Proper 19 (September 11-17)
Texts: Luke 15:1-10;
Exodus 32:7-14
YouTube: https://youtu.be/pGBIUz6dkmI
Sermon Take-Home Notes
LEARNING ‘GENTLE ACTION’ IN
ANOTHER WEEK OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
I attended a Zoom conference yesterday afternoon on the topic of “gentle action.” In a week in which we witnessed another tragic assassination, I think you’ll agree with me that we need more gentle action in our culture right now.
What exactly is “gentle action”? Even after four hours yesterday, I’m not entirely sure. But, as with most other things in my life, I relate it to models in my life, people I look up to, especially Jesus, of course. There is a beloved passage, for example, where Jesus says of himself,
“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, 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. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matt 11:28-30)
Jesus describes himself as “gentle.” There is another important verse which uses the same Greek word (praus), but there it’s usually translated as “meek.” It’s one of Jesus’ beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek (praus), for they will inherit the earth.” I don’t know about you, but “meek” and “gentle” have quite different connotations, and I think I prefer “gentle”: “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.”
In English, the word gentle is often used almost ironically to describe someone who does not look or act meek, but they are nevertheless gentle. We use the phrase “gentle giant” of large, imposing men or women who otherwise have a gentle disposition. Again, when I think of people who I look up to these days, I think of Abraham Lincoln, a very tall man for his time. He is often described as having been a gentle giant. Sometimes, that phrase is used quite ironically of someone who was quite small in physical stature but a “giant” in history. One of my other heroes, Mahatma Gandhi, could thus be described as a gentle giant — one who helped change the course of history. Martin Luther King, Jr., too, following in Gandhi’s footsteps for living by what they called “nonviolent action.”
I’m not sure if “nonviolent action” and “gentle action” mean exactly the same thing, but I sense they are closely related. Campaigns of nonviolent action must consist of other smaller gentle actions. For an African-American to sit at an all-white lunch counter in the pre-Civil Rights South was a nonviolent action designed to provoke a response, usually angry ones. But it took great training and discipline to meet those angry responses with gentle, kind responses. There are many wonderful stories of such gentle responses to angry threats. For the ultimate aim of nonviolent action is to win your opponent as a friend and ally.
But let’s get back to Jesus as the progenitor of both gentle and nonviolent action. Yesterday, as we talked about gentle action for a number of hours, I thought first of the story in John 8 where the scribes and Pharisees bring a woman accused of adultery to Jesus. They ask him if it is lawful to stone her to death. Jesus begins his response in a very curious way. He quietly doodles with his finger in the dirt where he’s sitting. Is that an example of gentle action? To wait a few beats in a tense situation and doing something disarming to let some of the tension drain away? After things have been defused a bit, he looks up and says, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). I think this is a good example of gentle action.
But I also thought of today’s Gospel Reading as I was learning about gentle action. It begins with the scribes and Pharisees grumbling about Jesus welcoming sinners and even eating with them. In today’s political climate, Jesus might have been tempted to film a short TikTok video with a rant against the hypocrisy of those Pharisees and scribes. But instead of the many options of directly confronting them, Jesus begins to tell parables of celebrating lost items that have been found. A lost sheep, a lost coin.
We know very well the magnificent parable which follows (which we read during Lent), the story of the lost son who returns home to a forgiving, loving father. But this series of parables ends with the elder son refusing to join the party. He has never counted himself as lost and resents celebrating his brother who was lost but now is found. Luke 15 begins with the grumbling of the Pharisees and scribes and ends with the very similar grumbling of the elder son. Instead of directly confronting the Pharisees and scribes, Jesus has drawn them in with these amazing stories with the aim of someday turning them into allies. At least one well-known Pharisee will someday do so, Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle to the Gentiles.
What I’m suggesting here is that Jesus’ teaching in parables might be considered “gentle action.” Instead of direct confrontation, kindness and stories help draw us in, with the hope of reconciliation. We need a lot more of that sort of thing in our current political climate, don’t we? Telling stories that draw us in and create some openness to bringing us together? Last week, I featured one of the great storytellers of our time, the historical videographer Ken Burns. He is a formidable historian, but he intentionally has chosen the videography format because of the importance of stories as what I would consider to be gentle actions.
I’d like to close this morning with what I’d consider another category of gentle action: the use of humor to disarm tension and open up common ground. Like so much in our current culture, humor can also be used to mock and browbeat — decidedly not gentle action. When we were in smaller groups in our Zoom conference yesterday, one of the participants happened to be a sit-com writer in Brazil. He felt drawn to this conference because he considers what he’s trying to do as gentle action. He hopes to use humor as a way of drawing people into stories that are ultimately about forgiveness, about reconciliation.
So I want to leave you this morning with a cartoon version of this morning’s Parable of the Lost Sheep. It is from the drawing board of LGBTQ+ cartoonist David Heyward. The cartoon is in your Sermon Notes this morning. You can see the shepherd bringing the lost sheep, a rainbow-colored sheep, back to the fold of 99 white sheep. One of the sheep says to the shepherd, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Hold it right there! He wasn’t lost. We kicked him out!” In other words, he isn’t just a lost sheep. He’s the so-called scapegoat, the one driven out in order to maintain peace in the rest of the group.
Jesus has come to bring God’s reign into the world with the gentlest action in history, the one that changes history — by letting himself become the scapegoat, the Lamb of God who takes away our sin of basing peace on scapegoating. He tells a parable of a Good Shepherd who reverses the scapegoating logic by leaving the 99 in the wilderness, the place of the scapegoat, in order to go after the one who has been scapegoated. The economy of God’s must seek to include everyone. It will never work to seek peace on the basis of expelling someone or some group. It reverses our usual economy by building community precisely around those who we usually throw away. He himself will be the cornerstone which the builders rejected. The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Siblings in Christ, we need to follow in the ways of such gentle action. We live in a time of ranting against the perceived other which creates a climate of violence against the other — a climate of assassination, and, if we’re not careful, ultimately civil war. We need to follow Jesus in responses of kind, gentle actions, learning to tell stories and use humor to circumscribe our common humanity. For in the economy of God’s reign, no one is to be left out. Not one sheep.
Let us hold out hope for even the elder brothers among us who resist joining the party of God’s grace. After all, that elder sibling may sometimes be us. So, even when we are, he hosts this meal each and every Sunday with the gentle invitation that we might join the party of God’s whole family together, forgiven and reconciled. That is the hope in which we live and work and have our being. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, September 14, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/pGBIUz6dkmI
Sermon Take-Home Notes
