Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 23, 2026
Romans 12:1-8

So once a year I have to go through the ritual of getting a new pair of glasses. Mostly I use them for reading, sometimes I need them at night. I used to wear glasses to preach, but now I just use a cartoonishly large font so I can actually read from up here. 

Now, I know that some of you are lucky and you’ve never had to go through this drill of picking out new glasses frames at the glasses place. So, let me describe it to you. It’s just silly. First of all, you can’t really see because you don’t have your glasses on. Then, you’re standing in front of these walls of glasses, trying to squint and see which ones you might like. But of course, how they look on a wall and how they look on your face are completely different. So you pick up a pair, kinda hold them up, and you think yeah, my face will look good with these. You put the frames on, without your prescription mind you, you look into a mirror that’s about this big, but you’re still squinting because you can’t see. And they expect you to make a decision that way. You’re getting a brand new looking face but you can’t tell what’s going on. It’s a miracle anybody walks out of there with anything halfway decent. I’ve taken to asking the person working at the store – just tell me if these are terrible, okay. I can’t tell. Because, of course, glasses were not made to be looked at, they were made to be looked through.

Looking at, and looking through. I think a lot of times we come to Church, we approach Christianity, by looking at it. We pick it up, we examine, we wonder about it. How does God work? What does forgiveness mean? What did that Bible story actually say? What is communion? We’re standing there, in the store, looking at the very thing that we should be looking through.

You see why this is a problem, right? Because without the glasses on, we can’t see well. The whole world is distorted. Things are out of focus, blurry. We’re looking at the glasses that should be help us see – but we can’t see them well because we’re holding them. And we can’t really see what they look like anyway because we don’t have our glasses on.

The only way that the Christian faith makes sense is to pick it up, put it on, and look through it. You have to live it. Christianity is not a thing to be investigated, to be considered – it has to be lived. It’s how we ought to be looking at the world. And if we’re looking at the world without those glasses, without the eyes of faith, things will be distorted. 

This is precisely what Saint Paul is getting at. Listen to what he writes, what we just heard – “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God– what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Let’s take that apart. 

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. In other words, put on your glasses. Without the eyes of faith, we will be conformed to this world. We’ll be like everybody else – bitter, resentful, suspicious, competitive. That’s how the world wants us to be. But Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, is working on our minds, to be transformed. So that we would see the world as God sees it. To see the world, to see our neighbors through the lens of love, grace, and mercy. This is the whole point – Saint Paul is telling us to quit looking at the glasses, and to start looking through the glasses. 

And the point of that, the point is so that we may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect. By having our minds transformed, then we can look at the world in focus. Then we can tell what is good and acceptable and perfect. It’s not good enough to own the glasses. You can have the coolest frames in town. But, unless you’re looking through the glasses, it won’t matter. You can say all the right things; you can have the superficial nature of faith; you can show up to church and look respectable and all of that – but Christianity is not a thing you can have – it’s something you live. It’s a transformation of the mind.

And, I want to go one step further. This line, this bible reading, is from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans. This fall, over the next few months at Trinity, we will be diving deep into more of Saint Paul’s letters. We’ll be covering them in Sunday School, we’ll be reading from those letters in church on Sundays, our book club is going to read a biography of Saint Paul, our youth group will be reading through those letters. Why? Well, the guy is responsible for 25% of the New Testament, so that seems like a good start. 

But more importantly, the world that Saint Paul lived in, is much like our own. The life he lived, is much like our lives. We’re a mix of things, he was a mix of things. Think of this historically – growing up, he was a devout Jew. He described himself as a, “a Hebrew born of Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5). He worshiped in the Temple and in synagogues. He was zealous for the Lord God of his ancestors. 

But also, Paul was born in a Greek city. The ancient city of Tarsus. That means that he would have grown up around Greek philosophers, and Greek teaching. We know that he even quotes Greek poets. He might have known the Odyssey, though he wouldn’t have seen it in IMAX. So, Paul is Jewish, but he’s also been raised in Greek culture.

And also, Paul lives in the Roman Empire, he’s a Roman citizen. Paul would have known Roman laws, Roman customs; he would have known who the Roman Emperor was; he would have used Roman money. Paul was a Jew, raised in Greek culture, living in the Roman Empire.

You see what I’m getting at – Paul is like us. Nobody in this room is just one thing. We’re all a mishmash, products of the various cultures and educations and families that we come from. Like Paul, many of us have moved around, from one place to another and each of those places have influenced us. I think about my my own life. I was born in Los Angeles, raised outside of Dallas, spent formative years at seminary in Virginia, and now I live Galveston – and is Galveston really part of Texas? 

And that’s precisely the point. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God– what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Saint Paul is trying to look at the world not as a Jew, not as a Greek, not as a Roman, but as a follower of Jesus. He’s taken off all those other glasses, all those other ways to look at the world, and now he looks at everything as a follower of Jesus.

So the lesson is clear, for us. Those parts of you, they are part of you. But we shouldn’t look at the world as this kind of person or that kind of person – as baptized Christians, we’re called to look at the world through Christ. This life with Christ, it’s not something to be examined, to be considered, to be investigated. It has to be lived. You have to put it on. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.