In our scripture lesson today, Paul gives us his ”Ten Commandments of Christian Community”:

Love must be sincere—or as Eugene Peterson put it in his Message translation, “Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it.”
Hate what is evil, cling to what is good
Be devoted to one another in brotherly love
Honor one another above yourselves
Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord
Be joyful in hope
Be patient in affliction
Be faithful in prayer
Share with God’s people who are in need
Practice hospitality.

Our scripture passage today reminds me of the Nike athletic wear advertising campaign:  Just Do It.  In the first 8 verses of chapter 12, which we studied in June, Paul gives instructions on how Christians should live out their unique gifts in unique ways.  But now he shifts gears and offers some generalized instructions for everyone.  These are things every Christian should JUST DO.  Easy, right?  Not for me.  I got stuck on #1, loving from the center of who I am and not faking it.  How are we supposed to love someone when what is first and foremost on our minds is that we are angry with them, or we’ve have been hurt by them, or we disagree on important issues?  If you ask me, sometimes it is a pretty big accomplishment just to be polite, to be loving in a fake kind of way.  Love one another for real, all the time, no matter what?  These are not ten commandments that lend themselves to a simple slogan like, “Just Do It.”

But perhaps the genius behind Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign is that those simple words inspire people to do things that are not simple.  Nike launched their Just Do It campaign in 1988, and one of the first television spots created featured an 80 year old man named Walt Stack who runs 17 miles every day.  The ad showed Walt running across The Golden Gate bridge.  He said, “People ask me, ‘How do you keep your teeth from chattering in the wintertime?’”  After a little pause Walt says, “I leave them in my locker.”  So cute!  But inspiring, too.

The Just Do It campaign was incredibly successful for Nike, helping them more than double their market share in ten years.  The success of the campaign comes down to one word:  feelings.  Nike coupled a brief rational command, Just Do It, with stories of passion, joy, pride, and hope.  Embedded in every “Just Do It” message was a deeper message, designed to help people feel hopeful, confident, curious, or connected.

There don’t seem to be many emotions in our scripture lesson today. Paul gives us some very straightforward, rational instructions.  Finally, something out in this letter to the Romans that is right to the point!  But, it seems to me, something is missing.  We know Paul’s spiritual pathway is intellectual.  But in your experience, do you think it’s possible to love well, to keep all those ten commandments, by thinking we can, or by willing ourselves to?  Even Paul had to admit he wasn’t able to do the good he wanted to do, and found himself doing the bad things he didn’t want to do.  Something else is needed.

And I think that something else is the biblical practice called lament.  To get in touch with our own painful feelings.  Feelings?  Yup, feelings.  For some reason, feelings have gotten kind of a bad rap among Christians over the years.  But in the Bible, God expresses a wide range of emotions.  God shows anger, frustration, remorse, sadness, jealousy, as well as pride and joy.  As people created in God’s image, we are created to have feelings!  Emotions are an important part of what makes life so rich.  People like David, Job, Jeremiah, even Jesus, express a wide range of emotions in the scriptures.  Acknowledging and expressing our feelings is a truly spiritual act.  We cannot be in communion with God, or others, without being in touch with our feelings.  Our feelings are a pathway to God.

The problem is, feelings can be hard to talk about.  I like to group them into five broad categories:  mad, sad, glad, hurt, and scared.  The glad part we usually don’t have much trouble with.  But the mad, sad, hurt and scared—these are often more difficult feelings to name.  Their cousins, shame, guilt, jealousy, loneliness, are also hard.  Now you might be saying, so some feelings are hard to talk about, what’s the big deal?  No one wants to talk about feelings anyway.  But it is a big deal, because over time, unattended to feelings can block our ability to love God and others.  We will not be able to keep Paul’s Ten Commandments of Christian Community unless we are in communion with our own feelings.

Recently I watched a helpful video about feelings by Peter and Geri Scazzerro, a husband and wife team from New York City who started a ministry called Emotionally Healthy Discipleship.  They used the image of a cruet of oil and vinegar show how negative emotions like shame, fear, and anger block our ability to experience peace, joy, creativity, energy, and love.  When I pour the oil and vinegar into this cruet, the oil will naturally float to the top.  This oil has no cholesterol, but still, we know too much oil in our diets will clog our hearts.  That is true of our physical hearts as well as our spiritual hearts!  Even if we refuse to talk about them, difficult emotions like anger, sadness, stress, and shame will find a way to rise to the surface and influence our ability to live well.

This week Phil & I watched several hours of Olympic coverage.  I love it when athletes have their very best performance at the Olympics, and it’s always disappointing when, for a variety of reasons, things just don’t come together and the athlete does not perform as well as they’d hoped.  I am no expert in sports psychology, but I can easily see how that happens.  Difficult emotions like stress, pressure, anger and fear block our ability to do our very best work.  It was so sad to see Simone Biles pull out of competition.  But when I think about the possible difficult emotions she was wrestling with, whether it was the stress of being called GOAT (greatest of all time), unresolved anger about the sexual abuse within USA gymnastics, loneliness with not having family nearby, whatever it was, we can see how easily that could keep even an elite athlete from being able to perform at their best.  Simone Biles realized she simply could not “Just Do It”.  She needed to take time to attend to her emotions first.

In our scripture lesson today, Paul is giving us his Ten Commandments for Christian Community because he wants to see the church function at its best.  He wants the church to have the best possible witness, to perform if you will at a level that will attract the attention of unchurched people in the world.  But what he does not do is tell us that one of the key elements to being able to perform at our best is to pay attention to our feelings.  My guess is he doesn’t mention it because the practice of lament was an important, regular part of religious practice in his day.

But that is not true in our day.  Sometimes I worry that church is a place where we pressure people to put on their “Sunday best”, not just in terms of clothing but in terms of the smile on their face.  But Church should be a place where we can be honest about our feelings, where we can get support in naming the difficult ones, where we can learn to love from the center of who we are and not have to fake it.

Psalm 62:8 says, “Trust in God at all times, O people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.”  The key to loving from the center of ourselves and not faking it is being honest with God about how we are feeling.  When I read over Paul’s list in this passage, I know in the last year I have wanted to say, “But I don’t feel like it!” to almost every single one of these rules for living.  My guess is you’ve felt that way over the course of this past year, too.  Confusion, isolation, sadness, and stress have blocked our ability to experience positive feelings like peace, joy, love, creativity, and energy.

But what might happen if, every time we wanted to say, “I don’t feel like it, Lord!”, we saw that as an opportunity, as a spiritual pathway?  God speaks to us through the scriptures, but God also speaks to us through our feelings.  This is not to say whatever we feel we should just go and do whatever we feel like.  No, not at all.  But our feelings are a type of guidance system, a way to tune in and hear what is happening on our emotional inner world.  And when we stop and get quiet and tune in to our authentic self, we can be sure the Holy Spirit who dwells in us will meet us there.

For instance, let’s say there is a member of the community I am having trouble honoring because they have hurt me.  Maybe it’s a family member with opposing political views.  Or a neighbor with differing views on vaccination.  Or a fellow United Methodist who doesn’t share my desire for full inclusion in our denomination.  Conversation turned to debate turned to hurt feelings.  Have you been there?  Does God want us to ignore that problem, and pretend our hurt feelings don’t exist?  No!  Because there is no such thing as truly ignoring hard feelings.  They are still there, as much as I think I’ve buried them, and like the oil, they will rise to the surface eventually and block my joy.  A much better option would be to say, “Lord, how are you coming to me in these feelings of hurt and anger?  How are you coming to me in these feelings of fear and distrust?”  Tell God what is truly going on in you, be open to God’s presence coming to you through your emotions, and let God redeem those hard feelings so you can flourish.

I poured some oil and red wine vinegar into this measuring cup three days ago, just to test it out and see if indeed the oil rose to the surface.  As you can see, not only does the oil rise to the surface, it stays up there!  Negative emotions have a way of accumulating within us, and they block our ability to experience our more pleasurable emotions. These negative emotions do not go away on their own.  Nor are they benign.  They get expressed—in the form of addictions, or sarcasm, or apathy, or self-sabotaging behaviors.  We all want to be able to love well.  I’m sure in theory all of us are in complete agreement with Pauls’ Top Ten Commandments for Christian Community.  That is the kind of church culture we want.  But it won’t be accomplished by a “Just Do It” mindset.  Just like Nike’s advertising series, we will have to add an emotional component if we want to make progress.

This summer we have been talking about seven different spiritual pathways, and how different people connect in different ways to God.  But our emotions are a pathway to God that is important to and shared by every person.  Each of us must find one way, or a menu of ways, that helps us process our difficult emotions.

Let me give you two options to consider today.  Almost sixteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine said, “It is solved by walking.”  You might try taking a walk with God, talking to God on the way out and listening to God on the way home.

Another idea is to solve things by writing.  Set your timer for two minutes, and write down everything you can think of that is making you mad.  Hit repeat on your timer, and write down everything you can think of that is making you sad. Repeat this with the other emotions, mad, sad, glad, hurt, scared.  Ten minutes.  Write as if you are talking to God.  Ask God, “How are you coming to me in these feelings?” Whether by walking, or writing, or some other method, pour out your heart once or twice a week.  See if the practice of lament helps unclog your inner world, so you can more easily tap into the positive and pleasurable emotions below like love, joy, peace, energy, and creativity.

If the thought of talking to God about emotions like fear, sadness, anger, and shame scares you too much—just think about the Walt Stack, the 80 year old man who runs 17 miles every day.  In the winter, instead of worrying about his teeth chattering in the cold, he just leaves them in his locker!  Don’t be afraid to look for God in your difficult emotions.  Just Do It!  And then watch and see what God does with that.  Amen!