Single Minded

"Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do." (James 1:8)

  I want to offer my apologies to Mayor Rob Ford.   If you have somehow missed the Rob Ford phenomena, you can look up the current mayor of Toronto on any web browser. There will be plenty of articles and video clips of his antics.  If you do view any of the videos, I would encourage you to make sure the little ones are out of the room.  And probably your Grandmother. And pretty much everyone else. In fact maybe just don't watch the videos at all.

  The Mayor has, in the past few weeks, admitted he smoked crack cocaine, but was probably in a drunken stupor when he did it, been accused of making sexually aggressive remarks to women (which he denied by making a crass and sexually aggressive comment about his wife) gotten in shoving matches, and last week knocked down a 60 year old woman.  Which to him wasn't that big a deal because "I picked her back up."

   I mentioned him in this past weeks sermon.  I brought up the fact that despite all of these things happening, Ford remains fairly unrepentant about his actions and sees no reason as to why he should step down from being the Mayor of Toronto.   He feels he is doing a good job, and his private persona should have no bearing on his public persona.  I mentioned that he probably has a different definition of what it means to be good and effective than many of us do.

  And I don't apologize for what was said.  But I do apologize for making it seem as if Ford is a singular case.  The truth is many of us, perhaps even the majority of people live as Ford does. Hopefully no in a drunken, crack riddled stupor. But many people live two separate lives. There is the life we allow the world to see and the inner life that we hide from everyone.  There is the person we are in front of the world and the person we are when no one sees us.

   We appear one way to the world. good upstanding, kind people. But inside we are ravaged by sinful thoughts, and actions. We say one thing and we do another. There is the person we would like to be, or at least the person we hope everyone thinks we are, and the person we truly are.  At best we hope to keep them in some sort of balanced stasis.

  It would be easy, I suppose to simply say we are hypocrites. but I'm not sure that's a fair labeling.  Most of us truly want to be that good person. We want tobe holy. We don't wish to be controlled by our sins.  We don't like the fact we are dishonest and often selfish and self centered.

  Such a person is, as James says double minded.  The word originally used here could be defined as having two minds or even two souls. I think that hits it pretty well. Ever feel as if you are of two minds. or even two souls? The person you want to be wrestles with the person you don't want to be? How many times have we echoed Paul's anguish from Romans 7 "I do the things I don't want to do, and do the things I don't want to do"? I see no hypocrisy in Paul statement. He truly wants to be good.  But he finds himself unable to do it.

  So if we are all like this, is it that big of a deal? Frankly, yes it is.  Look again at what James says. A person who is of two minds (or souls) is unstable.  Remember when we talk about having that stasis, where we try to keep thw two persons we are balanced? James reminds us we can't do it.  It just doesn't take much to tip us out of balance. And we find yourselves back where we were. We are not nearly as balanced as we think.

  But more importantly it's accepting less than what God wants for us.  When we read Jesus' sermon on the Mount He gives us a great promise that we don't have to live a life of two minds.  We can live with a consistency of inward and outward holiness. We can, in short, live a life of consistency.

  In this day and age I can think of no greater witness to the truth of the claims of the Gospel than living a life so different from everyone else. Not in a "holier than thou" attitude, but living a life so full of God's love and grace that we are of one mind, the mind of Christ.  The church needs a better message than simply "I'm not perfect just forgiven". The world longs for a witness of personal holiness where the church, in all joy and Milty, lives out a consistent faith in the midst of the world.

  The truth of this first warmed my heart to our Wesleyan theological heritage.  It was Wesley's emphasis on a personal holiness that could change the world around us that captured the hearts of the people of Great Britain. It was this promise ,and the evidence of it lived out, that swept like a wildfire though early America. And it is an emphasis on such a life that could capture us again.  Open minds and open hearts makes for a nice advertising campaign. One mind and heart, the mind and heart of Jesus living within us could change the world.

In Christ,
Rev. Dr. Brian Jones <><