James 1.17-27
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
​Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

 Sometimes the lectionary used by most mainline churches serves up just the right text on a given Sunday, and this piece of the pastoral epistle of James is one of those passages. It begins by acknowledging that God is the source of all good things. And given that, our response is likely to involve gratitude and the desire to do what is pleasing to our Creator.

I don’t know if you remember a staff reflection I wrote about two years ago, but I wrote about the “secret sauce” that I had discovered while going through radiation and hormone treatment for cancer. I was surrounded by an amazing team at the Harmony Cancer Center, and I could not help but be grateful for their outpouring of loving concern for my wellbeing. And the gratitude I experience changed me: it empowered me to have a better attitude about facing something scary and new. I certainly didn’t have a perfect attitude of gratitude, and I had some miserable days, but gratitude made life better. Have you had that experience with gratitude? Do you ever imagine what you are grateful that God has given you?

The second thing we hear about in the letter is that to take three steps in attitude: 1) be quick to listen; 2) be slow to speak; and 3) be slow to anger. This is sage advice, especially during anxious times like those where we currently find ourselves. 

This summer, I’ve been doing an online class from Tufts University that has two facets: the first is weight loss, which has been a challenge for me for a long time, and I’ve lost 30 pounds this summer. The second facet involves Positive Intelligence, learning to take difficult situations and respond to them in the most creative, positive way possible, even learning to see the gift in adverse situations. Part of what I’ve learned from this part of the course comes from the brilliant psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who while imprisoned in Auschwitz noticed that there was nothing he could do about what others did to him or his fellow inmates. Here is the golden kernel: he noticed that what makes a difference in psychological outcomes is the way the prisoner responded to what was happening. There is a stimulus from a guard, there is a millisecond when the prisoner’s brain absorbs that message, and there is a response from the inmate. What Frankl discovered is that if one can delay the response time even by a few seconds, it gave the person a chance to rely on their higher levels of thought in creating a response. Imagine a guard yelling something foul and cruel at a female inmate. Our immediate response might be to lash out in anger physically or verbally or to become totally dejected and simply accept it. But what if one can pause and use one’s intellect to create a more strategic response? Imagine the insulted woman saying to herself, “He is just trying to goad me, and I know that this lowlife is not worth my upset and anger. I’ll take a few breaths and know that I am in control of my reaction and move on.”

So, there is a stimulus, a message, and a response. Practicing the pause allows you to react not from the reptilian brain stem (which urges fight, flight, or freeze) and instead respond from the prefrontal cortex, providing you with insights about how you react. 

At La Foret last week, I had a conversation with our conference minister, Sue Artt, and I learned that conflict in our congregations is rampant at the moment, and I’ve heard the same thing from clergy colleagues on Facebook. All of us have experienced some trauma with Covid, political divisiveness, wildfires near and far, climate change, and the state of racism in our nation. It can look like the world is falling apart. What do you think that compound trauma does to our ability to practice the pause and not react from our reptilian brain? I’ve said it before… our fuses are shorter, our thoughts aren’t as clear, our sense of compassion may be wearing thin, and we’re looking for someone to blame. And it won’t last forever, so long as we take steps to recognize and heal some of our own trauma.

Do you remember those three pieces of sage advice I read a few moments ago? 1) be quick to listen; 2) be slow to speak; and 3) be slow to anger. The epistle writer knew about practicing the pause, the way human emotions work, and steps toward Positive Intelligence! Can you remember those three steps? 1) Listen. 2) Speak later. 3) Slow your anger response. “If those who claim devotion to God don’t control what they say, they mislead themselves. Their devotion is worthless.” (v. 26)

Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson (no relation) has a bit in his standup routine that provides sage advice in practicing the pause. He said that he and his former wife were in therapy for quite a while and that he developed a three-part question that he posed for himself before responding: 1) Does this need to be said? 2) Does this need to be said by me? 3) Does this need to be said by me right now? If you ask yourself those three questions in the affirmative, you can say it! And you’ll have given yourself enough time for your prefrontal cortex to wrest control from your reptilian brain. And let’s face it, nobody wants to react like a lizard!

Both of those elements — gratitude and practicing the pause — won’t just help your relationships, they will enliven your faith. Slowing down a bit, trying to see things in broader perspective, taking time to notice what God is doing in the world and in your life will deepen your experience of the sacred.

The third piece of the puzzle listed in the epistle to living into your faith, bringing theory into practice. “You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves.” (v. 22) One of the pieces of wisdom I learned in the nutrition part of my summer class is that 20 percent of the process is knowing what to eat, and 80 percent is developing habits in doing them. So, it’s important in this program to know that I need to eat more protein, more fiber, fewer simple carbs and very few sweets. Developing new eating habits means that I’ve started to love, even to crave, half of a Kirkland protein bar as my afternoon snack! I no longer have to think about it…I just do it. Habits work when you’re trying to DO something. I’ve tried to be a DOER of the diet, not just a HEARER of the diet.

It is similar with faith. We can have lots of theological knowledge, but if it isn’t put into practice, what is the use of it? So what if we think that Jesus was a healer and teacher of alternative wisdom within first century Judaism? If we don’t put his teachings into practice, they are just a curiosity. What are you going to DO about it? Are you going to emulate Jesus’ compassion to the extent it becomes habitual? Is being here at Plymouth or on our livestream every Sunday a habit, or do you have to cogitate and make a decision each week whether or not to attend? Are you someone who is habitually engaged as a volunteer, or do you need to debate with yourself about whether to participate? Are you somebody who is in the habit of acting for social justice, or do you sit on the sidelines and let someone else do it? It takes a lot of extra work to weigh every decision about how you are going to participate…unless you’ve simply made it a good habit.

Good spiritual engagement habits enliven our faith in ways that help the rubber meet the road. It takes a two-dimensional faith journey map and brings it into three dimensions, adding depth to your pilgrimage through life. Our faith in the UCC is a lot less about creeds and a lot more about deeds.

It occurs to me that the epistle writer charts a course for Beloved Community for us. It is our job is FIRST to live in gratitude to God, SECOND, to listen and delay our urge to blurt things out or to be reactive, and THIRD to engage our faith with love and compassion. Together, Plymouth, this is how we form a healthy church and Beloved Community. Amen.

© 2021 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal at plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.
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Rev. Dr. Ronald Patterson
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, CO
I Kings 8:1,6,10-11, 22-30, 41-43

Several weeks ago, on my first Sunday with you, I had one of those moments. I had the sense that I was suddenly in what the saints call a thin place. That Sunday was the first time I had been in a meeting house for worship in over a year. It moved me to tears because I had not realized how desperately needed and deeply missed communal worship had been. To sing my faith with others, to listen to a group of people who are happy to see one another, to hear the words of the Bible in a community on a shared journey had been absent from my life since a year ago March. It was understandable and necessary, and zoom and live stream were soul savers, but it just was not the same. Zoom is sort of like eating an ear of sweet corn or a half-ripe tomato shipped up from Florida in January. 

And I have heard similar thoughts expressed by others around the country as congregations bolstered by the vaccinated; gather, as those who understand that loving Jesus, means loving your neighbor enough to be vaccinated, or to wear a mask, as they too begin taking baby steps toward gradual reopening.  

We aren’t there yet. We are still taking precautions, listening to experts, and attempting to use the best information available. Given the Delta variant, this whole business is not easy. We are not out of the woods yet. But as people of faith, we know that we are on a journey and as St. John Lennon said, “Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay it’s not the end."

This congregation has wisely prepared for this gradual reopening, and I am really impressed that your leaders have embraced possibility with the new lighting on the way and the new cameras so that what we do here can be multiplied through media to enlarge our faith family and leave no one behind. We don’t know what might come next, but what you have done makes what might be less challenging. So let me say: “Thank you!”

Let’s start with a question: Do any of you collect things? Stamps? Beer cans? Barbie dolls? I collect church buildings and other places of worship. When we travel, I visit churches. I visit old churches, unusual churches, historic churches, and new churches. I visit great cathedrals or adobe mission buildings or churches with the simple colonial lines of a New England meeting house. And for some reason, I usually remember any church I visit or even pass by and often, when I am driving, I navigate by churches—once I’ve seen a particular church building, I just don’t forget it.   

Over the years, a few of the people I have traveled with, including my beloved, have grown tired of this fixation. I tour an old city from steeple to steeple. Years ago, traveling with four college friends touring Rome from church to church to church, they figured out what I was up to and the whole group rebelled and took my map away. They had had enough while I was just getting started. On another trip I learned that the great gothic cathedral in Cologne, Germany is surrounded by a dozen large Romanesque Churches, and I became obsessed with visiting all twelve. 

If I had a bumper sticker on my backside it might say: “Edifice Obsessed” or “This Vehicle Stops at All Houses of Worship.” Now before you think that this is a sermon about my personal neurosis, let’s engage the text.  

Today we heard another piece written by the anonymous Hebrew storyteller who’s book we name I Kings. We heard the story of the dedication of the first fixed non-movable worship space in our religious tradition—the Temple in Jerusalem built by King Solomon.  And it is an interesting story, full of things to consider. 

Let me point out a few. According to this story, the priests cook up a grand celebration for the dedication of the temple. They bring the Ark of the Covenant into the Holy of Holies in the new Temple—and according to their tradition God is present in the Ark of the Covenant. But at the very moment in this big celebration when they manage to localize God, just when they imagine that they have tamed God so that they will know where to find God and where to come to seek the presence of God, God makes a U-turn. God fills the temple with a cloud and drives the priests right out of the temple.  

In other words, God says: look, I don’t care how wonderful your building is, I don’t care how much time it took you to build it, I don’t care how magnificent it is, I am more wonderful still and I am not contained within any shrine you might build for me no matter how beautiful that shrine might be. 

Lesson one:  like Solomon’s temple, this place is a house dedicated to God, but God does not live here. God is here when we are here. And God travels from this place to wherever our journey might lead us. God is the one who walks the lonesome valley and takes us by the hand when the shadow of death comes calling.  

God is here when we are here, because you and I bear the image of God and Jesus said that when ever two or three of us gather in one place (whether on zoom or through the live stream which some of you are watching), God is there with us and we are not alone.  

This place is holy not because it is beautiful, it is holy because you and I are holy—the very children of God’s love and holy is as holy does—and being holy as God is holy is about loving others and making sure all God’s children have enough to eat and a warm, safe place to live.  

I think that most people would agree that this space is pleasing to the eye—the first time I visited here many years ago, I found this place beautiful in its simplicity—but its true beauty is the beauty of a community of people seeking to follow the way of Jesus who just happen to meet here. For example, God showed up here a week ago Saturday to meet some of you in the form of kitchen towels and kitchen gadgets and volunteers and students from around the world and that’s a fact—that was a genuine God sighting!

I sometimes come into this space during the week alone and I love to do that—but I must remind myself that the thing which makes this a sanctuary—a holy place—is the gathered presence of the people of God whether they are physically here or present on the other side of that camera.  

It is beautiful because here we find the strength to go out into this community and into the wider world and find ways to let the Christ light shine. It is beautiful because we discover ways while we’re connected here to be neighbor to one another and to hold one another’s hands when the going gets rough. It is beautiful because in our gathering in person (or virtually), we are reminded that the true holy places are wherever we lift up our eyes to see the goodness and the beauty all around us in this world and beyond this world in the mystery of a universe still unfolding. Beauty is as beauty does, goodness is as goodness does.  

Lesson two, when God filled the temple with a cloud, it was a warning about idols—don’t worship idols—you know that, don’t localize God and whatever you do, don’t make some image of God and bow down before it. This is just basic Christianity 101, Judaism 101, and Islam 101. Moses said it, Jesus said it, Mohamed said it!

Don’t ever get caught creating God in your own image or hemming God in with ideas that are too small or too local or that look too much like the backside of your own fears about the future. Don’t be seduced by conspiracy theories that are idols dressed up in ego-driven pseudoscientific costume. In my mind, that’s just the latest manifestation of the same old sin and there’s lots of it going around.

I have noticed that some people seem to believe that God is a conservative Republican. Others imagine that God is a liberal Democrat. I have noticed as well that some folks confuse their politics or their way of life or their contrary attitude with the will of God and call it freedom and that others are convinced that “God Bless America,” means that the rest of the rest of the nation and world with other ideas can just take a long walk off a short pier. That’s idolatry.

This text is a cautionary tale about religion or attitudes that create God in your image or mine because that is much more comfortable and comforting than the awesome deity who will not be built into a box or contained in my feeble brain or yours. 

This temple text teaches that opinions and behavior that are too small, too narrow, too certain, are the dirty dishwater approximation of the Holy that filled the Temple and taught through the voice of Jesus. This story is a reminder that when we are certain about where God is located, when we’re ready to confine God to one type of building or hang the deity as a graven image above one altar dedicated to a particular way of life or thought system, God moves. God moves inviting us to expand our understanding of the mystery of God’s love. Simply stated wherever love abides, God resides, and love knows no borders and God’s love is bigger than anybody’s politics or palaver.   

Lesson three, when it comes to God—when it comes to knowing God and following the way of Jesus, it is never about a place, it is about a relationship—our relationship with God, God’s relationship with us and our relationship with our neighbors and a place that makes relationships happen is a holy place. That is why we do what we do as a congregation.  

Do you remember what Jesus said when he was asked what we needed to do to become the inheritors of eternal life? He said that we are to love God with our whole heart, with our entire soul and with the totality of our mind and find a way to love one another with the same depth with which we have been loved. Solomon calls it steadfast love: the love that will never let us go; the love that will never abandon either us or this beautiful world. The apostle Paul calls it grace: the unconditional acceptance of each of us no matter how unacceptable we might believe ourselves to be.   

And so, here we are in this place, this place of beauty. And it is good, it is very good, but like that temple long ago—this beautiful place is not a destination. This place is a way station on the path that leads to life. Here we find renewal; here we are reminded of God’s love and mercy, here we can be recharged for the life journey, here we can meet a neighbor we need to love. Here we can work together, to accomplish great things, but here is not the destination. The journey is whatever comes next. Amen.  

Rev. Dr. Ron Patterson
​Plymouth Congregational, UCC
Fort Collins, CO
I Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14

This morning I want to talk about dreams.  I am not an interpreter of dreams, and I am not a psychologist or a mystic, but I am a dreamer and I believe with my whole heart that when I trust my dreams and listen to them, I am healthier and that when I ignore them and don’t pay attention to my dreams I am in a bad place.  I believe that dreams are important for our emotional health and for our spiritual vitality and for our physical health as well.
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Several years ago, I began to fall asleep in meetings.  Now I know that church meetings can be sleep inducing and that there is no end to jokes about people falling asleep in church, but I was really sleepy until one afternoon I actually fell asleep at a traffic light.  I finally went to my doctor and I expected him to poke around and do some tests, and instead he asked me a simple question:  “How are you sleeping?” and when I said to him, I get eight hours of sleep every night, he asked me:  “Are you dreaming?” and it suddenly occurred to me that I had stopped dreaming, that instead of waking up and remembering for a short time sometimes complex and convoluted dreams, I hadn’t dreamt for months.  He sent me for a sleep study that revealed severe sleep apnea and when that problem was solved, the dreams came back and I recovered my energy and my vitality and the sleepy’s went away.
The Bible is full of dreams and dreamers.   The lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs are driven by dreams.   Dreams get Joseph of the coat of many colors in trouble, and dreams ultimately save him.  The Wise Ones dream sends them home from Bethlehem by another route.  Joseph the father of Jesus saves the savior by listening to his dreams.  Herod, the wicked king is a man without dreams and he dies a terrible death because power without a dream or a vision is deadly. Haven’t we learned that the hard way in this country?

Pharaoh, Job, Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar, Jacob, and many more are warned, guided and sustained by dreams.  And then there’s those words spoken by Peter on the Day of Pentecost quoting the prophet Joel about the promise of the “kingdom” of God, about the time when justice and truth and peace will prevail on this good earth, the time when the old will dream dreams and the young ones will see visions. 

So today I want to talk about dreams and dreaming and my text is from the book of I Kings, the story of God coming to a very young King Solomon in a dream.   

Now in this this dream, God asks King Solomon what he wants.  Well, what do kings or for that matter, most politicians normally want?  They want long life or at least perpetual re-election and lots of power and lots of money.  

But this young King is not ordinary.  He doesn’t ask for wealth or power or money—he asks instead for an understanding mind, he asks instead to know the difference between right and wrong, he asks instead for the presence of God to guild him in his life.  And he gets his wish. Solomon receives from God an understanding mind.  He receives from God the knowledge of good and evil.  He receives from God a full measure of wisdom.  And as a bonus, because from God’s point of view he asked for the right things, all the rest:  long life, wealth and power were given as well.   Now this is a great story and one I hope you will remember the next time you mark a ballot or listen to the yammering of a politician or a talking head.

Now, let me talk just a bit about power of dreams.  To begin with not everyone believes that dreams have any meaning. I do. 

As I said, I’m not a psychologist and I am certainly no psychiatrist.  But those I’ve read disagree about dreams.  Some of them say dreams are important and some of them say they aren’t.  Some of them say that dreams are just random encounters with bits and fragments of the unconscious mind, totally without meaning.  Others believe that dreams are much more meaningful.  One of them, whose work I really admire has said that we do not sleep to rest, rather, we sleep to dream—that dreaming is the purpose of sleep and that emotional and spiritual health are not possible without a dream life. (C. G. Jung) 

That’s pretty close to my own belief about dreams—except that I would add one more layer to the idea that we sleep to dream.  I not only believe that we sleep to dream, but that dreams are the gift of a loving God for the purpose of healing and wholeness and wellness.  And that sometimes, in fact many times, God speaks to us in our dreams.  And that listening to our dreams is one way you and I can listen to the voice of God.   

Did you ever have a dream that repeats over and over again?  Let me tell you about a dream I have many Saturday nights.  I dream that you are all here and that I arrive late at the church building just as you are singing the first hymn, sometimes I’ve had a flat tire or sometimes I get lost but when I finally get here, the doors are locked and I go all around the building trying to find a way to get into the church.  But I can’t find the door or because you are singing, you can’t hear me knocking on the locked door once I do find it.  Or sometimes I get locked in the bathroom and can’t get out as the service starts or sometimes I dream that I get up in the pulpit only to discover that I have forgotten to bring my sermon with me and I’m suddenly standing up here with nothing to say.  I’ve even dreamed that I show up at the wrong time or in the wrong place.  Now that is a preacher’s nightmare and dreams of that type are what are referred to as classic anxiety dreams. 

Do you remember a dream like that?  Do you remember that dream from when you were in college and it was the last week in the semester and you suddenly discovered that you had forgotten to go to a particular class and that you were confronted with a final exam for which you had not prepared?  Do you recall how relieved of stress you were when you woke up and found out that it wasn’t true? Or how about a dream when you are embarrassed in public—that you arrive someplace with no clothes on or the wrong clothes?  Anxiety dreams like these are healing dreams. 
They heal us because they gather up whatever it is that worries us or troubles our hearts or makes us afraid and the dream maker—our own spirit under the inspiration of God’s love, I believe, lays out the very worst possibilities in life, reviews those possibilities, and causes us to live through them in our dreams.   And while sometimes they are full of the most graphic detail and sometimes, they are terribly painful, we wake up relieved of the burden.    

I believe that when we lay down to sleep the one who keeps your soul and mine sends us dreams to deal with those things in our lives which trouble us and worry us most.  The way I picture it, our anxiety dreams are like someone working the night shift on our behalf, first with a push broom and shovel, cleaning up the clutter of our harder days and dealing with the day’s worries, while helping us reduce our anxiety and our fears.   

And then when the mess is cleaned up that same still small voice of God the giver of dreams, can become a wise teacher and guild helping our unconscious mind to heal and to think new thoughts and consider new possibilities.  Did you ever have a dream which helped you make a decision?  Did you ever have a dream which gave you a new idea or a way forward in your life journey?  

Part of my nighttime routine is a ritual I call “giving it to God”.  When I lay down at night, I gather up my worries and the things that might be keeping me awake, or the things I am working on and all my prayer concerns and mentally put them in a little bundle and lay them up on the head board.  Then I say to God—would you work on these things tonight so I can get some rest?   And the blessing for me is that so many times, some of those concerns or some of the things I am working on get taken up in my dreams and new ideas and ways of looking at my present reality emerge.  And that is a gift from God the giver of dreams.    

Am I allowed to talk about Christmas at an outdoor service in the middle of August?  My favorite Christmas story—aside from the Christmas story with Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus is the one written by Charles Dickens.  Dreams moved the action of the first Christmas story, but do you remember the role that dreams played in the Dickens classic?  

In each of Ebenezer Scrooge’s dreams his uneasy conscience took his personal pain, his smallness of mind, his greed and his secret regret over his shriveled heart, and held those broken places up to the searching light of God’s love in ways that would have been a daytime impossibility.  Dreams converted Scrooge.  Dreams converted him from death to life, from darkness to light, from despair to hope, from misery to love.  He was saved in the night kitchen of his dreams.

Now, I’ve only touched the surface of this whole subject of dreams, but one last thing:  There is no record that Jesus ever dreamed.  The gospel writers and Paul are completely silent about his dream life.   But let me suggest that dreams heal our past and open the way to the future.  Dreams take our pain and open the path of possibility.  Dreams clean up what is old about yesterday and enable us to face tomorrow.   

That’s exactly who Jesus was.  That defines exactly what Jesus does.  He looks at this world as it is and invites you and me to embrace what might be.  He looks at hate and invites us to love.  He stares fear in the face and invites you and me to hope and confidence.  He confronts our fear of death with the power and the promise of abundant life.  He was and is quite simply a dreamer inviting all of us to embrace his dream.  

In our waking, in our dreaming, Lord may that become the truth about our lives!  Amen.  

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Ephesians 4 (selected verses)
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

The letter to the church in Ephesus is likely not to have been written by Paul himself, but by one of his followers who is taking care to reinforce some of what Paul was trying to inculcate into the new gatherings of people he called the ekklesia, which literally means “called out,” and is often translated as “church.” Paul is determined that the people whom God has called out to become the church are to be markedly different than the Gentile culture at large and also different than those who had been called together in Judaism. The rules and the roles have been changed. “You are no longer to walk as the Gentiles,” we read in the letter.

This is an interesting cultural shift, reinforcing that Christian community is to be in the world, but not of the world. There are going to be different standards and expectations of behavior of the members of this community, and at its core, the expectations center around love for one another. The writer of this letter calls out “humility, gentleness, magnanimity, bearing with one another in love” in order to keep the unity of those gathered. We are to shed our old way of being and develop a new community. “Let each one of you speak the truth to your neighbor, because we are one another’s corporal members,” that is, we are part of a single body, which is the body of Christ, the Anointed.

Over the next month or two, I’m going to be talking about the first concept mentioned in our new strategic plan: becoming Beloved Community. That may be a new term for you, and for others it will rings some bells as a concept used by MLK in the struggle for racial justice. To be sure, justice is a part of it. And there is much more. The early 20th century American philosopher, Josiah Royce, coined the term “Beloved Community,” and describes its Pauline roots this way: “The Apostle [Paul] has discovered a special instance of one of the most significant of all moral and religious truths, the truth that a community, when unified by an active indwelling purpose, is an entity more concrete and, in fact, less mysterious than is any individual man, and that such a community can love and be loved as a husband and wife love; or a father and mother love.”  Beloved Community has a macro sense, a societal sense, but it also has the sense of being most readily at play in a community of faith.

That Beloved Community is one of the first aims of our strategic plan, and it is the kind of community Paul was aiming for in the first century. And like the Kingdom of God itself, Beloved Community is elusive…we only catch fleeting glimpses of it being manifested, but those brief appearances are important, because without them, we have no vision of the future God is calling us toward. And so, too, it embodies the second piece of our mission statement of inviting, transforming, and sending. We not only need transformation, we will be transformed whether we like it or not. The question is what is the result of our metamorphosis? Will we move to become more Christlike or will we conform more to the culture around us? What does transformation mean for you, relative to becoming Beloved Community here at Plymouth?

The epistle-writer describes our growth this way: “So that we might no longer be infants, wave-tossed and carried about by every wind of teaching, by men’s sleight of hand, by villainy attendant upon error’s wiliness, but rather, speaking the truth in love we may in all things grow into him who is the head,” namely Christ. And we all have growing still to do.

You probably have heard that phrase before: “speaking the truth in love.” And like most parts of trying to lead a life of faith, it is not an easy task. Most of us would rather not speak an uncomfortable or an inconvenient truth in a loving way, if at all. And it certainly is not the norm in American political discourse.

In my family growing up, there were uncomfortable or inconvenient truths we never mentioned at least to my parents. It was hard to move to a new place so often…I attended four high schools in four years. Speaking the truth in love might have been having a sit-down with my parents and letting them know how difficult it was, but instead of doing that, I just stuffed it and learned to adapt again and again. We learned in my family not to rock the boat, to withhold truths that were too difficult to enunciate or to hear. 

How was it for you growing up? Was direct, loving communication typical in your family, or was it more like mine…or somewhere in between? If you have kids, how did or are you raising them in terms of encouraging them to speak the truth in love? How is it for you and your spouse or partner or dearest friend? Are you able to speak the truth in love? Sometimes, it’s easier to avoid…but that poses problems in the long run.

Direct, loving communication is difficult, but it is healthy — in relationships, in families, and in organizations, and it’s a hallmark of Beloved Community. Matthew’s gospel advises us what to do when we have been slighted: “go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.  You may have found this to be true in your closest relationships and in your family, but it is also true in organizations and especially in churches. And we have some growing to do in this area at Plymouth.
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This week, I shared some difficult personal news in a letter to our members. I’ve been treated twice for prostate cancer, and early this spring, my PSA levels began to rise, signaling a biochemical recurrence of prostate cancer. It’s scary and daunting for me and my family. And it isn’t easy for me to share that news with you. I’m kind of a private person and to be honest, I’d rather just keep it to myself as I learn more about the progress of the disease and what treatment options are available. Part of the reason I am being open and transparent with you is to demonstrate what it looks like to use open, direct communication: speaking the truth in love. And I trust that you will receive this message in the same spirit in which it is offered, and I ask that you, as Beloved Community, remember me in your prayers.
The other important piece of community that we read about in this epistle is saying that anger is okay, but rather that we shouldn’t let it fester. It’s normal for couples, families, people in congregations to disagree, and that’s okay, even when it results in someone getting angry. The trick is not to let anger stew within you and turn into bitterness. That’s good advice in relationships as well as in churches. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in couples’ counseling, but don’t these words ring true: “Let all bitterness and animosity…be removed from you.…Become helpfully kind to one another, inwardly compassionate, forgiving among yourselves.” It can be hard to “practice the pause” and not be reactive when someone says something that ticks you off, but to wait for even a few seconds and say to yourself, “Oh…I wonder if he is having a hard day,” or “Yep, that snippy response probably came from a place of hurt, rather than from animosity.” Or maybe realizing it’s how you’ve heard something with your own background issues at play: Maybe taking a breath and realizing, “That is really pushing my buttons….maybe I’m getting triggered by something that has nothing to do with her or the issue at hand.” Pausing and reflecting helps us to be more compassionate with one another…and to become more Christlike. 

What happens if we avoid open, direct conversations, even those that are a little bit scary? It means that we are not able to be fully authentic with ourselves or with others, and it’s impossible to grow into Beloved Community without being authentic. We need to be a little bit brave to engage in Courageous Conversations. So far as I know, nobody has died from having a Courageous Conversation in church…at least since the wars of religion following the Reformation in the 16th century.

Nobody ever said that Christianity or Beloved Community was easy…it’s not. But there is something I know to be true: it can be and often is a source of awareness, connection, meaning-making, and joy. Even in the midst of a pandemic, even in light of institutional racism, even in the wake of insurrection, it is possible for us to find a sense of joy in Beloved Community, which is another way of incarnating the kingdom of God.
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May you be challenged, goaded, guided, and graced by the Spirit as we grow together.
Amen. 

© 2021 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.