You have heard of arteriosclerosis, “hardening of the arteries,” a chronic disease of thickening, or hardening of the arterial walls, which interferes with blood circulation.

            R. Leslie Holmes accuses us of having a much, much worse disease, attitudinosclerosis.  Attitudinosclerosis, he says, is a chronic disease of the human spirit.  It causes a hardening of negative attitudes which interfere with the Holy Spirit’s circulation in the lives of its victims.

            As arteriosclerosis is often called “hardening of the arteries,” I would think  that attitudinosclerosis might be called “hardening of the categories.”  And while I think arteriosclerosis is not contagious, attitudinosclerosis is very much so.

            The good news is that this dreadful disease is curable.  

            Last week we considered forgiveness — again!  Now I would like you to do a little theological cogitation.  We’ll call it Lesson One in our course, Theology 101. 

            Proposition one:  This is the one sentence I quoted two weeks ago.  You will remember that my seminary professor told us it was the most important sentence he ever said to us.  And I told you it is about the most important thing I ever said, or will ever say to you. 

            Here is the sentence:  “If you believe, today, just what you believed 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 1 year ago, 1 month ago, then you no longer need the Holy Spirit.”

            After all, Jesus said the Holy Spirit’s mission is to lead us, guide us into all truth.  So if we already have what we consider to be all truth, and are not open to any new way of thinking, we obviously have no more need of the Holy Spirit!

            Proposition two:  If my professor and I are correct, then I would like you to ask yourself, “Why do I believe just what I did 5 years ago?  Why have I not progressed to some new, higher level of faith and belief?”  If you are honest with yourself, your answer may be, “Because I have not listened to the Holy Spirit’s voice calling me to grow and mature in my spiritual thinking.”

            If I am satisfied with things as they are, or if I don’t think what the Holy Spirit impresses on my mind is all that important, naturally I am not of a mindset to “let God transform (me) into a new person by changing the way (I) think.”

            Ten years ago, cell phones were a rarity.  Now there are more cell phones than land phones.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who would be “lost” without my cell phone!

            Most of us grew up in homes that were not air-conditioned.  Today, few of us are willing to live in homes or drive cars that are not air-conditioned.

            I was once a licensed electrician.  I worked my way thru 2 years of seminary as a hospital maintenance electrician.  Today, if I were to accompany Jim Harvey on his rounds at University of Michigan, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what he is doing.  Electronics has progressed!
            You who were here last week for VBS last week saw the miracle of electronics and computerize as Larry maneuvered them to augment Sarah’s gesticulations and Wilma’s song leading and Alvina’s leadership and the antics of our talented thespians.

            We obviously live in a different world than that in which most of us grew up.

            My question today is:  If we insist on getting more and more sophisticated in our material world, which we do, why are we quite satisfied with “the same old same old” in the spiritual world?

            The amswer is attitudinosclerosis, hardening of the categories. Please, dear saints, ask the Holy Spirit to teach us, lead us, guide us into deeper spiritual understanding.  Jesus promised (John 16:13) that when the Spirit comes “he will guide you into all truth.”

            We believe in the Bible, some add “and the Bible only.”  What Bible are we talking about?  Many who believe “the Bible and the Bible only” mean the King James version of the Bible, translated 500 years ago by dedicated Christian scholars, using the manuscripts they had available then.

            In the past few years, hundreds of ancient manuscripts have been discovered, many hundreds of artifacts have been unearthed by archeologists.  Shall we ignore all those discoveries, and the new insights into ancient languages which the scholars have at hand now, which they did not have 500 years ago?  We wouldn’t do that with material discoveries!
            I read recently about “Puritans, ‘pure Christians’ who refused to go along with the sinful secularism of Europe, so they came to America, where they ran off the Indians and brought black people from Africa to do their heavy work.”

            Praise God that most Christian Americans have been willing to let God “change the way” they think, at least in some ways!  However, if we want to avoid attitudinosclerosis maybe we better let God continue to “change the way” we think.

            Proposition three:  One of the most challenging concepts of Christian living, one of the most difficult virtues of our Christian behavior is what we discussed last week, the ability to forgive. 

            Attitudinosclerosis, hardening of negative attitudes which interfere with the Holy Spirit’s circulation in our lives, makes forgiveness very difficult.

            Jesus used stories to illustrate the truths he wanted us to understand.  So please consider a true story, very much in the news, to illustrate the point.

            A few days ago a man drove into an intersection without stopping, apparently without even looking.  Have you ever done that?  I have.  Some time ago I drove right thru a red light. 

            I am really blessed that no one was coming.  I have no idea what I was thinking, rather, why I was not thinking!  I do remember pulling over to the side of the road and thanking God that no one was coming.  I could have caused an accident like the man at Ford Road and M-14. 
            In his case, another man was taking his family for a ride in an antique automobile he and his father had just restored.  They were hit broadside by the man who ran the red light.  The father, mother and youngest child died.  Two other children are now orphans.

            I have tried to imagine how I might feel if I had been the one who caused that accident.  Just think; no matter what they charge him with, no matter what punishment he receives, he has to live with the memory of that one thoughtless moment for the rest of his life.  He has to realize that he destroyed a family who was innocently enjoyed a ride in an old car, all because of his one moment of carelessness, thoughtlessness. 

            Should he be forgiven?  Will you forgive him?  What would Jesus do?

            Our Old Testament lesson today is a shining example of a forgiving attitude.  Try to imagine how a 17-year old boy would feel being thrown into a well and left to die; but then being lifted out of the well and sold to be a slave in a foreign land.

            He made the best of the situation, became an example of faithful witness. Now he had the opportunity to get even, take revenge, or at least lord it over his brothers. 

            Instead, he demonstrated what forgiveness can do.  He proved that we need not be victims of attitudinosclerosis.  If anyone ever had an excuse to succumb to the virus of that dreadful disease, Joseph surely had the excuse.  

            In our Epistle for today, Paul gives us a prescription which is potent as a prophylactic, a protection against being infected by attitudinosclerosis.

            “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.  Then you will know what God wants you to do, and you will know how good and pleasing and perfect his will really is.

            “As God’s messenger, I give each of you this warning: Be honest in your estimate of yourselves, measuring your value by how much faith God has given you.” (Romans 12:2-3)

            Is that explicit. or is that explicit?  Can anything be more clear than that?  To prevent, or heal attitudinosclerosis, we need to develop new ways of thinking.  Long before mind-science developed into a recognized profession, Paul recognized and promoted it, warning us that our speech and behavior are affected by our attitudes, which can be improved by  “changing the way you think.”

            Jesus said, it is “not what goes into the mouth (that) defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth.”  (Matthew 15:11)  What comes out of the mouth, what we say, is determined by what we think, the way we think — the very thing Paul tells us to let God change!

            “. . . let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”  Paul is telling us that we don’t change much by our own volition; we need to let God change the way we think.

            To summon us to make a deliberate and intentional dedication of our lives to God, Paul uses a Greek technical term, sometimes used in connection with the Temple offerings, paristemi, “stand along side of.”  It can also mean “show your offering,” or demonstrate your commitment by what you give.  “I plead with you to give (present, paristemi) yourselves to God.”  Let your bodies be “a living and holy sacrifice to God.” 

            You remember how Jesus praised a widow for putting her last two mites into the offering, even tho “many rich people threw in large amounts.” 

            According to the paristemi principle, offerings are demonstrations of public worship.  In our Epistle today, Paul called it “your spiritual act of worship.” 

            Paul tells me that not only my offerings should be brought to God, but my whole being.  “I plead with you to give yourselves to God — this is your spiritual act of worship.”

            I hope you realize that is why I close the pastoral prayer each week with my adaptation of the traditional “Jesus Prayer.”

            “Lord Jesus Christ, light of the world, fill our souls with your peace, fill our hearts with your love, fill our minds with your truth, fill our hands with your mission . . .”

            Fill our souls with God’s peace.  I trust that our caring congregation does indeed fill your soul with the peace of God each week.  It surely does for me.

            Fill our hearts with God’s love.  You do feel the love of God evident in this body of Christ, I know. 

            Our hands, of course, are surely busy with the mission of Christ.  Cass Corridor, Gleaners, Crop Walk, the many domestic and foreign mission projects we support . . . and VBS!  What a thrilling fulfillment of mission was our Vacation Bible School last week!

            Now, how about the “fill our minds with your truth” segment of the prayer?  Truth!   Paul said, “Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”  To me, that is calling on us to do what Jesus asked us implicitly to do, to let the Holy Spirit lead us into all truth.

            Let’s now call a brief recess from Theology 101, and go into Psychology 101!  Take a look at our brains, that organ with which we think.  Our minds are our “thinking” tools.  The brain consists of two hemispheres, the right and the left.  Each works somewhat independently of the other.  The left hemisphere if the brain’s filing cabinet.  In that file is all the gathered information of a lifetime.  Every tho’t and every experience we ever had is in that file.  You might say it is the computer disc on which you have all the data stored for recall.

            The right brain hemisphere is the exploratory, creative, imaginative side of the brain.  Left-handed people tend to be right-brained people. 

            That is why a disproportionate number of brilliant discoveries and artistic masterpieces are the products of left-handed people. 
            Most people are right-handed, and left-brained.  We all grew up with rules, regulations, laws, times-tables, equations, formulas, codes, all sorts of rigid facts and figures which tell us what will work and what will not work, how we must behave and how we must not behave.  Right-handed, left-brained, we are almost robot-like human beings, doing things “the way we’ve always done”!

            That is why we struggle when we are challenged by significant changes to our life-style.  A new idea is submitted, and our immediate reaction is “that won’t work here” or “that isn’t the way things are done” or “let’s not rock the boat.”

            Why are we so prone to believe a new idea will be a failure?  Is it not because of the way we think?  New ideas just don’t fit into our traditions, into our left-brain thinking.  Fear of the unknown creates anxiety.  Change of any kind makes most of us — at least those of us who are left-brain — uneasy.

            If you present a new idea, or a new way of thinking, to a right-brain oriented person, the response is likely to be, “Why not?” or “Let’s try it!” or “We’ll never know till we try.”

            You should know that I grew up very much left-brained.  Rules, regulations, which made me very timid and withdrawn.  I was a slow-learner.  To make matters worse, I was reared in a rigid, black-&-white home, church and community.

            My studies in music conservatory, later in graduate schools (public relations, communications) and seminary sparked an interest in learning to be more creative.    Which I was not!  So to rectify this deficiency I attended several creative thinking seminars.  Without exception, they taught me that to become creative, innovative, I needed to force myself to be more right-brained.  And to do that, the prescription was always, “Do something completely out of character for you.  Do something you have never done before.  Change you life habits in some way.”

            I got back from the University of New York at Buffalo, with the assignment to “do something completely different” from my lifestyle.  My family had not yet come up from Nashville.  I leisurely drove up Gratiot Avenue one night.  There in a window I saw a black dress shirt.  A black dress shirt!  In those days no one I knew ever wore black shirts.  I went in, bought it and wore it to work. 

            My secretary looked at me and said, “What’s with you?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Your shirt!”

            “I always wear a shirt.”

            “Well not a black one!”

            As you know, I have adopted several more things out of the ordinary — bow ties, a flower on my lapel every day, a beard (even before anyone but “hippies” had them) and several other things.  Maybe I overdo it.  We usually go to extremes with things we feel deeply about, don’t we!

            Perhaps the widow in the Temple was right-brained.  She obviously had much faith.  The Pharisees, on the other hand, were practically all left-brained.  They took their rules and traditions very seriously, even rigidly! 
            Jesus, recognizing this, played a mind game with them, utilizing some right-brain ideas which revealed their left-brain attitudes, showing them to be victims of  attitudinosclerosis, the disease which limited their thinking. 

            Probably the best example is in Matthew 5, where Jesus several times said, “You have heard . . . but I say to you . . .”  Then he challenged them, not to repudiate their laws, but to reinterpret them, to “change the way you think.” 

            The Pharisees were sincere.  They took life very seriously.  Paul knew that; after all, he had been a Pharisee.  But just as Jesus had told them to think differently, more broadly, Paul echoed that mindset.  It is our Epistle for today he told the Roman Christians to “let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”

            The Greek and Roman world in which Paul grew up programmed people to function as left-brain, legalistic people.
Rome had strict laws.  As a Roman citizen and a Jew, Paul had two sets of laws to observe!  But when he met Christ, the horizons of his mind expanded.  He let God transform him into a new person by changing the way he thought.  Now he wanted everyone — Christians, that is — to adopt this mind-expanding Gospel, the good news which Jesus had called the “more abundant life.” (John 10:10)

            One of you said to me after a recent sermon, “You sometimes get rather passionate, don’t you?”  I hope you are right!  Yesterday morning as I walked, I listened to a biography of William Wilberforce, that devoted Christian who almost single-handedly persuaded England to abolish the slave trade — all because of his Christian passion.
            Russian poet Boris Pasternak said, “It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to better days, but someone’s soul, inspired and set ablaze.”

            Paul was very, very passionate about this new way of thinking.  So much so that he wanted to share his ideal with the church, hoping and praying that they too would get passionate about it.  That’s why he said, “I plead with you . . .”  Please, please, please “let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”

            This morning I pray that you will listen to Paul, and open up your mind, think in new ways so that your faith will come alive in Christ Jesus.  That is the antidote for attitudinosclerosis.

            I am here as a prophetic preacher, calling on you to open up to the Holy Spirit, to think up!  And I will continue to pray “Fill our minds with your truth.” as long as I am here.

            When God confronted Cain in Eden, he asked, “Why do you look so down?” he already knew why.  Cain had taken things into his own hands, and he was not willing to alter his thinking.  And remember, his refusal to think differently, which could have altered his attitudes, led to murder.

            I hope you see the danger of this terrible disease, attitudinosclerosis.  I want to suggest a guaranteed prescription.  Paul writes the prescription in these words: “let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”

            As with most medications, an explanation of the way it works is included with the medicine container. Read it: “And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give yourselves to God — this is your spiritual act of worship.  When you think of what he has done for you, is this too much to ask?  Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.  Then you will know what God wants you to do, and you will know how good and pleasing and perfect his will really is.”          (Romans 12:1,2)

            Dear friends, those are not my words.  Those are the inspired words of the holy scripture.  I promise that if you read devotional literature and scripture every day, the new “way you think” will feed you with rich spiritual nourishment.  You will suddenly see a word, a phrase or a scripture you have never seen before!

            Let us pray  .  .  .
            Lord we have come to consider your words, the Bible; and your Word made flesh, Jesus.  Thank you for your forgiveness and for promising us a new and better life.  Grant us the grace to grow and mature, that we may faithfully represent you to the world.