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“Courage Under Fire”
John 16:16-33
A sermon preached by
the Rev. Douglas M. Donley
First Congregational
Church
When I
picked this scripture, and this sermon title a number of weeks ago, I was
assuming that we would be returning from a very difficult denominational
meeting and that we would feel attacked and would be reeling from it all. I
used past experiences and dire predictions of defeat as my basis for this. Oh me of little faith. Although there were difficult times, the
majority of the time, speakers and applauders seemed to favor unity over
conformity, inclusion over exclusion, diversity over homogeneity and freedom
over creeping creedalism. It was a good weekend to be an American
Baptist.
It’s good
also to be around the United Church of Christ, too. People say that July 4th
will be remembered as a day to celebrate freedom not only because of what
happened in 1776, but because of what happened at the UCC annual convention in
2005 where the UCC again led the way and passed a statement supporting same sex
marriage. Hooray.
For both of
our denominations, our “side” won this past weekend. And yet, there is still a gaping wound. Many will leave the ABC and the UCC over
these decisions. That may make us more
homogenous and more unified, but it also makes us a little less
challenged. It might make us more
judgmental of our opponents. As one of
the pastors quipped at a breakfast meeting at the ABC Biennial, “I have been
yelled at and told I am a sinner by a whole lot of people in serious need of a
hug, a beer and an exercise program.”
We need to
have courage under fire and compassion in triumph.
Today’s
scripture calls for courage when there is persecution or tribulation. It also calls for joy in the midst of
that. That is the challenge. And if it’s real joy and not simply an
accumulation of denial, then the joy can give us strength and hope and power
and vision to see the big picture instead of simply the insurmountable wall of
persecution.
Jesus said in today’s scripture, “In the world you will have
persecution/tribulation, but be of good cheer/have joy for I have overcome the
world.” Maybe this sermon ought to be
called “Joy in spite of the cost”
But even as
I wrote this sermon this past week, events in our world put their own new
perspective on this. The horrifying
bombings in
Hurricane
Dennis rains down devastation on
In the
world there is tribulation. It can feel
like hell. This is when we need the
vision of God in the midst of it in order to make sense of it all.
As a
Biblical people, we need to have a larger view of the world. A God’s-eye view, if you will. The war, the
hard economic times, the terrorist attacks, the hurricanes, the endless
legislative session, the Supreme Court choices are not the end of the story,
says Jesus. “In the world you will have
tribulation, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.” Be of good cheer. Have joy in spite of the evidence.
As far as I
can tell, there are two kinds of joy.
The first is a blind joy—that kind of Pollyanna-ish
pie in the sky la-di-dah air headed joy that ignores everything wrong with the
world and says that everything is wonderful all of the time. M Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled calls this cathexis. This is the early in-love feeling that is so
intoxicating at the beginning of a relationship. This is the thought that the love can move
mountains. Nothing is wrong with the
other person. Everything is coming up
roses for me and my guy or gal. This is
not real joy, because it has little substance.
It is often not able to handle tragedy or the difficulties when
something shatters the precious ivory tower of complacency.
The kind of
joy I am talking about is a wonderful joy which Biblical people know is a
result of God going before us and sustaining and making straight the paths in
the wilderness. It is the joy of
reaching the mountaintop, knowing that the journey, being 40 years in the
wilderness or loving someone because of the struggles that you have endured
together has made it all worthwhile. It
is the joy that comes as a result or in spite of the trials and tribulations of
this life. This is mature joy. This is Biblical joy. This is the joy that is available to all to
receive if we only believe that there is something greater than ourselves—that there
is a higher purpose for this world and this life, that terrorists do not have
the last word. That’s the kind of joy we
are looking for.
According to today’s scripture, Biblical joy has four steps.
1. Confusion, followed by
2. Tears which give way to
3. Faith which leaves the way open to
4. Grace. Grace is joy’s loving sister.
Confusion
“A little
while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while and you will see
me.” Said Jesus to his disciples in today’s scripture from
John’s Gospel.
The
disciples were confused. “We see you
now, why can’t we keep seeing you?”
Jesus was trying to teach them about the resurrection, but the
stiff-necked and dull-witted disciples—in spite of Jesus’ constant
reminders—did not understand what he was saying. Like us, they wanted everything to be all
right.
They wanted
their pain and persecution to stop.
They wanted
joy and they wanted it now.
They wanted
to know what Jesus meant when he said, “a little while and you will no longer
see me and again a little while and you will see me.”
At the
Biennial, I saw a good friend whose wedding I performed a dozen years ago. While he and his fiancé were dating they were
geographically challenged. They lived on
opposite coasts and knew full well what waiting was all about. Each time they saw each other it was great
and then really hard, because they knew they would be separated again. The pain of the separation made the joy they shared
on visits even more intense. “A little
while and you will no longer see me, and again a little while and you will see
me.” But the waiting can be
excruciating. Not knowing how long to
wait causes confusion. Many of us are
still waiting in fear and trepidation of our relationships or our economic
conditions. We are waiting for the war
to end. We are waiting as poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti said…
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am seriously waiting
for Billy Graham and Elvis Presley
to exchange roles seriously
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder…”
Terrorism
brings chaos. What do the rainbow of
terror alerts mean? Who will be
next? It is a confusing time. And yet we know that creation happens out of
the teeming mass of chaos. In the midst
of it, we need a rudder, a guide to lead us through it.
Jesus said to us on the way to joy,
“in the world, you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer (have joy) for I
have overcome the world.”
This is the first step in joy, confusion. It is confusion because you don’t know, in your waiting, what will happen next. From the Bible we know what happens next. Tears happen next on the road to joy.
Tears
Many of us
have cried a lover’s tears at the end of a relationship, in the wake of
disaster, at the defeat at the hands of one more powerful than ourselves. Jesus said in verse 20, “very truly I tell
you, you will weep and mourn but the world will rejoice; you will have pain,
but your pain will turn to joy.” We have
seen people dancing in the streets at the bombing of
But instead of retribution, John
gives us the imagery of childbirth. “When a woman is in labor, she has pain,
because her hour has come. But when her
child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having
brought a human being into the world.”
Now, I bet
full well that the women in this room who have given birth remember distinctly
the anguish. We count off the labor
hours. We remind our children of the
hours of their labor from time to time. When
Kim was pregnant with Amanda she was in labor for 29 hours. I wish the doctor had given me an epidural
having had to watch her go through so much pain. But at the end, there was and usually is joy
when we think of both of our kids. The
joy is greater because of the pain. We
are stronger because of our tears. Our
joy has depth because we have lived through the trauma.
Tears and
weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth will happen on the road to joy. For the disciples, Jesus said that they would
weep and mourn while the rest of the world rejoiced. The world rejoices when trouble-makers are
silenced. People don’t want to hear
about reality, we want to hear about just the good things.
Let’s not
call it a recession, let’s cal it a slight downturn.
Let’s not
call them taxes, let’s call them fees.
Let’s not
call it the MX missile, let’s call it the peacekeeper.
Let’s not
call them mercenaries, let’s call them freedom fighters.
Let’s not
call it free-range pollution, lets it the Clean Air Act.
Let’s not
call it a lie, let’s call it misinformation.
This world is full of Orwellian doublespeak which creates an illusion of prosperity which leads too many of us to complacency.
For those
who were Jesus’ followers, once Jesus was killed, while much of the world
rejoiced, they were persecuted. They
were hunted down, and many would suffer the same fate as Jesus. There they were, huddled in the hovels and
houses of the faithful, licking their wounds holding on for dear life, fully
aware that the world was crushing down upon them. To feel joy in the midst of this is truly
subversive. It means that we do not
accept the reality out there. We know
that our redeemer liveth. We are sure that neither powers nor
principalities, nor life nor death nor things seen nor things unseen can
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Jesus told
the people to hold fast. You will have
joy, but your weeping and mourning are a necessary step to getting there.
We are
called to stand in opposition to much of the world. To follow Jesus, we need to stick our necks
our on behalf of justice and love. We
need to have courage under fire. It
means we will be laughed at, we will be persecuted, we may even seem foolish
and that may cause us to weep and mourn.
But we never do any of this alone.
When we weep and mourn God is on our side weeping along with us. Gandhi says that in the midst of a campaign
for justice, “First they laugh at you.
Then they ridicule you. Then they
fight against you. Then you win.”
Jesus teaches us that tears wash us clean and make us ready for the next step to joy. That next step is faith.
Faith
“So you
have pain now,” Jesus said, “But I will see you again and your hearts will
rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
Jesus said,
“I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your
joy from you.”
Jesus was
telling them to believe in the resurrection.
That he would come back and that they would see him again.
Have faith that there is something
greater than us.
Have faith that we are not alone in
this world that there are others gathered in churches or in homeless shelters
or in homes who believe and work for justice knowing that in the world there is
tribulation, but we follow one who has overcome the world.
Have faith that the vast majority
of the world do not agree with the terrorists and we
seek another solution to our problems than simply a vengeance-based solution.
The one who
has overcome the world has established a church in which God’s purposes might
be worked out. Faithful Christians grant
us the blessed assurance that the rulers and soothsayers of this world do not
have the final say, but that people of faith will continue to press on even
through the confusion and tears to say and actually live “Thy kingdom come, thy
will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Samuel Butler once said, “You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.”
Grace
And
finally, once you have lived through the confusion, experienced the
exasperation and healing of tears, and have drunk deep from the fountain of
faith with its ever-flowing streams of hope and love, you come to the final
step on the road to joy. That is what we
call grace.
The first three
steps, confusion, tears and faith, are steps which we take.
Grace is the step that God takes on
our behalf.
Grace is beyond us and yet within
us granting hope and life from the road ahead.
“On that
day you will ask nothing of me, “Jesus said in verse 23. “If you ask anything of God in my name, God
will give it to you. Until now you have
not asked for anything in my name. Ask
and you shall receive. So that your joy may be complete.”
Many people
misinterpret this statement to mean that all you have to do is just ask God and
it will be given to you--the “gimme” relationship
with God. That is not grace. That’s selfishness. It’s what Dietrich Bonhoeffer
called cheap grace.
Cheep grace
is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, and grace without Jesus
Christ, living and incarnate.
Grace comes
as an answer to confusion.
Grace comes as a comfort to the
bursting dam of tears.
Grace comes to prove a faith that
might be a bit shaky.
And it is this amazing grace which
saves us from ourselves and instills in us a sense of joy in spite of the
odds—in defiance of the difficulties of this life.
When you
leave church on Sundays, do you feel better able to face the world than when
you came?
Do you feel
that you have a bit more hope, a bit more power, a bit
more perspective with which to face this tribulation-laced world of ours?
Has your
burden been lightened by the knowledge that even through we have tribulation
and tragedy in the world, there is one who has gone before us who has overcome
the world?
If so, then
grace has captured a hold of you. This
is what we need on our way to joy.
Through all of our confusion, tears, and faith, the grace of God
captures and transforms us. The result,
shaky and tentative as it may be from time to time, is a mature joy.
It’s a joy that comes from courage
under fire.
It is a joy that sees the world
from God’s perspective.
It is a joy that undergirds our lives and grants us the hope and courage to
face the trials and tribulations ahead of us.
And it is a joy that reminds us
over and over again that we are not alone.
There are good American Baptist and
UCCers and people of faith across this country and
this world who believe like us and are convicted by
God like us.
These people know what we
know.
In the world we will have
tribulation. But be of good cheer, have
joy, for the one who leads us has overcome the world.
May we overcome and be overcome by
this awesome power which makes all things new.