Love: The Power to Change Your Mind

Luke 10:25-37; Philippians 2:1-11

What does it take to change your mind?

One of my favorite movies is Mr. Holland's Opus, in which Richard Dreyfuss portrays a creatively frustrated, poorly paid, often misunderstood public high-school music teacher. A subplot in the movie is the story of a student who is line for a scholarship as a college wrestler but needs one more credit to graduate. The coach convinces Mr. Holland to take him into the band. With no musical background, the only instrument that seems like a possibility for this student is the bass drum. Unfortunately, he has absolutely no sense of rhythm. Mr. Holland works relentlessly to help this rhythmically challenged senior feel, hear, or see the beat of the music. He tries counting it out. He taps the student's feet with his own. He puts a football helmet on the guy's head and tries beating the rhythm into his brain.

Finally, we see Mr. Holland directing the band in John Philip Sousa's "Stars and ftripes forever." He stops the band midway through the piece, just the way he has done every time the would-be drummer has missed the beat. Mr. Holland looks up to the drummer and says, "Congratulations. You've found the beat!" The entire band breaks into applause.

So, what would it take for us to begin to live by the rhythm of the mind-set of Christ? What does it take to change our minds?

Some people attempt to change our minds by force. Some try to convince us with logic or to manipulate us with advertising. But the apostle Paul was convinced that the one thing that really has the power to change our minds is love. For him, "being of the same mind" means "having the same love."

We've all seen this kind of change on a human level. We've known the stereotypical confirmed bachelor: good education, successful career, positive values and his mind set on never being tied down. Then some enchanted evening he sees her across a crowded room, and a mysterious power begins to change his mind. One day they stand at the altar, drawn together by an always amazing power that we call love.

Award-winning author Philip Yancey was one of those persons. He described his adolescent efforts at "erecting a strong stone fortress against love" because he thought himself unlovable. But one day during college, he met Janice. Yancey wrote, "Eventually the most powerful force in the universe, love, won out." His mind began to change. He wrote, "Hope aroused. I wanted to conquer worlds and lay them at her feet." For her birthday, Yancey learned Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique and invited her to hear him play it on the piano. "It was an offering to new life, and to her who had called it forth" (Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor [New York: Doubleday, 2001], 47-48). Yancey's mind-set, the fundamental perspective through which he viewed reality, began to change because he experienced the awesome power of human love. Janice's love brought out a whole new way of life in him.

That's a good place to begin, but the apostle Paul went far beyond mere human love. He coined a new word to describe it. The Greek word agape describes the unique love that transforms our minds into the mind of Christ.

The Love That Has the Power to Change Our Minds Is Defined by the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus

New Testament scholars tell us that in the second chapter of Philippians, Paul picked up a creed or hymn that was used in worship in the early church to define the mind-set of Jesus Christ. Like Mr. Holland trying to get the beat of the drum into the mind of his student, Paul is trying to get the rhythm of the way and will of the self-emptying love of God in Jesus into our brains, until we start to think, act, and live in rhythm with the heartbeat of God's love in Jesus Christ.

Across these weeks in Lent we will listen to that hymn and allow the rhythm of God's love in Christ to become the rhythm by which we live. At the outset, it is critically important for us to realize that when we use the word love, we are defining that term by nothing less than the self-giving love of God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Love That Has the Power to Change Our Minds Is Discovered in Community

One of the limitations of English pronouns is that the word you looks and sounds the same whether it's singular or plural. The exception, of course, is in the South, where the language has been improved by the use of "y'all" (for "you-all"). In Philippians 2, Paul is not writing to isolated individuals, but to the gathered community. He is saying, "Y'all be of the same mind. Y'all share the same love. Y'all be of one accord and of one mind. Y'all have among yourselves the same mind that was in Christ Jesus." The practical effect of the plural pronoun is that agape is best experienced in community with other disciples of Jesus Christ.

Lest we begin to think that the love of Christ is narrowly contained within the community of the church, however, it's important to remember that the "y'all" of God's love reaches out to the whole beloved human family.

Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that agape love was at the center of the Civil Rights movement. He called it "understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all [people] ... the love of God working in the minds of men" (Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope, edames M. Washington [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986], 13).

Luther D. Ivory wrote that the "organizing principle"—we might say the "mind-set"—at the center of Dr. King's witness was "his faith in the radically involved, loving, and redeeming God of history." He believed that "radical agape love in action" is "God's ultimate will for humanity" and that "God's primary concern with human history was the restoration of the beloved human community." Ivory wrote:

King understood God as radical agape love in action seeking to create, redeem, sustain, and restore community. Even when purposive human action tries to destroy it, God insists on community, and demonstrated (through the cross of Christ), that no sacrifice was too great to effect its restoration. (Luther D. Ivory, Toward a Theology of Radical Involvement [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997], 139)

The love that meets us at the cross is the sacrificial love of God for the whole human family.

The Love That Has the Power to Change Our Minds Takes Action in Human Relationships

The gospel message in Luke 10:25-37 contains one of Jesus' bestknown stories. In response to the call to love God with his heart, soul, strength, and mind and to love his neighbor as he loved himself, a lawyer asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?"

In response to his question, Jesus told the story of the man who, going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, "fell...