Coffee with Mother Nicole: The God of the Second Thought
On becoming, changing our minds, and the grace of discovering that we are not finished yet.
One of the strange things about being human is how quickly we can decide who we are. We tell ourselves stories about our strengths and limitations, our preferences and our fears. We decide what we are good at, what we are not good at, what belongs to people like us, and what does not. Over time, these stories can become so familiar that we stop noticing that they are stories at all. They simply feel like facts.
But faith has a way of making room for a different possibility: that we are not finished.
Jesus tells a brief parable about two sons. Their father asks each of them to go and work in the vineyard. One says no, but later changes his mind and goes. The other says yes, but never does.
I am drawn to the first son because his story reminds us that a human being cannot always be understood by their first response (and because I’m such a slow learner that God has had to give me lots of chances to change my mind)!
Something happens between no and yes. There is a moment when the possibility of change enters the story. This is one reason I love the image of God as the God of the second thought.
The second thought is not necessarily better because it comes second. Sure, it’s better to say yes and do what we say. Rather, it represents the possibility that we can remain open. We can listen again. We can look again. We can allow new information, new experiences, new relationships, and the movement of God’s Spirit to change what we thought was settled.
There is tremendous grace in that.
The person you are today does not have to be the person you will always be. The relationship you struggle with may not always look the way it does now. The thing you once thought you could never do may become something you are unexpectedly called to do.
So, pull up a chair and pour a hot cup of coffee. Listen to my further reflections on the God of the Second Thought, and then let’s spend some time contemplating how we might respond this week.
This week’s Sermon
September 20
The 17th Sunday After Pentecost | Proper 20
Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16
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Remember that time you said, with absolute confidence, “I will never, ever do that”…only to find yourself, months or years later, doing the exact thing you swore you would never do? No? Just me?
Indeed, I have a few of those “nevers” under my belt. My mom loves to tell the story about how I told her I was moving to New Orleans after I graduated from UGA to go to seminary. I loved the city and was certain it was where I was supposed to be. Then I was told that quite a few people lived in Mississippi, where there were more jobs and more affordable housing, and commuted into school.
I said I would never live in Mississippi. Cut to me calling my mom and asking if she would go with me to interview at a church in—you guessed it—Gulfport, Mississippi. I’ve never lived that one down.
Sadly, I don’t learn easily. I have several more stories like this one. Particularly funny was my constant insistence that I hated public speaking and was called to be a writer, not a speaker…and I stand before you now, doing one of the things I love most: preaching.
I’m guessing I’m not the only one who has used my “nevers” as a fortress, trying to protect my comfort zone and insist that I know best what lies ahead for me. But over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking less about my own “nevers” and more about what happens when I look around this beloved community.
Because one of the things I have come to love about a community of faith is that we get to watch one another become people we didn’t necessarily set out to become.
I know someone in this congregation who has told me more than once that he isn’t very good at prayer. And yet I have listened to him pray as an intercessor and offer words that have moved me deeply.
I listened to someone share that she said yes to tutoring at Jefferson Parkway. The first year didn’t particularly feel like a good fit. It would have been very easy to decide that it wasn’t her thing and move on. But she came back the second year.
I’ve watched someone who would probably tell you that the things she is good at are not particularly extraordinary transform our library into a beautiful space, which we will rededicate today in memory of someone whose own gifts were easy to underestimate.
He wasn’t formally trained in theology. He didn’t have academic credentials that would announce him as a theologian. And yet he had some of the deepest insights on God of almost anyone I have known.
Yesterday, at our flower festival and tea, we saw another kind of gift on display. There were people whose work was almost invisible—cleaning up and taking care of all the little details behind the scenes. None of it was particularly glamorous. But because those gifts were offered, dozens of women experienced beauty and delight and fellowship.
When I think of these stories, I don’t see a collection of people who have perfectly identified their spiritual gifts and then dutifully put them to work. I see something more mysterious. I see people discovering what God can do with what they have.
Sometimes the gift becomes visible only after it has been offered. Sometimes we discover that we are capable of something only because someone asks us to try. Sometimes what we thought was ordinary becomes, in the hands of God, exactly what another person needed. And sometimes the gift is not a particular skill at all, but simply our willingness to be present.
I think that is one of the things Jesus is getting at in the Gospel today. To understand the parable, it helps to remember where we are in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus has entered Jerusalem, and almost immediately the chief priests and elders begin questioning his authority. They want to know who has given him the right to speak and act as he does. Jesus responds by telling them a story.
A father tells two sons to go and work in the vineyard. The first says, “I will not.” But then something happens. He changes his mind, and he goes.
The second says, “Yes, sir.” It is exactly the answer we would expect a good son to give. Except that he doesn’t go. Jesus asks which son did the will of his father, and the answer is obvious.
But Jesus isn’t simply giving us two characters and asking us to decide which one is the good son. Most of us are both of them at different times. There are things we have flatly refused because they frightened us, cost us something, or disrupted the lives we had planned.
And there are things we have said yes to because yes sounded like the right answer, while our actual lives remained unchanged. There is a difference between saying something and allowing it to become true in us. Often our last thought is not our final answer.
And that brings us to something I noticed as I was sitting with this passage. There are a few words and ideas that keep repeating: changing one’s mind, believing, going. And when those words are translated into English, some of the texture of the original language can get flattened out. The particular words Jesus chooses, the way they are used, and even some of the sense of movement and action carried in the Greek can help us hear this conversation the way his first hearers would have heard it.
So, just for a moment, I want to dig a little deeper into the Greek—not to turn this into a Greek lesson, but because I think there is something here that is easy to miss in English.
A few verses later, Jesus uses the word pisteuō, the Greek word we usually translate as “believe.” We tend to hear belief as something that happens primarily in our heads—a set of ideas we accept as true.
But pisteuō carries the sense of trust, of placing one’s confidence in someone or something. In this passage, belief is not merely agreeing that something is true. It becomes consequential. It is an assent that begins to shape how we respond.
I would call it active assent. Not simply, “Yes, I think that’s true,” but, “Yes, I trust this enough to let it matter.” That distinction matters because the religious leaders knew the Scriptures. They knew what respectable faith was supposed to look like. What they could not do was trust what God was doing right in front of them.
The people they considered outsiders were able to recognize something of God in John’s message, and that recognition changed the direction of their lives.
Jesus is showing that we can know a great deal about God and still resist what God is doing. Faith, in this sense, is becoming available to God. It is allowing what we trust about God to begin taking shape in the way we live.
What allowed them to take this action, to live out their faith in this way? I think we see the answer to this in this same parable. I promised not to make this a Greek lesson, but I do have to point out that Matthew tells us that the first son metameletheis—he changes his mind, or more deeply, his heart turns—and then he goes.
Jesus uses the same word later when he tells the religious leaders that even after they saw what God was doing, they did not change their minds. I love what these two words hold together: metameletheis and pisteuō. A change of heart becomes belief. The heart turns. Trust becomes active. And then the feet follow. That is the movement of faith.
And this is where today’s reading from Philippians gives us an important word of grace. Paul is writing to a community learning what it means to live together as followers of Christ, and just before these verses he has been calling them toward humility, unity, and the self-giving pattern of Jesus.
Then he tells them to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” and immediately gives them the reason they can do that: “for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
Paul puts those two things together: to will and to work. It’s that same kind of active assent: the desire and the doing. The stirring within us and the movement that eventually follows.
But notice where Paul begins: God is at work in you. That matters for this parable because the good news is not simply that we are capable of changing our minds. The good news is that God does not give up on us while we are still in the middle of becoming.
The first son says no, and the father does not close the vineyard. He doesn’t say, “Well, I asked once.” He doesn’t disown his son. He doesn’t withdraw the invitation.
That is the God of the second thought: the God who knows that our first response may come from fear, defensiveness, exhaustion, pride, habit, or simply not being able to see what God sees yet—and who does not mistake that first response for the whole truth about us.
God leaves room. God keeps inviting. God gives grace enough for another thought. And sometimes, in that space God gives us, something in us changes.
And I think that is important for us to remember because we can so easily hear a sermon like this and turn it into another assignment: I need to be more willing. I need to say yes more quickly. I need to become the kind of person who always recognizes God’s call.
But that is not where Jesus begins. Jesus begins with a God who keeps calling, who does not take our “no” as the final word, who does not require us to have everything figured out before we can begin again. Our first thought is not always our final answer because God is not finished with us.
And that brings us to this season of stewardship. I don’t think stewardship begins with asking ourselves, “How much can I afford to give?” or even, “What do I have that might be useful?” I think it begins with paying attention to what God is already doing in us.
What has God placed in your hands? What desire has God been stirring? What gift have you dismissed as too ordinary to matter? What time, ability, resource, creativity, prayer, or presence might God be inviting you to offer?
Because when we look around this community, we can see that God has already been doing this among us. People have offered what they had, sometimes without recognizing it as a spiritual gift, and God has made something of it.
A prayer. A library. A meal. A flower arrangement. A tutoring relationship. A willingness to sit beside someone who is hurting. Ordinary things, offered faithfully, becoming something more than the person who offered them could have imagined.
So the invitation this morning is not, “Try harder to say yes.” It is simpler, and I think much more hopeful: Pay attention to where God is already inviting you. Notice what God has already placed in you and among you. Trust the invitation enough to let it matter.
Because the God of the second thought is always leaving the vineyard open. Our first thought is not always our final answer. God gives us room to grow. God gives us room to become people we did not yet know we could be. And sometimes, almost before we realize what has happened, our heart has turned, and our feet have followed.
So pay attention. Trust the invitation. And follow where it leads. Amen.
For Contemplation
Find a quiet place and sit for a few minutes without trying to solve anything.
Bring to mind one place in your life where you feel certain: This is simply how it is. This is simply who I am. This could never change.
Rather than arguing with that certainty, simply hold it in God’s presence.
Then ask gently: God, where might you be inviting me to look again?
Do not force an answer. Notice what arises: an image, a feeling, a memory, a person, a possibility, or perhaps nothing at all.
Rest there for a while. Then remember: the vineyard remains open.
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