Will Preach For Food Podcast

Sanctification 101 (EHR 4)

October 15, 2022 Doug Season 3 Episode 31
Will Preach For Food Podcast
Sanctification 101 (EHR 4)
Show Notes Transcript

Exploring the Iceberg

How do we grow closer to and more like Jesus? How are we experiencing the regeneration of the Holy Spirit in our lives today? It starts and ends with God’s agape love for us and for the world. God, in Christ Jesus, has done for us what we could not do for ourselves. Through the love of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we have been saved, justified, and called children of God. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Amen? Amen. 

In obedience to God’s command and following the example of our Lord Jesus, we practice the habit of quiet time with God, drinking deep from the well of God’s love so that we can love God and others well. Human relationships require open communication, especially about our mutual expectations and “the stories we are telling ourselves:” about the thoughts and motives of others. We may have Jesus in our hearts, we learned last week, but we also have grandpa in our bones! That is, our family histories—the good, the bad, and the ugly—all play into and play out in our current relating with God and others.

Everything Under the Sun

And that gets us to this week’s lesson that challenges us to “explore the iceberg,” to look inside us and see what lies under the surface, in our hearts and wills. Emotions. Motives. Yes, we are going to talk about our feelings. Let’s start in Ecclesiastes 3:1-11, written over 2500 years ago.

There is a time for everything,
     and a season for every activity under the heavens:

2     a time to be born and a time to die,
     a time to plant and a time to uproot,
 
3     a time to kill and a time to heal,
     a time to tear down and a time to build,
 
4     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
     a time to mourn and a time to dance,
 
5     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
     a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
 
6     a time to search and a time to give up,
     a time to keep and a time to throw away,
 
7     a time to tear and a time to mend,
     a time to be silent and a time to speak,
 
8     a time to love and a time to hate,
     a time for war and a time for peace.

9 What do workers gain from their toil? 10 I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. 11 [God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. 


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Sanctification 101 (EHR 4)

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the Will Preach for Food podcast. I’m Doug, a pastor here at Faith Lutheran Church, based out of Shelton, Washington, a congregation of the ELCA. We are in week four of our series focusing on Emotionally Healthy Relationships—EHR for short—as Faith leans into our congregation’s vision and dream to grow “closer to and more like Jesus.” Emotionally Healthy Relationships is an eight-week preaching, devotional, and small group series based on the work of Pete and Geri Scazzero.

You can learn more about Faith and about Emotionally Healthy Relationships at our website, www.faithshelton.org. Thanks for listening today. 

And before we dive in, let me briefly put this series in a more theological context. You see, if you were to go to lunch today and tell some of your religious friends that you just listened to your pastor’s podcast and he was talking about “feelings” as part of an eight-week series called “Emotionally Healthy Relationships,” you might get a few raised eyebrows, and murmurs about “what they’re teaching in seminary these days.”

Now, I don’t know exactly what they are teaching these days, because I went to seminary thirty years ago! But I can tell you that most of what we learn in seminary is stuff that has been a part of church doctrine for centuries. It’s just that back then we just had a different names for it. When we talk about “growing closer to and more like Jesus,” well, back in the day we called it the “doctrine of sanctification.” Peter called it the washing of regeneration. James called it the wisdom from above. Paul called it the new life in Christ. 

So this Emotionally Healthy Relationships course could also simply be called “Sanctification 101.” And, if you want to impress your religious friends, you can tell them about this course, then ask them: “So, how does YOUR church address, understand, and embody the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in the world today?” Because that is what we are doing here (in case you were wondering…). So…Sisters and Brothers in Christ…

Exploring the Iceberg

How do we grow closer to and more like Jesus? How are we experiencing the regeneration of the Holy Spirit in our lives today? It starts and ends with God’s agape love for us and for the world. God, in Christ Jesus, has done for us what we could not do for ourselves. Through the love of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we have been saved, justified, and called children of God. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Amen? Amen. 

In obedience to God’s command and following the example of our Lord Jesus, we practice the habit of quiet time with God, drinking deep from the well of God’s love so that we can love God and others well. Human relationships require open communication, especially about our mutual expectations and “the stories we are telling ourselves:” about the thoughts and motives of others. We may have Jesus in our hearts, we learned last week, but we also have grandpa in our bones! That is, our family histories—the good, the bad, and the ugly—all play into and play out in our current relating with God and others.

Everything Under the Sun

And that gets us to this week’s lesson that challenges us to “explore the iceberg,” to look inside us and see what lies under the surface, in our hearts and wills. Emotions. Motives. Yes, we are going to talk about our feelings. Let’s start in Ecclesiastes 3:1-11, written over 2500 years ago.

There is a time for everything,
     and a season for every activity under the heavens:

2     a time to be born and a time to die,
     a time to plant and a time to uproot,
 
3     a time to kill and a time to heal,
     a time to tear down and a time to build,
 
4     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
     a time to mourn and a time to dance,
 
5     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
     a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
 
6     a time to search and a time to give up,
     a time to keep and a time to throw away,
 
7     a time to tear and a time to mend,
     a time to be silent and a time to speak,
 
8     a time to love and a time to hate,
     a time for war and a time for peace.

9 What do workers gain from their toil? 10 I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. 11 [God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. 

This translation says there is a time for every activity under heaven, but the word in Hebrew is “Khay-fits” and it has more to do with feelings—the motives behind our actions and choices. From the day we are born to the day we die, we will most certainly experience a gamut of human emotions, including nurture, rage, disgust, boredom, joy, grief, sadness, anger, delight, despair, curiosity, greed, generosity, compassion, apathy, calm—those are just the ones listed in Ecclesiastes 3! From the wisdom literature of the Hebrew (Old Testament) scriptures, therefore, we learn at least three key concepts:

First: there is a time for everything, and God made everything beautiful in its time. That means that emotions are good. There are no bad emotions. God gives us emotions so that we can interpret our circumstances and choose how to respond. 

Second, the Bible insists that God FEELS—compassion, grief, delight, anger, contentment, jealousy, joy, longing, and lament. Sometimes Bible writers are accused of attributing human emotions to God, like anger or sadness. But it may be more accurate to say that the Bible attributes to GODLY emotions to humans, like anger and sadness.

Third, the Bible affirms that Jesus felt all the feels, too, from the pride of his Father’s affirmation at Baptism to the despair of abandonment on the cross. Jesus, the Son of God, our great high priest, as Hebrews 4 says, is able to “sympathize with our weaknesses” having himself fought the same emotional battles that we do. Or again, to say that as humans, we fight the same emotional battles that Christ did. The full humanity and the full divinity of Christ is thus affirmed.

Sanctification

Which takes us to the book of Ephesians. Here, as in all of Paul’s letters, we learn that “in Christ” we have been saved by grace through faith—apart from human effort or good works—this is what we call the doctrine of “justification.” 

But these books always have a second part—one having to do with the sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit in us now: Christ IN us. How the spirit is re-generating us in Christ. In Christ, in Baptism we are reborn children of God, but the “old self” is still with us. Jesus may be in our hearts, but grandpa is in our bones. This is the now/not yet of the human condition. The spiritual battle we face is not between our feelings and our faith, but between our new selves in Christ and our old, “unregenerated selves.” Here is a reading from Ephesians, beginning at chapter four, verse 22:

Ephesians 4:22-5:2

You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

25 Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body. 26 “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, 27 and do not give the devil a foothold…29 Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen… 31 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you… Follow God’s example, therefore…

Four things here to notice. 

1.      First, that anger itself is not a bad thing, but left unchecked, it can lead to sin. 

2.      Second, that we have a responsibility to do something with our anger—specifically, not to let it fester, not to let it control us or keep us up night after night.

3.      Third, that we are to follow the example of God. Literally: we are to be imitators of God. Mimic how God does things, Paul says. Being kind, compassionate, forgiving—more like Jesus. 

4.      This involves recognizing and repenting of some old habits and patterns of the un-regenerated life: bitterness, slander, malicious gossip, judging others. These things are simply community killers, says the book of James: You desire but do not have, he writes, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight (James 4:2).

Emotional immaturity is why churches fight and quarrel and split. And the only remedy, the only way a church family can stick together is when every one of us submits our wholes lives—feelings and all of it—to God. We need to talk about feelings AND faith.

The Voice of Mr. Vignoli

Podcasters and authors and TED talkers like Brene’ Brown and Krista Tippett are wildly popular these days because they are normalizing conversations about feelings. Feelings are “in.” Feeling our feels is growing more socially acceptable. That wasn’t so much the case for me when I was a kid.

I’m a pretty normal, well-adjusted, 55-year-old guy, I think. As a kid, I remember getting wound up sometimes, upset, and running outside to a little grove of evergreens in our front yard at our house in Kirkland. One of these times I was out there crying when our neighbor, Mr. Vignoli, saw me and said with exasperation and disgust: “Why are you always crying like that?” And I felt something called “shame.” Big boys don’t cry. So, I learned how to not cry, how to bury my feelings: “a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries…” Yup, I had become a man.

But not really. Because what happens is that stuffed emotions stifle maturity and growth. They come out sideways in the form of shame, judgment, and fear. And I even passed on the same messages to my own kids: keep your emotions to yourself. Stay in control. Don’t embarrass yourself. I had let the voice of Mr. Vignoli dictate my life instead of the voice of God.

As a pastor, I kept feelings and faith separate. I got really good at noticing and naming the feelings of others, but not my own. To this day I struggle to acknowledge and name my feelings and needs. And this hinders my growth in Christ, hinders the sanctification at work in me by the Holy Spirit, and hinders our mission and community life together at Faith. 

Explore the Iceberg

Lesson 4 of the emotionally healthy relationships course is called “Explore the Iceberg.” As the image suggests, sometimes our feelings and emotions are “beneath the surface,” the same way that 90% of an iceberg is below the surface of the water. Much of who we are is not readily seen. If we aren’t careful, we crash into each other. 

Learning to be still before God sort of stills the water around us so that we can notice what is churning below the surface. We learn how to relate to one another, to listen to one another. We clarify expectations and clean up our assumptions. We gently and fearlessly consider how our families of origin have literally shaped our icebergs! 

Now, how ARE you feeling? Social scientists today, building on the wisdom of ancient Hebrew scriptures now identify over 80 distinct emotions. This week Emotionally Healthy Relationships invites you to notice and consider four of them. 

1.      What are you angry about?

2.      What are you sad about?

3.      What are you anxious about?

4.      What are you glad about?

The course suggests that you give yourself two minutes for each question to write down anything that comes to mind. Past, present, and future. Don’t be surprised if the same thing makes you both anxious and glad! If you finish one question early, don’t rush to the next question. Pause in silence, invite God to contribute to the list on your behalf. Or not. 

Emotions Matter

In this lesson, the Scazzeros share a few helpful insights.

1.      Unprocessed feelings don’t die, they get buried alive

a.      Manifest in our bodies (illness, ulcers, sore neck, migraines).

b.      They leak—we take it out on others.

c.      Difficult emotions cover/hinder/dull the good emotions like joy, love, and creativity.

2.      Healthy communities know themselves—and each other. My Wednesday Bible study sometimes takes the first 30 minutes just sharing highs and lows. We all crave connection. If I don’t know what made you happy today, I don’t know you. If you don’t know what made me sad today, you don’t know me. If you don’t know what is making you angry these days, you don’t know yourself! 

3.      Feelings help us discern God’s voice. Emotions are a place where we meet God—or God meets us. In grief, in suffering, pain, in joy, in gratitude, in fear, in disappointment, in pride, and in despair. As the Spirit works in me, the true voice of God is replacing the voice of my grumpy neighbor, Mr. Vignoli.

Further exploration

·        Reflect on how your family of origin might have dealt with—or buried—these emotions when you were growing up. How’s that working for you?

·        Your children and grandchildren are feeling all the feels. If they want to talk to you about things they are feeling or learning about themselves, let them. Don’t judge. Don’t get defensive. Don’t roll your eyes. Listen. Honor their courage, even if they don’t do it very well. 

·        Let these lists be your prayer list for the coming week. This is how we “submit” our emotions to God. Whatever is brought to light becomes a light. “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear…take it to the Lord in prayer.” 

·        And, if you are ready and willing: talk to someone. Like me, or Pastor Brenda, or Terry, or Mike. Not only are we all very good looking—we are (also) very good listeners. 

·        “All the lonely people…” nearly every conversation I have these days it seems is about feelings of profound loneliness and a longing to connect in an emotionally healthy community. “Let us not give up the practice of meeting together,” is good advice from the book of Hebrews. And let us do it with intention, with awareness, with our whole selves.

Conclusion

Emotionally Healthy Relationships is more or less just a new term for an ancient doctrine of sanctification. We are doing the work of tending to the Spirit’s work in us, growing us increasingly in the likeness of Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.

Thanks for listening, folks. EHR resources, small group schedules and sign-ups are at Faith and at our website, www.faithshelton.org. Keep listening to this podcast for more in this Emotionally Healthy Relationships series. It is available on most podcast platforms, including Spotify, Apple, and Google. Preview the EHR videos on our YouTube channel. While you are there, like us, subscribe, donate, or sign-up for our newsletter. Thank you, Chas and Nadia, for your production and tech support for this podcast. 

All glory…