(Sunday School) PFT: Week 6

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It is really good to see you. Thanks for being here for the last politics class. I made it. I haven't been tarred and feathered. Maybe today is the day. So, thank you for being here.

If you make sure you find one of these papers, you're gonna need to be at a table with a bunch of people to talk because you're gonna be doing a small group discussion. So if you wanna move around or get close to some people, if you will look at the first part here where it says "remember this," and follow those instructions for listing the people below. Just take a moment to do that.

This is a repeat of actually class number one. So if you could grab one of those papers at the end of your tables. If you have missed a class, I have all the papers from the last weeks. You can also listen along as those are on our website. So take a moment, grab a paper, grab a group, and fill out that first section to the end of list people below.

Okay. Did you get a chance to do that first exercise? It was a repeat of the first week, and it's sort of a reminder of where we have started and where we're ending up this class. The whole purpose of doing this class prepping for Thanksgiving was to prepare you for conversations with people around the Thanksgiving table. I'm imagining you with family, and you can't choose your family. That's part of the thing. So I know that for some, in particular, Thanksgiving holiday represents being together with people with whom you may have major political differences or disagreements. And that's what this class is sort of preparing us toward. So today is sort of the end of that. And I wanted to remind you of the first week—the names of people who you may know that you love, with whom you may have disagreements—and prepare for that.

Passage Discussion

We're gonna do an exercise now, and I want you to look at this passage from Romans 12, verses 9 through 21. And you're gonna read that out loud in a small group of three to five people. Then I want you to spend some time answering some questions.

First question: How do the surrounding verses inform your understanding of verse 18, the verse that's in bold?

Second: How can you tell if someone is a brother or sister, or an enemy?

Third: What do you consider to be the limits of "live at peace with everyone" according to this passage? Can you think of a situation where you couldn't live at peace with someone?

So take ten minutes with that small group to read the passage, talk about how the surrounding verses inform our understanding of verse 18, how you can tell if someone's a brother or sister or an enemy, and finally, what you consider to be the limits of "live peace with everyone" according to this passage. Can you think of a situation where that would be impossible? Three, two, one, go.

If I could have your attention. So first, how the surrounding verses inform how we read verse 18?

Putting pressure on us to act in a certain way without regard to how the other person is acting. So that we do what we are called to do by Christ without any expectation being placed on the other person to act differently.

Okay, very good. I think it opens up the definition of "everyone" pretty broadly. We went through and underlined all of the groups of people that are referred to and it's pretty exhaustive: brothers and sisters, enemies, those who persecute you, the saints, those who rejoice, those who weep. That sort of covers everyone. So it sort of shuts the door on the idea that there are certain people who might disagree with you enough that you're allowed to disregard them.

I was thinking too that "living at peace with everyone" can sort of, on its own, make it sound like "live and let live."

Mhmm.

And yet we've got all those verses surrounding it. There's a lot of action, work.

Yeah. There's parts that we play and just like sit back and be like, "Oh yeah, I'm at peace." Yeah, that's right. Very good.

What about the second question? How do you distinguish between brothers and sisters and enemies? Is there a distinction?

They're actively seeking evil towards you. I think it's safe to call them that. Yes, that's good. Yeah, we're going to distinguish in a moment between hurt and harm.

Hurt is when someone does something against you. Harm is when someone intends to inflict, and there's a pattern here of regular intention to cut, to destroy. I think that's one way we can think about that.

I think it's discernment of the spirit. Yes, we have all learned that in the last couple of years, haven't we?

I had a question about the first instruction being "as brothers and sisters." In Paul's writings, that usually means I'm speaking to the church. Does that apply to everyone, or is that specific to the church?

What does the class think? Paul talks about enemies of the gospel. Maybe that's where this is going—where the whole church is here, and we would question the gospel being preached.

Let me ask this: What do you consider to be the limits of "live at peace with everyone"? Are there limits on that? Can you imagine a situation where that would not be possible?

I think there are people where it depends on how you define "live at peace with everyone." In the same way that the verse says "do not avenge yourselves"—if you're thinking about peace in terms of not avenging yourself, letting the Lord have that vengeance—then yes, live at peace with everyone. But when there are people who are inflicting harm on other people, especially in God's name, that should be stopped.

So it depends on how you define peace.

I also thought that one of the challenging verses was where it talks about doing what is honorable in everyone's eyes. While it's very important to pay attention to how what you're doing or saying is affecting other people, there's a point where not everyone is going to think what you're doing is honorable. You might be misunderstood for why you're acting the way you are.

I was telling the group that I had a pastor who gave a different perspective about the fiery coals. He was saying one way to look at it is that women had to keep up the fire, and if their coals were cold and they couldn't get a fire going, they would go next door to their neighbor with a hand on their head, and the neighbor would put good hot fiery coals in there so they could go back and get their fire going. I don't know that would be the correct interpretation, but it made me think differently about this passage—that it's not necessarily you're doing something bad to the other person because you hate them because they have a different perspective. You're doing something good to them even though they have a different perspective. That makes me think differently about that whole passage.

Peacemaking

I want to take us through several things for the category of peacemaking. Susan and I teach material from Ken Sandy's book The Peacemaker in premarital counseling and her counseling practice. He has a spectrum with regard to peace and pursuing peace with other people.

On one side is peace faking—pretending everything's okay, ignoring, downplaying something that's actually an offense, maybe rightfully overlooking an offense. On the other end is peace breaking, which is what we think of as active fighting. In the middle is peace making, which is pursuing conversations to try to reconcile relationships.

That's the background for where I'm taking this. How do we pursue peacemaking toward reconciling relationships?

Before I think about going to a conversation, I want to start with something else—your own social media usage. One of the things I noticed about myself during the pandemic is that for years I was on Twitter. I loved getting all kinds of articles, seeing what's going on in other churches, what other pastors are reading. I also liked the Darwin Awards, to be really honest.

What I found during the pandemic was that social media for me was conditioning my outrage. What I would receive was someone else's response to a situation, then the content of the situation itself, which shaped how I responded. Does that make sense?

A lot of social media, if that is how we get our news or understand what's happening, or it's the first way you hear something, it conditions your response before you have an opportunity to engage with the content.

That's one of the reasons why, for years, newscasters were trained to have a Maryland accent so everybody understood it, and also a flat delivery where they did not show excitement or upset on screen or on radio. This was to not precondition you in responding to what you hear. And that's a really important thing that may not seem like a big deal, but I'll speak personally. It made it really hard for me to go back and reengage a particular situation, a topic about our denomination or churches, or what's happening in the news nationally with an open mind and actually asking questions. It preconditioned me to think about that.

I think that can set up some of these conversations to be much more difficult than they could be otherwise. So if you're thinking about sitting down around Thanksgiving with someone and talking about the outcome of the election, which happened three weeks before, and you've been conditioned by what you've heard rather than engaging yourself, it's really hard to pull back from that. It's really hard to ask questions if you haven't asked questions to this point.

So I want to think about some other things before you start the conversation that you need to maybe think about in preparing this. This isn't in your notes. I thought about this later.

Preparing Yourself for the Conversation

First is checking in with yourself. Am I holding on to some resentment in the past in this relationship? Have I noticed bitterness toward this person that I actually need to go deal with with the Lord before I start this conversation? It's what Sarah's comment was about—preparing yourself, choosing the right time. Am I anxious about this? Do I need to pull back?

You can pray. I found this prayer online:

Jesus, I'm gonna go meet with whom I know you love. I pray that by the power of the Spirit I might practice love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Please grant me the strength to be patient and kind, not arrogant or proud. Protect me from being easily angered and keeping a record of wrongs. I pray that my words and my attitude will not dishonor you. I also know that you love me, that you delight in me, that you promise to be with me, that you're with me now. May your love for me, my love for you, and our love for this person allow me to delight in the truth, rest in hope, and persevere in faith. Amen.

Get some rest. It's hard to go into a conversation if you're exhausted. Recruit other people to pray for you.

Distinguish between hurt and harm. Hurt is physical or emotional discomfort. Harm is injury or damage. It may not be safe for you to interact with this person. They may have a history of being someone who is intentionally harming you in relationships. You may need to have a different strategy.

There's a book by Dan Allender called Bold Love. He has a chapter on loving an enemy, and he describes it kind of like guerrilla warfare. With guerrilla warfare, you don't just come and stand up like British troops and walk into the battlefield. Remember the Revolutionary War? The British would just walk straight in, and they made themselves targets. The Americans hid behind trees and rocks, and that's how they chose to fight. So thinking about that with loving someone who's dangerous, you can go see a counselor who specializes in hard relationships. Most of what my wife does in her counseling office is help people have hard conversations. And we need help to do this. It's okay if you need help to do this.

Commitments for Healthy Conversations

Consider these commitments for healthy conversations:

Patience. I commit to being patient in my words, whatever they say to me.

Perception. I commit to strive to perceive what's going on inside of my heart during the conversation.

Powerlessness. I commit to recognizing my powerlessness to change another person.

Invitation. I commit to inviting them into deeper conversation.

And finally, my thing to this is do this in person. Using text message, email, even phone calls can be really hard to hear a person's perspective. So if you are preparing for Thanksgiving and you're gonna sit down with someone who you think has kind of gone off the rails and this is gonna be a really hard conversation, let me start with what I have here on Field Guide to Engaging Family and Friends.

Clarifying Questions

In a book called Arguing Like Jesus, two writers, Joe Carter and John Coleman write: by asking your listeners something rather than giving answers, you let them come to their own conclusions, which often forces them to be more emotionally and intellectually attached to their conclusion. It helps them see kind of where they're coming from. When you lead with statements instead of questions, you run the risk of avoiding the heart.

So if you become argumentative—for example, if you start using "you" phrases or "you always"—you're missing the mark. Work on using open-ended questions like, "Hey, tell me more. I'd like to hear more about this." A lot of this material I'm stealing from my wife and our conversations. But I love that you're so passionate about this. Help me understand how you came to this conclusion. What's informing this for you? What experiences are driving this?

Shared Values

In Acts 17, Paul goes to the Areopagus in Athens and gets into a conversation with the people there. He looks for shared values with them. He says, "Oh, I see in every way you're religious. I'm religious. You like to talk about new ideas. I love to talk about new ideas." And he engages them on a place of common ground.

Think about what's important to the person you're going to meet with. It might be helpful to write out your values and the values of that person that you also know. For example: What are the people that we hold dear together? What do we celebrate together? What hobbies do we pursue in common? What are idols we're both tempted to worship because of our family background? We all do this the same way. Thinking about shared values is going to be really important.

Shibboleths

Shibboleths are phrases that signal "I'm an ally" or "I'm an enemy." We're going to talk about red flags—signals that you're an enemy. Shibboleths are things that people drop into conversation. This comes straight out of the book of Judges. In Judges 12, the Ephraimites have difficulty pronouncing the word "Shibboleth" in Hebrew. Shibboleth just means "ear of grain." The Gileadites, when people came across their path, would ask them to pronounce it. If they pronounced it wrong, they would kill them. It was a sign: "You're my enemy or you're my ally."

So looking for and avoiding shibboleths in conversation is crucial. For some of you, you might sit down with someone and they say, "I saw this on Fox News," and you're like, "Ugh." And it just makes you up to here already. Avoiding the shibboleths and overlooking them is really important to entering into these conversations. Those are litmus test statements people make to see what side you're on.

At the same way, also avoid red flags in your language—statements that mean "I'm your enemy." And this is obvious, but it needs to be said: "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I can't imagine anybody who's a Christian thinks this way." Things that come out of your mouth that say, "I'm not safe for you to talk to about this. I'm going to lose it, and I'm not even listening to you now." Watch out for those red flag statements you give when you're upset—"How can anybody think like this? You're out of your mind." Those little statements we make when we're upset get over the top.

Look for Good Things to Honor

Paul writes about this in Philippians 4:8:

Whatever is true, whatever is right, whatever is worthy, whatever is acceptable, think on these things. — Philippians 4:8

Look for with other people—what are the good things in the conversation you can honor? "Hey, I see. I am so glad that your country is this important to you. It's important to me. I'm so glad that you want to think about how your faith informs what you're doing politically. That's really important for me too." Honor areas where you have vastly different conclusions, but you're coming at this with good things. They have good intentions. Assume the best of someone else instead of assuming the worst.

Humble Subversion

Finally, humble subversion: asking guiding questions that work to disrupt the way they're thinking. Many people live on borrowed convictions that they've heard from somebody else. It's not really a conviction—it's a borrowed conviction. It's like, "I've heard this talking point, it kind of made sense, I can parrot this really well. I haven't really thought about it."

Ask further questions, guiding questions, questions pointing them back to Jesus. One of the really good questions is: "Where do you think God is in what you just described?" Because a lot of the conspiracy theories we're hearing right now are a world without God in them, even when people profess to be Christians. It's like God is off the throne and completely out of control, the political powers are in charge, there's a huge conspiracy going on, and it's all about to crash. Well, is the Lord still on the throne? Ask questions that bring God back into the conversation.

I'm gonna give you an opportunity to practice this this morning. In your small groups, we're gonna rewind the clock twenty five years, and today is 09/29/1999. You're probably sitting somewhere very far away from here at that time in a very different circumstance. But imagine it's 09/29/1999, and everybody's talking about this thing that's coming: Y2K.

You're gonna go to Thanksgiving this year with your relatives who are all the way down to conspiracy theory. They're believers, and they think Jesus is probably coming back on January 1. They think there's a great big government conspiracy going on called the New World Order conspiracy. This was really big in 1999. People were all in on deep state, New World Order—that somehow the government had done this thing with the computers that were gonna crash it, take over. It was gonna be a totalitarian dictatorship starting January 1. You may not remember this, but this is what was in the news. I went back and reread all this stuff.

So your group is gonna sit down with your relative and have a conversation. How do you, using this chart here, have a conversation? How do you try to understand your relative and ask honest questions and share values and look for shibboleths and avoid red flags, and look for good things to honor, and try humble subversion? This is really hard. I tried to avoid anything that's going on right now. So not party like it's 1999—your groups. Would you go back to your groups and work through? How would you have a conversation with this person? New World Order, Jesus is probably coming back, the world's coming to an end. Go.

Group Reflection

So I wanted to know how'd your groups do talking to uncle—Uncle Fester? How did your groups do? Was this difficult?

Yes. Why was this difficult?

No easy answer. Right?

Was it because it was hard to imagine why it was difficult?

We were trying to think of clarifying questions and they ended up fairly insulting.

Good. I was doing like a little counseling session, which would not be helpful.

Fears. Let's go there. Yeah. I think it is hard where I wanna go.

Yeah. That may be right. It is hard to look at something in hindsight too that we know was not harmful or impactful, really, in many ways, and imagine the things that we're wrestling with now.

It was hard to grab our minds around it. It feels—yeah.

Also feels like we were preparing for the discussion, which automatically, I'll speak for myself, puts me on the offensive of, like, what are they gonna say back? How do I need to respond? Instead of, to your point, like, checking my heart at the beginning and be like, do I really just want to have a conversation with this person that lets them feel heard and go back to that.

I think too that recognizing it's not our job to convert them out of their position, that's God's job. We're just asked to walk with them a bit.

Yeah, I don't know if that makes sense, but yeah. That's good.

We only got a tiny bit into shibboleths, but that seems like a—how do you avoid talking about these little explosion type words and ideas?

I think it also depends too on what they were doing with their life in response to this belief. So I shared my experience as a teenager at this time, and most of the people that I knew were basically just in prepper mode, storing food and making sure they had water on hand, and that's sort of just like a mountain people response. So in that example, we couldn't really think of a way that those actions were harming others—that they weren't harmful. It was just a waste of that person's time and money. But so it sort of depends on how they're using that information and how it's affecting their response to other people.

Some common ground we found was that like to plan ahead. Like, there's stockpiling and freaking out, but then there's—yeah, I need to think about this and plan accordingly. I don't know what's gonna happen. So we kind of brushed up against that to try to find a place. Like, Proverbs talks about, you know—

Yeah. Right. Right. Right.

Well, let me pray for you. For those people on the front page, this is not a wrap it up with a bow class. I wish it was. I wish I gave you a formula. I could give you a formula. Obviously, the things that we're talking about entering into are really hard. And being people who build bridges and not walls is really hard. And it's one of my prayers for our church is that we are bridge building—not a bridge burning, not a wall building church—that we know how to love people who are hard to love and we disagree with each other even within our congregation. And we do so in a way that honors Christ, and lets the Lord be the Lord too.

So let's pray together.

Father, I pray for the names that are on the front side of those papers. Family and friends that we love dearly. We pray, Father, that you would teach us how to love, how to move toward people, how to rebuild relationships, to build bridges, to tear down walls by asking good questions, dealing with what's inside of us.

Lord, we pray that you would work through us for the good of your kingdom, and we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

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