The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (A)
Verses: Galatians 5:22-23

THE ORDINARY CHRISTIAN LIFE: GENTLENESS (PRAUTES)

24 August 2008

Galatians 5:22-23 [English Standard Version, © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers]

22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

THE ORDINARY CHRISTIAN LIFE: GENTLENESS (PRAUTES)

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“In normal everyday usage, gentleness and strength are not usually associated with each other. But I would like you to reconsider that they do indeed belong together.

“When you walk along the beach on a sunny, windless day, especially at low tide, the waves seem to be no more forceful than when a dog laps at her water bowl. But when a hurricane is blowing in at high tide, there is nothing quite as frightening as looking at the ocean waves from a balcony across the street, pondering just when they will crest above the dune line and bring the floods.

“When you see a mother speaking softly with her crying child as the mother cleans and bandages a badly scraped knee, one can hardly imagine that parent as anything but a pushover. But when her child is misbehaving badly, there is nothing quite as fierce to that child as her mother’s stern look of disapproval and the forceful sound of her ‘No.’

“When you see the new father in the delivery room holding his tiny newborn daughter with tears of joy streaming down his face, you can’t even begin to imagine what terror that same guy can produce in a scrambling quarterback as that same man’s 6’9” 275 pound body is two inches away from a bone-crunching tackle.

“The philosopher Aristotle rightly said that gentleness was the mean between bad temper and spineless incompetence, between extreme anger and indifference. Yes, that’s a start in the right direction.

“But I contend to you today that most of us men act as if gentleness and strength were polar opposites rather than part and parcel of one another.

“When we leave home for the first time, there’s this natural tendency in each of us to embrace freedom as: ‘Now I no longer have to do anything I don’t want to do.’ That’s an attitude that is both childish and selfish and quite self-deceiving, too. And it’s the kind of mindset that many of us men don’t grow out of for many years. Yes, we may, in time, become law-abiding responsible citizens who love and provide for our families. But inside each of us men there remains this deep-seated notion that gentleness is somehow a betrayal of our manliness. And for this reason, the perception of gentleness as the epitome of femininity causes problems for men and churchgoing. After all, following a man who gets willingly executed, as the Lord Jesus did on the cross, doesn’t seem for many men to be the manliest option.

“I suspect that if Jesus had gone down fighting, taking with Him maybe a few dozen Roman soldiers and Jewish religious leaders and perhaps a few gawking bystanders, that such a Jesus would be more attractive to the guy for whom the highpoint of his week is getting drunk and screaming while one group of large men pound the hell out of another group of large men.

“I suspect that many men don’t get Jesus simply because Jesus has been pictured by several centuries of female Sunday school teachers as the kind of good boy that never caused His mama any heartache or tears. It’s closer to the truth to say that His mama probably wished He had been more that kind of boy than the kind that constantly was saying and doing exactly what He thought was the right thing even when it totally teed off the men around Him that thought themselves to be the biggest and baddest dogs on the block.

“I suspect that most guys forced to go to church by their mama, girlfriend, or wife occasionally find themselves looking at some stained glass picture of a simpering Jesus saying to themselves ‘No way does this guy have anything to do with me.’ Put a beer in Jesus’ hand, show Him with a tooth knocked out and scuffed knuckles, then you’re on your way to the kind of Jesus that most guys could identify with. Show Him holding up a crystal Super Bowl trophy with grass stains on His pants and champagne sprayed all over his sweaty hair, then you could get a lot of guys shouting: ‘Jesus! Yes!’

“I want you guys to rethink Jesus as more like the Medal of Honor winner that throws Himself on a grenade rather than allowing His platoon to be blown up. I want you guys to rethink Jesus as more like the Medal of Honor winner that carries fifteen wounded guys to safety before dying from His own wounds. It takes a lot of love, a lot of gentleness in your heart, to be able to stay strong in the face of overwhelming opposition in order to save the rest of the guys even if it costs you your life!

“I contend that many of us men don’t even begin to fathom how much gentleness and strength were fully integrated in the personality of God’s Son Jesus. He could calm the raging storm with one word yet embrace a little child. He could angrily toss over the money-changers tables in the temple complex and yet lift kindly lift the paralyzed man from his bed. He could curse the fruitless fig tree causing it to wither and die yet could weep over Jerusalem the city that stoned the prophets and that ultimately killed Him.

“Think then just how much strength it took for the Lord Jesus to be nailed to the cross and suffer and die, forgiving even those that were torturing and killing Him. All of that done for sinners like you and me although we didn’t and still don’t deserve it. It was just as St. Paul said to the Romans, ‘While were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.’ God’s Son Jesus died on the cross to save us from our bondage to sin, death, and evil though we certainly didn’t and still don’t deserve it.

“Therefore, my friends, I say to you today that gentleness and strength are not only combined in the Lord Jesus Christ. I say to you that the cross of Christ is the symbol of that union of gentleness and strength. And I urge you to pray daily that God’s Holy Spirit would produce that kind of fruit in your life.

“I would like you to remember that anyone can turn his or even her back on doing the right thing on a daily basis. It takes no effort at all to keep on being preoccupied with your own comfort and even, let’s be honest, laziness.

“It may seem some kind of strength to go through life taking whatever you want without regard for whom it hurts. It may seem some kind of manliness to go through life loving and leaving the latest one that attracts you without any sense of what you’re doing to both that person and you. It may seem the epitome of manliness to play at working and to work at playing. But I say to you it takes no strength at all to live that way. Indeed the guy that does that may have a man’s body but he’s still about five years old emotionally.

“It takes strength to be gentle. And the truly gentle person is always incredibly strong. As a matter of fact, we get our word ‘gentle’ from an old French word for nobility, for those from a more well-to-do background. We even have in the English language a French phrase ‘noblesse oblige’ which means ‘the obligation that comes with being from a noble family.’ Or as the Lord Jesus said elsewhere: ‘To whom much is given much shall be required.’

“I want you to think about your life as a gift. You didn’t ask to be born. You didn’t get to pick the people who raised you. You learned a lot about how to be an adult from both the mistakes and the right choices that the people who raised you made. If you’re alive today, and you are, then regardless of how much the people that caused you to be born messed up, you ought to be grateful that you’re still here. And furthermore if you survived some really bad parenting and, if you’re here you did, then you ought to recognize that you have an obligation to live better than the people that raised you. You know better now, so you have no excuse for just doing what comes naturally.

“Strength isn’t just working out until you have the perfect six-pack abs and bulging biceps. Strength isn’t just being able to be the last guy standing. Strength isn’t not caring that you’ve lied and cheated your way to the top. Strength isn’t ignoring her phone calls because you’ve already gotten all that you wanted from her.

“True strength is the kind of strength the Lord Jesus showed in the face of every day’s challenges and in the face of death by crucifixion. When people tried to get Him to do whatever they thought He should do, the Lord Jesus stuck to doing what He knew His heavenly Father sent Him to do. Even when He friends left Him all alone the night before He died, the Lord Jesus prayed: ‘Nevertheless, not my will, but Yours be done, Father.’

“It’s that kind of innate strength that enabled the Lord Jesus to be gentle as His enemies were killing Him on the cross. He stayed on course. He gave His life as a sacrifice for all of us, so that His Father in heaven wouldn’t just tell us all to go to hell and forget about us.

“The day you got baptized, God the Father made a decision to be your God. He said: ‘My Son Jesus died on the cross for this one’s sins, and now when I look at this one I see my Son’s obedience and not this sinner’s disobedience.’

“So…now the life you live is no longer your own. Because your Father in heaven says that you are more precious, lovable, and valuable than His own life, that means you have the obligation that comes with nobility. You are God’s child that has been purchased on the cross by the death of Christ Jesus. You are a royal priesthood. You are – together with all the people of God of every time and place – a holy nation set apart for God’s use and for God’s purposes.

“Now God has sent you to be gentle and strong just like His only begotten Son Jesus. God has sent you to do His will, to do the right thing every day, even when the people around you are urging you to give up and just do the lazy thing, the stupid thing, and the selfish thing. Any little boy can do that, but it takes a real man like Jesus to be both gentle and strong.

“It’s not my job to tell you which decisions are the right ones. It’s not my job to tell you what you ought to do with the rest of your life. It’s not my job to tell you young guys who to end up with and where to live. It’s not my job to tell you why some choices you will make this week are more godly and some will be more selfish and, thus, evil.

“It’s my job to point you to the cross of Jesus Christ and to say to you that if you want to follow Him every day, you’re going to give your life away in service to God and neighbor just like Him. And you can do that no matter if you’re old, young, or somewhere in-between. You can do that no matter if you’re single or married. You can do that no matter what type of work you do in life or even if you’re retired.

“Today is the day to die to your selfish self, to return to the waters of Holy Baptism. And if you aren’t baptized, today is the day to ask to become God’s child by no effort or merit of your own. Today is the day to pray: ‘Help me, Holy Spirit, help me to be both gentle and strong just like the Lord Jesus.’ Yes, and remember, dear ones, that you are to pray like that every morning when you get up. And then, at the end of every day, you are to pray that your Father in heaven will remember His Son’s obedience rather than your disobedience, and then go to sleep knowing that your sins are truly forgiven.”

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With those words, Pastor David concluded his weekly sermon. Jack, taking his girlfriend Jenny’s hand in his, looked at her and whispered: ‘I love you.’ And she whispered back, ‘I love you, too.’ The diamond engagement ring on her left hand glittered in the church lights. Then Jack and Jenny stood with the congregation to sing the hymn: “Lord of All Hopefulness.”

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

©Samuel D. Zumwalt
szumwalt@bellsouth.net
St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church
Wilmington, North Carolina USA