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Discernment Is Better Than Keeping Your Guard

Sermon
Proper 24 | Ordinary Time 29 - A
Matthew 22:15-22
Joseph M. Freeman
Where Gratitude Abounds
Gospel Sermons For Sundays After Pentecost (Last Third)
Over the course of one's life, one knows those persons/groups who think the worst of you and who aren't the least bit interested in changing their opinion. In my life, as I cross paths with such persons, I automatically put up my guard -- high! -- and I match their low regard for me with an equally low regard for them. However, that high-guardedness, attitudinally and dispositionally, bars one from meaningful conversation and ensures only perfunctory exchanges. We leave each other's company all the more grounded in our limited perception of one another.
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