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SERMONS:
Pastor Peg posts her two most recent sermons on this page. If you are interested in reading more of her sermons you can go to pastorpeg.wordpress.com. From August through September we will be doing a sermon series about the questions that Jesus asks us. Enjoy.
Cultivating the Fruits of the Spirit
October 17 & 20, 2024 22nd Sunday of Pentecost
Galatians 5:16-26 1 Peter 1:13-16
It's a bit weird to be preaching this week because Dawn and I have switched pulpits on the last day of our Character Construction sermon series, and we’re going to be completing each other’s take on this. The series started with How to Control our Thoughts; moved to How to Guard our Hearts; then discussed the importance of Keeping Good Company. And now we come to the finale which is: Cultivating the Fruits of the Spirit. And essentially the fruits of the spirit: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control; are where all the effort that we put into constructing a Christian character ends up.
I don't know what Dawn has been preaching on but I'm going to give you a quick rundown on how I've taken this sequence before I talk about the fruits of the spirit.
With controlling our thoughts, I talked about how our thoughts move through our brains to create reactions to our experiences. We start at the base of the brain which is our safe or dangerous reaction area. I throw a ball at you, and you catch it (safe) or duck it (dangerous). But then that reaction goes to the middle part of your brain where the emotions are. Are you happy that I threw the ball because we're playing together or are you angry that I threw the ball because we're fighting? Then, depending on the emotional reaction and the situation surrounding us, you go into the frontal logic part of your brain and decide either you’re playing, so I'm going to throw the ball back to you; or we're fighting, so I’d better figure out a good defense.
Of course, we sometimes get stuck in the reactive part of our brain with either fight, flight, or freeze. We sometimes get stuck in the emotional part of our brain, and we just let the emotions control our words or actions. And sometimes we get stuck in the logical part of our brain trying to figure out what's going on; and we disregard the safety or danger, or the emotions connected to the event.
As Christians we are asked to engage in our emotional reactions and our logical reactions through the lens of our faith. And we need to practice this; it's not an automatic thing. We evaluate our environment, emotions, and reasoning by asking if something is Grace-filled or Sin-full. If it is Grace-filled it will be a generous renewing action of compassion existing to help and nurture us. If it is Sin-full, what I call spontaneous, strategic, or systemic inflictions of negativity, that’s going to create a toxic environment and will harm us. (Spontaneous: You make a mistake and probably don’t mean to hurt the person. Strategic: That’s thinking about how you can hurt someone. Systemic: That’s when the system continually hurts people – like not allowing certain people to vote when they should be able to.)
Are you living in emotions, attitude, and reasoning of Grace, or Sin?
Another way to evaluate our thoughts, emotions, and actions is with the questions: How can we live as Christ would wish us to live? How can we live so that we are loving and honoring God with all our hearts, minds and beings, by loving and respecting ourselves and loving and respecting our neighbors? And I would like to add God’s creation to that because God’s creation is also our neighbor.
This leads to how important it is to choose the people around us so that we can live in a loving, supportive environment. Even though we are supposed to love everybody, there are people out there who are not willing to be good or kind to us; who do not have our best interests in mind. There is nothing wrong with watching out for that negativity and creating boundaries for yourself so that you can live in a place of safety, love, and reasonable actions. And there is nothing wrong with keeping out those who are dangerous, selfish, and unreasonable. You can, in some ways, love them by praying for them and seeing if you can help them, but it’s best to do that without dragging yourself into their chaos.
Christianity calls us to be more intentional. More intentional about being aware of our environment so we know where safety and danger is. More intentional about understanding our emotions because they can point us to some good directions that we should take. Emotions are part of the thinking process and are incredibly helpful to show us what is important in our lives and what we don't want to deal with. And finally, to intentionally use our powers of reason to not let ourselves get trapped in our emotions and to see the broader picture of what surrounds us.
When we work on constructing our Christian character, we’re accepting that we’re going to go through a lifelong process of growing into and maturing into a better person than we were before. Christian mystics called this Capus Dei – the ability for a human to receive and embody Divine life. God is in this process: In the forming and the struggles, and it ends with our better understanding of God’s Grace – His generous renewing actions of compassion that we are given every day.
We know that we are receiving God’s Grace from our intentional practice when we receive the fruits of the spirit:love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I want you to notice that these are states of being, but they’re also actions. And so, I would urge you to look for actions of the spirit that you can do every day.
Look for ways that you can love others more. You don’t have to overwhelm people just do simple actions of love and caring. Speak nicely to the people at the check-out counter. Or help a friend who needs to clean out their garage. Love is connected to kindness. Being kind is showing love.
Look for ways that you can share joy. So many people have told me that mission work is incredibly joyful because they know that they are doing good by helping people. We get joy in our relationships with each other and with God’s creation. I love being here in the Catskills because I get so much joy at the scenery.
Look for ways to bring peace into your life by creating a safe space for you and others to live in. I remember when I created a safe classroom environment, and my students knew it was a safe place to make mistakes, without judgement, and to learn from them, the class became a peaceful place of learning. What area in your life can you bring peace to?
Look for ways to be more patient and kind to yourself and others. This can be a tough one. How many of you remember that prayer: Lord, give me patience and give it to me NOW! But we’re more willing to be patient if we can open up our understanding of others, to have a broader scope about what people are going through. And we can forgive the glitches of life more readily. Patience also helps us to have greater gentleness in our words and actions.
Look for ways to become more generous with your gifts and graces. I think one reason why we hesitate to use our talents is because we don’t think that they’re needed, or we don’t even know they’re there. But sometimes we get surprised. My father, who never worked a retail job in his life, got roped in to run the clothing section of the church tag-sale. (This story makes more sense when you know that my mother was the Tag-Sale Chair!) He grumbled, but there was no one else to do it so he said: OK, this year I’ll take it on. He loved it and did it for the next ten years. He said: Who knew I had a talent for clothing retail? God did, and a little God’s breeze pushed him into it.
And finally, all this practice is going to lead us to greater self-control, because we are recognizing what our faith is and what it’s doing for us. We grow in our faith as we practice being the fruits of the spirit and using the fruits of the spirit to act our faith into our communities of family, friends, neighborhood, and the world. We are nourished by the spirit’s fruits and we nourish others in turn.
Constructing a Christian character doesn’t happen overnight. It is a life-long endeavor that moves us closer and closer to God every day we live. But think about it – what’s the alternative? Would you rather be stuck in one place that might be safe but doesn’t give you anything new; or sliding into a place of negativity and despair; or moving into love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and a stronger connection with the divine power of the universe?
Jesus came to show us how to choose the good stuff. Let’s all work on it together, support each other in our endeavors, and praise God that we have a door open to the eternal nourishment of mind, heart, body, and spirit.
Keeping Good Company
October 13, 2024 21st Sunday of Pentecost
Proverb 1: 8-19, 32-33 James 1:12-18
In the 90s there was a columnist, Bob Greene, who would tell stories of his experiences growing up and how they influenced him. In one of his columns, he told about an event that took place a year after he graduated from college. He had come home for a holiday, got together with some of his buddies, and they went out to a bar for some drinking and reminiscing. After the bar closed, they got into a car and the friend who was driving said, “Hey, let's get some cocaine and continue the party elsewhere.”
People said yeah, but not terribly enthusiastically. Bob could tell that they didn’t want to break up the party; but he didn't feel good about this. As the driver made his way to the house where he knew he could get the drugs, Bob started thinking: One, he didn't do cocaine, and he didn't have the desire to do cocaine. Two, he had just gotten a very good job with a prominent newspaper, and he didn't want to jeopardize it by getting in the middle of something that could go wrong. He got more and more nervous, and finally, at a stoplight, he got out of the car, said goodbye to his friends, and told them that he would walk home or find a taxi. Naturally there was pushed back, especially from the one who was promoting the idea of getting high. But Bob just said goodnight and kept on walking.
He knew when he got out of the car that he was probably ending the friendship of some of the people in that car. And yes, two friends didn't speak to him again. But later, two other friends said that they wished they had gotten out of the car with him. Fortunately, nothing happened to those who were in the car. But Bob said that was a defining moment of his adulthood because he realized that people change, and that just because somebody was a good person and a friend once, that they didn't necessarily stay that way for the rest of your life.
One of the thoughts that hit me when I read this article was: Well, Bob was brought up right, and he did the right thing by getting out of that car. All through the Bible we are warned about what will happen if we stray from the Commandments that God has given us, do not respect the law, or if we do not love kindness, do justice, and walk humbly with God. The book of Proverbs, one of the first written books of the Bible, is meant to be an instruction manual of how to live a virtuous life, and how to avoid falling into an evil one. And one of the admonishments is to choose your friends wisely. Today’s set of verses is just one of a number of passages about what will happen if you choose the wrong companions. This passage describes a rogue’s gallery of thieves and highwaymen, people who are out to take advantage of others, steal their property, and perhaps even commit murder to do so.
But also, through-out the Bible there is this notion of temptation. You see one of the foundations of the Jewish-Christian faith is that we have free will; we get to choose the path that we walk. We can either take the good path of living rightly or the bad path of selfishness and destruction. The Bible emphasizes that people aren’t born bad, rather they are made bad by either the bad rearing of the child through the family, or most likely, the temptations of the world which play on our desires and are often influenced by bad companions.
In this section of Proverbs, the bad companions are telling the susceptible person that if they join the motley crew of criminals that they will have riches and live well. But it’s pointed out that it will be at a cost from others. But this is an extreme example. Most people don’t get into trouble because they want to get into trouble – but like Bob Greene found out –we can be tempted by those we care about to do foolish things because we trust that they would never want us to get into trouble. I am sure that the reason why there wasn’t a lot of protest when the friend suggested cocaine was because no one thought that this friend, who they had known for years, would really want to put any of them in danger or lead them into an addictive substance.
It's easy to walk away from people we’ve just met when you find out right away that they're involved in some shady dealings, or they have attitudes and beliefs that you don't have and that you consider to be wrong. We haven’t developed a firm connection with them yet, so we don’t feel an emotional loss. But we have a hard time turning down people who we are positively connected to, and have history with. It surprises us when people turn out to be different from how we remember them, even as children.
We have also met people who we thought at first were very good people who turned out to be not very good people. It's emotionally trying when we find out that someone who we thought was a person who believed in what we believe in, but does not, and who would act as we would act, and does not. This can confound us, because how you deal with someone who is not who you thought they were?
Plus, Christianity sets up a conflict within it about the judgement of others. Jesus said, do not judge lest you be judged. That we should remove the mote in our own eye before disparaging others. As well as: We should walk a mile in somebody's shoes before we judge them. So how do we fit this notion of unconditional love and mercy with the examination of other people's actions and the judgment of good or bad, and right or wrong? How do we fairly judge others and evaluate them as friends or not friends.
I’m going to go back to the values that Paul gave us a couple of weeks ago as a starting point. Does your friend tell you the truth? I think that some discretion is needed in truth-telling, but I think that if I’m messing up, or that I’m acting on the wrong information, that I would want my friend to tell me. Also, if I’m doing something that make them uncomfortable, I would want to know about it; or if they’re doing something that makes me uncomfortable, I should be able to tell them about it.
Does your friend act honorably? Do they put you in difficult positions for their own benefit? Do they like to disparage others or try to put themselves above others? Are they fair, or just, in their dealings with you or others? People can’t always be equal with others, but we can support each other to reach our goals in an ethical manner.
Is your relationship with your friend straightforward or complex? Some people really like drama. Everything has to be over the top too difficult or too emotional, or they are always the victim in the story. Our emotional landscapes can sometimes be complex and often people are hurting or traumatized, and dramatics can be a way of getting attention or hiding. This is where friends are needed – to help each other heal when the world gets to be too much. But it’s when the dramatics lead people to do stupid things that might hurt themselves and others that we have to watch out for. I have lost friends to alcohol addiction because even though I tried to be kind and honest with them they didn’t want to accept my honesty about their problems.
But this gets back to what I mentioned before about loving kindness or wanting to be a kind person. As a minister I’ve counseled couples, and I have found that the biggest positive factor in a relationship is if the two people are kind to each other. And it takes both people. If one side is not kind to the other, eventually the relationship will fall apart, because the kind person just can’t keep it up forever. You can have different likes and dislikes, different bedtimes, or the occasional disagreement, but if you don’t have kindness for each other no relationship is going to work. Marriages, families, friendships, even business relationships don’t work if there isn’t kindness. Kindness is one of the greatest things we can cultivate towards each other.
The admonitions in the Bible to keep good company is because we need each other’s support – but we need the right support. It’s a difficult world out there and we can’t do it alone. There is nothing wrong with evaluating if a friendship is truthful, honorable, straight-forward and kind. It is what we should be for each other and what we should be looking for in our relationships. These types of relationships reflect how God loves us, and when we support others, we are loving ourselves and God’s creation. Loving and supporting others is loving God.
There is nothing wrong with creating a boundary that keeps you from an unhealthy relationship. Sometimes you do need to get out of a car and walk home. But when you’re tempted remember that you do have the love and support that you need from those who love you. And if you can’t find that support right away, know that you have it in Jesus. In Jesus, you have the love, understanding, and support that will sustain you always. So keep your relationship going with God and you will always find yourself in good company.