In a sense we’ve been in a “holding pattern” this past year since the wall fell and we vacated the church building. And we’ve been “on hold” because we’ve had to wait to get a lot of information…from the engineers, the insurance, and the Town of Great Barrington.
So, we’ve made the best of it. We’ve been blessed to have Crissey Farm and Wheeler & Taylor for our worship, and the open arms of our sister churches and the Diocese for most anything we’ve needed.
In this year, we’ve been given a special measure of FLEXIBILITY…Now that’s not one of those gifts that comes on the usual list of Gifts of the Spirit in the Bible, but I firmly believe it is a much-needed gift that God’s Spirit has graciously given us. So we’re able to continue with our ministries and even start new ones. We’ve remained in good spirits, and we’ve remained very generous. (A sign of that generosity, by the way, is the $3,540 we will present to Jake later in the service. It will help support the teaching mission he begins in Honduras in a few weeks.)
Yes, we’ve been “on hold,” but in the past few weeks, we’ve gotten out of the holding pattern: We’ve gotten some more information. It’s not ALL the information we need,
but it’s MORE information than we’ve had about the building. This new information will help us discern how we might move forward.
Now I’ve noticed with our moving out of the old “holding pattern” and into this new place, the stress level among us is increasing. There’s still information (facts) we need
before we can actually discern what God’s preferred future is for us, but we all know
we’re closer to the time of making some decisions. So, of course the stress level is up.
There are lots of ideas out there among us…ideas as different as night and day. And there are lots of feelings…grief, fear, pain, anxiety and excitement. With this kind of stress, and being human beings (and human beings being what we are), we are ripe for a level of conflict we have not known in the past year.
So I think it’s really fortuitous that we have today’s reading from the Ephesians.
The passage ends, remember, with the familiar Offertory Sentence “Walk in love, as Christ loved us.” This passage in Ephesians is a kind of manual for right relationship,
“Rules of the Road for a Christian Community.” I’m going to quote quite a bit from the Ephesians, but I’ll be using (Peterson’s) The Message paraphrase, instead of the NRSV,
which was read earlier.
In Ephesians, Paul tells us first, “No more lies, no more pretense. Tell your neighbor the truth.” And in our situation, I think “neighbor” means not only our fellow parishioners,
but also the people in our community, who seem to have a lot of thoughts & feelings
about our situation at St. James. Ultimately, of course, our “neighbors” are everyone.
Paul reminds us that as neighbors we are “all connected to each other”. We’re not isolated or apart from, but part of each other. Then we get the famous Pauline admonition about anger. I really like this because Paul says, “Go ahead be angry.” From a psychological point of view, Paul is acknowledging not discounting our feelings. He’s saying it’s ok to be angry. Feel what we feel. (We can’t help how we feel anyway.) Now that’s good news because we do get angry from time to time. In fact, anger is really a gift from God that tells us something is threatening to our well-being: Our physical safety, our sense of what’s right, our sense of self-worth, our attachments to things as they’ve always been, or our concern for anything we value. So Paul says, “Be angry. You do well to be angry,” but adds the caveat, “But don’t use your anger as fuel for revenge.” It’s not feeling angry that’s wrong, it’s what we sometimes do with our anger that’s not OK. And one of the worst things we can do with our anger is stay angry. Paul says, “Don’t go to bed angry because that gives the devil a real foothold in your life.” Don’t let anger fester inside instead of seeking to talk it out with the hope of reconciliation.
In today’s passage, Paul encourages us to deal with our feelings of frustration and anger before they fester and tempt us to act out in ways we will regret. That’s a good “Rule of the Road” for our community here at St. James.
Then in the reading there’s that lovely part about no evil talk coming from our mouths and about “saying only what is useful for building up.” We’ve had a wall collapse. We don’t need to tear each other down. In fact we must be about building each other up:
Giving words of grace during this time of discernment so that God’s Spirit has room to lead us and guide us into the future God wants for us. Paul says, “Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk. Be gentle with one another, sensitive (tenderhearted). Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.”
God’s forgiving us through Jesus is the SOURCE of our being able to forgive our neighbor. I’m reminded of a quote from James Alison that Lee sends at the bottom of
her emails, “Give someone who is wrong a soft landing.” There is a kindness, a gentleness, in Paul’s “Rules of the Road for Community.” And what I like about them
is they recognize our human condition. They acknowledge we as human beings can be less than angels. And yet, Paul and God call us to our higher selves: To be a community that, even under a lot of stress, is kind and gentle and forgiving.
With THAT Spirit, we at St. James will find our way into the future God wants for us,
and we will “Walk in love as Christ loved us”. Amen.
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