What Is This Feeling? (Chester UMC)

We're continuing today, this Sunday and then next Sunday

we're actually going to go back and pick up the theme that we

missed on the 14th. And Paisley's going to be

singing for us next Sunday. And I didn't, I really didn't

want to miss her singing. So we just shifted that theme to

next Sunday and then we will wrap up next Sunday.

We'll be wrapping up our Wicked for Christmas theme this year.

So the question we're asking today, which I'm sure you have

guessed already, is what is this feeling?

One of the songs early on and wicked is, is the song What is

this feeling? Elena and Aaron are going to be

up and singing that for us in a few minutes.

But Emma, what did I say? Aaron, No, that's your mom.

It's Emma that sing. I did it again.

My brain. It's tough.

I've had way too much sugar this past week.

So I might have put your mom's name on the slide then, too.

Let's see. I did.

I'm sorry you don't feel too bad because it originally said Aaron

and Leah were singing. So again, way too much sugar.

Sorry, Emma, I actually know. My I don't know.

My brain does that. I'll fix it.

I'll fix it right here. Oh, and I thought the Christmas

card thing was a problem. My goodness, the feeling you're

feeling now is just best be described as that.

But what is this feeling? It's a good question to ask when

we have feelings. It's a good question to ask,

what is this feeling? And I want to talk a little bit

about feelings and emotion. And I want to say first of all,

in general, that what is this feeling?

When we're asked that question to ask what our feelings, Why do

we have feelings? What's the purpose of feelings?

We can't answer all of that this morning.

I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a psychiatrist.

They can give you much more detailed answers as to the

biological functions and reality of emotions.

But I want to just say this about feelings, about our

emotions. Our feelings are an excellent

gauge of what is going on inside of us, and our feelings are a

horrible measure of external reality.

Our feelings tell us nothing meaningful about external

reality. They tell us many and

significantly meaningful things about our internal reality.

For example, friend of mine from years and years and years ago

back when we lived in Tiffin, I'm going to call him Bob.

His name is not Bob. I'm not sure that he would mind

if I used his real name, but I don't know.

But anyway, Bob was it. What's that?

It wasn't Aaron either. So I'm just going with

pseudonyms all across the board today.

Thank you very much, Bob. I appreciate that.

Now my other friend Bob Bob and Tiffin Bob.

Great guy, about 6 feet 7 inches tall, maybe on the high end of

6-7, maybe closer to 6-8. Not a like a big beefy guy, but

fit and muscular white dude covered in tattoos.

And Bob used to say to me, almost with tears in his eyes.

I don't understand it. I walked down the street and

like the other day, I stopped. I was waiting at an intersection

to cross the road and little old lady pulled up in her car to

stop at the intersection and she looked up at me and then rolled

up her window like she was afraid of me.

Two answers to that one is what? Yeah, you look scary.

Didn't say that to him, but he does.

He looks scary. But the simple fact is, is Bob

is one of the kindest, most compassionate, most gentle

people I know. Bob would not hurt a family.

There might be some exceptions. You go after his wife and kids.

You don't want to be on the receiving end of Bob.

All right, but but just in general human interaction, one

of the kindest, gentlest people I have ever known and deeply

distressed that little old ladies would roll up their car

window because he looks scary. People will cross the street and

walk on the other side if they see me coming at night.

Like, yes they do. How can this surprise you?

Those feelings are understandable.

Those feelings, when people have them, we can say, well, yeah, I

get that. But those feelings were a awful

measure of the actual external reality.

No one was in danger. Those little old ladies were in

no danger of Bob at all. None at all.

But that's how emotions work. Emotions tell us wonderfully

important information about our interior life and almost nothing

useful about our external reality.

Elphaba and Glenda found this out as Aaron, Not Aaron, Emma

and Leah. Whoop.

I'm just. I'm doing it on purpose now.

Trying to dig myself out of this hole.

Wait a second. Hold on.

Hold on. Right here.

Whoops. Escape.

End up deleting the whole thing. No, no, no, no, no.

Now it's messed off my messed up my formatting, so I got to fix

that. No, I did the wrong one.

Go stop, stop. OK, let's do this.

Why are you doing this? OK, we're going to leave it

there. Never mind.

Come on up. Which one of you is which one of

you is Glenda and which one of you is Alphaba?

Your Alphaba. Hence the green and the pink.

OK, so Alphaba and Glenda, you can turn around and face them.

We're not singing just quite yet, but this song sung at the

beginning. Alpha and Glenda grew up

separately. They didn't know each other till

they got to college. And they were assigned to be

roommates. And.

And when they were roommates, they had an initial very strong

reaction to each other that the strength of it, I think, may

have surprised each of them. And Emma and Elena are going to

sing about that right now. All right.

Are you ready? OK.

All right. Here we go.

At this point in the sermon, we listen to Emma Taylor and Elena

Buckley singing. What is this feeling from the

movie Wicked? Emma and Elena did a great job

with it, but due to technical limitations, I was not able to

get a good recording of them singing.

You can find the Ariana Grande Cynthia Revo version on YouTube

and all major music platforms though, and I hope you'll listen

to it. It's a fun song about two young

women who, upon first impressions, loathed each other.

Now back to the sermon. Glenda and Alphaba hated each

other at first. They later became deeply loving,

fast friends who had a powerful and significant and meaningfully

positive impact on each other's lives.

But at first they hated each other.

Their initial feeling was loathing.

And by the way, group testing, focus grouping, and

crowdsourcing on this kind of information also is not always

helpful. I think crowd can get it wrong

too. And the focus groups can get it

wrong too, when they're looking at their feelings to try to

measure external reality. This was the issue that was

happening with Jesus and the Samaritans when Jesus was

traveling through Samaria. They wanted to stop in a village

and the village, just because Jesus was Jewish, said, oh,

yuck. We don't feel like having him

around here. We don't like them.

We don't like the feeling was immediate and it was rejecting

Jesus. And when Jesus was rejected, his

disciples were all like, Oh yeah, well, let's just have God

kill them. It's a little escalating a

little too fast, I think there, But that was the response, 100%

emotional response. I feel like that person is bad.

I feel like those people are bad and, and all Jesus could do was

shake his head, rebuke his disciples and move on.

Because Jesus understood what Glinda and Alpha became to

understand that our feelings don't really tell us about

another person. Our feelings don't tell us about

another group. Our feelings tell us about

what's going on inside of us and if we really want to know

another person, if we really want to know another group, we

need to move past our feelings, work through those feelings.

Elphaba and Glinda, they worked through them.

They moved past the initial feelings and became close

friends, and they gave us an example of God's way of relating

to people. They learned what Jesus already

knew, that our feelings. They can tell us.

They can tell us the reality of our biases.

They can tell us the reality of our fears, the reality of our

expectations, the reality of our hopes, and the reality of our

dreams. But they cannot tell us the

reality of the other person. And to really get to that, we

need to do our relating the way Jesus did his relating, not on

the basis of emotions. God's way of relating to people

is different. God's way of relating to people

is to look at people's hearts. And when I say heart, I mean,

that's a biblical thing. We hear that, that I put that

Scripture in there. Yeah.

First Samuel, this is this is God talking about David.

The Lord does not look at look at the things people look at.

People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks

at the heart. This is a discussion about David

and God choosing David to be the next king of Israel.

When other people looked at David, their feeling was he.

There's no chance. He's the youngest of like a

bunch of sons. There's a whole lot of people in

line and ahead of him and his own family and he's not

important. He's a shepherd.

He's he's good for taking care of sheep.

When he came out and and Goliath was there confronting the armies

of Israel, including the king of Israel, and David said I'll

fight him, I can take him. And people like they were like,

yeah, no, there's no chance. There's no chance.

Saul's feeling was the David would get to slaughtered by

Goliath and then later when David killed Goliath and David

became very popular and very successful and people loved him

a lot and we're celebrating him a lot.

And he proved himself to be a very capable soldier and leader.

Then King Saul was afraid of David.

First he he felt contempt for David.

Now he feels fear toward David because he was afraid David was

going to try to take his place as king and overthrow his

Kingdom and disenfranchise his children.

His fear had nothing to do with reality.

But when God looked at David, he looked at David's heart.

And again, this is not sappy, romantic kind of heart.

This is not, well, let's see how David feels about things and if

his feelings are the kind of feelings we it wasn't that at

all. The heart in ancient culture,

the heart was the word used when we were describing the the a

person's true being. Heart encompassed their

intellect, their thoughts, their character, their emotions, their

spiritual life, everything that makes us us apart from physical

appearance, our character, our faith, our intellect, all of

those things were in the heart. And God says that's what I look

at. I don't look at who's the

tallest. I don't look at who's the

strongest. I don't look at who's who's, you

know, the, the most talented. I don't look at who's the most

popular. I look at a person's heart.

And that's how I know who that person is and what that person

is and is not capable of by looking at their heart.

That's what Elphaba. It took a while, but Elphaba and

Glinda eventually got past the superficial, got past their

feelings and saw each other for who they really were, saw each

other's hearts. And that made all of the

difference. And by the way, that whole

emotion thing, it can work on the flip side too.

Alphaba and Glenda both looked at the wizard and at the

Wizards, You know, right hand person, Madam Morable.

And their first emotional response was, they're wonderful,

they're amazing. We really want to get to know

them. They're the best.

Until they got to know them and solve their hearts and realize

their emotions had been wrong about them too.

A poor evaluator and descriptor of them as well.

Jesus calls us to relate to people in God's way, by getting

to know people, groups of people, individuals of people.

Not based on our initial emotional responses to them, but

based on their heart, on who they are, on how they relate, on

what their character is on, on how their mind actually

functions on work, on what their attitudes and intentions really

mean about them. And when we get to know people

that way, we still don't have permission to judge and stand in

condemnation over them. But now we at least know whether

is this person a safe person or not a safe person?

Is this person that I want to invest a lot of time and energy

and relationship with or not someone?

Is this someone who is going to help me draw closer to God or

someone that's going to pull me further away from God?

Those are the things we know when we get to know people.

God's way would really get to know people's hearts.

Jesus met that woman at the well, and she did what is so

easy for us human beings to do. Her response to Jesus was

initially largely an emotional response based on generations of

cultural conditioning and the culture she had grown up in,

based on probably some personal experience along the way of what

men are like, what other how other people treat me, and

particularly how Jewish men will treat me.

And she saw Jesus and Jesus spoke to her and she's like, EW,

this is gross. He's Jewish and he's a man.

And he's talking to me in public.

And her reaction was one of resistance and hostility and and

maybe even a little anger. What are you doing talking to

me? I'm a woman.

You're a Jewish man. Stop.

Stop. Jesus's response is telling.

If you knew. If you knew the gift of God, if

you knew who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have

asked him and he would have given you living water.

He's issuing this woman an invitation to not look at him on

the superficials, to not let her emotions guide her response to

someone who is religiously and ethnically different from her

and has a different gender than her.

To look and know him and see who he is.

And if she will do that, then she will see that he is someone

who is safe in the sense that he will love her and care for her

and guard her and protect her. There's a lot of ways Jesus

isn't safe. Jesus calls us to all sorts of

changes of heart and changes of mind and changes of behavior

that can feel and be at times very risky and threaten many

things in our lives. But Jesus himself is not a

threat in that way. Jesus is a source of life, and

we can only see that when we get to know him.

And that's what Jesus invited her to, and that's what he

showed her. Jesus has a gift that we don't

have. Jesus can look at a person and

know their hearts. He probably could have done it

with his eyes closed. You know, He's Jesus we don't

get to. We don't have that about it.

We have to work at this. But but Jesus saw past what all

of her, her neighbors and associates and people in her

village knew about her, Her, her, her sketchy past, her

questionable relationships, her, her, her, her status and

society. Which was the reason why she was

going at the middle of the day to go to the well, because

everyone else had already come and gone and she didn't want to

have to deal with the people. She went there because she

thought she would be by herself. But Jesus, Jesus was never,

never seduced by judging her or anyone else based on crowd

responses or emotional reactions.

He saw her heart. He took the time to know her,

and He invited her to do the same toward Him.

This is the invitation that we have.

This is the hope and the possibility that we have that

we, as followers of Jesus, created in the image of God, can

live and relate to people the way Jesus lived and related to

people not driven by our initial emotional responses.

No matter the color of their skin, no matter their political

persuasion, no matter their nationality, no matter their

ethnicity, no matter their gender, no matter what group

they do or don't belong to, we can.

We can get past our initial gut reactions, our initial emotional

responses, and know people's hearts.

It takes work for us to do that, but it's the work.

It's one of the works that that Jesus is especially interested

in helping us with. He's especially because that's

the work that he calls us to do, to love and relate to people

that way. So what is this feeling?

Whatever feeling you're having, I can tell you that feeling is a

great measure of what's going on inside of you.

It can tell you your some of your strengths and some of your

weaknesses. It can tell you what you feel

threatened by and what you don't feel threatened by.

It can tell you what makes you happy and what doesn't make you

happy. What makes you sad.

Can tell you all of those things and that that information is

incredibly important. But it will never tell you the

truth about the person sitting next to you, or across you from

you, or across the room, or across town or across the state

or across the world. To know about that person we

need to get to know their hearts.

And to really get to know their hearts, we need the guidance and

direction and the help of the Holy Spirit.

Thank God we have it in Jesus name, Amen.

Amen.