Once You Know

Ephesians 5: 1 – 10

(I want to offer a bit of a trigger warning – I am going to talk about suicide and about hate and discrimination aimed at LGBTQ folks.  Please do what you need to do in light of that to take care of yourself.)

 

I wish that I could invite you into sermon prep some weeks. Sometimes there is a formula – reading, reflection, word study, consulting the commentaries. There are piles of books scattered all around and a crazy number of browser tabs open.

 

Other weeks the Holy Spirit just plants a seed – sometimes it is a seed that feels very subjective - and then She keeps dragging me back to that spot.  That is kind of how this week played out. 

 

Or at least that is how it played out until yesterday at about 1:45 p.m. when I learned that not only had our pride flag been stolen (again), but this time, the vandals had damaged our sign and left their mark on the Memorial Garden.

 

Sometimes the Holy Spirit nudges with ferocity.

I came to know about the vandalism because a GOOD neighbor named Lilly, who cares deeply about having a safe and inclusive community in which her family can thrive, reached out on a neighborhood list serve trying to connect with someone at the church. She wanted us to know what had happened. And she wanted us to know that she cared. She’d spent a chunk of her morning cleaning up the vandalism on our sign. Because she knew it was offensive. And therefore hurtful. And even dangerous.

 

You see, signs like ours, flags like ours matter. Our signaling care for LGBTQ+ people MATTERS. The decision by The United Methodist Church to remove language that discriminates against LGBTQ+ people matters. A lot.

 

Because the rate of suicide attempts among LGBTQ+ youth is four times the rate among all teens. Challenges faced by LGBTQ teens include bullying, family rejection, threats of physical harm and limited access to appropriate healthcare. 

 

All of that risk is improved by loving, caring and supportive relationships. So for LGBTQ youth, seeing a church fly a PRIDE flag instead looking the other way or judging them MATTERS.

 

I know that sometimes when I talk about our pride flag here at Faith, folks express fear for our safety or concern about our property. They express concern that we are focusing on the wrong things, attracting the wrong kind of attention.

 

I get it. It feels uncomfortable to be targeted the way that we were this weekend.

But here’s what else I get:

 

For every call I get or for every incident of hate and vandalism on our property, I hear from at least two folks who say THANK YOU, I appreciate your church’s support.

·      There was the gentleman who arrived in worship this spring and as he left said, I wasn’t even planning to go to church today, but when I saw your flag out there, I knew I had to come express my gratitude.

·      There are the families who are here because this is a safe place for their LGBTQ+ family members to be themselves. 

·      There are people who are on our staff because they want to be part of an organization that is figuring out how to actually love everybody.

·      There is the neighbor who sent us a check this week so that we could buy all the flags we needed to show our support.

·      There are families who are here because they want their kids growing up with inclusion and not hate.

·      There are the guests who don’t yet know what they are looking for in a church, but they know the things that tell them it is ok to walk in the door.

 

Our sign, our flag, they matter. 

 

This week our scripture points toward the fruit of the Spirit that is “goodness.”

 

And yesterday at about 1:45, the call to goodness came loud and clear. Because it matters.

 

At first blush, the word “goodness” is pretty generic. And five weeks into exploring attributes like love, joy, peace, patience and kindness, goodness feels like a pretty razor-thin differentiation that relates to all of the previous ideas.

 

But perhaps that makes it a fundamental attribute. One of those building blocks on which all of discipleship – all of Jesus – following –  is built.

 

In Greek, the word goodness in the Galatians text about fruit and here in our text from Ephesians todoay is a form of the word agathos (which means good). So goodness (agothosune) is the state or the attribute of being “good.” And across the epistles, the body of letters that shaped the earliest Christian community, it is a word used quite a bit, especially in Paul’s teaching, juxtaposed against either “bad” or “evil.” 

 

From a very dualistic worldview then, and the Roman empire would have been shaped by such dualism, things were either good or evil.  So the fruit of goodness WAS fundamental. It was a building block. One was understood to either be good or bad, developing and practicing goodness or acting with evil or bad intent.

 

The letter to the church at Ephesus is a “contested” Pauline letter. A lot of scholars believe it was written by a follower of Paul, someone writing in the wake of Paul, meaning that the struggles of blending Jewish and gentile communities has pretty much worked itself out, and this is a letter counseling the church on how to be in the world without getting sucked into the ways of the world – which at the time would still be heavily influenced by pagan polytheism – a different god for different things.

 

So then, use of the word “good” in today’s scripture, which ends with the encouragement to pursue “all that is good and right and true,” is an encouragement to stay focused on the goodness of God, understood in the life of Jesus. Goodness is an encouragement to stay focused on what it means to be part of a community that lives in light of who Jesus was and what he taught. 

 

You all are doing goodness when you commit to being fully inclusive. And your goodness makes some other people very uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that they have to erase your goodness, they have to criticize your goodness, they have to undercut your message of love, they have to try to make you feel unsafe, to quiet your proclamation of love for all.

 

And in truth, we have a choice when challenged in that way. We can conform to the ways of the world, contracting in our fear or our strong survival sense of conforming, or we can lean into the way Jesus is beckoning us forward as a testament to and a source of unconditional, unwavering love.