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September 6,
2009
Rev. Judith Bither
Fruit of the Spirit: Self-Control
As most of you know I moved to Reno the last week of June
from Manteca, CA. Not too long ago Manteca was a rural community with almond
trees and dairies. The last twenty-five years it grew from a town of 12,000 to a
suburb of 70,000. The almonds trees have been removed and huge housing tracts
put in with people commuting 75 miles west to the Bay Area.
As you can well imagine with such a radical change in the
population, Manteca went from being a small town where everyone knew everyone
else to place of strangers. This came to a boiling point in the summer of 2005.
The local newspaper ran this headline: Road Rage Comes to Manteca. One
man was so angry with another driver as they came off the highway and into town
that he chased him down and cut him off. He then beat in the first man’s car
window with a baseball bat. The bat was handy because the belligerent driver was
a little league coach!
The opposite of the fruit of self-control is abundant
everywhere: too often in our homes, our neighborhoods, on our streets and even
in our houses of worship.
Globally violence and terrorism have become the norm so
that we hardly notice any more. One more suicide bombing, one more wall on the
Gaza strip. When I preached on the fruit of gentleness I mentioned that
this is often paired with the fruit of self-control. This indeed seems to
be true. As I mentioned the first Sunday of this series we can also think of a
bookend on each end of the fruits holding them together: on one end is love,
on the other end is self-control.
Recall where we’ve been this summer: we began with love
and moved to joy, then peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness and we end with self-control. We remember that Paul wrote these
directions in his letter to the Church in Galatia. He was contrasting the Fruit
of the Spirit with the ways of the world in the 1st Century. Not much
has changed with human beings in 2000 years. Sure, a lot has changed
technologically, but basic human values and instincts are pretty much the same.
The author of the book Life on the Vine: Cultivating
the Fruit of the Spirit in Christian Community looked at the root meaning
translated as self-control and again came up with a word closer to what
Paul was suggesting. He contends that when we think of self-control we define
that as mind over matter or strength of will.
He describes well-trained athletes in this way. They discipline themselves to be
self-controlled in order to achieve mastery over a subject or task. He suggests
that a better word in English to explain this fruit of the Spirit might be
continence: the control of one’s actions and feelings. This suggests
restraint rather than training. Not the way we usually think of continence, but
I invite you to think of it in this way.
Many wisdom traditions recognize how easily human beings
become enslaved to their passions. Buddhism, for example, suggests that the
follower meditate on stamping out all unwanted desire. This method suggests
self-mastery, much as that achieved by athletes. Paul had something else in
mind. With each one of these fruits of the Spirit he was speaking about
cultivating a quality rather than eradicating a behavior.
I have relished the gardening images with this series and
the parables Jesus so often used. Everywhere I’ve lived, from the San Francisco
Bay area, to Alaska, Montana and Wyoming I’ve always enjoyed learning about the
local plants.
Each place has had its own challenges and rewards as I
have tried to grow a few veggies and bear a little fruit. It’s much the same
with the Fruit of the Spirit. Take, for example, pruning. One of my favorite
flowers is the rose. I was thrilled to see roses growing in the backyard of the
parsonage here.
I remember that my father also loved roses and had an
annual tradition of pruning the roses in the yard on New Year’s Day. On the
church grounds in Manteca they have a beautiful rose garden with a variety of at
least 30 plants. They are still tended every Friday by a retired man named Dale.
Dale is just on the edge of 90, but is there every week to tend the roses. He
taught me not to prune on New Year’s Day, but to wait until you just begin to
see a little swelling on what looks like dead wood. That swelling shows you when
and where to prune. The abundance and size of the roses every year are a
testament to the results of Dale’s pruning.
You see, it takes self-control to know when to
prune, where to prune and how much to prune away. The same is true
in life. Pruning cuts the worn out dead wood away, but it goes even further. It
cutes back something of what is alive and growing.
The pruner has to cut off suckers that will never produce
fruit, or in this example, roses. They are called that because they grow from
the bottom and suck away the nutrients needed for the plant to produce fruit.
You know, I need that sometimes in my own life. I can find myself growing in too
many directions, trying to do too many tasks. One of the lessons of Jesus and or
nature is that we need to be pruned occasionally.
Again, think of the example of a freshly pruned rose
bush. Roses are cut back so far they look as though they have been destroyed.
Yet when spring arrives there is new growth and beauty in the roses that bloom.
We also need to be pruned back in order to produce new growth and beauty.
Sometimes we seem to get the mistaken idea that the purpose of life is to take
over the garden! The purpose is to bear fruit. To bear fruit we can’t be
everything to everyone.
To prune something which is living hurts. It hurts to cut
back. But when we prune we thin out enough of the bulk so that air and light can
reach the center. In pruning, one shapes the tree because it’s growing out of
symmetry with what the trunk intends or can support.
So it is with our lives. Like a tree, if we don’t do a
little pruning, the wind might do it for us. The wind in this case might be
emotional burnout, a heart attack or another stress related illness. The
important art of pruning, however is to know what one is doing. One needs a
guide. If we cut back too radically, the plant will become stubby or even die.
We, too, can prune out activities that nourish us. We can cut off our very
roots. That’s why we need to cultivate the Fruit of the Spirit through prayer
and in Christian community. Worship, classes, fellowship and being in mission
together affirm our self-control in all matters of life.
Perhaps you remember a couple of Sundays ago I told the
story of trying to get plants to grow in large pots inside my former sanctuary.
When I pulled them up to plant another variety of plant, I just couldn’t bring
myself to throw them away. I remembered how my grandmother would break off a
cutting from almost any plant, put it in water to root and then plant it in her
garden. I thought, what could it hurt? They looked really dead, but there
may have been a spark of life left there.
So I put them in water under the patio cover in the
backyard and waited. When they started to leaf out I took the pruners and cut
away the dead wood. Eventually I planted them in my yard where they thrived and
eventually bloomed.
The Fruit of the Spirit is:
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Love
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Joy
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Peace
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Patience
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Kindness
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Goodness
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Faithfulness
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Gentleness
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Self-control.
May we continue to cultivate these gifts at First Church
Reno, never for our own sake, but for Jesus’ sake. Amen
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