Changing Your Mind Is Holy Work

Hi, I'm Rev. Sam, pastor at University Lutheran Church (UniLu) in Palo Alto, a small, queer-affirming, Stanford-adjacent congregation that takes the Gospel seriously and itself not so seriously.

This Sunday the congregation built the sermon with me, in small groups through a couple rounds of questions and reflections, while I stitched between rounds. Where we landed, together, is the thing I most want you to take with you: changing your mind is holy.

based on Matthew 21:23-32 and Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
​for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Season of Creation, Year A

"We don't know."
I used to LOVE that phrase. In a mystical, mysterious world of God, where not knowing can be an honest opening for possibility, it's such a beautiful thing to say.  A reminder of this huge cosmic soup we're all a part of, but barely if at all understand. Some of the holiest work in my life has grown from "we dont know."


But the way it gets used by the authorities in this Sunday's Gospel? That's different. And here's where I've landed: "we don't know" is the oldest move to innocence there is. The faithful life isn't knowing everything. It's refusing to pretend we don't know what we've seen, and going right ahead to do the work of changing our minds (and hearts, for that matter).


This one was a dialogue sermon. Folks gathered in small groups, I asked questions, they talked together, reflected back, and I stitched what came from our collective voices. So as you read, I'm going to hand you the same questions. Take a minute with each before you keep going. The sermon is better when you build it with us.
· · ·

Here's the scene.
Jesus has just turned over the tables in the temple, and the next day he walks right back in and starts teaching. The chief priests and the elders come at him: "By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?" In other words, who decides what this sacred house is for, and who profits from it?

Jesus answers with a question of his own. "Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?"
And then Matthew lets us overhear them. They huddle up and reason it out among themselves (the Greek is dielogizonto, they deliberated). "If we say 'from heaven,' he'll ask why we didn't believe John. If we say 'of human origin,' we're afraid of the crowd, because everyone thinks John was a prophet."
So they answer, "We don't know."

Your turn.
1. What do these leaders want from Jesus?
2. What do they do before they answer him?
3. Do you think they really don't know?


· · ·
Look at what they're doing.
They're claiming authority and innocence at the same time. They want the power of the one asking the questions, and the cover of the one who couldn't possibly be expected to answer. They demand that Jesus account for his authority. They never account for theirs.

What happens in that huddle isn't ignorance. It's a cost-benefit analysis. "We don't know" is a lie about their own knowledge, told to protect their position. Scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have a name for this: moves to innocence, the ways people with power find to feel absolved without giving anything up. The philosopher Charles Mills wrote about a kind of ignorance that isn't an accident at all; it's structured, maintained, and it works very hard to stay ignorant because knowing would cost too much. And the anthropologist David Kertzer shows how familiar ritual words can hand us a false comfort, a feeling of being on the right side of things without having to actually move or change or understand anything.


We have a devastating example of this in our own tradition. The Doctrine of Discovery was a set of fifteenth-century papal decrees that claimed authority "from heaven" to seize lands and subjugate the peoples living on them. That authority was of entirely human origin. (The ELCA formally repudiated it in 2016. The Vatican did in 2023. Five and a half centuries is a long time to say "we don't know.")


Ezekiel saw this coming, too. In chapter 18, the people complain, "The way of the Lord is unfair." The Hebrew says it doesn't weigh true, like a rigged scale. And God fires right back: "Is it my way that doesn't weigh true? Isn't it your ways that don't weigh true?" That's the whole move, named in God's own mouth. We build the unfairness and the exclusion. We project it onto God. And then we use "we don't know" so we never have to turn from our own behavior.


So let me be really clear about the distinction. Not knowing is fine. Not knowing is human, and sometimes it's holy and helpful. Using not-knowing so that we never have to change? That's something else.


Your turn again.
1. Where do you hear leaders, institutions, or us say "we don't know" about the earth, the climate, or the land, when we actually do know?
2. And what does that "we don't know" protect?

· · ·
Here's where it gets uncomfortable, and I say that with love. It's easy to start by pointing outward: oil companies, politicians, those people. That's fine as a starting place. But the chief priests and elders weren't villains to the crowd. They were the respectable, educated leaders of their community. They were the people everyone looked up to. As some people pointed out on Sunday, they also had a responsibility to the broader community-- to protect them, to basically be the "quality assurance" of their time and check in on whomever or however many people claimed prophet status. Simultaneously, these elders and chief priests are operating within the Roman Empire. They themselves are not Roman, they themselves are caught in a particular mix of in-between that comes with rough pressures to protect, preservere, and try to find pathways toward rightness.

This is also who's sitting in the round on Sunday mornings: us. 


Right after this exchange, Jesus tells a little story. A father has two sons. He says to the first, "Child, go and work in the vineyard today." And the kid says, flatly, ou thelō: "I don't want to." But later, something moves in him. The Greek word is metamelētheis: an afterthought, a regret, a turning of feeling. And he goes. The father says the same thing to the second son, who answers beautifully: "I go, sir." Respectful. Titled. Correct. And he never goes.
Notice what the father calls them: teknon, "child." He asks; he doesn't command. And notice what Jesus says to the leaders at the end, in verse 32: "even after you saw it, you did not change your minds."

The problem was never the first "no." The problem is seeing and refusing to be moved.


Ezekiel has the mirror image: "they saw and turned" (18:28). The Hebrew is almost that plain: he saw, and he turned. See. Be moved. Go. The failure is stopping somewhere in between.

This week I talked with a student who's in the middle of exactly this. They grew up inside a faith that handed them some beliefs they now can't hold, and they're not pretending not to know what they now know. But they're also not walking away from God, and they're not waiting around for God to do the turning for them. They're refusing the sour grapes and in the chaotic waters of questioning and trying to find the way.


That's Ezekiel's phrase too (sour grapes). The people had a proverb: "The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." We'd say, "That's just how it is." "The damage is done." And Ezekiel refuses it. You are not doomed by what your elders ate. (It cuts both ways, by the way. You can't hide behind your ancestors' sins, and you can't hide behind their guilt either. What we inherited, including what we benefit from, is still ours to answer for.)


So let me turn it back on us. What did we inherit here, in progressive, affirming, Lutheran faith, that we'll someday have to poke at? We will have blind spots that someone will name for us in fifty years. Can we be the kind of people who turn when they do?


I want to say something out loud here. There's an honest kind of not knowing, and there's grief: real, heavy eco-grief, the kind that freezes you. Those get compassion. Always. But strategic not-knowing, the kind that protects what we'd rather not give up, what we'd rather avoid... gets named.

Ezekiel's God says, "Make yourselves a new heart." Not "wait for one to be issued." And then: "I have no pleasure in anyone's death. Turn, then, and live." The turn is toward life. It isn't penance. And Martin Luther, in the very first of his 95 Theses: when Jesus said "repent," he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. Turning isn't a one-time event. It's the whole of life. Changing our mind, turning, is holy work.


· · ·
We build solidarity through doing things and spending time together. We also build solidarity, sometimes, through familiar words. BUT we've got to watch for when authorities use familiarity, familiar words, or even seemingly comforting words like "we don't know" to evade the responsibility to turn and make new choices.


It's OK to be wrong. It's not OK to think twice on it and still choose to insist on being wrong because it serves you, or a few, better than the greater good of God's creation.


So here's the thing I most want you to carry out the door: changing your mind is holy.
The work of turning, of changing yourself, is holy work, and it's always important work. We can't opt to live and refuse to take a track. And we can ALWAYS (well, almost always) opt to live and change tracks.


"Child, go and work in the vineyard today."


with joy,
​Rev. Sam