Lent 3A
2017 – Resentments
Romans
5:1-11; Psalm 95; John 4:5-42
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
March 19,
2017, St. John’s Sharon
This Lent, we’ve been talking about dealing
with conflict. Today, I want to look at
the importance of what we are thinking when we are hurt, angry, resentful, or
facing conflict. In many cases, we will
never find a satisfactory resolution to the issues we are having with others
until we change how we are reacting to a situation.
In his letter to the Romans that we heard this
morning, Paul says that, “We also boast in our sufferings.” Paul’s use of “we” is interesting, since I
think we tend to whine about sufferings, not boast about them. But Paul offers this powerful explanation for
why he can boast. He knows that
“suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces
hope, and hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into
our hearts.” In the end, Paul can boast
about his sufferings, instead of resent them, because he knows, trusts, and
hopes in God. Paul knows that God is
more powerful than all his sufferings.
Think about Jesus on the cross. “Father, forgive them.” Very few people have experienced the
suffering that Jesus did. Jesus could
have called down an army of angels to fight for him, or balls of fire to smite
his enemies, or any number vindictive responses that from a worldly perspective
would have allowed him to “win.” But he
didn’t. Instead, Jesus accepted his
suffering and forgave the people who were murdering him. His forgiveness wasn’t superficial,
either. He didn’t say, “Father, forgive
them,” so that when they wrote the gospels people would think he was a nice,
spiritual person, but he was really going to go home, eat a pint of Ben and
Jerry’s and complain to his disciples about how unfairly he’d been treated. Jesus saw people with all their flaws,
recognized that they needed his forgiveness, and knew that he could rely on his
heavenly Father for all that he needed, even during something as painful as
crucifixion and even in something as seemingly final as death. Jesus decided that his suffering wasn’t going
to define him. His relationship with God
was going to define his sufferings.
Paul and Jesus show us that even in the most
extreme cases of suffering, we can get to the place where are suffering does
not keep us from expressing the love for other people that we are called to
show. We also can hold onto the truth
that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character
produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.
We just have to get to the root of the things that keep us from living
into that hope.
Twelve-step programs have practical techniques
to look at where we are allowing our resentments about sufferings to interfere
with our ability to live a sober, righteous, and godly life. Some of what I’m saying today is based on
their fourth-step process, which is itself based on Christian spiritual
disciples.
Note that our sufferings are not the same as our
response to our sufferings. Even when our sufferings are caused by mean, nasty,
horrible people who have decided to harm us, we get to respond. We can have three basic responses. The first is a neutral response like, “OK,
that hurt,” and then we go about our business.
We respond that way all the time concerning stuff we feel isn’t worth
worrying about.
The second response is Paul’s. We actually use whatever has been given us to
push us forward. More suffering
increases endurance. Less resources
means more reliance on God. A shortened
lifespan means we’re with God sooner. None
of this makes suffering good or says we should seek it out. Blissfully ignorant and happy is OK. But a good model for reacting to being harmed
comes from Northwestern Pennsylvania driving – steer into the curve. When you lose a bit of traction, if you try
to turn away from the skid, you end up in a snowbank. If you turn into the curve, you can regain
control. Paul steers into his suffering for endurance, for character, for hope.
The third response to suffering is when we lose
control over suffering and let suffering gain control over us. By gaining control, I don’t mean the physical
pain, which may or may not be present. But
have our resentments over our injuries overwhelmed our emotional and spiritual
life? One way we know that our injuries,
real or imagined, have grown too large in our heads is when we have imagined
conversations with people who aren’t in the room. We start imagining what we wish we would have
said, or we come up with the perfect response to make them suffer, or admit we
are right, or apologize, or whatever. These
conversations can keep happening and take up hours that we could spend thinking
about spring flowers, or cute kittens, or ways to feed the hungry. Or maybe the conversations aren’t in our head,
but we find ourselves talking about whoever or whatever we think has done us
wrong to anyone who will listen. Or maybe
we avoid people or do self-destructive things out of spite or otherwise do dumb
things we otherwise wouldn’t. All of
these behaviors indicate that we have handed over control of our life not to
God, but to our resentments.
To deal with these resentments and give control
back to God, we start with prayer, and then we pray at every other step in the
process. We ask God to show us what we
need to know and then to be able to do what we need to do. Only by God’s guidance can we change for the
better, and God is eager to answer these prayers.
Once we’ve prayed, we need to acknowledge that
the resentments are there and identify who or what did it and exactly how we
feel harmed. Maybe someone got a job promotion that I wanted. Maybe they
weren’t paying attention and my favorite dish broke or my grandchild got
hurt. Maybe their potato salad got eaten
before mine at the church supper. Maybe they passed legislation that made my
life worse. Maybe they dress in ways
that I think are ugly or inappropriate.
Maybe they physically hurt me just because they could.
After determining what they did, we look at
what specifically in us their behavior affected. Usually resentment behaviors affect
either my pride and self-esteem, or my security, or my personal relationships. Actions affect my pride when they threaten
the way I think about myself or when I am not treated the way I think I should
be, or when I am shown in a bad light.
Actions affect my security when I feel like my physical or economic
safety and stability, or that of my family, is threatened. Personal relationships are affected when I
worry that actions will make others think differently about me or that I will
lose relationships that I want to keep.
Often the same action will affect more than one thing. The person getting a promotion instead of me
might threaten my pride because I wasn’t treated the way I thought I should be,
my security because I’m not getting the raise, and my personal relationships
because my co-workers won’t think as highly of me. If I’m complaining about someone dressing
inappropriately, they are probably affecting my self-esteem because they are not
dressing how I think they should and therefore not making me feel as important
as I want, and they might be affecting my relationships if I am afraid that
they will be getting attention that I want coming to me.
After identifying how we are affected, we need
to flip the situation in our heads.
Instead of focusing on what people have done to us, we look at what we
are doing that is contributing to this particular resentment and hatred. I am not saying that our suffering was our
fault. But if we have a resentment that
is bothering us, then we are contributing to the situation, at least the
situation in our own head. Turning
around the resentment will help us stop worrying about what people did to us,
which is out of our control, and let us focus instead on what is in our control. If we let go of the part that we are bringing
to the situation, we will be able to let go of our resentment. We might also get a better sense of the other
people involved as broken human beings that need our love and help.
I’m not saying we should let people keep
hurting us that are actually hurting us.
Getting out of abusive or other destructive situations may require a lot
of work and not make the person hurting us happy. That’s OK.
Taking that action is good. The
problem is being resentful and not taking action, or allowing the resentments
about the harm continue to control us after the fact instead of doing the work
to heal and get fully free.
Three of the major ways we contribute to our
resentments are through dishonesty, self-seeking and fear. Dishonesty takes any number of insidious
forms. Satan is called the Father of
lies for a reason. One of the common dishonesties
that creates resentments is when we decide that we know what other people are
thinking. Based on some behavior, we become
sure that we know their motivations, their feelings, and, most dangerous of
all, what they think of us. We can spin
out imaginary conversations in our head with someone, telling them all the
reasons they did something until they have become some combination of Adolf
Hitler and Cinderella’s step mother. We
compare our insecure insides with their calm outsides and assume that they are
self-assured, cold and calculating in ways we never could be. Instead of assuming the best, we decide we
know that things are really the worst. In order to let go of those resentments,
we have to identify when we are making assumptions about what is going on in
someone else’s head. We have to admit that
we are being dishonest with ourselves because we can never really know what another
person is thinking. I barely know what
is going on in my own head most of the time.
Our dishonesty about what we think other people
are thinking can get us into bigger issues when we respond to our own fantasies. A lot of resentments come because we go out
of our way to try to control our image and how we think people think about
us. Then when our scheme doesn’t work,
we get mad. The truth is that other
people’s opinions about us are none of our business. Ever.
What people think about us is not in our control and not something we
are supposed to worry about. We are
supposed to do what’s right and let people think what they think. Any image
control on our part is just a resentment waiting to happen.
We are also often dishonest about our own place
in the universe. We think people should
do what we want them to do or what we say they should do. But we really don’t get to control other
people. We might have reason to
influence them and sometimes bad things do happen when they don’t listen to us,
but we don’t have any right to expect people to do what we want. Even when we are in a position of authority
where on some level they should listen, any resentment on our part about their
decisions are about our pride. We need to let that pride go. We aren’t the center of the universe, God
is. In the end, God will make sure
things come out OK.
Self-seeking also causes us resentments. We wanted something, and we didn’t get it,
and now we are mad. Usually the more we
tried to get something, the more resentful we become. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t go for our
dreams or try to reach our goals or strive to succeed. I’m just saying that if we don’t, we’re
better off mourning our loss and moving on to the next thing than nursing
grudges. God is a God of abundance and
we will have enough. We can let go of
our self-seeking and receive everything as a gift from God with thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a great antidote to
self-seeking.
Finally, we come to the base of almost all our
resentments, which is fear. Even much of
our dishonesty and self-seeking has its root in fear. We fear many things, but the antidote to all
of them is God’s perfect love. We know that “perfect love casts out fear.” We cannot overcome the resentments to our
sufferings ourselves, but God’s love for us can. Paul ends his statement that
hope does not disappoint because God’s love has been poured into our
hearts. If we can recognize what we are
afraid of, we can recognize how God’s love can overcome our fear.
Many of our fears stem from our own sense of
unworthiness. We are afraid that we
aren’t good enough, that no one will like us, that no one important will like
us, that we aren’t important or special or loveable. God’s answer to all of these fears is that we
are God’s beloved children. He made us,
he died and rose for us, and he wants to be with us for eternity. The more we focus on that love that God has
for us, the more we can recognize the dishonesty in our fears when we resent
how other people relate to us.
The other broad category of fears are fears for
our own security. We can be afraid of
not having enough – enough money, enough food, enough time, enough food for the
party, enough anything. We can be afraid
of being sick, or hurt, or injured. We
can be afraid of losing people we love.
We can be afraid of dying. All of
these are very legitimate human fears. But
if we turn our lives over to God, we don’t have to be afraid anymore. We can trust that God will give us what we
need, even if it isn’t what we think we need.
God can also take care of us even beyond death, so that greatest human
fear can be overcome by God’s love. We
know that neither death nor life nor anything else can separate us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This firm confidence in God’s love is why Paul
can boast in his sufferings. Every
suffering he endures is a chance to root out more dishonesty, more
self-seeking, and more fear. Every
suffering he endures is a chance to recognize that he is a beloved child of God
and that God’s love is enough. Every
suffering he endures produces a character that hopes in God, knowing that his
hope will not disappoint because God’s love has been poured into his heart. So
pray for God’s love to fill your heart, and when you are being controlled by
resentments, do the work to turn them around.
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