Changing Our Minds

Shiphrah and Puah by Dina Cormick (1989).

Towards the conclusion of his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul writes:

"I appeal to you therefore, [siblings], 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."

I wonder, when was the last time you changed your mind? 

When I was interviewing to become the pastor of Highlands, the committee asked me that very question: 

When did you last change your mind? 

My answer back then was that I had started listening to a podcast about U.S. politics featuring several former Republicans—political operatives who had worked for candidates and championed policies I would never have supported. 

Before, I would have assumed, even though we were on the same “team” now,  that I had nothing to learn from them. But with the 2024 election looming, and our move to Wyoming becoming incredibly likely, my mind had been changed. I had lots to learn from these savvy commentators. 

And, perhaps more profoundly, I was becoming convinced that I needed to regularly engage with and learn from these people whose political experiences and perspectives were very different from my own.

Now, for some of you, this confession might sound a little ridiculous. Perhaps, to you, changing your mind about a podcast or about a political party is hardly earth-shattering.

But take a moment and ask yourself the same question:

When was the last time you changed your mind?

What was it about?

What caused you to reconsider what you thought you knew?

Was there a particular person who helped change your mind? A conversation? An experience?

And then ask the trickier question: what made you willing to change your mind in the first place?

In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul describes the journey of the faithful as a continual process of resisting conforming to the world's standards to renew one’s mind in accordance with God’s will. 

In other words, Paul seems to be saying that a life of faith will require us to continually discern—to remain open to having our minds changed.

This makes sense especially when we consider the context to which Paul was writing. The church in Rome was experiencing tremendous conflict. While we don’t know all the precise circumstances behind Paul’s letter, it is clear that he is addressing tensions between followers of Christ who were Jewish and those who came from non-Jewish backgrounds—Gentiles, as they are called in Scripture.

These tensions were significant enough that word of them had reached Paul, even though he had not yet visited the church in Rome himself.

Questions of identity and belonging run throughout the letter: Who belongs to God’s covenant? What becomes of the promises God made to Israel? What does it mean that Gentiles are now being welcomed into this growing movement around Jesus? And how are people with different histories, cultures, and religious practices supposed to become one community without requiring one another to become the same?

Paul wrestles with these questions throughout the first eleven chapters of Romans. And here, in chapter 12, he summarizes all that he has laid out for his readers. 

God, Paul argues, is at work drawing the whole human family into relationship. Gentiles do not replace the Jewish people. Jewish followers of Jesus do not possess God in a way that excludes Gentiles. Neither group gets to claim superiority over the other. God’s love and mercy are wider than the boundaries they have drawn around themselves.

And if that is true, then encountering the wideness of God’s love and mercy should change them.

It should change how they think.

It should change how they understand themselves.

And it should change how they understand one another.

That is why Paul calls them to the “renewing of your minds.” Their old ways of dividing the world, assigning status, and deciding who belongs must continually be examined and transformed in light of what God is doing.

And Paul makes clear that becoming one in Christ does not mean becoming the same.

Instead, he gives them the image of a human body.

“For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ.”

Each member brings different gifts, different experiences, different functions—and each belongs to the whole.

So their unity cannot depend upon erasing their differences. Paul does not tell the Jewish members of the community to stop being Jewish, or the Gentile members to somehow acquire the same history and traditions.

Instead, they must learn how to belong to one another through their difference.

Their diversity is not an obstacle they must overcome before they can become one body.

Their diversity is part of what makes the body whole.

We should not miss just how countercultural this vision of community was.

Paul is writing into a society obsessed with hierarchy and status. Roman society carefully distinguished citizens from non-citizens, free persons from enslaved persons, wealthy from poor, those who wielded power from those expected to submit to it.

Difference was constantly being used to determine a person’s place—and their worth.

It was a world not so different than the Egyptian kingdom, where, as the story goes, the ancient Israelites were taken into slavery. 

The book of Exodus is a grand, mythic tale of freedom and unfreedom. There are a lot of details that are not verified by archaeological evidence. However, it is important to remember that Exodus functions very differently from contemporary historical scholarship, and regardless of its historical accuracy, it has nonetheless been an undeniable force of history.

The story of Exodus has spiritually nurtured dispossessed communities through their suffering and oppression and animated movements for liberation the globe over. 

In today’s reading, we learn that the new king did not know Joseph, the leader from long ago. The story seems to imply he also knew little of his descendants, the Hebrew people. But what he did know made him afraid. 

There are too many of them! 

They have too much power! 

They are a threat to my kingdom! 

This cycle of scapegoating is familiar to us today.  

We see this story in the experiences of transgender youth, muslims, and immigrants.

And just as this story shows how humans so often misuse power, it also exemplifies how God intends for power to be used. 

While the king uses his power over others to prop up his power. The two, seemingly powerless midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, co-conspire to use whatever power they do have to bring about life. 

Together they trick the king, using his own prejudices against him, about Hebrew women being biologically different than Egyptian women, to protect the life of many children, including the powerless child, who would eventually rise to break his people from bondage. 

And just as God worked through the mission of Shiphrah and Puah, God worked through Paul to inspire Christ's followers to reimagine human relationships—to move away from relationships of power over, of hierarchy and control, to power with as the body of Christ.  

In the body of Christ, he tells them, Jews and Gentiles are different, but your differences do not determine who is more worthy of belonging. You have different gifts, different histories, different purposes—but you belong to one another. You are one body.

We should be careful to not interprete the “renewing of our minds” as simply an internal spiritual exercise. Paul is calling them into a different way of life together.

He tells them to present themselves as a “living sacrifice.” This is not about suffering or dying in order to please God. It is about turning our whole selves—our bodies, our relationships, our choices, our lives—toward God’s purposes so that we might all become more fully alive.

Elsewhere in Romans, Paul describes this transformation as moving away from “life according to the flesh” and toward a life formed by the Spirit.

By “flesh,” Paul isn’t saying that our bodies are bad. He is describing a life turned inward, governed by fear, self-interest, and the illusion that we belong only to ourselves. Those tendencies do not only shape individuals. They can shape entire communities and societies. Fear can become exclusion. Self-interest can become exploitation. The desire for control can become domination. These were realities Paul’s listeners knew intimately, as they lived within the hierarchies and systems of power that sustained the Roman Empire.

So when Paul tells them, “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds,” he is asking for more than that members of the Roman church become nicer or more spiritually enlightened individuals.

He is asking them to resist being formed by the world around them.

It is easy to spiritualize Paul’s message, as much of American Christianity has done, and hear Romans primarily as a guide for individual belief and morality. But we miss something important if we ignore the political dimensions of what Paul is saying.

Paul imagines a community whose life together bears witness to another way of being human.

We are continually called to seek to be a people continually transformed and renewed by what God has revealed in the life and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To have our minds changed again and again by what Divine Love has done. 

Faithfulness requires us to continually discern and to remain open to having our minds changed.

Not because we are to live without backbone or conviction—but because we are called to live with humility.

Humility reminds us: I am not God. We are not God.

And yet, God is never absent.

God is within us and around us, behind us and before us—the ground of our being, always larger than our own understanding.

Which means we do not have to possess perfect understanding in order to be faithful. We can hold deep convictions while still acknowledging the limits of what we know. We can listen. We can reconsider. We can discover that something we once believed no longer reflects what God is revealing to us.

Because faith requires the humility to trust that God is still teaching us. That the Spirit is still redirecting us. That even our deepest convictions can be examined, refined, and renewed.

Changing our minds, then, is not necessarily a failure of conviction.

Sometimes, changing our minds is evidence that we are still allowing God to change us.

This week, as I set up the photos and stories featured in the Authentic Selves show, one stuck out to me in particular. 

When Mack came out to his parents as transgender, he was terrified. 

Mack had seen what happened to other trans kids when they came out. He had seen kids rejected by their families, even kicked out of their homes. And Mack had no way of knowing for certain how his own parents would respond.

Especially because his dad, Marshall, was a preacher at the conservative church their family attended every Sunday.

But when Mack told his parents—Marshall broke out into a smile and replied, “Well, it’s about time.”

The family left their conservative church, and Marshall started a new, progressive Christian community that focused on LGBTQ inclusion. I don’t know if Marshall’s faith in God faltered, if it took him time to put back the pieces of his theology. This would make all the sense in the world.  

What astounds me about this story is not that Marshall didn’t lose his faith in God, but how Marshall never lost faith in his son. 

Marshall believed that his son Mack—a member of the body of Christ just as he is—had a purpose.

And that Mack had something to teach Marshall about himself and about God.  

He believed that his son was a part of how God was renewing Marshall’s own mind towards God’s divine purposes. That his son could change his mind.  

Mack’s mother Stephanie wasn’t as immediately receptive as Marshall. She told Mack it would take her some time to figure it out. Mack understood that; it had taken him some time to figure it out too! Sometimes it takes us more time to change our minds about something that at one time we depended on.

As I close, I wonder, when was the last time you changed your mind? And when will you next have your mind renewed? 

In all things, thanks be to God. 

Sermon preached by Rev. Delaney Piper on 8.23.26.