Be transformed by the renewing of your minds.
Dr. DeeAnn Reeder is the wife of one of my best friends from seminary. She has a PhD and is a professor of biology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. She studies brain physiology, specifically the ways our brains physically change based on our behaviors and the environment. As she explained it to me, scientists no longer debate whether a trait or behavior is genetic or environmental. Genetics and the environment affect each other, and demonstrate how we can be, as Paul said, transformed by the renewing of our minds.
For example, when I became a father, it was sudden. I had just started dating Meg and her son asked if he could call me daddy. It changed my life. We married and I adopted him. But it wasn’t the legal process of adoption that changed me, but buying into all that it means to be a daddy. There was a change to my being. I will never stop being a daddy to Rob (or to our other children.) In doing so, my brain’s architecture adapted to that new reality and formed physical neurological structures to house it. A decision of my mind caused a physical change in my brain that is permanently part of who I am. That’s transformation – the mind eliciting a physical change.
Paul wrote to the Church in Rome, “Do not be conformed to the 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.”
Ancient peoples, including particularly the Jews and the Greeks, developed an understanding of human nature as body, mind and spirit. Our bodies are, of course, the physical organisms that house us. Our bodies grow, they get sick, they get old, and they die. But they are not ultimately us. And we all know it.
The whole idea of the soul or spirit addresses the fact that we all know to the core of our being that we are more than the cells and water etc. that make up our bodies. Your soul is that part of you which is apart from your body. It is your ultimate being.
The mind is the connection between the physical body and the soul. It is different from your brain, but it is housed in the brain and shapes our physical being. That connection is fascinating and helpful in understanding this passage from Paul and our Gospel today.
Paul wrote, “Do not be conformed to this world.” No. The body is driven by physical needs, appetites and desires that cannot bridge us to the spirit. Following Christ is literally a transformational process of accessing the grace of God through faith. The process goes something like this:
1. Accept and invite Christ into our minds. This is at heart an act of submission, of subverting your mission to His mission. It’s “Jesus take the wheel” whatever it takes to get us to that decision.
2. Then comes the day-by-day decisions of discipleship, of remaining in prayer and remaining in study. Meg introduced me to Joyce Meyer some years ago and I like what she has to say about this. Look at yourself, look at your life. If you have a problem or you have some area that is troubling you, study it in scripture and pray on it. It may be anxiety, forgiveness, anger, money – whatever it may be have a look and see what God says about it. But remember that the spirit most often has to lead understanding.
3. Follow your discernment faithfully and remain in a mode of ready repentance when you get off target, trusting God to redeem and use even your missteps and mistakes.
That will keep us humble and moving in the right direction. I believe that God is chiefly concerned that we be sincerely on that right path. He will forgive the stumbles because His larger goal is to bring us home.
With all that in mind, how important is Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God?
Just as the mind is the bridge between the spirit and the body, Jesus is the bridge between heaven and earth, between spirit and flesh, between God and mankind.
We know Peter will continue to struggle with the meaning and implication of his own confession. Next Sunday and we’ll hear his immediate failure in the next few verses. He will go on to stumble repeatedly and famously. He doesn’t get it fully and won’t until after the Resurrection. That’s ok. He doesn’t have to get it all right straight away.
But we can see his transformation begin.
Peter will spend the rest of his mortal life probing the depths of his love of Jesus as Messiah, Christ, Lord and Savior. And he will die for it. And we are blessed by his faith and sacrifice so that we could come into this moment.
He does need to take that first step, which he did for all of us, then take the next steps as they come.
That is Christian life. That we make that same confession that Jesus is our Messiah, the Son of the living God and buy into all that implies. It changes our being, transforms us day by day into being more like him and becoming a beacon to others.
AMEN