Fear Not

Psalm 51; Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 12:20-27
March 25, 2012
Last week we talked about the gospel, the good news that we are loved, the simple, fundamental proclamation that God loves us and that we belong to God.
I believe this is what Jeremiah was talking about when he said, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
The great good news is that every step of the way in our long journeys we belong to the God who loves us, the God who makes us alive, the God who raises us up!
That’s what I said last Sunday … and then I asked you what difference that makes.
This morning I want to tell you what difference it has made in my own life. I’ll not attempt to speak for Cheryl and the kids on this, but as for me, I am no paragon of virtue. As the psalmist said, “I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.” There are plenty of cracks in this jar of clay, and I can only hope that they let the light in sometimes.
But in spite of those cracks I have always trusted that baseline gospel message that has been written on my heart. God so loves the world, and somehow, regardless of my own brokenness, I am included in that promise, and that has made all the difference.
“What difference?” one might well ask. Simply this: trusting that I am somehow included in the promise to the beloved has allowed me to live at least a bit more fearlessly, to make choices that may not align with the values of the broader culture because trusting that promise has freed me – not all the time, to be sure, but at critical moments – freed me from paralyzing fear.
That liberation is essential because God is not finished with me yet. If the journey was done, if God was through with me, I would never again face any fearful moments or decisions. But that’s not how this life works: we all face times of decision, times of crisis, times of fear, sometimes all of the time.
An early one for us came when, as the old song says, I “left a good job in the city …” back in the mid 90s, and we cut our family income roughly in half in order that we might live more faithfully into the often fearful calling to be parents of young children – a vocation which, at that moment, seemed more likely to be lived well in Lexington, Kentucky, than in Chicago, Illinois.
Before we’d been in Kentucky even six months, I discerned quite clearly another calling that I really thought I’d buried under years of denial and neglect, having run, like Jonah, far from Nineveh. So, having enjoyed so much the liberation from half our income, we decided to try it again. We did, for the second time in as many years, cut our income roughly in half so I could go to seminary.
There is not much in American life that runs more counter to the prevailing cultural values than that, but we made the decision as a couple trusting, simply, that God loves us, makes us alive, raises us up and would be with us all along the way.
We did not know that any of this was right. We did not know how any of it would turn out. I listened for, longed for, prayed for the kind of lightening-bolt-from-the-sky clarity that would make the next step, the next turn, the next decision utterly clear, but I never heard a voice from heaven. Instead, in hundreds of little things – a supportive word from a trusted friend, an unexpected opportunity to do meaningful work, a prophetic word from a pulpit – in hundreds of little things way became clear.
By the end of the 90s we were in Pittsburgh, struggling in a place where we never felt remotely at home, because sometimes even what seems clear and faithful turns out muddled and painful.
At that point the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was living through the earliest efforts to change or repeal G-6.0106b – the provision voted into the Book of Order in 1997 requiring candidates for ordination to “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.”
We took a family vacation in the summer of 2000 to the Gulf Coast of Florida, a destination I pushed primarily because I wanted to drive through my birth state of Alabama. We could take the kids to the space center in Huntsville – which they would love – and to the Civil Rights historical sites in Birmingham and Montgomery – which I would love.
Standing at the base of the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon, we marveled at what human beings can imagine and accomplish.
Standing in Martin Luther King’s first pulpit in the small sanctuary of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, we marveled at the same thing. Looking out at our children from that pulpit I came to some clarity. “What would I say,” I wondered, “when 20 years down the road my children asked me what I did during the great civil rights struggle of my day?”
I returned to Pittsburgh – among the most conservative Presbyteries in the country – resolved to speak out on an amendment before the denomination that year that would have prevented any church officer from participating in any way in any service that blessed a same-gender union, and would have prevented sessions from allowing church property to be used for such services. The General Assembly had approved the amendment while we were on vacation.
Prior to Pittsburgh Presbytery voting on it in January, 2001, I preached a sermon insisting that same-gender marriage was a civil right that Dr. King would have insisted upon. Two weeks later I was asked to resign.
I don’t recount this personal history to claim any particular vision, any particular courage, certainly not any particular rectitude. If anyone has such a claim to make in this story, it’s Cheryl, who lovingly supported me through all of it, often against her own self-interest.
No. All I’ll claim in any of it is this: I really do believe that God loves us, God brings us to life, God raises us up, God is with us. And that has made all the difference. That simple truth has freed me from the shackles of my own limited vision, my own narrow self-interest, my own abiding fear.
Some years ago I was talking with someone about a church-related plan that was unfolding with painful deliberateness, much too slowly for this person, and I said, trying to be reassuring, “it will work out in the long run.”
The person responded, “in the long run we’ll all be dead.”
It was said lightly and I responded in kind, but I should have said, “No, in the long run we will all live, and we’ll live lives free from the fearfulness that binds us in this life.”
You see, at the heart of the gospel is this astounding claim: death is not what defines us. Rising up in the face of death is what defines us! Resurrection is real!
The great thing about living faithfully here and now is that you taste the liberation of resurrection life. Faithful life is not life without pain or suffering, it is life without fear and such life is worth savoring.
That’s what Jesus meant when he cautioned his followers about clinging too much to this life. “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
That messages runs counter not only to the culture, but, indeed, to our very DNA. We are programmed to cling to this life. Such clinging is the logic of survival. Take a deep breath. Now hold it … for about three minutes!
In an address to the NextChurch conference last month in Dallas, theologian Stacy Johnson, citing Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, suggested that there are two ways of living as Christians: “We can live as those who are perishing or those who are being saved. Mainline religion,” he said, “faces a tsunami of change that may make us feel that we are perishing.”
You know what? It’s not just mainline religion that faces waves of change. Each and every one of us confronts change on an almost unimaginable scale almost every day.
How many of y’all remember Netscape? How many of you remember the first time you encountered the letters “www” as meaningful? The web, as we know it, is younger than our first child, who took his first legal drink last month. The job that he hopes to have this summer did not exist when he was born.
The waves of change that we try our best to stay ahead of or on top of can certainly make us feel like we are perishing.
The goal of the logic of survival in this, and any, context is to live for as long as possible, and surely longer than average.
As Johnson told the folks in Texas, “We’ll say or do almost anything to achieve that goal. Yet we know that Jesus of Nazareth embodied a different logic – the logic of the cross. Jesus … lived under Roman domination and occupation but Jesus’ message was … not to give in to the reign of the Romans but to trust in a different reign: the reign of God.”
To trust in a different reign means letting go. For the church it means letting go of ancient orthodoxies in order to get back to deeper truth. For each of us along the way it means letting go of our longing for security in order to rest in the deeper security of the gospel.
God is not done with me yet. God is not done with this church yet. God is not done with you.
Letting go does not bring unending waves of joy – at least not in this life. But it does bring deep peace, true shalom: wholeness, healing, communion with one another and with the God who is not yet done with us. That’s what difference the gospel makes, and therefore it is good news worth giving your life to. Amen.