Be Kind to One Another

Here is my message from Sunday. The scripture passage was Ephesians 4:25-5:2:

If it seems like flying the friendly skies is a little less friendly these days, you’d be right. The FAA began keeping records of referrals made to them of unruly passengers on planes in 1995.  A few weeks ago they released statistics on those unruly passengers on planes so far in 2021. In less than six months this year, there have been more reports than in any full year since they began keeping those records. This has included a Southwest flight attendant being punched in the face, losing two teeth. A Delta flight being diverted to Albuquerque after a passenger threatened to bring the plane down and tried to get into the cockpit. There have been multiple incidents of passengers fighting with each other. Southwest and American have delayed bringing back alcohol sales, and United only sells beer and wine, and then only on long flights, to try and eliminate alcohol exacerbating the already high tensions. Long time flight attendants have said it’s worse than they can ever remember it. And then we could talk about increasing altercations in grocery and big box stores, which are also on the rise. It seems like we’ve just forgotten how to get along with others.

And so with all of that in mind, today we begin a new worship series entitled The Kindness Challenge, which is based upon a book of the same name by Shaunti Feldhahn. I initially read the book a number of years ago, and even did a series on it at my last church, but with our current climate and situation I decided to dust it off and do it over again. I was going to do it later in the year, but decided to move it up now because I think it’s necessary for us as Christians to be showing a different way of living. As was said in the introduction to the passage from Ephesians today, when we put on the clothes of Christ, something we’ve heard a lot of in the past few months, then we are to put away the ways of the world, and to live like Christ, to imitate Christ, and one of the ways we do that Paul says is by practicing kindness.

Wrath Versus Peacemakers

 Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:38-48:

One of my favorite movie characters comes from the movie Inside Out and it’s the character of Anger, voiced by the inestimable Lewis Black. For those unfamiliar with the movie, most of it takes place inside the head of a 12-year-old girl, and features the emotions of joy, sadness, disgust, fear and anger as they sort of battle for their spots in how Riley lives her life. And so anger plays a role as one of her natural emotions, and really has some of the best lines in the whole film, including after Riley and her mother receive pizza with broccoli on it, saying “Congratulations San Francisco, you ruined pizza. First the Hawaiians and now you.” Although I actually like Hawaiian pizza. But, as it turns out that even though Joy is trying to deny sadness a place in Riley’s life, she can’t because sadness belongs, just like anger belongs as a primary emotion. 

And so as we think about anger, we have to understand that there is a natural place for anger in our lives, it’s just a matter of what that place is, and why we are angry. After all, we are even told that God “is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” So God gets angry, and when God is angry it’s normally because of injustice or violation of the commandment to love. We even see Jesus getting angry, thinking of him turning over the tables of the money changers is probably the most prominent of them, but would anyone describe Jesus as being an angry person? No, just as when we talked about gluttony we said that while that was an accusation made of him, it would not be how we would describe him.

Wrath Versus Peacemakers

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The texts were Matthew 5:1-12 and 5:38-48:

Most of us probably remember where we were and what we were doing 15 years ago today. We remember the moment when we first heard about a plane, or planes hitting the world trade center, we remember seeing people fleeing from the buildings, and seeing the fire department running towards the buildings. We remember the buildings collapsing and our tears and our sorrow and our questions and maybe our fears. Some watched from a distance not knowing anyone involved, and others had their lives ripped apart that day.  When we lived in Boston, Linda and I were friends with a woman who had a plane ticket for one of those flights, but her meeting in LA got cancelled, and so she never got on board, and in both churches we served there, literally right around the corner from both of them was a memorial to the people in those towns who had lost their lives on that day. and yet in the devastation of that moment we experienced something special, something unique. We witnessed bravery and heroism most of us had only heard about. We witnessed sacrifice and selflessness. We witnessed a nation, and to a large degree a world, coming together, not based on national or tribal affinities, but based on a shared and common humanity.

Jesus said that “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And so, someone said that in witnessing the firefighters and the police officers running into a burning building while everyone else was running out, laying down their lives for their friends in the greatest sense of that word, we glimpsed the kingdom of God. Of course that glimpse did not last long, and we soon turned away from the things that brought us together, and instead started building up barriers and walls, shouting tribal chants and seeking revenge and war. A war that continues to this day, so that this year’s entering college freshmen can never remember a time in which we as a nation were not at war. But for a moment, in the midst of the chaos and violence and tragedy, we witnessed the kingdom of God.

One of the responses I received about what people would like me to preach on was to talk about the election and how we as Christians should be thinking about and responding to what is happening. With disgust might be one response, but probably not the appropriate one. I do think it’s appropriate that we talk about the election, but how I was going to do that was the issue. I do know that there are some people who get upset and think that politics should never be talked about it in church, but that’s actually an impossibility. Because to proclaim Jesus as Lord and King, is to make a political statement; it’s to claim where our allegiance belongs, to God, and also where it doesn’t belong, to the things of the world. In addition, Jesus had a lot to say about things that are impacted by what we would call the political realm. So if we are to proclaim ourselves as Christians, as followers of Christ, that is political.