Weekly Sermon: 05-24-2026 - Values That Stick - Gentleness

The Holy Gospel According to John,

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were

locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood

among them and said, Peace be with you.

And after he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.

Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you.

And as the Father has sent me, so I send you.

When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,

Receive the Holy Spirit.

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.

If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

This is the Gospel of the Lord.

You may be seated.

So my grandfather was a larger-than-life figure.

He had a kind of laugh that can fill any room that he walked into.

He could tell a story in a way that drew you in like metal to a magnet.

And he had this superpower where he can walk into any town and walk out with

a brand new group of friends.

It was crazy to watch him in action. But on top of all this,

he also had opinions, very strong opinions, about everything.

And he had a way about him where he could disintegrate your most deeply held convictions.

And before you knew it, you found yourself agreeing with him.

And despite all of that, he and I could never quite seem to get along,

even from the very beginning.

I remember there was this one event back in middle school when I joined my football team.

Most grandfathers might have said that I'm proud of you, like you go sport,

you're awesome, but not mine.

His first words to me actually after joining the team were that he would kick my butt.

And he used another word for butt. if I ever took steroids.

Now, mind you, I didn't even know what steroids were at that time.

And I was also in just seventh grade, okay? It wasn't even registering to me,

but that was just who he was.

Never one to give easy encouragement, but he always seemed armed with a warning.

And as I got older, things didn't get easier between us because I am just as

opinionated as my grandfather.

And when we talked, our conversations would turn into full-blown debates.

And those debates would then turn into full-blown arguments.

And they almost always ended the same way with me leaving the room while carrying

a little bit of resentment.

And this went on for a while between me and him until about 10 years ago.

I was visiting my grandparents in Kentucky and we got into it about my future.

I had just graduated from college a couple months prior and I was contemplating

at that time whether to go to seminary or just get a job in ministry somewhere.

And he thought he needed to talk about where my life was headed and what path I should be on.

And my grandfather was absolutely certain that he knew the answer and I needed to get a real job.

And he was so sure and so unmovable in his convictions that he kept cutting me off mid-sentence.

And he said things during that conversation that cut really,

really deep. words about my worth, about my direction, about who I was.

And being one to defend myself, I had some words locked and loaded for him as well.

And when the argument was finally over, I retreated back into the guest room,

and the next morning I packed up my truck and drove away.

And we rarely spoke after that moment. And it's been about four years since his passing.

And in that time, I've had the chance to sit with our story and ask harder questions,

not just like, why couldn't him and I get along?

But why couldn't we see each other?

Because while I knew deeply that he loved me and I love him back.

It always seemed like we were at disagreements and couldn't quite come to an

understanding of each other.

And I'm starting to understand why, because we weren't just disagreeing on the

topics that we argued over, it was something much deeper.

We were each taking in the sum total of our entire life experience and we're

rejecting them onto each other.

We were looking at each other and seeing not who the other person was,

but rather who we assumed they were based on the world we had each individually come from.

Because my grandfather, he grew up on a small town, went straight into the military

and spent his career in border patrol.

And he worked both borders until the day he retired.

And during this time, he raised three wonderful children, one of which is my

dad. And he stayed faithfully devoted to my grandmother.

And he, during this time, saw some of the worst that human beings are capable

of, and also the best of what they hoped for.

And he learned hard-earned truths about the world.

But mine looked different. I went into college.

I started a ministry outreach with my friends for our unhoused neighbors.

And I served at a hospice during that time. And afterwards, I became a youth

pastor with many of the kids in my ministry being poor, from poor and migrant families.

My life taught me different truths.

And there were just different ones earned in different places.

And while we were both speaking English, we were not speaking the same language.

And this is why I've come to believe about us. as humans, we all,

without realizing it, can sometimes fall into assumptions that the lens we see

the world through is simply the correct one.

This isn't always done arrogantly, but it comes from an assumption that the

way we see the world is simply the way it is, that our experiences are the standard,

and if everyone else just thought the way that we do,

and they thought about it enough,

we can all get to the right place.

And so when we encounter someone with the worldview differently than ours,

our first instinct isn't always curiosity, but rather volume.

When someone speaks differently than us or holds different views of the world,

it's easy to project our own beliefs onto them and to deliver our convictions

loud enough so that those convictions of ours become the loudest in the room.

And I think that's what was happening between my grandfather and I.

Neither of us stopped to consider that maybe the problem wasn't our stubbornness

or even the other person.

It was that we had been shaped by different roads, that the same words meant

entirely different things coming out of our mouths.

And what I've learned from all of this is that often the louder we get,

the less anyone actually hears.

The moment a conversation becomes a competition

we tend to stop listening to the other person

and focus instead on reloading our next

argument and from here dialogue can easily become a duel and nobody wins duels

and if left unchecked this can become seeds of prejudice that begin to take

roots and walls get between us and other human beings.

And we end up in a world where people are reduced to the consumptions that we

carry about them, rather than being seen for who they are.

And it is in this condition that it's underneath so many of our broken relationships,

and that we are so full of our own perspectives that we have left little room

to actually receive someone else.

We talk, but we don't always listen. We speak, but we rarely hear.

But it is in this tension that the Holy Spirit can finally begin to be heard.

Now, if you've been with us the last couple months, you know that we have been

walking through a series on the fruit of the Spirit, and today's theme lands on gentleness,

which makes our passage in Acts a little bit surprising, because the Spirit

as we find her here seems anything but gentle.

The Spirit doesn't tiptoe into the story.

She arrives with a violent wind, tongues of fire rest on all those who are gathered,

and she fills them completely and makes her presence impossible to ignore.

And this isn't a still and small voice that we find in other places in scripture.

This passage depicts a clear and bold divine presence.

And I think what I understand, I'm beginning to understand about why the Spirit

chose to act this way in today's passage.

And it reminds me of a story going back to when I was a little kid where my

father had a move he would use on my brother and I whenever we were too caught

up on ourselves and a little too stubborn.

He would take his knuckles and give us a firm thump on our head. Okay.

And he didn't do it to hurt us, but rather to interrupt us so that he can cut

through all the noise going on around us and in our heads and redirect our attention

towards something that we were missing.

And I think that's what the spirit is doing here. A divine thumping.

But notice how she does it. The Spirit speaks through the disciples in the language of others.

And in order to do this, the disciples first had to stop speaking in their own

voice. They had to surrender.

There was a surrendering that was happening here. And it's so easy to overlook

because they had to lay down their own voice and become less interested in what

they had to say and more open to what the Spirit wanted to say through them.

And it's from this place of surrendering to the Spirit's will that the miracle begins to take shape.

Because after that surrendering, the Spirit then moves through them toward the

most diverse crowd imaginable.

People from every nation that Luke can possibly name.

She walks into maximum diversity and in that produces connection.

And in doing this, was able to meet each person in their own language,

in their own understanding.

And here is where the gentleness finally begins to appear.

Because while the arrival of the Spirit is loud, the act is profoundly tender.

She does not demand that others come to where the disciples are standing.

She moves the disciples through those people she wishes to speak to.

And this is what gentleness looks like. It's not weakness.

But rather, gentleness is the decision to move towards someone on their terms

rather than demanding that they meet you on yours.

It is a choice to lay down your need to be the loudest in the room or that your

way is the only way and trust that the Spirit can do more with your openness

than you can ever do with your own will.

The Spirit doesn't just give them new languages, she gives them a new way of

connecting with people who are not like them.

And what I find funny and deeply human is that people from the outside looking

into this moment couldn't find words to describe it. They thought they were drunk.

Because connection looks profound.

And the world hadn't quite come up with words or labels.

To quite land on it, to quite describe it.

And they dismissed this experience because it doesn't fit their framework.

It didn't make sense inside the lenses they were already carrying.

When we see genuine connection happening between people we assume could never

understand each other, our first instinct is often with suspicion as well.

But the spirit has never been deterred by our skepticism.

That same spirit who built bridges across cultures 2,000 years ago is the same

spirit at work today, connecting and unifying while calling us to set aside

ourselves and approach one another with gentleness.

So what does that look like today? How do we live this out and follow the same

spirit who built bridges 2,000 years ago and apply it to our own lives?

And a few thoughts that come to my mind is that first we need to choose gentleness every single day.

Not necessarily as a personality type, but a posture that we take towards other people.

You can make a decision that you

make before you ever walk into any room you

can make it a part of your daily prayer to ask the spirit to guide you before

difficult conversations so that you may understand somebody else in your life

and it can be a simple prayer like spirit make me more curious that I am convinced today.

These simple prayers and affirmations can be something that can reshape the

way you show up for the people in your life.

Next, the Spirit is calling us to expand our circles.

We often gravitate towards people who already think and see the world like us,

and our algorithms from YouTube to Facebook to TikTok make this worse,

and they quietly sort us into different echo chambers.

And they simply repeat back what we already like to hear.

And these echo chambers in our lives, whether with the friends we keep in person

or in the communities we are online, they actually look closer to Babel,

I think, than to Pentecost.

So when the opportunity presents itself, reach out to someone whose life looks

differently than yours.

And don't arm up for a debate, but rather with genuine curiosity.

When you stop trying to change somebody's mind about how they live their life

or to project yourself and your own beliefs and start trying to understand their heart instead,

common ground often shows up.

And on top of this, if your algorithms are bringing you into the only one point

of view of the world, take a break from social media for a little bit or reset

your algorithms or double-check your sources.

Doing these things can allow you to see a world that is bigger than your own,

or turn off the TV or whatever it is that is keeping you in these echo chambers.

Next, practice surrendering your voice. Just like the disciples had to stop

speaking in their own languages before the Spirit can speak through them, we can only do that,

because Christ first models it for us.

He was the one who had every right to walk in and be the loudest voice in any room.

Instead, he chose to kneel and to listen and to move towards other people on their terms.

And so the question that this raises for us is, when was the last time you entered

a conversation genuinely curious

about the other person and willing to be changed by your conversation.

The miracle of Pentecost didn't begin with disciples speaking,

and it begins with them yielding.

One way we can do this is something I do when I feel like I'm taking up too

much space myself, is to start asking questions about them.

Something like, tell me more about why you chose your job, or tell me more about

your belief systems, and what's going on there.

And when they talk, listen and use that as fuel to ask follow-up questions.

Because through this, the Spirit can begin to reveal who they are.

And that can begin to build a bridge between you and this other person.

And finally, I think that it's

very important to know that it's never too late to rebuild our bridges.

My grandfather and I never quite had the chance to reconcile before we passed.

There are words that I never got to say and questions I never got to ask.

And while I can't go back, I can honor him by refusing to let the same distance

grow between me and other people who are still here in my life.

And you can do this too. Maybe there's someone you were drifting from,

someone you left a room to get away from and never quite found your way back.

The invitation of Pentecost is that the Spirit is always moving us towards the

people we have walked away from, so it's never too late to try.

So if there is someone on your mind, someone who the Spirit is thumping you

on the head to reach out to, consider following the Spirit's guidance and reaching

out to see if there is a bridge to be built.

And what I believe is, if we can follow any of these lessons from Pentecost,

if we woke up each and every morning and chose gentleness before we chose to

be right, if we walked into our hardest conversations with open hands instead of clenched fists,

if we made room for people whose roads look nothing like ours and let their

stories begin to change us, We can begin to look a whole lot more like the world

that God has always been moving us to.

A world where connection replaces brokenness, where unity is chosen over division,

where people are seen before they are judged, and where diversity can be celebrated

while we still work and move together.

Because the Spirit is still moving, even now, today, here, still building bridges

in places we have given up on.

Still calling ordinary and opinionated people like me and my grandfather to

lay down our own languages and speak something better.

So the question that Pentecost leaves us with is not whether the Spirit is willing,

because the Spirit has answered that 2,000 years ago.

The question is whether we are willing to let it do it. Let her work through us.

Go forth into the world, strengthen in Christ to live with values that stink.

Sharing the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience,

kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Tell others what Jesus has done for you and invite them to St.

Luke's as you love, serve, and welcome all. thanks be to God and we yeah if

you were inspired by this week.