Listen More, Speak Less

 I want to begin today by thanking you, because I’m going to be starting a class in September through June in Gestalt Pastoral Care.

I’m thanking you because the Rader-Schellenberger Endowment for Theological Education is paying for it. I believe you will find that it will be mixed into my sermons as well as the pastoral care that I give to all of you and to anyone who comes to the door.

Gestalt Pastoral Care, what does that mean? Well, the Gestalt model is a holistic model. Gestalt Pastoral Care is about realizing that our emotions, our spirit, our mind, and our body are all connected. We can’t just talk about what’s going on in our minds. We have to look at our bodies, our souls, and our emotions. We have to look at all of that.

What I love about this approach to pastoral care is that it does not seek to prescribe anything. It’s not about giving advice or setting goals for anyone. It is merely about asking questions, listening, and helping the person find their truth because we believe God is already at work in all of us. It is learning to listen to God and learning to listen to the Holy Spirit, to recognize how the Holy Spirit is working in each of us, continually stretching us towards healing and wholeness.

I’ve been looking at it for about a year, and I’ve gone to a couple of workshops on it, and I have seen amazing things happen with it. So, I’m starting this course and I want you to know about it. In this coming year, I’m gonna be focusing more on pastoral care. We’ve been in this shift of job descriptions and figuring out what’s Melissa’s and what’s mine, and how do we work together? Now I’m at a point where I feel like I have more time and energy to put into the care of our members and to those outside.

I will also note that there’s just an interesting thing that’s going on, and that is that I’m getting emails from people outside of the church who wanna be baptized or who want their children baptized. I don’t know what’s happening, but I’ve got two Preschool families that I’m talking to. Then we have our babies who are gonna get baptized. Breanne and Carlos’ baby, Bella, and Adam and Sarah’s baby, Lucy, are both going to be baptized at the end of September. The spirit’s moving and I don’t know what that’s all about yet, but we’ll see.

We have this scripture today, Ephesians 4:1-6. This makes my top 10 of scriptures.

We have our favorite scriptures, and this is definitely in mine, particularly the fourth chapter of the book of Ephesians. We’re not sure if Paul wrote it or not, but that doesn’t matter. There is a lot of truth in it and there’s a lot of wisdom in it that we can still take.

It’s not really clear what the issue was. You know, usually there’s a specific issue that a letter is written for. It’s not clear what it is in this book, but there is, especially in this chapter, and in the first three chapters, this sense that the writer wants this church to come together. That they were separated between Jews and Greeks, and they wanted them to come together and recognize that they were better together. In the course of this book, it does say about them being tossed and blown about with every wind of doctrine.

There’s some other information that is coming to this congregation, and whoever wrote the book didn’t like what was coming. There are several references to the devil. There’s a reference to cosmic principalities and powers, and there’s a reference to deceitful teachers. I’m not sure what they were saying, but this author was trying to bring them back to the wisdom of Paul because Paul started the church. He founded the church in Ephesus, and this is still the church in Ephesus.

What is clear is that it’s saying that we need to come together with our differences because we are one humanity. Then this part is near the end of what I was reading, and it’s interesting, the author lists seven things that are one, one body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God. Now that’s important because the number seven is the number of completion in the Bible.

That’s just like one of those things you need to learn about the Bible that scholars have figured out over the years. There’s nowhere in the Bible that says if it’s seven things, that is complete, but that’s wholeness. So the world is complete and all is well and perfect when seven things happen. This is the wish of the seven things, or the author is trying to convince the church in Ephesus that these seven things are present, that even though they might have disagreements in the church, that’s okay.

In fact, I was listening to a podcast this week where they talked about the need for antagonism. We need to have some tension between us. We need to have differences of opinion so that we wrestle with where, we should be. What’s the best answer in this?

This is where it gets interesting because I want to say that I think we are in a moral moment.

Because there are a lot of truths being said right now, or claiming to be truths, and we are at a time when we need to determine whether we opt out or whether we opt to participate. What happens in the future, what the future’s gonna look like for our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren.

We can be about faith, hope, love, and peace, and the ways of Jesus. That’s who we say we follow, or we can be a different thing. I hear Christians, they call themselves Christians, they say they follow Jesus, but they follow someone who is all about power over others and being militant. They say, “We don’t agree with you, so you are the enemy”, and they’ll squash us, arrest us, detain us, and do all kinds of things.

There’s a lot of dehumanizing language in our society right now, and we need to hear that. If we’re able, we need to say, “That’s not what I want us to be.” That’s not who I think we are, and I don’t think that’s who we want to be in the future, because Jesus was not about that. Jesus never belittled somebody else. Jesus was never demeaning to people. Maybe to the Pharisees a little bit, he tried to teach them about humility, but he never put himself above everybody else. He had power with people, not power over.

There are tensions between our liberties and everybody getting to do what they want. But that’s when our liberties step on someone else’s rights. We have to figure out where the right point is between those. You don’t get to just take away someone else’s rights because you don’t like it. How do we figure this out? I don’t think we have that. We’re at a really important moment in time, and I think that there’s wisdom that we can rely on.

So what are we gonna be about?

I don’t know how many of you know who Archbishop Oscar Romero was, but he was an archbishop in El Salvador. He spoke against the militarization and authoritarian regime that was there, and this is one of his quotes. “When the church hears the cry of the oppressed, it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises.”

He took a strong stand at his time, and he was gunned down in the middle of a mass by a member of the military who didn’t appreciate what he had to say, but he stood for what he believed in. I think that’s part of this moral moment. We need to figure out who we are and what we stand for, and we need to stand for it. Because, by being silent, we allow the other.

Now that I’ve taken you to a dark place. Let me give you some light, because remember, Christ is the light that comes into the world. Well, I also found some light in a quote from a bluegrass band called The Jet Rows. I’ve never heard of them, but I found their quote.

“When people in power try to remove our humanity and our dignity. Art and music provide a reason for being. The simple act of making music in difficult times becomes an act of defiance and self-determination. Creation of art and music is cathartic and reinvigorating. It can inspire action, collaboration, and resistance. Music eases our minds during difficult times in our lives. It reminds us that we are a community. We are all in this mess together. Music reminds us that even when life is difficult or when the odds are stacked against us. Life itself is beautiful and worth celebrating.”

We are not called to be perfect, but God does call us to be our best selves. So let’s do that by listening more and speaking less, but speaking when we need to. Let’s listen to the pain of others, because I think that’s where a lot of this is coming from. It’s coming from a place of pain.

May it be so. Amen.

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