Monday, May 20, 2019

How Do You Find Courage on Even the Scariest of Days? Here's How

Do you ever get tired of listening to the news?   It’s important.  I know.  I still try to keep up.  But between school shootings and conflicts in Washington, I need a break.   And do you know what helps me?  Podcasts     

I’ve gotten old enough that it takes me a while to get with these new ways of listening like podcasts.   But I gotta say.  I love them.   I get leadership tips, preaching insights, even some theological education.  But this week I got hit by a podcast that I still haven’t really fully recovered from.

I heard about it one of those days I was listening to the news.  These two reporters had solved a 50-year-old mystery, the murder of the pastor Jim Reeb in Selma during the height of the Civil Rights movement.  I love mysteries.  I read one or two a month even.   So, I thought.   This could be pretty cool.

But then I listened to the first episode.  I didn’t know much about Jim Reeb.  Now I know a lot.   He started out as a Presbyterian pastor then switched to the Unitarians.  But I don’t hold that against him.  And when police beat civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettis bridge, the call went out for clergy to come to Selma to stand with the marchers.  And Reeb went, leaving behind his wife and four kids.  But he wasn’t interested in doing anything crazy.  The night he died all he had done was go out to eat.  But as he walked down the block after dinner with two other pastors, four men attacked them.  One of them took what looked like a pipe and slammed against it against Reeb’s head.    Two days later, he died in a Birmingham hospital because the white hospital in Selma had refused to help. 
I heard that story, including interviews with the two other pastors attacked that night.  And I wondered.  Would I have gone?  Would I have had the courage to risk that?   I’d like to think I would but who knows?   And as I thought about that, I came across this quote from Gary Haugen, who along with his co-workers risk their lives to stop slavery and human trafficking around the world.  Haugen wrote.  There are two things that are always the will of God and almost always dangerous: telling the truth and loving needy people.  I realized.   You don’t need to go to Selma in the sixties to do those things.  And those things can be risky.  Heck, just living your life well takes courage. The great saint, Teresa of Avila, put it well. “To have courage for whatever comes in life, everything lies in that.” 

And let’s be honest, lots of things come in life.  Three months ago, a 53-year-old mom, my church's beloved bookkeeper, Nathalia, was dealing with back pain.  That pain turned out to be cancer, cancer that took her life just this week.   In life, lots of things come at you.  Every day, you have moments that require courage, sometimes a lot of courage.  How do you find that courage to face what comes, to do what is right especially when that is hard?  In these words, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.  


Hopefully you’ll never need the courage to face wild animals like Paul talks about.  But you don’t need to face wild animals to need courage.  Life can hit you with pretty scary things without anything wild entering the picture at all.   Heck, just every-day life gives you times that call for courage.  But when those times hit, does your courage come?  Too often, in those moments, fear takes hold.   We hold back.   We hesitate.   We don’t enter the danger, even when we know we need to. 

How do you find the courage to confront what you need to confront, do what you need to do, live the life you’re meant to live?  In these words, God tells you.  You can find that courage because Jesus’ resurrection doesn’t just change things when you die.   It changes everything right now.

After all, you don’t only experience death when you die, do you?  Every day, death finds a way to hit you.   Dreams die. People you love pass away. Relationships disappear.  The preacher, Eugene Peterson put it well.  “…dead ends, rejections, bewilderments, snubs, abandonments, unanswered questions, wrong turns –…each in turn a shadow of the final death.  We die ten thousand deaths before we” [die].

When I was about eight years old, I had decided I was going to be an astronaut.  But when I told, Hal Turner, one of my friends, he looked at me and simply said.  “You can’t be an astronaut.  You wear glasses.  Astronauts can’t wear glasses.”   I protested, but I had a sinking feeling he was right.   That day,my dream began to die.  And almost fifty years later, I still remember how painful that felt. (By the way that rule has changed, and withcontacts, you can go to space, so take that, Hal Turner!) 

And as you grow older, those little deaths keep happening.   Two years ago, I was going into Walgreens with my three- year-old son, Patrick, to pick up some photos.  As we waited for the cashier to locate them, she turned to Patrick and smiled.  “Hey, little guy, spending a way with your grandpa, aren’t you?”  Let me tell you that was a little death.  But do you know, in that moment, I didn’t have the courage to correct her either.   I said it was because I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.   But that wasn’t it.   I didn’t want to deal with my discomfort at correcting her, a correction that might have prevented her from making that assumption again.

In fact, looking back at that eight-year-old moment when my astronaut dream died, I can’t help but wonder.  Why did I let Hal Turner derail that dream?  Could I have thought?  Well, if that rule exists, then I’ll simply need to change the rule.  But even if I had hope that the rule could be changed, it still would have been a pretty human hope. 

Life brings you far deeper deaths than the demise of my astronaut dream, deaths that can seem impossible to come back from.   And that’s where the resurrection changes everything.  If Jesus had simply died, a good man brutally executed on a cross, where’s the change in that?   Good people get brutally and unjustly killed all the time.  What makes Jesus different is Jesus came back.  Jesus defeated death.  And if Jesus can do that, then, anything, anything becomes possible.  That’s why Paul hammers home that point to this church he is writing to.   If in Jesus, God has defeated death, anything is possible.  If the ultimate death is defeated, no death you face now can defeat you either.   God can always make a way even where there seems to be no way.

And when you know that’s true, it gives you courage no matter what death you face.  Why?  You know death is never the last word, ever.    It’s why Paul can face wild animals in the coliseum.   He knows.   If the animals kill him, he’s still good.  And if they don’t, he gets more time to share the love of Jesus who has changed everything. 

Do you get what that means?   No failure exists that God cannot redeem.  No loss happens that God cannot work for good.  No wound cuts so deep that Jesus cannot heal.   It doesn’t mean death won’t happen. Jesus died.  But the resurrection tells you that whatever death it is, it is never the last word.  As a famous actor once said, “In a world where the dead have returned to life, the word “trouble” loses much of its meaning.”  And when you know that, it gives you courage.  It gives you courage to move past whatever death to the new life God has in store. 

This past week, I read the story of Montlure Camp, a Presbyterian camp in Arizona.  Seven years ago, a forest fire shut down their camp.  And since that fire seven years ago, the forest service has refused to let them back.  So, how do you have camp when you no longer even have a camp.  How do you do that for seven years with still no idea when you can return to your original land?   For Montlure, they found private ranches where they could do a few weeks of camp every summer.   But their number of campers kept declining, a decline that had begun years before the fire.   Then they realized.  Why are we trying to bring kids to camp?  We can bring the camp to them.  So, Montlure launched traveling day camps, helping churches do summer programs right on their church campuses.  And now camp attendance is increasing for the first time in 12 years.  Churches are having summer programs where before they had none.  And kids are hearing the news of God’s love that never would have before.   And none of it would have happened without that fire. 

Oh, and as for Jim Reeb, who died in Selma.  His death mobilized the nation’s leaders to adopt the Voting Rights Actof 1965.   He did not die in vain. Death comes, but in resurrection time, death never ever has the last word.  Resurrection does.

But moving towards this resurrection doesn’t simply happen.  It takes courage.  It takes risk.  It takes trying new things, thinking new ways.    It takes trusting that Jesus will make a new way and trusting him enough to take the risks so that way can happen.  In the church I serve, we, like Montlure Camp, face our own deaths, our own dead-ends, our own challenges.   In the face of that, we simply need to remember who we are.  We are children of the resurrection.   

 In your life, whatever deaths you face, whatever failures, whose burden you still carry, the resurrection is there for you.   God will make a way where there seems to be no way, if you just have the courage to trust.  


As DorothyThompson, the great journalist and preacher’s kid, the first journalist to get kicked out of Nazi Germany, said well.  Courage…..is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow. No matter what deaths you face, know that Jesus has conquered them all.   For Jesus has risen.  And death has lost its sting forever.   So, live in faith. Abound in hope.  And go forth with courage.  For the Risen One goes before you this day and always.  And before his love, not even death can stand. 

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