Open Minds
Text: 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48
By: Rev. Terry Carty
Date: 4-22-12
Place: Kingston Springs United Methodist Church Season: Third Sunday of Easter
Main Point: Often Christians are considered to be people with closed minds. But meeting the risen Christ actually opens minds.
Today we have heard yet another account of people seeing the resurrected Jesus Christ. Again we heard a story of people doubting and being given proof that Christ is risen indeed. I don’t get tired of these stories – they remind me of the miraculous nature of the Jesus. And they remind me that we are slow learners.
There is something in particular that I want to look at in this passage today. In the 45th verse it says that he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. Now these are people who had been with Jesus for three years, tramping around the country, hearing his teaching, seeing his miracles, having everything explained to them in detail. After all that time Jesus just now opened their minds to understand?
The learning process is an interplay of information and experience. We know that children learn by repetition and memorization. The multiplication tables are not something that we come by without applying ourselves. At some point, students must memorize that 5 times 5 equals 25. Later, when we stack 5 nickels together to make a quarter, we don’t even remember that we didn’t always know that. When information meets experience, learning often occurs.
When we are children, we are challenged by new experiences frequently and we appropriate information rapidly. As we grow older and new experiences become more rare, our learning seems to slow down. We may find ourselves closing down to new possibilities.
This week I was talking with Ed Greer about his experience as a volunteer in mission in the little island of St Vincent. He was reflecting on having stayed in the home of the school principal and what he learned from that experience. Ed reminded me of the richness of staying in the homes of people of different cultures.
I remembered when I prepared a team of youth to go with me to that same island to teach the youth how to do youth ministry. I had a ton of knowledge about youth ministry and was very successful at growing youth groups in American churches. We prepared to lead seminars and make their youth into our own image of youth group.
But when we got to St Vincent and the best youth from all around the island came to the leadership camp, we discovered that we were not considered the ‘experts’ that we had been prepared to be. Instead, we were expected to take our seats among the other students there and be taught in a very disciplined, 19th century British-style classroom setting.
As my team huddled during the breaks and at night, we first shared our frustration because we had come to teach. But as the week bore on, our conversations turned to realization that our USA culture was quite different from that of St Vincent. The things we came to teach would not have worked without significant modifications.
The things that we eventually taught them were some of the songs we knew. The enduring thing that we left them was the song books we had created and a guitar we had brought to give them. But the enduring thing we took back with us was a deeper understanding of another culture. We had been able to process the information that we took with us and return with a far different conclusion because of our experience there.
It was an experience that opened our minds to deeper understanding.
Those disciples, even though they had been traveling with Jesus, they had been living much as people had lived for a century or more. As they encountered situations, they drew on their experience and information, and reached the same conclusions as usual. It was not that they were stubbornly closed-minded. It was that their minds were not open to new possibilities for information that they already had.
The risen Christ here opened their minds to the scripture – they saw new possibilities in light of an altogether new experience of the resurrection of one who was dead.
We say that we are “resurrection people.” Our United Methodist motto is “Open Hearts, Open Doors, Open Minds.” But I am not sure that we always fulfill the “Open Minds” part of that. It is not that we intend to the closed-minded. But we are often unaware that there are other ways of viewing the same set of information. Our minds are closed because we do not even notice that other people may not think the way we do.
The disciples, good Jews, had accepted Jesus as Messiah, but as a Messiah that would overturn the political scene by force. The resurrected Jesus opened their minds to realizing that the same scriptures pointed to a Messiah who came in peace to change the way people understand the desires of a loving God.
Resurrection people are not people who increasingly close their minds to any other possibilities of scriptural truth. Resurrection people are those whose minds become increasingly open to all the possibilities of God’s love.
Today’s scripture story is one that can serve to remind us that it is not enough to open our hearts to another – without opening our minds we may simply pity. It is not enough to open our doors – without opening our minds the stranger leaves still a stranger.
As we go back into our world this week, may the risen Christ open our minds to understand the gospel of love.