How do we keep on caring?

On Thursday evening it was great to meet with visitors and deacons in our twice yearly Visitors meeting, welcoming Tricia as she joined the visiting scheme. Always good to welcome more. In leading our meeting Phil got us off to a good start with some reflections on Caretakers.

After a section on our services, the next section in our church directory is ‘serving the church’ – opposite the page listing the members of our Diaconate we have a page of those who keep the nuts and bolts of what we do together as a church. Among them is our Church Caretaker Bridget.

That’s a title Bridget is fiercely proud of. Unless you are in the church very, very early on a Saturday morning, or at unexpected other times during the week you won’t see Bridget. But we all know that she’s been here. The floors in the back of the church always shine.

Caretakers are very easy to take for granted. But very important for all that we do. In a sense, Phil went on to suggest, that we all ‘care-takers’. The word ‘caretaker’ doesn’t crop up in the BIible, but there are many people who take care of others. The Good Samaritan, those friends with the paralysed man … so many are people who take care.

That’s the task we have. It is just what you do. It’s what we are about. And we share that with many, many people. And yet, taking care of people, giving time to people, simple acts of kindness, graciousness, care … are things we cannot take for granted. Because sometimes they are not there.

Last week I posed the question … why care? What is it that motivates us in our care? There are all sorts of ways of responding to that question. There is something in our basic humanity that makes us care. It goes right to the heart of our Christian faith as well.

I was drawn to the story of Paul as it unfolds in Acts and the moment when he heard the news of a famine situation over in Jerusalem when he was more than 1000 miles away in Macedonia, how he was prompted to organise a collection and take it at great personal risk to himself back to Jerusalem.

Fascinating to re-construct the story of Paul in Acts but then put alongside that the letters – and you see the thinking behind what it was Paul did. And we looked at the thinking Paul has on giving.

Why Care? It’s not a matter of rules and regulations. It is not that we love and work hard at caring in order to please God – it is a response to the love that God has first shown us. Look to the love of Christ – and in response to that love is a longing to share that love with others, to make a difference for good. Each is to do that as they are able, from those who have to those who are in need – a principle of sharing that love that God pours on us.

How do you keep that kind of care going?

How do you keep at it?

How do you keep going in care?

The first thing we do in our church visitors meeting is to think of the people who make up the church family – we work through the visiting districts and think of the people who make up the church family. We have in our church family now 38 people who are over 80, not a few of whom are still very active in visiting in caring in the church family. How do you keep going? How do you stick at it?

The last part of our evening each time we focus on one area of pastoral care to strengthen our understanding of what it is we are about in caring. It was great this time that Kate who is on our steering group for the pastoral care scheme, was able to step in and share some insights in her particular area of expertise as now a consultant working with the NHS in Hereford drug and substance abuse. It was great to share Kate’s insights – help in the littlest of ways is so valuable, every tiny success to be celebrated. Thought-provoking when asked are there addictive personalities, no, was Kate’s response – not so much addictive personalities as addictive substances. Start from an acceptance of people – non-judgemental – that’s where Jesus starts accepting us as we are and working with us from there. Good to be able to refer people on. All sorts of agencies. And among them the ones with a 12-step programme. Not for everyone but helpful to many. We host two groups that follow that 12-step programme that originated with Alcoholics Anonymous – and it was great when they arrived in the church to have Kate’s wisdom in guiding us in the way we should be welcoming of those groups.

It begins by acknowledging the need of help and then moves on to seek a strength and a power from outside ourselves.

That’s an element of that programme I find fascinating. It was moving to be invited to sit in on one of their sessions and to see how seriously they took that turning to a strength from outside ourselves.

But that’s not just something for that situation alone

I think it is an insight for all of us that can be helpful. How often do people in dire circumstances speak of finding a strength they did not think they had.

I think it is a fascinating insight that Paul has in other letters of his that he wrote.

Early on in his ministry, during the very first missionary journey he took he wrote a letter to the Galatians. It’s all about freedom and the way faith, getting to know Christ and all he stands for is not a burden, but it’s a real sense of freedom. But it’s not the freedom that can do what you like regardless of the cost to others, it’s a freedom that honours others and enriches all.

Paul did not want to think of the Christian way of life as a set of rules that places a burden on you. But at the same time he was one for lists. And towards the end of his letter he comes up with a list of those things that go to the heart of the Christian way of life, of Christian values. That underpin the kind of caring that is so important.

I think his list says it all – and makes you think. There are nine things, Paul suggests that it takes if we are to be caring, the kind of people who will make a difference. It starts with love, that kind of selfless concern for others that’s the be all and end all. It’s not a burden. It’s a joy. Not a grudging caring, one that enjoys caring. It’s a caring that has about it a tranquillity, a serenity, a peace. To be caring calls for patience, kindness, generosity. You need to stick at it – faithfulness and commitment are important. You need a gentleness – and an ability to control your own reactions – a self-control.

Think of any kind of caring commitment we need to have and those are the kind of things that we need.

How can we muster them. That’s the insight that to me is so precious from Paul. It is not something we can generate from within ourselves. Important though it is to have the kind of training and deepening of understanding that Kate shared with us on Thursday, it’s not something you can work up. Paul regards these nine things as the fruit of the Spirit.

Our Christian faith directs us to the God of creation who is as close to us as can be. Our faith finds its focus in Jesus Christ who opens up for us a way of life to follow and gives us that sense that God is a forgiving God always there to enable us to start over again. But then God gives us a strength from beyond ourselves – a spirit. Yes, do the training. Yes learn about caring. Yes, develop these virtues. But then rest in God and recognise there is a strength of God working in you and let that Spirit work with you.

Let’s hear what Paul had to say about the fruit of the Spirit.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.

I notice that the fruit of the Spirit is one of those collective nouns. Sometimes people talk of the fruits of the Spirit. No. This is the fruit of the Spirit – it is this range of things the Spriit produces in each one of us. You cannot pick and mix and choose which of these fruits you want – for this is the fruit of God’s working in us – the whole range.

All of us as we rest in God’s spirit need to cultivate the whole range of this fruit.

But we are at the same time individual. Each of us is different. And we need to rejoice in that rich diversity that God has given us. So it is much later in the third of those journeys that Paul enters into correspondence with the church in Corinth. There he talks of the rich variety of different things people do – take a church family and we all have different gifts.

The very word Paul uses for gifts is an interesting one – it has a play on words that is lost in translation.

The Greek word he uses for grace –that wonderful free gift of God’s love is charis.

Think of grace as the free gift of God’s love that is given to us.

You can add a suffix, two letters to the end of the word ‘grace’ and that signifies what grace works as it is at work deep wihin our hearts. So Charis becomes ‘charis-ma’

But that’s difficult to translate into English. It becomes just the ordinary –gifts’ or ‘spiritual gifts’.

But it is the simple idea of the grace of God working it’s way through us and out in the things that we do.

And that happens differently in each one of us. For there is this wonderfully rich variety of ways that grace works its way out of us in that rich variety of gifts.

He lists quite a number – other lists are given.

1 Cortinhains 12

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
One Body with Many Members
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Each of us has particular gifts that we are to use … but we are to recognise that these too are gifts that come from God – which then we can develop and enrich – and use for the common good.

The fruit of the Spirit is something for all of us – these are the qualities we need, this is what it takes to live a life of caring for one another, to be care-takers. But it’s not what we generate, it’s what God’s spirit and strength produces in us.

Then let’s recognise we are all different – recognise that again the gifts we have don’t come from our own making, but are the gifts of God – and they are to be honed, developed, built up, and then used for the common good.

Hoe do you make it as a care-taker? How do you keep going? Draw on that strength that comes from beyond ourselves build up those gifts the spirit has given and produce from deep within the fruit of the Spirit in that love, joy peace and patience, that kindness, generosity, faithfulness and gentleness, that self-control that can make all the difference.