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. What does that mean, and how do we do it? First, I suppose we need to know what Paul means by the word “mind.” It is the brain, the intellect? Is it what Agatha Christie detective Hercule Poirot calls “the little gray cells”? Does transformation mean we change our minds, like being convinced to alter our outlook by some new evidence or argument?
As is so often the case, here English lacks an adequate translation for Greek. The Greek word Paul uses here, which we translate as mind, is νοῦς [n-o-u-s], and it doesn’t mean brain. In fact, in the ancient world the nous was understood not to reside in the head at all, but in the center of us, right where the solar plexus is found. The nous is difficult to grasp. Practically every classic philosopher describes it just a bit differently. It is awareness, self-consciousness, intuition, that which comprehends, that which discerns what is good and true. Judeo-Christian people who know their Genesis might say that the nous is the image of God in us.
If we take in all this—this expanded, biblical idea of mind that is so much more than our modern idea of the brain—then what would it mean for the mind—the nous—to be transformed? It surely doesn’t mean merely changing one’s mind from thinking that Jesus is a nice but delusional dude to believing he is God’s son. It means something much more like changing one’s… everything. It means realizing that the things in which we’ve placed importance in the world, things we’ve imagined are gold, are really cardboard. It means the anxiety, anger, resentment, jealousy, petty yearning which have clung to us all begin to lose their hold, as we wonder how they ever gained their grip in the first place. It means walking out into the world and the air surrounding us suddenly feeling electric, as with an ionic charge. It means glimpsing trails of glory flowing behind the people walking amongst us—every one of them—each of whom is also created in the very image of God.
It means all these things. Do you see? This is why, when Jesus himself spoke of such a transformation to Nicodemus, Jesus said it was like being born all over again.[i] This is why Paul makes it the crescendo of his letter, the most important thing of all. In the first eleven chapters of Romans, and in all his other letters leading up to Romans, Paul has spoken of the trials and tribulations of the world, the Powers that seeks to tear us down, and even the squabbles that constantly threaten to tear apart the community of Jesus itself. The solution to it all—the thing that makes the difference for everything—is the transformation that comes from the re-newing of our minds, our nous, the center and core of who we are.
Contemporary Christianity too often fails to grasp this. It is not about a momentary conversion or spoken magic formula. In the Gospel today, we see what comes from just such a misunderstanding. Today, Simon has his moment—his conversion, we might say—and he speaks exactly the right words. Jesus asks him, “Who do you say that I am?” and Simon responds, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” This is a moment Evangelicals love, because in an instant it seems that Simon goes from muddled confusion to faith.[ii] But immediately after this—literally, in the very next paragraph—Jesus will call Simon Peter “Satan” and say, “You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind [there’s that word again![iii]] the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” That’s next week’s Gospel text, so I don’t want to say much more about it now, except that clearly Peter’s flash of conversion, as incredible and awesome as it is, does not transform him in his nous, in the core of his being. Within scant minutes, he is back to being his old self. How, then, does the transformed renewal of our minds happen, and how does it look in the world?
There is no better Sunday of the year to ask these questions than Rally Day, the Sunday on which we renew our commitment to engaging our faith, granting time and attention to God, and, indeed, coming to church. Because these are exactly the ways that sustained transformation happens. For many, transformation may begin with a bolt of lightning, or a startling realization, or even a brush with danger or death. But renewal—the long-term, gets-into-the-marrow-of-our-souls, changing everything—transformation of our minds only happens with time. As it did for Simon Peter, whose renewal and changed-being-in-the-world still wasn’t complete when Saint Paul met him in Antioch years after Jesus’ Resurrection, our own renewal will be fragmented and occur bit by bit, moment by moment, over a commitment of time. Just as when we become adept at a sport, or a musical instrument, or an artistic pursuit, it is steady and regular commitment that changes the way we walk through and see this world. So, how does it happen?
For us, here, we participate in the liturgy. Think about what we do here, Sunday after Sunday, season upon season. We sing praise for the awesome God who creates us. We kneel in humble penitence as we recognize the ways we’ve fallen short. We hold up our hands to receive the overwhelming grace of the sacrament.
We go to forum and send our kids to Children’s Church and Sunday School, attend bible study or Christ Care groups, or Daughters of the King, or the Rector’s Book Club, diving more deeply into our knowledge of God so that God becomes our intimate companion rather than someone to whom we begrudgingly give an hour per week of our time.
We volunteer at the Food Pantry, or Shrimp Boil, or as lay chaplains, or in the church service itself, remembering that we are the hands and feet of Jesus and that through our own witness others will discover their minds begin to renew.
The bishop who ordained me[iv] was fond of saying that “We consecrate things by their use.” He meant that things and places become holy over time when we use them for holy purposes. What is true of spaces is equally true of us. As we commit ourselves to the life of discipleship, the things in which we had placed importance in the world—things we’d imagined were gold—will be revealed as cardboard. The anxiety, anger, resentment, jealousy, petty yearning which have clung to us will begin to lose their hold, as we wonder how they ever gained their grip in the first place. We will walk out into the world to discover the air surrounding us electric, as with an ionic charge. We will glimpse trails of glory flowing behind the people walking amongst us—every one of them—as we recognize that each one is created in the very image of God. We will find our minds—our nous, the very center of our being—renewed and our lives transformed, and we will look upon Jesus and say in wonder, as if realizing it truly for the first time, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God!”
[i] John 3:3
[ii] It is also a moment that Roman Catholics love, since Jesus replies to Simon, “I tell you, you are Peter [Petros in Greek, Cephas in Aramaic, Rock or “Rocky” transliterated into English], and on this rock I will build my church.”
[iii] Here, the word is φρονεῖς [phroneis], but the root is νοῦς [nous]. https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/phroneo
[iv] The Rt. Reverend Don E. Johnson, Bishop of West Tennessee, Retired
God in the Midst of the City 