Beyond Fear

Propers: The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 12), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Have no fear. Do not fear. Do not be afraid.

Three times in 16 verses, Jesus admonishes His disciples never to fear those who can but kill the body. There is One and only One who can kill both the body and soul, yet He lavishes His care and His attention upon even the smallest of sparrows. How much more, then, must He love and care for you—He who has counted every hair upon your head?

Fearlessness is an attribute of all the greatest of saints. Not naïveté, mind you. Not some Pollyannaish notion that bad things can never happen to good people. Christians historically have been quite clear-eyed when it comes to suffering and death. But we’ve also been boldly straightforward in our proclamation that death is not the end, that it has no hold upon us, that the grave has been conquered in Christ.

When you don’t fear death, you are free in ways that very few others ever are. And that’s really what salvation is. Salvation is liberation. Salvation sets us free: free from sin, free from slavery, free from the fear of death and of hell. That’s why we can speak of salvation as our present reality as well as our future promise. It is for us both a process and a fait accompli: we have been saved, we are being saved, and we shall be saved, all in Jesus Christ.

Jesus assures us that beneath the unstable and ever-shifting surface of this world, upon which we are tossed about by every wind and wave, there lies an infinite, depthless, unchanging Love who upholds us in every moment of our lives. Not only is God the deeper reality, He is the only true reality, the source and the ground of all being. And this God sees you, knows you, loves you better than you ever could. God is Goodness, Truth, and Beauty; Consciousness, Being, and Bliss. And you rest forever in His love, forever in His care. No-one can take you from Him.

Faith, recall, is nothing other than trust that God is good; trust that He keeps all of His promises; trust in the faithfulness of God. The more we trust in that, the more we trust in Him, the less we shall be shaken by the turmoil and vicissitudes of life. We shall calm the stormy waters. We shall walk upon the deep. We shall neither hunger nor thirst nor ever grow weary. If God indeed is for us, who can be against us?

And I know it’s not easy to hold to that truth, to hold to that core. We are beset in this world by insecurities, stresses, illnesses, losses, true and real suffering. But God is always with us; we are never alone, never ignored, never misunderstood in Him. And we have to work to believe it. We have to surrender every day, to die to ourselves and rise again in Jesus every day. We need Word and Sacrament, Confession and Absolution, Body and Blood and water and oil and all the grace of God.

Which is why we come here, of course. We gather together around the Word, around the promise, around the life of Jesus Christ alive in this community. We need His Spirit breathing within us; we need His Blood in our veins. For when we all are one in Christ, we then are one in God, joined to Him, resurrected in Him, beyond sin, beyond death, beyond the winds of change and chance. And having been given everything in Him, we then are sent back out—out to be Christ for a world still in need, out now to save every soul.

And that’s when things start to get tough, more so perhaps than before. Because when we are Christ for this world, when we together are Jesus bearing forth His salvation, then the world will treat us as it treated Jesus, as we once treated Jesus. And that means there will be a Cross. Not one that we have to seek out specifically, not one that we make for ourselves, but one which the world will lay down upon us, and nail us fast to its wood.

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth,” He says. “I come not to bring peace but a sword.” Jesus has just told us to be not afraid, over and over again. Now He warns us to expect division, destruction, and death: father against son, mother against daughter. Obviously the Prince of Peace would never justify violence. We often wished that He would, for things would be simpler that way: permission to kill off bad things with a sword. Zealotry has its appeal.

But that isn’t what Jesus is saying. His followers are not to bear the sword. We are to go out as Jesus did, to preach and teach and serve as Jesus did, loving our neighbors, crossing each boundary, and calling the lost to come home. We are to do so bravely, with eyes wide open, having already accepted the cost, the sacrifice of discipleship, which is none other than the vulnerability of love. Find what you love and let it kill you, they say. Well, God so loved the world.

This is the paradox of Christian discipleship, the reality of life upon Jesus’ Way. He recognizes our discouragement and promises to us His hope. He calls us out to something new and dangerous, sent to be sheep amidst the wolves. Yet He ever implores us to be not afraid, for we are not alone. And honestly, we’d be stupid not to be afraid, were God not with us. But He is! And because God is with us, because we have Him in Jesus Christ, nothing and no-one can claim us. Nothing can ever steal us from His loving and crucified hand.

Keep in mind the context of the Gospel reading. This is before His Passion, before the thorns, before the Cross and the Sepulcher. Jesus gives to His disciples all this promise in advance, so that when things get hard, their hope will be familiar. He is fortifying them, in other words, preparing them for the hardships ahead, for how the love of Christ will cost many if not most of them their relationships, their standing in society, and then their very lives.

Being a Christian could get you killed for those first three centuries or so. In many places around the world today, it still can. Christianity is the most persecuted religion on the planet. The blood of martyrs freely flows. We just tend to ignore all that, because in our society, in our narrative, Christians act as oppressors. We had a lot of political power, and it did not sit well in our hands.

Today we face a different sort of challenge. Christians in the West, and in these United States, are free to practice our faith without persecution, without martyrdom. It may be passé, it might be seen as gauche, but it’s not going to get us killed. This is in large part, however, because we have settled for generations for a milquetoast Christianity, a sort of respectable bourgeois default. Our love is rarely radical, our preaching status quo.

In the words of the theologian Walter Bruggemann: “The crisis in the US church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative;  it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian Baptism and settling for a common, generic US identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.”

We gave up on Jesus, in other words, ignoring the cost of discipleship, and settled instead for societal respectability. This is why Luther warned that complete toleration is total persecution. We became part of the establishment, and for the vast majority of Americans, the establishment no longer works. It hasn’t for decades. Instead of salvation setting us free, we’ve come to embrace our more comfortable chains.

So what then is the solution? Have no fear. Do not fear. Do not be afraid.

Our world is chaotic and shifting. Our world indeed is on fire, literally and figuratively. Pandemic, inflation, cyberattacks, wars and rumors of wars, literal Nazis on the streets—it would be funny were it not so insane. Everything’s falling apart. Have no fear. Do not fear. Do not be afraid. The only One who can destroy you is the One who loves you most, the same One who loves every sparrow. We would be stupid not to be afraid were God not with us. But, O my Christians, He is!

Do not fear death. Do not despair at the state of the world. Go out in faith as Jesus Christ, to do all the good that you can. You don’t need to seek out a cross; one will be provided for you—which is to say, there is need enough next door. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, rebuke the sinner, forgive the repentant, educate the ignorant, speak truth to power, and treat every single human being as neighbor and brother in Christ.

When we do all that, the world sees Him in us, because He is the One who is doing it, every single time. Be Christ for the world and be not afraid—not in order to earn our salvation, but because He is salvation itself. In Him we are fearless and free.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

 

 

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