Clothed for the Work Ahead
12-14 So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.
15-17 Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness. Let the Word of Christ—the Message—have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God! Let every detail in your lives—words, actions, whatever—be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way. (The Message, paraphrased by Eugene Peterson)
Note where we are in our series – last week we talked about gentleness.
The fruit of the Spirit that is gentleness reflects God’s gentleness with us.
This week, we finish up the fruit of the Spirit – focusing on self-control. If you saw our Wednesday video, you heard me say this:
It feels as though we have drifted into the kind of division that causes us to act on our passions, separate from both gentleness and self-control.
Self control is the power we have to avoid acting from our passions. Self control is the power we have to think before we act, to love before we react, to remember whose we are before we speak aloud. Self control is the power we have to keep going when the world suggests otherwise.
It is a funny topic for this week.
For those of you who are not familiar with the events of this week here at the church, here’s the short version.
Sometime before 11 p.m. on Wednesday night, vandals once again graffiti-ed our property, spray painting our sanctuary doors, the ones that we insist are open to all, with the misspelled and misappropriate label – Fake Church.
This is the sixth act of vandalism that has targeted our property with a focus on our pride flag in six months. The last three incidents have escalated. We’ve filed three police reports in six weeks.
Someone is very bothered by our inclusive witness here on Montrose Road.
I assure you that when I pulled into the top entrance to the parking lot on Thursday morning and came face to face with the message on our doors, self control did not guide my first response, my first words….or the first text message I sent to my husband.
The week had already been full of some complicated things, and earlier in the week, the Holy Spirit had very plainly reminded me to lay down my burdens and I had heard that message plainly again and again throughout the week.
That’s easier said than done, and it might have taken me a few hours (or six) of fight or flight response to what felt like a threat to begin hearing the Spirit whisper it again and again…lay it down. I had to tap into a deep bit of self-control to walk toward the Spirit’s leading
This week, I’ve been listening to a song called Take a Moment on repeat –
Take a moment to remember who God is and who I am.
There you go lifting my load again.
I felt the gift of a lot of fruit in the hard parts of this week. It is my deep prayer that you are experiencing that fruitfulness as well.
Since this series started, I have gotten so many earnest questions about being connected to God. So many of you have asked about prayer, about how to listen for God’s guidance, about how discerning what is of God and what is of the world works. They are such good questions and it is beautiful to hear so many of you longing for that kind of connection to the Triune God.
Many of you know by now that I identify as a contemplative – that is to say that my prayer life is more silent than spoken, rooted it times of opening myself up to a relationship with God. I think I have said weekly in this series that prayer is about relationship. As if on cue, Fr. Richard Rohr’s daily meditation this morning had this explanation of prayer:
I believe prayer is a symbiotic relationship with life and with God, a synergy which creates a result larger than the exchange itself. We ask not to change God, but to change ourselves. We pray to form a living relationship, not to get things done. (That is why Jesus says all prayers are answered, which does not appear to be true, according to the evidence!) God knows that we need to pray to keep the symbiotic relationship moving and growing. Prayer is not a way to try to control God, or even to get what we want.
Prayers of intercession or petition are one way of situating our life within total honesty and structural truth. We are all forever beggars before God and the universe. We can never engineer or guide our own transformation or conversion. If we try, it will be a self-centered and well-controlled version of conversion, with most of our preferences and addictions still fully in place, but now well-disguised.
…It’s important that we ask, seek, and knock to keep ourselves in right relationship with Life Itself. Life is a gift, totally given to us without cost, every day of it, and every part of it.
That symbiotic relationship is achieved not by one specific prayer practice or form. And I would even argue it is not achieved by trying to use words at all. That relationship is achieved when we show up every day – moment by moment and say, here I am, Lord.
Beloved, this is how we dress in the wardrobe that God has picked out, clothed in compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline.
Clothed in that way, we are best able to fulfill our baptismal vows to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.
Clothed in that way we are best able to love all of our neighbors, even the vandal who doesn’t seem to understand how it is that we are called to love all.
We continue to expand our garden of fruits of the Spirit today by writing down on our beautiful thing a response to this prompt (and I confess I’ve modified it just a bit today in light of all the things):
Follow Nike’s advice and “Just do it.” Select one way that you will intentionally put yourself in God’s presence daily this week. What will you focus on as you embrace the spiritual fruit of self-control?
Now, enough from me…Leaders here at Faith want you to hear a message sent to us from the Baltimore Washington Area Reconciling Ministries in light of this week’s events.
Beloved Siblings at Faith UMC,
As the Baltimore-Washington Area Reconciling United Methodists, affectionately known as BWARM, we send you greetings of love and peace in this turbulent and anxious season. We are aware that you as a faithfully inclusive congregation have been the target of those who seek division and hatred. It is an extraordinarily painful experience when our sacred church homes are desecrated. We are praying for you as you seek to show up faithfully in your community while also tending your own hearts after these traumatic experiences.
At BWARM we are so very grateful for Faith UMC’s faithful work of ministry in the name of Jesus Christ. Voting to become a reconciling church in 2021 was a brave and faithful decision. Words matter. In your reconciling statement, you proclaim a hard truth acknowledging “that we live in a world of profound social, economic, and political inequities” and also naming that it is as disciples of Jesus that we are called to confront those very injustices and stand in solidarity with all who have been oppressed and marginalized, including the LGBTQIA+ community.
You have spoken this message boldly, not just through a statement on your website or words in sermons and studies, but by proudly flying the rainbow flag in front of your church, a visible witness of God’s all-inclusive love for your larger community. This witness matters. It matters to people who show up to your church, but it also matters to people you will never meet—people who have experienced harm in religious spaces and whose drive on Montrose offers them a healing glimpse that there is another way to be the Church.
And now, just as so many people and congregations who have taken prophetic stances for God’s justice in the past, you are now facing the painful opposition of those very forces of “evil, injustice, and oppression” that we vow to resist in our baptismal vows. While we deeply regret that you are having to face these incidents of hate, we at BWARM want to remind you that you have been preparing for this season and you are exactly where God has called you to be for such a time as this.
All the work you did to make the decision to become reconciling, all the time you have spent discerning how to proclaim the good news of the sacred worth of all of God’s children, all the witnessing you’ve done at Pride, all the sermons you’ve experienced, all the books you’ve read, all the prayers you’ve uttered… all of that was to prepare you, strengthen you, and equip you to stand steadfast in your mission and values when the going has gotten tough. You’ve got this! And God’s got you. And we do too.
You do not stand alone. In the Baltimore Washington Conference alone we are 35 reconciling United Methodist Churches, 10 reconciling communities, plus countless more reconciling individuals ready to have your back as you show your larger community who you are by how you respond to these incidents of vandalism and hate. It’s not the opportunity for witness that any of us would have chosen, and yet, it is a powerful opportunity to model for our larger community and culture the gospel lessons that we preach. That only love overcomes hate. That we follow a Savior who refused to be silenced in his message of God’s reign of love and justice. That we speak the truth—even hard truths—in love. That faithful discipleship can be costly. That we keep loving our neighbors even when things get uncomfortable. That we “accept the freedom and power God gives [us] to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”
We are so grateful for your witness in this season. We love you. We are praying for you. And we will remain at the ready to stand with you as you continue to respond faithfully. You’ve got this! And God’s got you. And we do too.
In Christ’s love,
The Baltimore-Washington Area Reconciling United Methodists
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