September 15, 2024
• Rev. Mindie Moore
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Making Room Week 2: Making Room for New Ideas Acts 9:19b-22 This past week was the presidential debate. There’s probably a lot we could say, but this is not actually a sermon about politics—that's our October series! But this is a sermon about changing our minds. Last week we talked about making room in our hearts, and this week we’re really looking at making room in our heads. Making room in the way we think. And how that can make an impact. So I bring up the fact that we had a presidential debate this past week, because there’s always a question that the moderators ask that grabs my attention. It feels like it’s a bit of a gotcha moment, and it’s one that is asked to essentially every candidate regardless of their political party or platform. It’s this question: “Why did you change your position on (fill in the blank)”. Basically, why did you change your mind? And here’s the real thing that frustrates me...so often, we don’t get a good answer for this. So often, the candidate will pivot and sort of navigate around the subject. Because under that question, there’s an assumption: changing our minds is a negative thing. Believing one thing and then shifting to believe something else shows a lack of consistency or like maybe they don’t know what they’re talking about.
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I think it’s interesting to contrast that kind of sentiment with what happened back in the 1920s, when Calvin Coolidge was president. Because he faced that same kind of question from a reporter. They said to him, “you just said something that contradicted something you said in a previous statement.” And his response to the reporter was this: “It’s simple. I learned something,” Today as we keep talking about our Making Room campaign, and as we look at what it means to not only create more physical space in a church building but what it means to create spiritual, emotional, and thought space within ourselves, I want to invite you to hold that idea in front of you. That it is ok to change our minds. That it is ok to learn something. That it is ok and even HOLY to grow and evolve and make space for new ideas and understandings of how the world works. Today we’re reading about Paul, and actually, he’s still known as Saul at this point in his story. When we pick up what’s going on in Acts 9, he is coming off of the huge impact of his conversion experience. He’s been living his life, raging against the Church, overseeing violence against people who follow
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Jesus...he’s a guy who is feared by many and rightfully so. The rumors are true! He’s done all of these bad things. But if you know Paul’s story, you know that the movement from Saul to Paul comes after he has this absolutely dramatic and earth-shaking encounter with Jesus while he’s traveling. He very distinctly hears the voice of God, he loses his sight, he goes from being ultra-powerful to being helpless and dependent. And as he experiences the kindness and hospitality of people who had no reason to give him ANYTHING, he finds himself in the position where he has to process what just happened to him. He has to untangle a belief system that has been driving him. A belief system that gave him a lot of power and notoriety. A belief system that led him to do what he thought was right, but actually harmed a lot of people. As Saul becomes Paul has to undo all of that in order to make room for something new. And (SLIDE) Sometimes we have to undo beliefs that are no longer serving us in order to make room for something new. This coming Thursday, Jon Jones, our Senior Director of Discipleship and I are leading an event called Deconstruction Done Healthy. It’s going to be right here in this room, at 7pm, you can still register. And we’re holding this event, because one
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of the things we’ve seen here at St. Luke’s is that a lot of us are undoing beliefs that no longer serve us. And I’ve preached sermons about deconstruction before, this is not one of them, but when I think about that process, I think a lot of people engage in it becasue they WANT to make room. They WANT to create space for new ways of thinking and engaging with their faith. They want to broaden what they believe and care about and they want to do that in a way that feels faithful to who they are and who God is. So if you’re someone who is in a similar place, if this idea of changing your mind and shifting belief sounds familiar, I just want you to know that this might be a good opportunity for you. And if you can’t make it, we’re recording it and we are doing 6 episodes of a deeper dive podcast, for all the stuff we can’t cover in an hour and a half. But what we know, what I really believe, is that these kinds of significant changes can be huge acts of faith. It takes faith to say “I used to believe this and now I believe something different.” It takes faith to say I’m changing my mind on a core belief I’ve held for a long time. Because what I have found, and maybe you have too, is that (SLIDE) Following Jesus makes our lives more complex. Following Jesus challenges a lot of our
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assumptions and beliefs. Following Jesus is the reason that I care about things and people who it would probably be easier to ignore because I’m not directly impacted by what’s going on in their lives. I’m not directly impacted by the different crises that face a lot of vulnerable groups. But you know what? Following Jesus means that I, that WE, have an urgent call on our lives to care about these sorts of things. We have an URGENT call to make room because that’s what Jesus was about. And taking seriously the things that Jesus said and did has the possibility to really mess up our ideas of what makes us comfortable and safe and what’s important. We see that messiness in Paul’s conversion story. It’s messy for Paul, he has his whole career, his life, his reputation...all of that gets upended by this encounter with Jesus that changes him. But it’s also true for the community that he’s part of. They have to take all of these things that they assume about it, maybe that they even KNOW about him, and they have told hold those things up and say, “what do we do with this now? What do we do with this new information? How does the fact that we know and follow Jesus impact the way we can make room for healing and hope and grace in this moment?”
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It was all messy. It was all maybe a figurative construction project for the mind and the community that these people were part of. But the amazing thing about embracing this messiness, and embracing the experience of change, is that they got to create something new from it. They got to create a new community. They got to create a new legacy. All that work...led to something really important. In the text we read, in verse 22, it says this: (SLIDE) Saul became increasingly more powerful and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Messiah. --Acts 9:22 There’s this word here that I want you to notice. And it’s the word “prove.” In the Greek, this word is a verb that means “to unite. To knit together. To show, to teach.” There’s an idea here that Paul was bringing together some new things. And this took work. The conversion part of Paul’s story was one of those bam! In the moment dramatic things. Yes, that happened in an instant. But the actual work of Saul becoming Paul and becoming this great leader and creator of churches that would bear Jesus’ name...that wasn’t quick. That took time. That took more learning and unlearning. It was a process. It was the willingness
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to bring together new groups of people. Paul’s life, where it used to cause division and harm, began to build something and helped people experience Jesus in a new and different way. And none of that change happened overnight. None of our own change happens overnight either. It takes time that is spent on purpose. It takes the trusting of the Holy Spirit and it takes being willing to do the work of growing over the long haul because that’s where real change happens. That’s where real change sticks. That’s how we make room so we can have the capacity to build something new. You might know that this past Spring, I helped lead a group to Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, AL on a Civil Rights Pilgrimage. On this trip, we talked about voting rights and how that is not just an issue of the past but a very real justice issue today and we spent a lot of time interacting with the resources that Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative have curated to help people understand the history of our country, from enslavement to mass incarceration. One of the places we visited was (SLIDE) Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. It’s brand new and this park is on the banks of the Alabama River, where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked. There are these incredible sculptures that tell
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real stories, there are train cars and authentic dwellings that enslaved people would have experienced. And when you go there, you are so immersed in this place and the information, it just lands in a different way. It’s different than a quick glance. It’s different than an easy way to learn. Because when you’re at Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, you take your time. You walk in the heat. You feel the mosquitos bite you because you’re by the river. You hear trains going on tracks that had been laide by enslaved people. You get the chance to knit together new ideas and learn a deeper version of something that most of us know something about, but are better for by going deeper and learning more. You have permission and it’s celebrated to leave that place with your mind changed. You have permission and it’s celebrated that you would take those things you’ve learned, and be somehow different because of it. Paul’s story has the impact it does because he could change and be different. It has the impact it does because he could trust Jesus with things that he likely didn’t even understand at the outset, and he was willing to spend the time leaning closer to this Jesus he had encountered. He was willing to say he was wrong. His change of thinking wasn’t driven by shame but it was driven by love. It was driven by the love and grace that God
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would stop at nothing to show him, and in his case he had to get blinded and knocked down! Sometimes our experiences with Jesus love and grace that change us can be a little aggressive. But the bottom line is that (SLIDE) an experience with Jesus can change everything. There is someone in our church who has lived this in a very real way. I’m not going to use their name in this story and we don’t need to know it. But they remember as a child going to events like abortion rallies and gay pride parades, but not to support them. Instead, their father took them and had them hold signs up that said things like “You are going to hell.” You’ve unfortunately probably seen these signs out in the world. This person shared, “My earliest experiences of being a Christian were formed around condemning others. A narrative was pounded into me that said we should look down on “the lost” and use whatever tools were necessary to convict them to turn from their wicked ways.” They had a very clear idea of what they knew, and that knowledge drove a lot of their actions. Not only was this the culture of this person’s family but also their faith community. They emphasized excluding those who don’t look, sound or act like us. But all of this began to crack
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with an encounter. This person had a close friend who one day shared that he was gay. This challenged this individual’s whole world view and what it meant to follow Jesus. Particularly this person had to wrestle with what Jesus would do in this situation: shun or show grace? They began to reexamine what being Christian meant and how the old ways of thinking did or did not line up with where Jesus was taking them now. They had to ask themself if God was calling them to knit something new together because of a changed mind. They said, “It was terrifying to consider that I had perhaps been working against who God actually calls us to love without exception. To include when it’s uncomfortable. To admit to oneself that you still have so much to learn. The heart of Jesus changed me. And I am forever grateful.” I don’t preach a sermon about changing your mind without knowing that it can be incredibly difficult or even terrifying to do that. When we have a belief that we have held for a lifetime or through a significant season, seeing things differently can feel like we’re betraying something or someone or that maybe we’re going to get it all wrong. And yet...even when it’s scary. Even when we feel unsure...we remember stories like Paul’s. We remember what Jesus can do
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when we’re willing to make some room in ourselves and embrace the possibility of a new way of thinking. So I just wonder today, (SLIDE) where is Jesus inviting you to make some room in what you believe or think right now? What impact could that have? Who could you be and what could the Holy Spirit DO through each of us when we open our minds, and open our hands, and say, “God make room in us and through us.” Let’s pray.