Bearing Fruit with Love: How We Conquer Fear and Divisiveness
Tony E Dillon-Hansen
29 April 2018
A reflection based upon Psalm 22 • 1 John 4:7-21 • John 15: 1-8
As someone of fitness, I would like to exercise your hearts and
minds today. You may agree with me with things and you may not. Just remember
that some things, like exercise, might make you uncomfortable. We know with Christ’s call to service,
discomfort is part of the territory. Like Christ, exercise can help our hearts
get stronger. So let us witness Christ
together with whole heart and mind.
Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the
meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our Rock, Our
Redeemer. Amen.
The Issue: Fear and Divisiveness.
For our reflection, I am going to address a difficult issue
that impact our everyday lives today and one that needs our attention. I want to talk about rampant fear-based
spiritual abuse and divisiveness. We see this in a bunch of places all around
us. We see it on the news, in the halls of government, during the coffee hour,
at the ballpark, and we see it in church: yes from people like you and me.
Why is this issue important and why today? The Gospel of
John likes to talk community and how people belong to the community. Our Gospel
today invokes the imagery of the vine, as interconnectedness, and growing of
the community. Further, the epistle from John provides a way to “cure” the ills
of division and abuse. So let us address the problem, look at the cure, and understand
a path to the cure. Ultimately, that is God’s vision for us, and so, the
question is how do we get there?
First, in order to correct an injustice or cure a disease (and
disease it is), we must be willing to name it. For centuries, people would treat
mental illness by throwing people into asylums which was the same as a prison
cell. Otherwise, creative relatives might lock up one of their own so as to
hide the issue in the closet, the attic or remote room that was left alone. People
were given cute names (e.g. funny farm, looney bin, crazy house or worse) and
people were warned to stay away like the illness was contagious. Yet, what was
contagious was the fear that people perpetuated. Instead of helping people,
society preferred to simply not deal with the issue and hid behind their own
fears. People watching others in treatment saw how horrible the conditions
were, but did nothing. They were paralyzed by irrationality. Some of the fears
were real but focused upon the symptoms instead of the cause.
Then one day, some people decided, these were real people
with real issues. They called it “depression”, “anxiety” or if you were from
battle, “shell-shocked” (which almost sounds as bad as the explosions
themselves.) They gave it a name decided asylums were in fact not solving the
issue but rather hiding an ugly truth. We have ways to go with mental illness,
but we have come far.
Divisive and Fear spiritual abuse is another illness. Like
depression affects a person, this illness affects our (the whole) community and
is making our community very sick for far too long. We have locked it away
behinds closed doors of secret societies and hypocritical oaths sworn to defend
a “right” to discriminate. We used cute phrases in order to normalize the
sickness like “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” “it’s tradition,” or “they
don’t live like us”, or even better “they deserve God’s wrath.” (and why was it
deserved, I ask?) For doing nothing more than trying to make a peaceful home in
this community – in God’s community. What
is important is that language is part of this because the use of “they and
them” in opposition to “us or our” helps us articulate the illusions of
division.
This is one reason why people have wondered about the Gospel
truths when those that profess them want to demonize many around them. Even
though people simply want an equal and fair part in the community of God, there
have been people sitting in pews and standing in pulpits that say “not for you.”
Where is the Gospel in such a message? How welcoming is that?
This is one reason why some people do not feel there is a
church home for them. I mean why would anyone want to subject a spouse, let
alone their beloved children, into a space that offers lofty words that all but
hide a sign of hate in their work.
Regardless of writings on the walls or what was read in scriptures, what
people do matters. When people don’t feel welcomed or when they feel conflicted
by what they have heard or experienced, that is spiritual abuse and builds fear
of Church and God.
Our challenge should you choose to accept it. How do we
bring these people back to God? How do we as a community heal? How do we pass
onto our children a church that bears the good fruit today and tomorrow?
A Cure
A Cure according to 1st John is love,
specifically authentic love. How many of you knew I was going to say that? That
means some of you were paying attention to the readings. This was meant for the
times when it was written, and the cure is meant for our times today. A cure to
divisiveness and spiritual abuse is love.
Yes, a cure to these ills, I submit, is love and caring.
That is God tells us to be love, to be love authentically and with whole-heart
– no matter where they are on life’s journey, whether they are believers, what
they say, or how they live their lives. We are love now and always. From a
pastoral care perspective, this makes sense because people often come to me
with a list of issues and many of the issues are about what other people are
doing --as in what they are doing or not doing – or at least what they think is
happening. Just because you may not see
someone pray might also mean they might be taking the Gospel of Matthew to
heart about not praying in public or loud.
In that list of who and what, their focus is upon someone
else and how those people irritate or offended them. To clarify, there are
legitimate and real pains because of damage done. Jesus tells us that judgment
coming, but that is not our call. We take care to correct our own paths and our
response to injustice. Do we enact pain upon someone else because we are in
pain? No. Do we allow people to continue injustice upon us? No.
Do we look with faith for the love of Jesus? Are we love?
The letter from John teaches us not just to be love but why
it is so important. In the words of 1st John, love casts out fear
and punishment. That is precisely because there is no reason to fear when you
walk with love.
Isn’t that really the crux of the issue with spiritual abuse
and divisiveness is fear? Instead of trying to understand another person or how
they come to God, fear is used to mask and to avoid the opportunity to
transform each of us. Essentially, we have allowed fear to paralyze our society
into this sickness.
That fear is for us to prune away and toss away as withered
and rejected branches because that will not bear the fruit our community needs.
Beloved: be love and love all brothers and sisters. Don’t
let fear win.
We have called it by name and we have a cure.
Like any great journey, there is a path to the cure.
A Path:
A path is the challenge for us. As a gardener, I especially
resonate with a Gospel story that talks about growing fruits and vines. Partially,
I can enjoy the results as a snack or meal, but I know that growing a garden of
flowers, herbs and fruit is hard work. It takes some discipline. Some days the
discipline is great and some days, I am flat lazy. In those days, I have to pay
more attention and really pull together the effort to keep going.
So yes, when the Gospel mentions growing gardens and vines,
I am there! Hopefully, I can learn a tip or two along the way (like soil depths
or proper shading). The tips from Jesus are kind of like the nuts and bolts of
gardening, and that we have to tend all parts of the garden or the vine or else
we risk losing parts of it. That is figuratively speaking how we have to tend
to all parts of the community to be His Church.
(Even Paul’s letters to Corinth reminds us too that our
Church requires all parts of the Body or the Church.) From my experience, it is
nearly impossible to grow a fruit that is detached from its root or vine.
Unlike the vine or grape, people can be reconnected and help the whole
community grow together. Together, we help the whole grow because we know that
poor conditions can impact the wider connectedness. How can we help those? We
raise the conditions and give them attention. The answer is love!
Thus, despite the spiritual abuse from social media, news,
or certain misguided ones, we have an opportunity to repair damage and grow our
community again. As I said before (and in the Gospels, we do this through
action, sharing and engaging our community with that cure.
The cure and path can be tricky because this does not come
with instant gratification or allow for easy judgments. Our path may not seem
easy to market or sell because it requires dedication to love, discipline to
open ourselves, and willingness to invite people into our lives that we may not
normally invite.
Yes, we invite them with all of their brokenness so that we
can learn from each other. As difficult as that may sound, the payoff can be
immense and shines. When we show our love by engaging our community and
supporting all of God’s Beloved children, we will see a community that rises,
takes care of each other, shakes hands with each other, has coffee together,
and sings praises together.
We don’t need division and hurt. We don’t need fear. We know
what is making us sick, we know the cure and is our Church’s mission from Jesus
to our community and our posterity that we pursue this path.
You don’t get to the cure by pointing fingers and trying to
look superior. No one is perfect and no one is exempt from God’s love. We
cannot start being the cure by being that which we are trying to cure. There is
enough division in our world without us reinforcing our own.
We know the name, we have a cure and it is up to us to do
the therapy to get better. So our path is to start today in the fellowship hall
after worship because we are not just here for words; we are here for action as
an action-oriented, mission-based Church. There are a couple action plans in
mind, but let’s hear your action plan. A discussion series is being offered to
discuss the issue in depth along with reviewing a book to initiate a healthy
dialogue for those that want to study the issue more. If you want to help in our community outreach
efforts, you wont want to miss these chances.
There is so much that we can do and so much that we must do.
It is up to us to live out the example we have been given by Jesus and teach
the world (our community) as God’s community. Our community needs this and God
wants this. We teach them what love looks like by being love and by welcoming all
Beloved of God.
It won’t be easy because good fruit on the vine does not
just happen because we say it does. That takes time, work, attention, and
loving care. We do our part and be a great example. Remind ourselves to leave
room for people to join us, for ideas and for God’s big love to embrace us all.
We are going to do some wonderful work.
We do that by being the best UCC can be.
That is how we bear fruit for generations and stay connected
to our community.
We are love in thoughts, words and action because love wins.
Thanks Be to God.
