Growing Up Together A Sermon by Jeff Carlson St. Pauls United Church of Christ, Chicago August 5, 2012 Text: Ephesians 4:1-16 (at end of sermon) We are already in August. And it has come far too soon. All around us nature is doing everything she can to go to seed. Last week Avena told us about the abundance of vegetables and fruit that she finds at the farmer s market. I have been keeping my eyes on only two pieces of fruit, two tomatoes that are ripening in our garden, as they approach the perfect time to pick. Our garden hangs 8 floors above Adam s St. and takes up most of the space on our balcony. Joe plants one every year and takes care of it. The plants get lots of sunshine, and he waters them daily so that the tomatoes will mature and ripen on the vine. That s all they need, good soil, the sun to warm and rain to nourish and they grow up, all on their own. Under the right environment, they just automatically live out their calling to be tomatoes. It s not quite as easy for us, is it? We have roughly 70 years, more or less, to fully ripen and mature. We can be given all the advantages - food, healthcare, education whatever we need to grow up. Yet we don t mature automatically, like tomatoes. We can hit our thirties, forties, fifties, and although we may be grown-up on the outside, we can still be as tough and sour and green as an unripe tomato. We know what a mature tomato looks like, smells like and tastes like. But what does a mature human being look like? We have benchmarks for what it means to be an adult. At 16 you can get your driver s license. I remember feeling grown up driving my first car, a blue Chevy Chevette hatchback, to school. Then when you turn 18, society says you re old enough to vote. I remember feeling grown up, voting in my first presidential election, for Ronald Reagan. Then you go off to college, move away from home. You turn 21, and society rewards you with being able to buy booze. And eventually, hopefully, you get a job, become financially independent. You might fall in love, get married, have a kid, begin advancing in your career, buy a house, your kids grow up, you re sending them off to college and you re looking towards retirement. You re as much of an adult as you re ever going to be. But are you mature? We do know what immaturity looks like. If you want to insult somebody you say, Stop being such a baby. You re acting like a child. Grow up. We love babies. I love carrying a baby around during a baptism, all fresh and sweet-smelling. We put up with her messes and her temper tantrums and her demands, because she s just a baby. But nothing s more pathetic than seeing a grown man yell at a waiter because he messed up his order, or a woman blasting her horn in traffic because the idiot in front of her isn t
going fast enough. Or a couple giving each other the silent treatment, and going to bed angry, because of the childish words they said to each other. We might be specialists in our field, have reached the peak of success, and yet remain babies when it comes to maturity. We know what immaturity looks like, especially what it looks like in other people. But what about maturity? In the book of Ephesians, Paul tells us to grow up. Become mature. Put away childishness, and like a tomato ripening in the sun, let the sugars and sweetness and flavor of life develop within us. He says, You must no longer be children, tossed around like a toddler wading in the waves at the beach, but grow a pair of legs, steady legs, grow up in maturity, grow up into the full stature of Christ. In this passage, Paul gives us four words for what maturity looks like. They have nothing to do with those benchmarks that society gives us for being an adult. These are the words Paul uses to describe what a mature and ripe human life looks like: humility, gentleness, patience, love. Notice how those are all relational words? Humility, gentleness, patience, love. For Christians, maturity is all about relationships. It s about how you treat that waiter. How you respond to the idiot driving in front of you. How you relate to your spouse and your children and people you disagree with. Humility, gentleness, patience, love. Those are all slow words. Maturity takes time. Relationships take time. There is no crash course in maturity. But we live in a culture that moves at an incredibly fast speed. Have you heard of the slow food movement? It s in contrast to fast food, and it values food that is good, clean and fair, for everyone and for our world. There s also a slow church movement. It means that growth as a Christian doesn t happen in our lives over night. It won t happen through getting a quick fix of spirituality once a week on Sunday mornings, any more than the tomatoes on our balcony will ripen if Joe only waters them once a week. The slow movement is in contrast to what Canadian journalist Carl Honoré calls our cult of fast. He says, Slow and fast are not just rates of change. They are shorthand ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. But slow: Slow is the opposite: calm, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It s about making real and meaningful connections with people, culture, work, food, everything. i
The signs of Christian maturity are all slow words: humility, gentleness, patience, love. We have roughly 70 years, more or less, to grow up into a life that looks like that. The resources of our faith give us exactly what we need to mature. The experiences we have in worship, week after week, are the sun, the water and the soil to help us grow up in love. A couple of weeks ago, the members of our various committees at St. Pauls were invited to gather for a retreat to help us deepen our relationships and become better leaders in whatever ways we serve. At one point, we sat in a large circle, and Matt led in a brief reflection about worship. We were asked to share what our favorite part of the worship service is. One member gave an answer that surprised me. She said her favorite part of worship is the Prayer of Confession. She said that s the part of the service where we all tell the truth. Saying a prayer of confession is counter-cultural in a world that, especially in an election year, specializes in half-truths, and that hates to admit when it s wrong. Weekly confession teaches us humility. In confessing our sins together, surrounded by a community that has promised to love and support us, we learn to grow up into people who are able to tell the truth about ourselves and about our world. We have heard a lot about free speech this past week. And I believe we need to protect free speech for everyone. But for Christians, we do not believe that we ourselves have the right to free speech. We do not believe that we are free to say anything that we want. Christians believe that we are free to speak the truth in love. That s not something you can pass laws about. Speaking the truth in love is not free speech. It s mature speech. I did not share on that Saturday morning what my favorite part of the worship service is, but I will tell you right now. It s at the end of the processional hymn. The pastors have processed up to the altar, and then we turn around, and I look up and I see all of you doing something so utterly and unproductively beautiful. You are singing together. And it makes me smile every time. I am glad that you are a congregation that sings. If you have ever been to church full of people who can barely manage to mouth the words of a hymn, then you know how deadly that can be to good worship. But you sing, many of you at the top of your lungs. Singing together is slow church. You can t speed-read the text of the hymn while you re singing. Singing gives you time to pause on a whole note and savor the words and let lyric and melody get inside of you, watering the soil of our hearts so that we grow more and more in maturity. We need habits that help us slow down in our fast-food culture. Because growing up into maturity takes time. I have friends who grow gardens, friends who love to read long, complex Russian novels, friends who practice tai chi, who meditate, who cook slow food and share it with others. For myself, I like to learn and read foreign languages, which makes it impossible to speed read as I have to slow down and struggle over a word. Those are the kinds of practices that bring mature, slow growth into our lives.
In a few minutes we ll be lining up for something else that we do together in church. We ll be lining up, down the aisle, to come to this table, with open hearts and empty hands, in order to be fed. This past week we saw people lining up to be fed. Some waited in line for hours in order to buy fast food. How long would you stand in line to receive communion? Would you wait for an hour? The people standing in line to buy chicken sandwiches gave various reasons some said they wanted to support free speech; some said they wanted to support a brother in Christ who was being persecuted; some said they wanted to come out and support a business that shared their family values. Whatever one may think of the whole chicken sandwich business, it was a meal rooted in politics, a meal rooted in division, in angry sides in a culture war between boycotters and chicken-eaters. Although it might appear on the surface that the meal in front of us today is fast food, just a bit of bread, a bit of wine, the meal served at this table is slow food. Like everything else we do as Christians, week after week, coming to this table is meant to shape our lives. It s meant to help us to grow up into people of humility, gentleness, patience, and love. We are meant to carry the meaning of this table into all the other meals that we eat throughout the week, whether in a fast-food restaurant, in a soup kitchen or in our homes. At this table strangers are greeted as friends, with a word of peace. This table has no regard for your politics or ideology or whatever else is currently dividing our world and turning neighbors into enemies. This table is, however, about politics. It s about the politics of the Kingdom of God, where we are only free to speak the truth in love and where everyone is welcome at the table. A few sermons ago, I told you about an old friend of mine from my evangelical youth that I had reconnected with on Facebook. He works in one of the educational epicenters of the Religious Right. Yet we ve renewed our friendship and have carried on a really respectful and rich dialogue over the past few years. He wrote to me in the midst of the great chicken sandwich storm saying, One of my students who has a brother that s gay messaged me and wanted me to pray for him as it was a difficult day for them. It made me see the eat-in in a different light that it might be perceived as hateful. I eat at Chick-fil-a regularly as I enjoy their product. I didn t eat there that day, because I was uncomfortable with the message it was sending. Many of my colleagues seemed mad or retaliatory in their actions We can t let these liberals push us around or silence our views!
He went on, I wondered how helpful this would be in winning a hearing for the gospel. That s what took me to the words of Jesus in that for many evangelicals, homosexuals are the enemy (and I hope it goes without saying I m not one of these). And if that s so, wouldn t the best way to preach the gospel be to love that group? And getting together with people who agree with your point of view, patting ourselves on the back, and loving one another is not an explicitly Christian display. Any run of the mill worldly group can do that, from the Kiwanis Club to the KKK. But to love one s enemy was a distinctly Christ-like activity, who took lots of heat for who was on his lunch list. I ve not arrived in any regard and need to grow up in love in so many ways. But I want you to know that I value your input and our friendship very greatly, and want to continue to learn how to live in a more Christ-like manner. Although my friend and I differ theologically and politically, we are learning to grow up together. The politics of the table of Jesus teaches us a different way of living in the world, a different way than is taught by the politics and ideologies that divide us. What we learn from the table of Jesus is a slow way of relating. A mature way. It s a way of eating and living that is rooted in humility, gentleness, patience and love. On Thursday, that same friend posted something on Facebook that I d like to end with. They are words that all Christians need to hear, whether we eat chicken or not. They come from The Message version of the Bible, from a sermon that Jesus once preached. It s easy to buy or boycott a chicken sandwich harder to love someone who disagrees with you. I am reminded of the words of Jesus: You re familiar with the old, written law, Love your friend, and its unwritten companion, Hate your enemy. I m challenging that. I m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. God gives his best the sun to warm and the rain to nourish to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a reward? Any run-of-themill sinner does that. In a word, what I m saying is this. Grow up. i Quoted by John Pattison in Why We Need a Slow Church Movement, http://neuemagazine.com/digitalarchives/issue-08-augustseptember-2011. Ephesians 4:1-8, 11-16 I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ s gift. Therefore it is said, When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people. The gifts he gave were that
some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body s growth in building itself up in love.