Repent-part 2: Flexibility of Mind

Last Sunday I talked about the real meaning of repentance. I told you, that repentance is not what you think it is. It does not mean feeling sorry for your sins and asking forgiveness. That is not the primary meaning of repentance. That may be the dictionary definition. But the biblical definition of repentance is change your mind, or have a different mind. And changing your mind about something that strongly believe, is extremely hard. A close minded person thinks that his opinions about issues are right. I understand why people don’t want to reexamine their beliefs and change their minds because it can be scary.

Feeling sorry for your sins and asking for forgiveness is not enough. It will give you temporary relief, but it wont bring lasting change in your life. For example, take the case of domestic violence. An abusive husband beats his wife. In the morning, when he comes to his senses, he apologizes to her and as a token of his repentance, he brings her flowers in the evening.

A week later, he beats her up again and goes through the same pattern — apology, forgiveness, flowers. In domestic violence literature, it is called the cycle of abuse. I know about this first hand because, as a therapist at Women in Distress, a shelter for abused women, I came face to face with this cyclical reality too many times. Unless the abusive husband undergoes serious therapy, and examines the root cause of why he is doing what he is doing, saying sorry is not going to change his abusive behavior.

Another example of why saying sorry and asking for forgiveness does not have long term impact is the case of Catholic confession. I have been on both sides of the confessional. Until I became a priest, I used to go to confession every week. It was a requirement. I will go to confession and basically repeat the same list of sins every week. I was focusing on my behavior, not my thinking that caused that behavior. So there was no lasting change. During my 13 years as priest, I sat inside the confessional, and heard thousands of confessions. People will come up and repeat the same formula: Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks, since my last confession, and then they will basically repeat the same list of sins.

I am sharing this not to denigrate the sacrament of confession, but to let you know that focusing on your behavior without focusing first on the thinking which generates that behavior, is not going to change your life.

The engine driving your thinking is your brain. Thinking generates feelings and feelings fuel behavior. So if you want to change your behavior, start with your thinking.

For example, let us say someone walks up to this church right now, and says, that a car is being towed from the church parking lot. Our ears will perk up. The next piece of information will determine who is going to run to the parking lot and who is not. If he says it is a Blue Toyota Rav4, Barbara is going to get anxious and go out there. If he says it is a white Toyota Rav4 Terri will, or if it is a black Toyota Rav 4, Angela will. It is the thinking that triggers your anxious feelings and your behavior.

This is such an important concept to understand and so let me use another analogy.

Let us say you are putting on a shirt with buttons. You are distracted and hurried, and you button up and suddenly realize that the buttons don’t align with the holes. You look in the mirror to find out that your first button is in the second hole. You cannot make your shirt straight by just rearranging that one button. You have to start at the beginning with the first button. If the first one aligns, all of them will align. It is the same with life. If your brain does what it is supposed to do which is called thinking and your mind is clear, your life will be much happier, peaceful and joyful.

That is why Jesus said repent first, which means change your thinking first, and have a different mind.

An open and flexible mind is extremely important in these changing times. We are experiencing seismic changes in all areas of our lives. Amazon has completely changed the way we shop these days. The last remaining bookstore in Coral Springs, Barnes and Nobles, closed last week. Sears at the Mall is on its last leg. I was talking to my nephew in England who is an Uber driver. He told me that Uber has dominated London so much so that three private London taxi companies have gone out of business.

In the midst of all these changes, religion is not faring well. In fact the number of people belonging to organized religion has dropped precipitously in the last 25 years. 3000 churches are being closed in this country every year. Gone are the days when a preacher could say “there is no other name given under the sun by which man may be saved.” Most young people today don’t believe that. Using their smart phone, they are checking out other religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. And their brains get to work and they ask: “If more than half of humanity are members of those religions, can they all be doomed because they don’t believe in Jesus?”

Of course Jesus still matters. But you need an open and flexible mind to understand how Jesus transforms and empowers our lives.

Our church is not immune to the impact declining interest in religion and church attendance. We are feeling the effect of the national trend. 18 years ago, when I started attending this church, there were many more people on those pews. Honestly, today, when I stand here and look out, it breaks my heart.

As you know we are in the process of looking for a permanent pastor. I really appreciate and thank Horace and his search committee for doing a very important but hard job. Finding the right person can be a vicious circle. We might find somebody who fits our needs and goals, but it may not match up with that person’s needs and goals.

So, times are hard, but keep praying and keep faith and God will bring the right person at the right time. In the meantime, we have formed a group called Focus Growth to think about how to grow the church. We met once. During that meeting it was decided that we read this book called THRIVE: 12 Habits of Transforming Congregations.

The author does a good job of analyzing what is paralyzing the mainline protestant churches in America. I won’t go into details of the book, but what fascinated me is the phrase she repeatedly uses in the book. Transforming Congregations. It is very significant that she uses the word transforming instead of changing.

Change is superficial. Transformation is deep. Change is temporary. Transformation is permanent. Change tinkers with the accidentals. Transformation focuses on the essence. Change is focused on external behaviors. Transformation zeroes in on the internal thinking that fuels the external behavior. Change happens when we think of repentance as feeling sorry for our sins. Transformation happens when we see repentance as having a different mind that can grapple with the challenges posed by an increasingly diverse and complex world.

Remember the days when we used to watch movies on Blockbuster videos. On Friday night we make a trip to the Blockbuster videos store, pick up a few of those clunky video tapes, insert it into a chunky VCR, turn the TV to channel 3 and watch the movie. At the end, we had to rewind it because it said Be kind rewind on the case. And we got mad at those who did not rewind. And then we had to make another trip to the store to return the video. And if you are late, you pay a fine. Later it became a little easier when movies came in the mail as CDs from Netflix but we still needed a CD player and also involved mailing the CDs back. Now, we can just click Netflix on TV and binge-watch any movie we want, any where we want, at any time we want.

When you think about transforming congregations in these changing times, think about that. Just as you don’t feel nostalgic about those clunky blockbuster videos, we should not feel nostalgic about the old ways of doing church. Expand your mind to imagine a new understanding about God, Jesus, religion, church, spirituality, worship etc. and embrace change to bring about lasting transformation.

So, we need an open mind, a flexible mind at this stage of the evolution of our church.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate what flexibility of mind looks like:

A man was on a scavenger hunt and knocks at the door of Mr. Smith. It was midnight. The man tells Mr. Smith: “I need a piece of wood, 3 feet by 7 feet. And I will pay you five thousand dollars.” Mr. Smith thought for a moment: Home Depot closed; there is no wood in the garage. “I am sorry; I can’t help you, I don’t have any wood in the house.”

The man leaves and Mr. Smith goes back to bed, but he can’t sleep. He had all kinds of thoughts going through his mind. If only I had bought some wood during my last trip to the Home Depot, I would have had $5000 in my hand. He thought about all the things he could have done with that money. He felt so depressed and began to fall asleep. And then suddenly, he jumped out of his bed and said to himself: The door, the door. There were half a dozen doors in his house, all of them made of wood, all of them, 3x7 feet. He could have taken one off the hinges, and given to the scavenger hunter!

What happened in this situation is that, when Mr. Smith heard the word wood, he could only think of the wood on the shelves of the Home Depot. His mind did not have the flexibility to expand and include the fact the door was indeed wood; he had put door in the category of door only, and wood as separate from it.

We do this all the time. When it comes to life, death, religion, God, Jesus, church etc., we have this one track mind. We are afraid, unable or unwilling to think about or include other possibilities. That is why life becomes a struggle, our faith stagnates, our spirituality becomes choreographed to fit the confines of one religion, and our experience of God is limited to reading just one holy book.

If we stubbornly hold on to our age-old customs and beliefs and. refuse to consider other options, we are purchasing church demise on an installment basis.

I like to reread the that passage from Ephesians. What apostle Paul told Christians in Ephesus is relevant for our church today: “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts (Eph 4:17–18)

Futility of their thinking, Darkened in their understanding, caused by ignorance, which creates hardening of hearts, which separates us from the life of God.

I recommend that you post that sentence on your bathroom mirrors, read it every morning, meditate, and pray.

Centuries before Apostle Paul, prophet Isaiah said the same thing to the Israelite who were hard-hearted and narrow minded.

“You will be ever hearing, but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. This peoples’ heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes.” (Is 6: 9–10)

We cannot close our eyes and sit in this church and pretend that everything is fine the way it is, and that people are going to flock here.

So I invite you to pray for the focus growth group. The author speaks about 12 habits of transforming congregations and the first of which is praying.

So what should we pray for? I think we should pray for a clear understanding of what it means to be a christian in a fast changing and diverse universe.

We should pray for a deeper seeing that leads to perceiving, because most of our seeing is very superficial.

We should pray for the softening of our calloused hearts, callouses such as fear of change, suspicion of others, narrow mindedness, blind obedience to tradition and denominational purity.

We should pray for acceptance of reality as it is and vision and strength to change it for the better.

And we should pray that we become agents of wholeness in a fragmented world, which by the way, is the stated mission of the Disciples Church.

But remember that we cannot bring wholeness to the outside world, if we are broken inside.

Pray that we can fix our personal and communal brokenness before we can engage in fixing the brokenness of the world.

And above all, keep an open and flexible mind., because, when you do that, you are actually heeding the call of Jesus to repent, which is what we are supposed to do on this second Sunday of Lent.