Sunday, March 26, 2017

Lent 4 -- Talking Across DIfferences

Lent 4A 2017
Ephesians 5:8-14; Psalm 23; John 9:1-41
                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  
March 26, 2017, St. John’s Sharon

This morning’s gospel talks about how a man born blind comes to increasing faith and sight, while those born seeing become more and more blind.  Jesus performs the incredible miracle a healing his sight, and the religious leaders are totally unable to accept it. They have already made up their minds about Jesus, and about how and when miracles are supposed to take place.  They can’t see what is right in front of them.  Their blindness would be unbelievable, except that we see it all the time.  So many people in so many contexts make decisions about so many things, and even the starkest reality right in front of their own eyes won’t convince them otherwise. 

If anybody would have reason to be secure in their beliefs, it would be the Pharisees.  They studied the law of God, and most of them practiced it.  Pharisees were the religious folks who made sure that normal people still heard about God.  They were also the ones who tended to be concerned with public morality when the Chief Priests and scribes and Sadducees were concerned about the expensive temple rites and the politics the Roman occupation.  Yet, even the Pharisees, who should have been so right, in this case were so wrong.  All they had to do was listen to the testimony of the man born blind and to hear his story, but for whatever reason, they couldn’t.  They claimed to see, and, as Jesus said, their sin remained.

In today’s society, a whole lot of people aren’t able to listen to each other.  Our minds are filled with the stories we have already written about people or groups.  These stories are at best partially true and can keep us from hearing and seeing what is really going on with people.  We all have in our minds pictures and characteristics of all sorts of people and groups formed from messages we’ve distilled from whatever media we are exposed to, as well as input from parents, peers and others.  We know what people who live in Sharpsville are like, or that live in Hermitage, or Sharon, or Farrell.  We know about liberals or conservatives, democrats or republicans, white folks or black folks, Mexicans or Arabs, Muslims or agnostics, millennials or baby-boomers, Catholics or Baptists, poor folks or half-way house residents or business people, or social workers.  The Pharisees already had a story in their minds about people who violated the Sabbath—they were ungodly people who were dangers to the Jewish way of life.  The Pharisees were wrong, or at least they were not all the way right.  We are in the same situation with all the stories already formed in our minds.

A few weeks ago, the clergy from our Diocese had a training done by a group called Visions, Incorporated to teach us skills to go beyond the stories in our heads to be able to actually see and hear each other.  We did a lot of exercises, which I won’t make you do this morning, but many of them were good and they were hard work – and we were in a room full of people that already knew each other and were pretty much the same.  As a church, part of what we need to be able to do is talk to people that are different, because even if we all seem the same, eventually we make up new differences to stop talking with each other about.  That’s part of the reason we have all the denominations that we have – somehow we always find ways to stop listening and understanding each other.

The trainers gave us some guidelines for effective dialogue. 

Guidelines for Effective Dialogue From Visions Inc.
  • “Try on”
  • It’s okay to disagree
  • It is not okay to blame, shame, or attack, self or others
  • Practice “self-focus”
  • Practice “both/and” thinking
  • Notice both process and content
  • Be aware of intent and impact

These should help us in our congregational life if we use them, but they are also tools that we can use in all aspects of our life.  If we learn to listen to each other better as a church, we can offer that gift to a society that desperately needs it.

The first guideline is “try on”.  Trying on means that we listen to someone else’s story or perspective and try to try it on.  How would it feel to walk a mile in their shoes?  I need to set aside my own existing judgments about people and their motivations and experiences so that I can understand what is actually going on in their lives.  When I am listening to someone who has very different opinions and I “try on” their story, I often find that I might end up thinking or acting a lot more like them if I had their life.  Trying on doesn’t mean that we give up our own thoughts and feelings and experiences.  We just set them aside for a minute to understand someone better so that when we pick our own up again we have a more complete, and a more loving, perspective.  

The second guideline is that it is okay to disagree.  Many of us don’t believe that it is actually okay to disagree.  We can feel threatened if people hold other opinions or want different things.  Alternatively, we might have been raised to be nice and told that we weren’t allowed to disagree or that it was impolite, so instead of being ourselves, we hold back.  I’m not saying that we have to say everything we think.  But disagreements are usually signs that we live in a bigger world and worship a bigger God than we can comprehend and control.  Since people do see and experience their lives differently, then the places where we disagree are places where we can learn from each other and deepen our understanding and appreciation of the depth of God’s creation.  Even if we disagree because someone is just misinformed or wrong, and sometimes that happens, they still get to have their opinions and it is still okay to disagree. Only through honest disagreement can the truth come forward.

It is okay to disagree, but it is not okay to blame, shame or attack either ourselves or others.  We can’t have a dialogue or be in community if we are moving to blame, shame or attack.  These actions are often the result of applying the story in our head to the complex, particular human being standing in front of us.  Not all white people are responsible for slavery and not all people with Black Lives Matter signs are unconcerned about the lives of police officers and their families.  People who like traditional hymns are not the reason young people don’t come to church and people who like more contemporary music aren’t trying to throw out our Episcopal heritage.  We are called to listen to what the people with us are actually try to accomplish, what their dreams and aspirations are, what the barriers and threats they see are, and why they believe or do what they are doing. 

We also can’t slip into blaming and shaming ourselves.  If we are people who start to say something and then end with phrases like, “but that’s not important” or “don’t worry about it”, we are devaluing our own perspectives and opinions.  Who we are is as important as who others are.  Sometimes the story we tell about ourselves is that we are not as good or as smart or as capable or as whatever, or that we aren’t supposed to be involved in certain things because it isn’t our place.  We need to bring fully who we are if we are going to have a loving, respectful relationship with others.  They actually need us as much as we need them, and we both really do need one another.

The next guideline is to practice self-focus.  Self-focus has two components.  The first is that when I speak, I speak for myself.  I can only really talk authoritatively about who I am, what I think, what I feel, and what I’ve experienced.  I really don’t know what “everybody” thinks, or what “all sane people” know, or what “anybody who is really a Christian” does.  I only know what I mean as I talk about those things.  The other piece of self-focus is that when I’m talking to people in ways that are difficult or challenging, I need to pay attention to myself.  When am getting angry, when am I happy, when I am relieved.  Those feelings in our conversation tell us about where our own resentments, pains or prejudices may be lurking.  When we know that information, we can deal with them, instead of projecting them on others. 

Practice “both/and” thinking.  So often we decide that if one thing is right, then everything else is wrong.  Often, seemingly opposite things are both true from certain perspectives or in certain ways.  To emphasize this during our workshop, the facilitators always said “and” instead of “but” as they were making points or summarizing discussion.  Can we allow our ideas to be filled with “ands” instead of “buts”?  A person can really want to volunteer AND also be totally swamped this week.  A person can really love you AND forget to check their phone messages.  A person can know something is for the best AND still feel scared or hurt enough to resist changing.

The next guideline is to be notice both process and content.  How we are getting somewhere is important AND so is where we are going.  Maybe after a discussion, everyone has said they agreed, but one person dominated the conversation.  Probably that person agreed, but the process issues point to other problems to be addressed.  Or maybe after a long, difficult conversation, everybody still disagrees on what to do, but everyone felt heard, said what they needed to say, and, in the end, feels more comfortable with each other.  That situation could actually be a huge win.  To build a community requires that we deal with the issues and questions we need to deal with, but that we also ensure that we do it in a way were people feel supported, loved, and respected.  Speaking the truth in love means ensuring that we are both speaking the truth in our conversations and that we make sure people still feel loved afterwards.  

The final guideline is to be aware of intent and impact.  Often, the effects of what we say and do turn out differently than we thought they would.  One part of this guideline means that we have a responsibility not just to mean well, but also to make sure that what we say and do has the impact we mean it to have.  Often ensuring our that our impact matches our intent means getting to know someone well enough to understand how they will feel about what we do, and then to be willing to change our behaviors to match.  The book, The Five Love Languages is a great study for our family life about how even the most loving relationships can get thrown for loops when two people don’t feel the same way about actions like gift giving, or service, or words of encouragement, or quality time, or physical touch.  We might think we are doing one thing, but someone else perceives it very differently.  We need to find out how they will feel about what we will do and then act accordingly. 

The other part of this guideline means being aware that the impact of other people’s behaviors on us may not have matched their intent.  If the impact of something someone did is harmful to us, then we should do a couple of things.  We can keep an open mind about their intent. Maybe they did want to harm us, but probably they didn’t. Their intent may have been completely different.  Then we can talk with them directly about the harm.  If their intent was good, that conversation is an opportunity for them to learn, and for healing and reconciliation to take place.  If their intent was about something else entirely and we were just some sort of collateral damage, that will be helpful for both them and us to hear and understand.  Finally, if they were actually trying to cause us harm, then we know who really needs our prayers and we can start taking steps to protect ourselves in the future.


None of these guidelines are meant to say that we don’t act, or vote, or work to do the things that we believe and that matter to us.  Hopefully, however, by engaging with others in discussions even across our differences, we can be better informed about decisions we make and find ways to be more effective in what we are doing.  More importantly, these guidelines, and the other aspects of developing loving relationships we have focused on during Lent, should help us build a church and a society that are better able to include a wide range of people that love God and our neighbor more like Jesus would have us love them.  

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