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The Miracle and Mystery of a
Changed Mind Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 2, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Jonah 3:1-10
I have found myself wondering, more and more these days, what has the power to make up the human mind and, once made up, what has the power to turn that same mind around. Though the events of yesterday overshadow most everything on our minds this morning, before that day my mind, in various stages of being made up, was on the President's State of the Union address. Having all heard the same speech, and leaning forward with special interest to see if his recitation of intelligence information could be deemed sufficient to warrant our going to war, I suspect, at the end of that day, most of us fell to sleep with our minds unchanged. If we were for the administration before, the President's speech powerfully confirmed our perspective. If we were not, his words did nothing to make us think otherwise. So it goes with most public debate over the issues of our day: affirmative action, abortion, sexual orientation, global warming, capital punishment, taxes, universal health care. In some cases, we may agree on the facts before us, but draw different immovable conclusions. In other cases, we may dispute the facts themselves, thereby concluding the conversation in our mind before it ever has had a chance to begin! "Don't confuse him with the facts," we sometimes say of another whose stand has no basis in reality as we know it. But how do we know it? How do we know what is real both within and beyond all human knowing? By what authority do you and I make claims for the ground on which we stand or fall? Squaring off on the boundary between truth and fiction, the question with which we began is begged. For to ask what has the power to make up the human mind and, once made up, what has the power to turn that same mind around, is to ask not after the facts surrounding any given issue. Rather to ask what has the power really to change the human mind, to redeem it from darkness, is to ask after the truth that imparts understanding and intelligibility to the disparate details of human existence. That is to say, the question before every set of so-called facts is not first a question of veracity: it is a question of faith. You and I live our lives in the light of certain experiences or events that reveal to us the real nature of human existence and the world. The prior question is, "What is the revelatory event or events of my life," and the decision of faith is the decision as to which experience will provide the clue to the meaning of all other experiences. Make no mistake! The question of faith cannot be avoided, even and especially if you are among those who would rise to counter the claims of organized religion with the principles of scientific procedure or the presuppositions of philosophical argument: all people live by faith. "To be a human being," says John Leith in echoes of Augustine, "is to live by faith. There is no other alternative.... The events of life compel us to faith commitments whether explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious. Each day before we have been up three hours, we have made decisions in the light of some faith commitment about the nature of the universe, about the nature of human being, about the significance of a human being, about the meaning of human life.... The difference [in our decisions lies] not in the facts but in the faith in the light of which the facts are understood." In the first three hours of wakefulness today, how you spoke to and treated the other members of your household, what decisions you may have made about the use of your accumulated resources, your critical reflections as you listened to the news, the part of the food chain that nourished you, the aspect of wakefulness that called out of you gratitude or anger or indifference or a sigh too deep for words: your life has rested upon a trust placed somewhere, consciously or unconsciously, in the light of which these hours have been understood. What then is the clue to the meaning of the first three hours of this day, the first three hours of yesterday: what is the clue to the meaning of all the hours awaiting our witness? What we know about the first three hours of wakefulness in Ninevah is this: according to the prophet Nahum, the Ninevites probably had lied to a loved one before breakfast, no doubt had done something vile on the way to the office, most likely had purposed evil toward a colleague as the work of the day commenced. Judging by their actions, what the citizens of Ninevah believed about the nature of the universe, about the nature of human being, about the significance of a human being, about the meaning of life, began and ended with themselves: their lust, their greed, their dominance, their brute survival. It is where humanism leaves you at the end of the day! Enter Jonah, spit up dripping from the belly of the whale, and sent a second time to turn the Ninevites from their wicked ways: Jonah had been charged to change their minds and move them toward a great repentance. Given Jonah's attitude toward his mission, we can safely guess that nothing in his demeanor or his delivery logically could have caused the wicked Ninevites to change their minds and repent. "Forty days more, and Ninevah will be overthrown!" Jonah cries under compulsion. Under no compulsion to change their ways given their attitude toward human life, we would expect the Ninevites' response to be one of defiance or derision or indifference. Instead, without skipping a beat or a breath, the narrator reports, "And the people of Ninevah believed God, they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth." Clearly the teller of the tale wants to allow his reader only one conclusion: excluding all other reasonable factors, the fact alone to be reckoned with in Jonah's address and the Ninevites' change of mind is God. Only in the hearing and believing of God's address, mediated in the most unlikely of characters, are human minds really changed. Through Jonah's cry, a revelatory voice addressed the lives of this people and called forth the faith, in light of which everything else, from that moment on, was to be understood. In similar, stark fashion, Mark narrates the calling of the disciples at the beginning of his gospel. Not from the belly of a whale but from the wilds of the wilderness, a no doubt scrawny figure emerges on the hills of Galilee calling for a change of mind: "The kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." Without the aid of a miracle to amaze, Jesus addresses a few fishermen. And whereas we knew much about the Ninevites, we know nothing of these men or of the state of their souls. We only know that they are fellow human beings who--like most human beings--made sense out of their hours at some remove from the sense and truth for which they were made. Into the first three hours of their day walked the Savior of the world saying, "Come," and they left the lives they had constructed for themselves to follow one in whose light everything else, from that moment on, was to be understood. Here is the rub: most of the people who would walk into our lives for the purpose of changing our minds have little to do with the truth for which we were made. Suckers we are for the truth they have come to peddle, because, short of being wicked, we are wanting for life's meaning and purpose. In her study of religious conversion, Chana Ullman reported one common element: "The typical convert was transformed not by a religion, but by a person. The discovery of a new truth was indistinguishable from a discovery of a new relationship, which relieved, at least temporarily, the upheaval of the previous life." What is so insidious in religion, of course, is the tendency of the convert to mistake the person mediating the faith in light of which everything else is to be understood from the faith mediated. This tendency in the convert, I would add, often coincides with the tendency of the person mediating some so-called truth to elicit what Ullman rightly names infatuation on the part of those who would believe and follow. I promise you, the combination is only destructive: just ask the Pope! John Calvin was much more taken with those whose religious quest engaged the mind and so human reason, rather than engaged the too easily manipulated emotions. Such a quest, Ullman later writes, "could be prompted, at least in part, by 'choosing' the new view as a better alternative to former beliefs, rendering life more meaningful and intelligible, albeit not always more pleasant or easy.... [Furthermore,] the experience, which does not depend upon the recognition or approval of others...need not abolish in the convert a critical, searching attitude." Calvin insisted that the only options in life are between faith in God and faith in idols. Idols, he would go on to say, become the object of human worship and infatuation, whereas true faith finds our hearts restless unless we are addressed by a voice that turns our lives and changes our minds Godward. How could the disciples have known that the One whom they followed was no charlatan, but the Christ of God? How could the Ninevites, in their brute stupidity, have heard the voice of God in Jonah's cry and repented? How will any of us ever know, in our time, the voice which addresses us in our restlessness and calls out of us a change of mind, a decision of faith in the Living God, in whose light everything else, from that moment on, is to be understood? There seem to be no guarantees but, in this morning's third hour, only the decision to turn and critically follow this One who invites us to taste and see the miracle and the mystery of the God who in Christ has already turned in love toward us. Thanks be to God! |