The Way Forward: Discernment

The Way Forward:  Discernment

Colossians 3:12-14

This morning, I want to start a long walk with the congregation.  The pastoral transition team has been challenged to lead the congregation in a discernment process that will unfold this fall.  The questions will be about who the church has been, who it is now, who it might be in the future.  The tricky part of the project is not to just answer who it is that we would like to be but who it is that God is calling us to be.  There is a church that we aspire to be, that we would enjoy being.  However, far more dauntingly, there is a church whom God is calling us to be.  How would we ever hear—or discern—that calling?

Let’s say a couple of things from the start.  First of all, I think it is my job to help you all think about how this process of discernment happens.  As a pastor, one of the central things that we do is help people think about how God is present in the world and how we might live in a way that reflects that presence.  In this sense, part of what I want to help us do is remember what we’ve been doing for a long time.  I’d like to name those things and invite everyone to be more intentional about naming these things in your own life and in our life together as a church.  What are the moments when we step back and realize that there was “something more” that was present—not the skies parting and an old man appearing, but deeply felt meaning?  It’s the sermon we hear or the hymn we sing or the service project we were just doing that leads us to think, “Ya…that was it.”  As a pastor, I love to point and ask, “Did you just see that? Did you just feel what I felt?  Wasn’t that amazing?”

Second, although I can point to things, the real task at hand is to help you all feel confident enough to point for yourselves.  The discernment process ahead is not about who I would like the church to be going forward or who Tracy would like the church to be going forward.  The discernment process ahead is who you would like the church to be, or, more specifically, who you think the church is being called to be in it’s next chapter.  I think God is calling the Union Church forward.  I believe that it is up to you all to hear that calling and bring it to life.

Third, if the church family is to discern our calling forward, then the prerequisite for that happening is that each one of us has to be doing the work of discerning God’s presence and God’s calling—locating the sacred, if you will, in our own lives.  If we are going to learn how to listen to our life together, then we each need to be working at listening to our own lives.  In other words, there is “homework” and that homework begins today.

Here’s both the easy and the incredibly tricky part, all rolled together.  How do we know when we are on the right path in life?  We know we are on the right path—at least we suspect we are—when things feel right, when we feel whole, when there’s a sense of peace that prevails.  Things are—at least for a moment—in harmony—the original meaning of “shalom.”  We catch a glimpse of how the world would be if it was the way that it was supposed to be.  Instead of feeling fragmented, we feel whole.  Instead of things feeling chaotic, things “click.”  Instead of feeling overwhelmed, we feel that we are in the “flow.”  So, these elusive but powerful feelings are essential feedback in discernment.

And the tricky part?  Well, we all know that we can be absolutely, 100 percent wrong.  Doing whatever feels good can be the life motto of an addict or a psychopath, right?  If I just want to fix of good feelings, I can say whatever I need to say and do whatever I need to do to get whatever I want, right?  This is the danger.  Feelings can lead us to get lost in ourselves.  Discernment, though, always leads us beyond ourselves and into the world of loving relationships.  We have to ask ourselves, “Does this feel good or does this feel like God?”  You can eat a large bag of Doritos and feel full (and sick.). However, experiences that are full of God’s presence lead us to feel “fed” spiritually, nourished at a deeper level.

I actually don’t think recognizing this difference is that complicated.  Although we don’t spend a lot of time in this church talking about “sin” I think we can all acknowledge that we are born selfish and self-centered.  As babies, we don’t use our first words to say, “Mom, you look especially tired tonight.  Why don’t you take the night off?”  As teenagers, we struggle mightily to tell the difference between what feels good and what’s right and all of us have lost that battle.  Still, although self-centeredness and selfishness are built into us, most of us, thanks to loving parents and friends and teachers and others along the way learn to choose something higher and deeper to live.  Sooner or later, most of us learn that “What’s in it for me” just leads to one lonely place after another.  Sooner or later, we learn the joy of being part of an “us” and of being self-sacrificing in order to help someone else.

So, let’s say that the pre-requisite for discernment is being able to tell the difference between my worst instincts and my best instincts.  If I want to discern who I’m being called to be and who God is calling us as a church family to be, I can probably safely trust that God isn’t calling me, individually, to a life of selfishness and that God probably isn’t calling us to be the church where everyone just gets whatever they want.  Don’t get me wrong!  There are a lot of people who live selfish (and lonely and shallow) lives.  There are a lot of pastors who will tell people exactly what they want to hear to put a few more bodies in the pews.  I just don’t see how any of that actually fits with a faith that is about self-sacrifice.

Our text for this morning points us to a place to start our thinking:  

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.

Let’s unpack this together…

We’ve talked before about how hierarchical society in Jesus’ day was and how robes that people wore were a reflection of one’s status.  If you had a purple robe, everyone knew that you were rich because dyes like that were expensive.  If you had a plain robe, everyone knew that you were just another poor person.  People clothed themselves to send a message to each other.

Of course, we still do, although the messages can be complicated.  We dress up to say, “This night really matters to us!” Or, we dress up to say, “Look at me!”  Or, we dress up to say, “I’m super anxious and just desperately want to fit in!”  Or, we dress down to say, “I’m a relaxed guy” or “I’m just going to be who I am” or “Heck with you!  I don’t care.”  That, of course, is the problem.  We dress ourselves to say certain things but people can interpret our dress however they like.  Coded messages get confusing fast.

When Paul is talking about “clothing” ourselves, he’s talking about something deeper.  How should we present ourselves to the world?  Paul says, in Eugene Petersen’s delightful translation, that our “all purpose garment” is love.  We don’t ever want to be without that.  In this loving category, though, Paul says that God has provided us with a whole wardrobe of choices.  We can be compassionate and kind people in a world of hurt and needs.  We can be humble in a world that seems to place such a high value on being selfish.  We can be diligent and persistent and quietly strong, in a world that sometimes seems drawn to the loudest person who declares that they are the strongest person in the room.  We can be  even tempered and not lose ourselves over the slightest provocation.  We can make peace with coming in second.  We can learn to not only be forgiving but to not leave people hanging while we take our sweet time getting to forgiveness.

The gist of what Paul is saying, of course, is that faith is about who we choose to be and how we choose to live.  We could be selfish.  We could just care about ourselves and our own loved ones.  We could hold and nourish and feed every grudge we’ve ever had.  We could act as if we, alone, are the only ones who can do anything that’s worth doing.  We’re perfectly free to do all that but we are not free to do all that and call ourselves followers of Christ.  Christ calls us—as individuals and as a church family—to be loving.  There are a whole host of things that loving people do.  There are a whole host of things that people do that are never going to be loving.  Knowing the difference is where discernment begins.

So, at the outset of this journey, I can tell you with confidence that God is calling each of us individually to be loving people.  I can tell you with equal confidence that God is calling us to be a loving community of faith.  That’s our foundation:  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.  You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  You shall love.

Here’s where things get tricky and interesting.  For some of us, certain loving activities come easily.  For one person, service makes all the sense In the world.  For someone else, spiritual practices (prayer, singing, studying Scripture) are totally comfortable.  The complicating truth that the Bible keeps telling us in so many different ways is that God always calls us beyond our comfort zones.  Of course, we should freely do what comes easily and is experienced as loving by someone else. However, growth happens when we stretch, when we push ourselves to get through the initial discomfort of doing something new, when we take the risk of maybe even doing something we never thought we’d do simply because it appears to be the loving thing that needs to happen.

Finding the balance between keeping track of and living the things that are essential and, at the very same time, being willing to try something new is what discernment is all about.  This is what I want to explore with you in the weeks to come…