|
Back to Sermon Archives
October 21, 2007 - 10 am
The Rev. John H. Emerson
Extreme Makeover – “And the
Greatest of These is…”
Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, 12, 13; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-18; Matthew
5:43-47
I would enjoy having a chat with the Apostle Paul about a number of things he
wrote, but I’ll probably have to wait until I make the transition to the next
life. One of the topics I’d like to discuss with him is the Corinthian “hymn of
love.”
I’d begin by saying, “Paul, your words in the Corinthian letter about the
pre-eminent power and energy of love are extraordinary! Your description of the
character of love is practical and down-to-earth. Your wisdom is as much needed
to guide our re-lationships now as in your day in that secular, cosmopolitan
city of Corinth. But, with all due respect, I’ve come to a different conclusion:
faith, hope, and love surely abide, but the greatest of these is courage!
In my life experience, Paul, I’ve concluded that it takes courage to be
faithful, hopeful, and loving otherwise I don’t think they will abide.
“Paul, my study of your life and ministry has led me to believe your own
practice of faith, hope, and love was forged on the anvil of courage. You were
courageous to risk a chronic health problem making those mission travels to
establish new churches. You showed courage defying local authorities and being
jailed for speaking your convictions. You displayed boldness facing angry mobs.
You exhibited bravery enduring a stormy voyage and shipwreck only to face the
judicial system of Rome and be placed under house arrest for the remainder of
your life. Luke, your physician and traveling com-panion, wrote in the sequel to
his gospel that through the entire experience of those travels you ‘took
courage’ to proclaim the Kingdom of God and taught ‘about the Lord Jesus Christ
with all boldness’ (Acts of the Apostles 28:15,30,31). Along the way, Paul, you
cared about people and nurtured the transformation of their lives through a
relation-ship with Christ Jesus with remarkable audacity.”
That’s how I would begin the conversation with Paul. I’m sure that at least by
this time he’d interrupt with comments of his own, and a genuine dialogue would
be under-way.
I don’t know about you, but in my life experience faith takes courage.
One reason is that I have learned that faith is not so much a catalog of
beliefs as it is a way of living. Faith is not a noun but a verb; not a
possession but a process that often includes many questions and doubts. The
Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that Abraham was obedient to the call to go
forth to a strange, new land, “not knowing where he was going” (11:8). Abraham
was faith-full to God’s call. His act of faith was not being sure where he was
going but going anyway. Faith is “a journey without maps” (Frederick
Buechner). We must also credit Sarah for bold faithfulness – following that man
on his crazy adven-ture and accepting her pregnancy at an advanced age! With one
foot in the grave and the other in the maternity ward, Sarah had a good laugh,
probably an hysterical laugh; but better to laugh than to cry! No wonder they
named their child Isaac, which is Hebrew for “laughter.”
Fifty-one years ago this month I answered God’s call to leave my academic pre-paration
for a career in pharmacy to enter the vocation of pastoral ministry. I remember
the angst with which I made that quantum leap, a leap of faith! I had absolutely
no idea where the journey would take me. The words of scripture spread out on my
path every step of the way: “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). I imagine each of you can recall
circumstances in your life when you journeyed without a map. In retrospect you
may be able to realize that God was with you and you were faith-full. Each day
when I read or hear the headline news, it takes bold faith to trust that God is
good and ultimately in charge of things; and that the “arc of the moral universe
is long, but it bends toward justice” (Martin Luther King, Jr.).
Courage, after all, is God’s grace under pressure.
I don’t know about you, but in my life experience it takes a generous amount of
courage to be hopeful in these chaotic times. It is nothing short of
audacious hope that motivates any of us to be good stewards of the environment
or fulfill the prophet’s vision of beating “swords into plowshears and spears
into pruning hooks” (Micah 4:3). The image here is of the harvest of food for
the hungry poor, who are sacrificed for our war-ring madness. Our hope is
intrepid when we dare to stand fast with Jesus’ call to be peace-makers, not
merely peace-wishers; as a bumper sticker reads “WWJB – Who would Jesus bomb?”
It takes courage for the baby-boomer generation to hope that their Social
Security and pension funding sources will be solvent in decades to come.
All of our hopes are like a bunch of balloons that cannot soar into the heavens
until we let go of the strings. That’s the first step in a series of deliberate
steps to make our hopes a reality. If you’ve read Maya Angelou’s childhood
memoirs, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” you have come face-to-face with
intrepid hope. She and her family endured so many threats, terror, and
indignities. There were burdensome happenings in Angelou’s life and life all
around her that led her to write, “The world had taken a deep breath and was
having doubts about continuing to revolve.” At a young age, Maya was sexually
assaulted. Though she remembered having sung that special hymn countless times
in her young life, finally one day those words of James Weldon Johnson came
alive for her as if hearing them for the first time:
“Stony the road we trod / Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope, unborn, had died.
Yet with a steady beat / Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed…
Lift every voice and sing / Till earth and heaven
ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty…”
That years later Maya Angelou could tell her story with incredible
self-reflective acumen, attests to the hope that lived strong within her.
Robert Kennedy was fond of saying, “Each time you stand up for an ideal, you
send forth a tiny ripple of hope.” Ultimately for the Christian, hope is in
Christ, as the Apostle Paul said so long ago. As we have the courage to live in
Christ and let Christ live in us, we stand fast for the ideals that send that
ripple of hope into the world.
And that courage, after all, is God’s grace under pressure.
I don’t know about you, but in my experience to love is a courageous decision
because the purest form of love is self-giving with no strings attached;
unconditional. Make no mistake: love is not primarily an emotion but an act of
will, a decision. No wonder it involves courage because, as someone once pointed
out, it is both powerful and powerless: powerful because only it can conquer the
stronghold of the human heart; powerless because it can do nothing except by the
consent of the other individual.
When I choose to receive God’s unconditional love, which I neither earn nor
deserve, courage is required of me to live worthy of that gift and do something
con-structive and beneficial with it. I can certainly love family and friends
generally with ease, as the Gospel of Matthew text indicates. So there is no
great virtue in what is expected in those relationships (5:46,47). But when
Jesus challenges me to love my enemies, which these days includes cold-blooded
terrorists and the road-rage guy who nearly runs me off the highway, I am faced
with the bold choice of retaliation or finding a method and means to bring
understanding and dignity to the situation, knowing that liking and loving are
not the same thing. Sometimes, it must be confessed, it takes courage to love
those who share one’s household when disagreements run rampant! It is in risky,
daring love that we meet God, for the biblical truth is unequivocal: “Whoever
does not love does not know God, for God is love” (First Letter of John 4:8).
And again, courage is God’s grace under pressure.
Oh yes, Paul, I embrace the virtues of faith, hope, and love as
abiding pillars of a solid foundation for a life of meaning and purpose. But I
humbly submit that the greatest of them all is courage. May God grant
each of us an abundance of grace under pressure so we shall live faith-fully,
hope-fully, and lovingly.
John H. Emerson
top of page
Archives
|
