Tuesday, June 12, 2012 at 8:27AM No Small Fruits
From Scott Hoezee
Years ago when doing a sermon series on The Fruit of the Spirit, I noted to my congregation how relatively pedestrian some of the spiritual fruit seem to be. Who might have guessed that when detailing the evidences of the Holy Spirit in a person's life the Apostle Paul would tumble to listing things like "kindness" or "gentleness"? To the minds of lots of people kindness is akin to being nice. But niceness seems more like something you'd run into in a book about "Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" than a post-Pentecost trait displayed by people who had been doused by no less than the Spirit of the Living God.
Yes, the Fruit of the Spirit include some big-ticket items the likes of which you might expect: love, patience, self-control, faithfulness. But the seemingly more commonplace virtues of gentleness and kindness (and goodness while we're at it) mingle in freely with those other fruit and there seems to be no ranking among them, either. Each is as important as the next. None can exist without the others.
It's wasy to think, though, that kindness and gentleness may be lower on the list of fruit than others. That is until you bring your thinking about the Fruit of the Spirit into contact with a venue in which kindness and gentleness are wholly absent. Because it is then that you realize that without the ability to be kind, to be gentle, to be NICE for heaven's sake, life devolves into gross ugliness in a big old hurry.
Reader Comments (5)
@Jason: I think the main upshot 0f my post was not so much on Chef Ramsay's insistence people do things right as the way the fellow team members treat one another. Maybe there's a trajectory there from Ramsay's insistence on quality and the teams' desires for the same. But within those teams, there are more ways to handle their disagreements and even their failures than the purple-faced, foul-mouthed screaming and cruel shredding of one another's souls that I have witnessed in the past.
I hear what you're saying, Jason. But as a writing teacher I am faced all the time with the challenge of telling the truth in love. I think it's possible to uphold high standards and still communicate respectfully with people. Tough, but possible. I bet Theresa would have something good to say at this point about non-violent communication! But Scott is right that violence sells on TV. Violence, drama, spectacle. So that's what we like to watch even if we don't want to live it. Back in middle school I made a nifty banner about the fruits of the Spirit. It was very colorful and tidy and cute. No that I'm older, though, I understand what Scott is saying: the fruits of the Spirit are matters of strenuous sanctification. Receiving them is a demanding proposition. In recent years I've come to believe that those first three--love, joy, and peace--are the hardest of all.
I am also reminded of a comment that I believe comes from C.S. Lewis: Christianity means far more than just being nice, but it does not mean less!
I guess I wonder if love, joy, and peace necessarily equate to "niceness". In my world being "nice" is an excuse to avoid real conversation - to avoid engaging the significant issues. I wonder if "niceness" itself can be a form of violence when we do not really see or hear the other, but for the sake of a false sense of "peace" we avoid taking the other, and the issues that arise from our encounter of the other, seriously. I don't want "nice" - I want authenticity... even if that means dropping the f-bomb a time or two.
Funny - I too am reminded of something written by C.S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity he has a section entitled "Nice People or New Men [and Women]." He makes the argument that God isn't concerned to make people nice... but to make them new.
In Book II of Spenser’s "Faerie Queene," Sir Guyon, the knight who (mostly) exemplifies the virtue of temperance, looses his horse; he is a pedestrian knight walking the slow path of the pedestrian virtue of temperance. Temperance might not be as F-ing entertaining as “Hell’s Kitchen,” but there sure is a heavenly goodness about it.