Saturday 22 February 2014

The Sure Foundation

 One of the most important questions, if not the most important question, from Scripture that the Church must answer and answer for is: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?” This is a defining question for the Church second only to Paul's question to Jesus there on the Road to Damascus: “Who are you,Lord?” “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?” If we are God’s temple, where he dwells on earth, then we are most certainly not just voluntary gathering of religiously like-minded people. We, the Church of Jesus Christ, are not a volunteer civic organization different only in that we are founded on the “principles” of Jesus. No. We, not the building, are the temple of the Living God, the place on Earth where the image of the Triune God of grace is to be unquestionably evident of earth. Every temple in the ancient world except for the Jerusalem temple had an image or idol of the god worshipped there prominently displayed. For us, the loving communion that the Holy Spirit is fostering among us in our fellowship is the image of our God - the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?” is indeed a defining question for the Church because if we don’t know we are God’s temple, that he dwells in us, and we are his image then we will be something other that what God would have us to be and people will not be able to look at us and know who the One true God is. Unfortunately, this is the case of so many churches today.
As we set about answering this question there is a simple matter of English grammar that we must keep in mind: the “you” here is plural rather than singular. Being a Southerner, we have have a word for this concept, “y'all”. So, we must think “us” together, “us” this church rather than thinking individualistically such as “me” as a part of a group as we normally tend to do. This may be difficult because we do not live in a culture that thinks in terms of putting “we” before “me”. We like to think of ourselves as “I am an autonomous, rational, decision making animal” when in fact it is more true to say that “I am the sum total of the effects that all my significant relationships have had on me”. But in Paul’s day in the Mediterranean world, that is the way they thought.
It’s like going down south and you run into Joey Bob at the gas station and if he knows you he’ll ask, “How y’all doing?” You or any other non-Southerner would assume that he had asked you how you the individual is doing and you would answer, “Oh, I’m fine” and precede to tell him either what’s so good with you or what’s been ailing you here lately as if what’s been ailing you is what makes your life so fine. But, if you were to ask Joey Bob, “How are you doing?” with respect to how he himself is doing, he would immediately start telling you about how Mama and Daddy and Granny are all doing and how Mary Sue was getting real good at shooting them squirrels. Joey Bob thinks “we” before he thinks “me”. People who live outside of close-knit communities like the up-the-hollow South tend not to get this for we think “me” before we think “we”.
That being the case, most people today when we hear Paul’s question hear it as if he is asking, “Do I not know that I am God’s temple and that God”s Spirit dwells in me?” A “y'all” question suddenly becomes “all about me” and how “I” the individual believer go about tending to “my” relationship with God. It is not wrong to say that we each are a temple of God and that God dwells in us each. I hope you do know that you are (you in the singular). But, being a Christian isn't just about Jesus and me. Rather, we in the y'all sense are by the Holy Spirit bound together in him. So, please understand that your relationship with God is way bigger than a “Jesus and me” sort of thing.  It's about us and Jesus and our life in him in the Holy Spirit sharing his relationship with the Father.
You see, later in Corinthians Paul goes as far as to call the church the body of Christ; the living, breathing, organic, dynamic body of Jesus Christ the resurrected Lord and Saviour of all creation. So, since we are God's temple and we are the body of Christ what we do together is to be profoundly all about what he is doing now before the Father in the Spirit. Jesus stands now before the Father in the Spirit doing certain things that we by our being bonded to him in the Spirit participate in as well. What a church does isn't about “What would Jesus do” or WWJD as the paraphernalia goes but rather about “What is Jesus doing” or WIJD?
This is an important point. So many if not most churches do mission by trying to figure out something to do that might attract bums in the pew who put bucks in the plate in the hope that God blesses their efforts so that all their institutional problems will be solved. Doing mission that way is just so completely and utterly off the mark. Let me tell you something. The New Testament Greek word for sin, hamartia, is an archery term which means to miss the mark. It is to miss the mark by doing the things of man rather than the things of God. Just simply coming up with stuff to do that might attract people in the hopes that God might bless it is indeed a sinful approach to mission. It is sinful because it is congregationally self-centered and truly not Christ-centered and really has nothing to do with what Jesus who is our center is doing right now. Doing what he is doing is where the real healing, transformational, salvational component of new life in Christ kicks in. Alcoholics go to AA meetings because God is unconditionally there and truly and powerfully working to heal them and giving them a new life. AA does nothing to try to preserve itself as an institution. That's the way the church is supposed to be! And we'll get there if we just get back to Jesus and what he's doing and in the full knowledge that he is here get on with doing what he is doing.
So what is Jesus doing? In the book of Hebrews Paul calls Jesus the great High Priest. Therefore, since we are God's temple and the body of Christ what we do together is to be profoundly all about worship. As the great High Priest Jesus stands now before the Father in the Spirit doing acts of worship that we by our being bonded to him in the Spirit participate in as well. First, he stands before the Father in his resurrected human body in union with the Father in the Holy Spirit ever interceding for us. Jesus himself is always ever knowing our deepest troubles and flaws and is always ever praying for us, pleading that the Father grants us our needs for faith, for healing, for hope. At this moment and always Jesus is praying for us each. That should be a very great comfort. Therefore, as Jesus is always praying and we are in union with him in the Holy Spirit we also should be striving to pray without ceasing for one another and the needs of the world bearing our souls up to him knowing that our prayers become his prayers and his prayers become ours. Being in prayer is integral to what the Bible calls being “in Christ.” Mission begins in prayer.
Second, Jesus is ever leading the worship that the creation lifts up to the Father. Jesus ever stands before the Father in union with him in the Holy Spirit adoring him and offering himself to him in reverent obedience. It's like this. I love my wife and I will do whatever she asks. So Jesus the Son loves the Father and we participate in that. And, it is not simply a one way street either. The Father in the Spirit pours his own adoration for the Son by giving himself to the Son and doing what he asks. We get that outpouring too. As we are in union with Jesus in the Holy Spirit we share in the Son’s love of the Father and the Father’s steadfast love for and faithfulness to the Son. The love of God, the love of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit is in us and that love is making us to be a new creation – humanity utterly reconciled to God that is free to do his will here on earth as it is done in heaven.
Thirdly, as the only one in all of Creation worthy to be able to reveal and to do God’s will Jesus is Lord and the Father has sent him in the power of the Holy Spirit to put the creation to rights. So also Jesus sends us into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit. Our first priority is the proclamation of the Gospel that Jesus by his life, death, and resurrection has reconciled not only us humans, but all of creation to God and saved it from sin and death. In accord with this proclamation we live the Gospel. We strive to put the world to rights. We work for peace. We work for justice. We work for freedom for all forms of oppression. And we do it all prayerfully and unconditionally, expecting nothing in return. The love of God, the love of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit can only be lived and expressed in a community of people who do not withhold themselves from one another but rather give themselves to and for one another. The love of God, Jesus Christ, is our sure foundation nothing else. That is what we strive together to grow in. Our prayer, our, worship, our proclamation, our mission all flow from this love. This love of God active in and through us is what the world sees in action in our midst. A communion of love, of humble, sacrificial self-giving is what the image of God in God’s temple looks like because the Triune God of grace dwells in it. Friends, this is what y’all is. Amen.

Saturday 15 February 2014

Rhetorically Speaking

Text: 1 Corinthians 3:1-11
 At face value, this passage from 1 Corinthians appears to be one of Paul’s most angry moments in which he calls the Corinthians a bunch of babies and for that reason it is not often preached on. I've been in the pulpit ministry for seventeen years and usually use the lectionary. That means I've had at least six opportunities to preach on this passage and this is only the second time. Most preachers will preach on verse six “I planted, Apollos watered, and God gave the growth” and talk about natural church growth all the while avoiding the fact that Paul is indeed calling the Corinthians a bunch of spiritual babies. But, looks are deceiving and there is certainly more going on in the passage than an apostolic dressing down of some trouble makers. So, let's have a look.
The Bible scholars who study ancient Greek rhetoric have something else to say about it particularly the message that comes across when we pay attention to how Paul is saying what he says. But first, let me define rhetoric. Rhetoric is the skill of crafting the structure that a speech should follow so that the hearers, knowing its structure, can find it easier to follow and understand what the speaker is saying. Unfortunately, today we think of rhetoric as what preachers and politicians do to side step an issue; all rhetoric, no content. But, it was different in the ancient world. Pencil and paper were in short supply and people had to rely on the ability to listen so rhetoric – the rules of structuring communication – helped people to hear, remember, and pass along information.
Well, according to the experts, Paul’s rhetoric here, his structure of argument, in these first three chapters of 1 Corinthians has been a masterful way of confronting those in Corinth who thought they should lead the Corinthian congregations because they were super smart, super wise, rhetoricians, and philosophers. These were likely the folks who were saying, “I follow Apollos” because Apollos himself was known to be a very skilled speaker, a skilled rhetorician and that was a good thing. He wasn't just some stump preacher using big flashy words to rally people or coerce them into a faith decision. Paul, on the other hand, had the reputation of being a bit rudimentary or crude; a bit of a Luther. Luther was quite often what we would call vulgar.
We don’t pick up on it in our English text and its mostly because we just aren't taught rhetoric anymore, but in the Greek the rhetorical structure Paul uses is that of a skilled philosopher’s diatribe. By saying it the same arrogant and dismissive way that philosophers back then said things to appear knowledgeable Paul has in essence said to the “wise-crackers” in Corinth that the weak foolishness of Jesus Christ and him crucified is the heart of true wisdom, that the way of the cross is the simple rule by which we must live our lives. So Paul here with his rhetoric (and grasp my analogy) is grabbing those “wise” Corinthians by the ear as if they were disobedient, little children and then skilfully he twists their ear lobe to lead them where they should go by showing them he can do the rhetoric thing too. Then, with a handy bar of soap he rhetorically washes their mouths out saying, “this is God’s wisdom. God himself through the prophets long ago said that this wisdom, his wisdom, would be a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. And you so-called wise Corinthians are just lumping yourselves into the camp of those who are fools in God’s eyes with your quarreling and divisiveness over who has the power. 'I follow Paul'. 'I follow Apollos'. Who cares. Apollos and I, we’re both just slave gardeners. I planted you. Apollos watered you. But, it is God who gives the growth. But you’re not growing in the wisdom and way of the cross. So, it doesn't matter how smart you are. You are still infants. I fed you with milk, not solid food. You weren't ready for that and you still aren’t. Your jealousies and your quarrels prove it.” Thus said Paul to the Corinthians.
Kicking back to last week's message, Paul emphasized in chapter 2 that it is the Holy Spirit who teaches us who God is and does so by giving us the mind or mindedness of Jesus Christ. Another way of saying this is that the Holy Spirit teaches us who God is by bringing us to Jesus Christ and him crucified. The God we know has revealed his very heart to us as Jesus Christ and him crucified that we may be reconciled to God, that we may share in the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as Jesus the Son does. The Corinthians seem to have totally missed this one and were rather more impressed that they had the Holy Spirit in their midst who was giving them all kinds of spiritual gifts. They totally missed that the new humanity created in Jesus Christ is about the love of God, the self-sacrificing, self-giving, apparently wasteeful, unconditional love of God being fashioned among human community.
We talk about, and sing about, the Trinity as God in three persons blessed Trinity. God is three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – who give themselves in love so selflessly to each other that they are one. This type of relational union is inconceivable for us because our fallen nature is that we withhold ourselves from one another so selfishly that we can never really know another person no matter how well we think we know them. It is possible to look someone in the eye after sixty years of marriage and say “I don't know what it's like to be you. I can predict your actions, but I still don't know you.”
Paul says at the very end of chapter two of 1 Corinthians, “But we have the mind of Christ”. This doesn't mean some sort of weird psychic thing where we know everything there is to know of the personal thoughts of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, it means we have his mindedness, his drive. We know personally what motivated him – the Father's love for him and his love of the Father and we share in that through the gift of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit – and this knowing is changing us at the very core of who we are. In, through, and as Jesus Christ, God has not done what we do in withholding ourselves from one another. Rather, God has freely shared and indeed given himself to us. By the gift of the Holy Spirit who gives us the mind or mindedness of Jesus Christ and brings us into union with the Son and into communion with the Father and the Son, God has given us himself so that we may know his great love. As Jesus of Nazareth God shared himself with us and with the gift of the Holy Spirit indwelling us God has indeed given us his very self. Unfortunately, in our fallen world the Son had to die to do this. Therefore, the God we know is Jesus Christ the Son crucified who has died that we might share his relationship with the Father in the Holy Spirit.
Turning back to the Corinthians, God had given them his very self just as he has given himself to each of us, yet they were spending this gift not on growing in Christ, not in living and loving in the way of the cross, but were instead cliquing off into groups which were competing for control in the different churches. There were wise people, rich people, tongue-speaking-prophesying people all competing for who was going to get control and have their way in the church. You’d think God would be quite angry with them. We expect God to say to them, “I gave myself to you but you’ve trampled it like hungry pigs following the slop bucket.” Paul indeed goes in that direction and rather angrily calls them a bunch of immature infants not ready for solid food...and he was right. They did indeed have bad table manners, especially around the Lord’s Table. The rich feasted while the poor stood back and watched. Paul is legitimately angry with them after all they are adults. Yet, I think God sees them differently.
Dana and I have a few pictures floating around of William and Alice in their first attempts at eating solid foods or rather mush. I think I was the first to feed William spaghetti and he got it all over himself, the table, the chair, the floor. Ice cream was another huge mess. Alice too, she did and still does get herself covered in everything she eats. Learning to eat solid food is a major achievement and we don’t get mad at our babies for not being able to eat decently and in order. Rather, we laugh. We smile. We take pictures and float them around Facebook. We clean them up. We discipline them when we know they know better. We love them. I like to think that this is how God was seeing the Corinthians, small children with messy faces who need to get cleaned up after this meal and try again next time. I also like to think that this is the way the Trinity sees us as churches and us as individual Christians when we are blowing it with respect to living by the standards of the cross and instead are still walking in the ways of the world.
To close, this is a difficult text to preach for it is easily misunderstood and taken wrongly by those who hear it. The Trinity is in our midst trying to create human community that is in God’s image, community in which people do not withhold themselves from each other but rather in unconditional indeed sacrificial and often apparently wasteful love give ourselves to one another that we grow together to be more in the image of Jesus Christ so that we may give our Christ-like community to the community around us in unconditional indeed sacrificial and often apparently wasteful love. The sharing of loving community in the image of Christ is our goal not the continuance of an institution. Sometimes we get the spoon right and we don’t spill our porridge in our laps or drop our peas on the floor in this respect and most of the time we look like a sloppy baby at dinner time. Nevertheless, God our Father still loves us greatly. He cleans us up and gets us ready to try again. Amen.

Friday 7 February 2014

All I Really Needed to Know I Learned at the Cross

Text: 1 Corinthians 2:1-16
 In testimony to how fast time flies, it has been just over 25 years since Robert Fulghum wrote his classic in the genre of wisdom literature entitled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. He wrote trying to capture a child's sense of wonder at things that are otherwise ordinary. He begins the book saying: “All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sand pile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned: Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life -- learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are like that. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup -- they all die. So do we. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned -- the biggest word of all -- LOOK. Everything you need to know is in there in that list somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation, ecology and politics and equality and sane living. Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all -- the whole world -- had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had a basic policy to always put things back where the found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are -- when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.”
Robert Fulghum's words here are wisdom, not flashy words of philosophy or powerful persuasion. They are just little tidbits of truth in the form of rules to live by to help us through life on the good side. Well, the ancient Jews also collected such words of wisdom. We find them in such books of the Bible as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Yet, their ideas of wisdom were a little different from Robert Fulghum’s kindergarten maxims. You see, Fulghum collected his wisdom from his life experiences. The ancient Jews, they collected their wisdom from the midst of lives lived in relationship to God. For the Jews, wisdom came from God and in a sense it was the very mind of God as Paul seems to indicate to us in today’s text by saying that we have the mind or mindedness of Christ and wisdom is the byproduct of living accordingly.
To the ancient Jews, gaining this wisdom comes through two avenues. First, worshipping God is where wisdom begins as the writer of the book of Proverbs tells us, “The fear (or reverent awe) of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Wisdom is rooted in the awesome gobsmack that comes with knowing one's utter dependence on God who is steadfastly loving and utterly faithful and therefore why would one want to go against him. Second, wisdom also comes to us as the collected lessons learned by people who have walked in the ways that the Lord God revealed in the Law, the Ten Commandments. An ancient Jew would say that a truly wise person tries to get to know God by walking in the ways given by God.
Well, if we were to apply these insights from the ancient Jewish faith to our own, we can say that Christian wisdom comes from worshipping God and by conducting our lives in the way which Jesus showed us when he went to the cross. For the Apostle Paul both the Law and the accumulation of Jewish wisdom came to their fullness in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. Jesus Christ and him crucified as offensive and scandalous as it might be is the only wisdom we need according to Paul. This simple message of a man (well, not just any man) being crucified and risen from the dead when accompanied by the witnessing power and presence of the Holy Spirit reveals to us the wisdom by which and in which we are to conduct our lives.
Paul tells us that he went to Corinth not to persuade anybody to follow Jesus Christ by means of wise words or piercing argument. Rather he came preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ who was crucified by man and raised by God. The fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians states Paul's message, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me....in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For "God has put all things in subjection under his feet."... When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.”
This message of a man dying and being raised from the dead and by that event - and not just the event but who it was that died and was raised - our sin is dealt with and death ultimately defeated sounds foolish to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God. We may want to ask how. First, we must note that it is by the workings of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit opens our eyes and our ears and our minds and our hearts to believe this message that the Triune God of grace has finally intervened to heal his beloved humanity and indeed the whole creation of sin and save it from ultimate and final death and has made the new life in Christ available now, implanted in the midst of the old. You see, the Holy Spirit comes to indwell us and so binds us to Jesus the risen and ascended Lord so that we share in the relationship that God the Son shares with God the Father. The Holy Spirit points us to Jesus, binds us to Jesus, and causes us each to know ourselves to be a child of the Father just as Jesus knew himself to be, that at the end of the day come what may we are God's children and the Father loves us as much as his own only begotten Son.  He is for us to the same extent that he was for Jesus. The steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father is the final word with respect to each of us. God the Father, the God and Father of Jesus Christ, is our Father too.
Knowing ourselves to be loved by the Father as much as he loves the Son, is at the heart of what it is to have the mind of Christ. The Spirit, the Holy Spirit who knows God’s thoughts and ways, who is the personification of the communion of love that the Father and Son share has been given to us. We know this because we can look at the cross and the one who died on it and it means something very profound for us. It is the love of God objectively displayed for all to see. We look at the cross and understand that the self-giving, obedient love which Jesus the Son of God showed to us by going to the cross to reconcile us to the Father and destroy sin and death in the process is the way we ought to live. When we see the cross with eyes illumined by the Holy Spirit we see the way of the love of God. When we hear the gospel message amplified by the Holy Spirit, we hear the call to obedience and feel compelled to follow in that way to become ambassadors of reconciliation; compelled to question ourselves, our motives, our actions, our drives, and even our goodness and indeed find even that wanting in comparison to the great love of God in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit places within us and compels us to live by the same drivenness that characterizes Jesus' cruciform way of life: the same self-giving, unconditional, indeed sacrificial, and apparently wasteful love that is what defines being obedient to God the Father as was God the Son.

All we really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be we learn not in kindergarten but at the foot of the cross. The cross is wisdom to us not foolishness. The way of the cross is the wisest way to live in this world and by living it we come to understand better who our God is and what he has done for and indeed in us. In all it's weakness and shame the message of the cross is the power of God for our salvation. At the cross we see the extent of the love God has for us each and indeed all of creation. In the cross of Christ we see the self-giving way in which we must live and we desire to live by it. So, let the way of the cross be the lens through which you see and understand your life in Christ and live accordingly the reward is truly knowing Jesus. Amen.

Saturday 1 February 2014

The Beautiful Mind of Christ

Text: 1 Corinthians 1:9-31; Philippians 2:1-13 
          The movie, “A Beautiful Mind”, told the story of Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. of Bluefield, WV and his struggle with schizophrenia.  It begins with his college struggle of being a genius but unable to come up with anything unique until the day when in a flash of insight he revolutionizes economic theory.  He went on to become one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.  Sadly, at age 31 he became delusional with paranoid schizophrenia and spent the next 20 or so years in and out of hospitals, but still functioning as a brilliant mathematician.  Nash's story is remarkable because he was able to use his rationality to work his way around his schizophrenia without medication.  He came to see that his politically oriented delusions were hopeless wastes of intellectual effort and so he chose to came back to the rational world of scientific thinking.  The return to rationality was not a joyous thing for him for he understood first hand that rationality was a limitation he placed upon himself, a limitation that kept him from experiencing the fullness of his reality as he knew it.  Nash's case is an exception and his story is by no means meant to encourage people with mental illness to stop taking medications.
         "A Beautiful Mind" did a lot to raise public awareness as to what paranoid schizophrenia is like from the viewpoint of the person suffering with it.  It disorders the mind with a disorientation that affects the entirety of a person’s life.  Due to chemical imbalances in the brain schizophrenic’s become delusional, meaning they follow a wrong mind - a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality and they stick to it despite what almost everybody else believes and the incontrovertible and obvious evidence to the contrary. A paranoid schizophrenic’s mind will function like: “I saw a red car, therefore my food is being poisoned.”  They cannot help but believe the delusion is true reality because the chemical make up of their brain is saying its real as a "normally" functioning saying "I saw a red car, therefore there are red cars in the world."  In response to this delusion the schizophrenic will enter into an unquestionable world of diet control and trying to determine who is doing the poisoning.
          We tend to want to think of the mind as being that part of us that thinks.  We go to school to train our minds to function in a world where everybody thinks alike.  Yet, the mind is much more than just our ciphering mechanism, our reason.  The mind is that part of us by which we understand and order our existence and it involves particularly what we believe about reality.  Dr. Nash in his autobiography states that the way he keeps his existence orderly is to keep his delusions, his false beliefs, at bay by consciously choosing to live in a world that operates according to the beliefs of scientific rationality.  He complains that rationality is a limitation placed upon the human mind, which in his case limits his relationship to reality as he knows it.  His delusional world is apparently quite brilliant.  When we say we have a sound mind we mean that we function according to acceptable beliefs about reality.  People who live functionally with schizophrenia must choose which mind they are going to live in if the can.  Indeed, that is what the medication is help with and again Dr. Nash's case is an exception if not an anomaly.  Unfortunately, the reality that they truly believe to be the real world is not what jives with the reality of nearly everybody else.  Summing up, the mind is not just that part of us that thinks.  
          In the biblical worldview, the mind is that part of the person by which we understand and order our existence.  It deals with truth and how one lives accordingly.  What the mind believes to be “the truth” is what we will order our lives around.  Indeed, biblically speaking sin is primarily a problem of the mind not of behaviour and morals.  Alcoholics Anonymous has the saying, "It's not the drinking.  It's the stinking thinking."  With addiction, it is the mind that needs to be dealt with, the spiritual mind, the relationship with God and others if there is to be any reprieve from the disease.
          The topic of the mind comes up quite often in the New Testament.  Actually, the New Testament Greek word for repentance is metanoia.  Meta means with and noia means mind.  Therefore, the root meaning of repentance in the Bible is “with mindedness”.  The call to repentance is for us to have in us the same mind that was in Christ Jesus – a sincere love for God that affects our lives to the point of wanting nothing more than his will for our lives and to live accordingly.  Indeed, our repentance is a gift from him by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who brings into us a new mindedness which our sin driven mind struggles against.  He puts his mindedness in us, his understanding of reality and drive to serve his
Father, that we might choose to understand and order our lives according to it and together become with minded in Christ as new humanity reconciled to God and in unity with one another.
          Paul tells us, “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose (1 Cor. 1:10).”  “If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind (Phil 2:1-2).”  Most importantly, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross (Phil. 2:5-8).”  Is Paul here inviting us to enter into a world of delusional thinking, a world that does not jive with the reality to which most people seem to subscribe?  We could handle a reality that says the virtue of humility is a good thing.  But, Paul here seems to be inviting us into a world of poor mental health.  In a world where self-realization and being all you can be is considered the definitive healthy mindset, it would seem wrong to invite people to a world of dying to the self, a world marked by the wisdom of the cross and Jesus' power to save by it. 
          Christ Jesus’ mind apparently operated according to the unquestionable love of God, a love that led to a life lived in perfect obedience to the will of God the Father.  He did not question his love for the Father nor his Father’s love for him despite the incontrovertible evidence against it…the way he was publicly scorned and his death on the cross.  As he is the Beloved Son with whom the Father is well pleased, displeasing the Father was something he would not do because of love.  In adoration of his Father he continually offered his life a living sacrifice to do his Father’s will, an act of offering that led to the cross.  In the Holy Spirit Christ Jesus gives us to know and understand his mindedness that we might also love God the Father by offering ourselves to do his will as living sacrifices in thanks and in praise.  This leads to our dying to ourselves.   If we choose to live in his mind, we will have to let go of our old one.
          One final delusional thought, the mind of Christ is not simply the property of us as individuals.  It is our, this congregation’s, every congregation’s, way of life.  Having the mind of Christ means the church is fundamentally about being a group of people who relate to one another according to Christ’s mind.  We love God because he first loved us.  Because we love him we offer ourselves as living sacrifices in thanks and praise as Jesus did.  In this self-sacrifice God teaches and empowers us to love others as he loves all, unconditionally.  This is the word of the cross which is the power of God for us who are being saved.  It is the same power by which he raised Jesus from death.  The same power by which he creates and sustains the entire creation.  Sound delusional? Amen.