I Peter 3:8-18 "The Soft Gospel: Gentleness" Scott Hoezee

In his memoir Angela's Ashes Frank McCourt gives a detailed account of the confirmation class he and his friends were required to take at his church in order to take their First Communion. Their instructor was a glowering man who paced in front of the classroom with a stick. Here is a brief snippet of how a typical confirmation class would go:

"The teacher tells us that we are a disgrace to Ireland and her long sad history. He tells us we're hopeless, the worst class he ever had for First Communion but sure as God made little apples he'll make Catholics out of us, he'll beat the idler out of us and the Sanctifying Grace into us. Brendan Quigley raises his hand. Sir, he says, what's Sanctifying Grace? The master rolls his eyes to heaven. Never mind what Sanctifying Grace is, Quigley. That's none of your business. You're here to learn the catechism and do what you're told. You're not here to be asking questions. There are too many people wandering the world asking questions and that's what has us in the state we're in and if I find any boy in this class asking questions I won't be responsible for what happens. Do you hear me, Quigley? I do. I do what? I do, sir. [The master then warns us about the evils of the cinema and the devil's henchman in Hollywood.] Quigley raises his hand again. There are looks around the classroom and we wonder if it's suicide he's after. What's henchmen, sir? The master's face goes white and then red. His mouth tightens and opens and spit flies everywhere. He drags Quigley from his chair and snorts and stutters. He flogs Quigley across the shoulders, the bottom, the legs. I'm sorry, sir. The master mocks him. What are you sorry for? I'm sorry I asked the question. I'll never ask a question again, sir. The day you do, Quigley, will be the day you wish God would take you to his bosom. What will you wish, Quigley? That God will take me to his bosom, sir. Go back to your seat you poltroon, you thing from the dark corner of the bog. The master says that if he hears another question he will beat the boy until the blood spurts. What will I do boys? Flog the boy, sir. Till? Till the blood spurts, sir. Now, then McCourt, what is the Sixth Commandment? Thou shalt not kill, sir."

Here is a stunning, if not sickening, vignette of how absurd life gets when a religion of grace gets combined with coarse brutality. Only a fool could fail to perceive that such an education in the gospel undercuts that same gospel. Such an approach is profoundly un-Christ-like in no small measure because it is so desperately non-gentle. But although Mr. McCourt's story is obviously ludicrous, a similar combination of gospel zeal and ungentle tactics has happened throughout history and continues today with unsettling regularity.

In the last ten years Christian people have made headlines for their loud demonstrations, their fist-pumping condemnations of gays and abortionists. Christians have heckled the president, screamed in public rallies at those with whom they disagree, published false reports on this nation's leaders, and just generally have learned how to play the game of political hardball. It did not require a huge transition when the former leader of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, slid from that post to the position of a high-octane political strategist. It's called a "culture war," and all's fair in love and war. Such a battle is not gentle but when was the last time you heard of a gentle general or a soft soldier?

But perhaps just that indicates a problem. In the four previous sermons in this series we have noted how inter-dependent the fruit of the Spirit are. You need all of the fruit to have any one of them. The fruit of the Spirit do not come salad bar-style so that you can pick which ones you'd like, leaving the others behind. No, the fruit come on a single plate with a sheet of saran wrap stretched tautly overtop. This is a package deal: take the plate or just leave it but don't pretend you can work on patience without needing love or gentleness.

Gentleness must lie at the heart of how we live out the whole gospel. If you cannot present the gospel in a gentle way, it may very well turn out that in the end it is not the gospel you present. But what is gentleness? The Greek word is praütes which means gentleness in the sense of courtesy, respect, considerateness, meekness, flexibility, and humility. The gentle person is polite. The gentle person is able to stick with a conversation and be flexible enough really to listen to and try to understand where the other person is coming from. There is a mildness to the gentle person's speech. He's courteous.

The opposite of a gentle person would be the gruff, bony-finger-in-the-face person who keeps cutting other people off. This is the person who, as soon as he hears something with which he disagrees, jabs his hands into the air and spits out, "Oh, I've heard enough of this!" The non-gentle person is arrogant, defiant, a shouter more than a listener, a rigid conversation partner unwilling to let others have their say.

In the New Testament it is not just the Greek word which got borrowed but the entire virtue. In ancient Greece praütes was prized as a civic virtue. Gentleness was the mark of a good citizen. The philosophers of Athens realized that if life in the much-prized Greek polis, or city-state, was going to work, then gentleness would be needed as the grease lubricating the gears of communal life. No one agrees with everybody else's ideas. In a polis of differing viewpoints the person who ever and only insists on his own way, who is so inflexible as to foment constant ugly confrontations, would be like sand in the gears. Life could soon grind to a halt.

In the Christian context apostles like Peter put their own spin on gentleness. It's not that they sheered the word of what it meant to the Greeks but the apostles re-located the center of gentleness in Jesus. It is the gentleness of Jesus which sets the tone. Jesus was the gentle soul who attracted children, the gentle man with whom outcasts felt comfortable, the gentle shepherd who depicted himself as gathering up lost sheep in his arms.

Could Peter forget the shame he felt at having so disastrously let Jesus down through his denials? But could Peter forget the gentle way by which Jesus restored and forgave him that day on the beach shortly after Easter? Over fried fish and coffee Jesus gently looked into Peter's red-rimmed eyes and said, "Tend my sheep, feed my lambs." Small wonder that Peter advises his readers to tell the world the truth, to always be ready with an explanation of what Christian faith is all about, but to interact with the world only with "gentleness and respect." Because had Jesus treated Peter in any way other than a gentle way, Peter would not have been around to pen epistles to Jesus' lambs and sheep in the church.

Here we sense a curious thing. Whatever else gentleness means, it most certainly does not mean being spineless or empty of convictions. When we think of gentleness, we probably conjure up the image of a kitten or a lamb. Gentleness is a maternal trait, the way mommy nuzzled you to her cheek when you were little. Gentleness is softness, fluffiness. It is soothing words, a loving pat on the hand, a grandma in a plaid skirt with a cabbage patch doll-like face who greets her grandchildren with a smile so broad it squints her eyes even as she opens wide her arms to draw those dear little chicks into her bosom for a great big hug.

In short, we don't usually associate gentleness with strength or effectiveness. It seems all sweetness and light but no corporation is run on sweetness and light. Instead the world of competition and success is driven by the cigar-chomping corporate tycoon. CEOs can't be gentle, they need to be tough, gritty, savvy. Bill Gates is not going to keep Microsoft together by being gentle! (Then again, Mr. Gates did not succeed at hustling out the competition over the years by being gentle, either! You need to take the gloves off!)

No one wants a gentle general to lead an invasion like D-Day or to take on Saddam Hussein. The road to gentleness is the road you take when you are not really trying to accomplish anything. Everything else, though, requires strength, savvy, determination, and a mental toughness which is willing and able to mix it up, get dirty, play hard ball. And as we've noted, not a few Christians adopt just such power ploys as ways by which to reach the world. Gentleness is for baptisms and children's sermons but the real world requires putting on the full armor of God so we can fight, fight, fight and just maybe also win, win, win.

But that is a misapprehension of gentleness. Gentleness does not mean a lack of firm conviction but it means holding very firm convictions indeed. In fact, the truly gentle are so comfortable with and confident in their convictions that they can afford not to play rough in favor of letting the sheer power of their faith, and of the Holy Spirit who is the mover and shaker of that faith, to work in a way consistent with Christ. In this passage in verse 13 Peter urges his readers to be "eager to do what is good." The word "eager" in Greek is zelôó from which we get the word "zealot." We are holy zealots for what is good and true. We want people to know what's right and wrong, who Jesus is, what he did for this world, and what he expects of us if we are to get along in this creation in ways that glorify God.

We're deeply convicted people. We are not spineless. We do not aim at ineffectiveness. But lest we end up undermining our message of grace in a way similar to Frank McCourt's catechism teacher, we present the gospel gently. We can't force people to believe it. We can't bully them into faith. We cannot threaten with legal sanctions or physical harm in the name of the God who, in order to save us, sacrificed himself.

We have confidence, and the center of the word "confidence" is "fide," the Latin word for faith. We let God do his work in his own fashion. G.K. Chesterton once said that there are two kinds of people in this world: When trees are swaying madly in the wind, one group thinks that it is the invisible wind which is moving the trees whereas the other group thinks it is the movement of the trees that is creating the wind. In history people have been sensible enough to know that it is the invisible wind that moves the trees. But increasingly today people, including many Christian people, think the trees have to create the wind.

We think that unless we make a lot of noise, waving our arms around madly in the public square, blowing a lot of hot air into the faces of our opponents, the Spirit of God will not move. We've got to make something happen. But while none of us would deny that we are the instruments of the Spirit, we must trust the Spirit to use us in God's own gentle ways.

As someone recently wrote, whenever we act in brusque, in-your-face, harsh ways what we demonstrate is that we don't really trust the gospel. We don't trust that the gospel's message alone, as moved into people's hearts by the Holy Spirit, can get the job done. We read about turning the other cheek but we would rather be the ones inflicting the blows than getting slapped around. We read that the first shall be last and the last first, but we insist on winning because we cannot abide the thought of losing a debate. We read that we are to love our enemies but we don't like dealing with enemies and so we try to eliminate them. If we can't bully them into a conversion, then at least we'll legislate them into behaving. And if we cannot squirrel them away in any other manner, we'll simply ignore our enemies, look the other way, cut them off. It's easier to block enemies from our line of vision than doing the hard thing of loving those with whom we could not disagree more.

We don't trust the gospel. A gentle Lord Jesus Christ brought the gospel of grace to this world in the first place. So why would we think we can perpetuate that same gospel through intolerant, non-gentle ways?

We are deeply convicted people. We are zealots for the truth. Where necessary we will protest injustice, threats to life, the persecution of the church, racism, discrimination, and all that wounds the human spirit or harms the creation. Gentleness does not shut up our mouths! Gentleness does not bind our hands! Gentleness, like the fruit of patience we looked at two weeks ago, does not indicate a passive existence.

No, we are deeply engaged in this world. But gentleness sets the tone for that work. Along with the self-control we looked at last week, gentleness checks our tongues before we speak harsh words that inflame. Gentleness checks our hands before we make rude gestures. Gentleness understand how mired in sin people are and so does not allow us to carry placards which proclaim, "God Hates Fags" or "You Will Not Enter the Kingdom of God!"

Actor Robin Williams once said that he walked past a Christian protest populated by purple-faced screamers, one of whom did indeed carry a sign that said "You Will Not Enter the Kingdom of God." Williams concluded that if people like this were included in the kingdom, it didn't sound like the kind of place he'd care to be in anyway.

Had Jesus acted like that we would never have heard of the Samaritan woman at the well, Zacchaeus, any number of lepers, Mary Magdalene, or those children who clamored to sit on Jesus' lap. We would not have heard of them because they would never have dared get that close to Jesus--his non-gentle demeanor would have assured them from afar what they already suspected: they weren't good enough to be loved. Best just to turn away.

In a recent Christianity Today article Daniel Taylor wrote extensively and thoughtfully on the theme of tolerance. Taylor reminded us that truly tolerant people are not folks who have little or no convictions but precisely the ones who have lots of convictions. If you are some liberal person who finds nothing objectionable about couples who live together without being married, then you cannot really be tolerant of that behavior. It's just that you chalk it up as no big deal. That's not tolerance but rather apathy.

But people like us who have a great many firm convictions are the ones who have more to put up with. That means God has the most to tolerate in this wretched world and it further means that no human being who ever walked on this planet needed more tolerance than God's Son, Jesus. Yet despite the fact that Jesus saw what he surely regarded as intolerable examples of sin everywhere he looked, he did not respond to this with a steady stream of harsh judgments, cutting words, or brusque turnings-away from sinners.

Instead Jesus let his parables and his Holy Spirit and his commitment to the truth and the grace and forgiving mercy that leaked out of his every pore do the gospel work for him. But you would hardly call Jesus soft, ineffective, fluffy, or passive. Nor could you accuse Jesus of failing to live out his convictions. Instead, precisely because he operated from a position of strength, Jesus was able to be gentle.

If all of that sounds like a very difficult course to pursue, you're right! In this world there is so very much that properly drives us a little crazy with moral indignation. There is much to shock us, upset us, and offend our holy sensibilities. There is much we'd love to do and accomplish for the sake of the gospel.

But we worry that the quiet witness to which gentleness directs us will not be able to cut the mustard in such a mixed-up society as this one. We see the hurting, the lost, the messed up, and the sinful around us and we want to do something! But if we trust the gospel and the Lord Jesus at the center of that gospel, then we could hardly do better than to repeat the words of our Lord himself: "Come unto me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls." Just so and Amen.