Sermons

“Abiding in Courage ”

Psalm 71:1-6; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – August 25, 2019

Fourth of four in the “Abiding in Christ” Series

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might be emboldened by the power of your Spirit, to abide faithfully in your Christ and bear fruit for the sake of your world.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

There are people who find it very comforting to hear that God has plan for their life, a plan that’s been in place since before they were born, even.  You yourself may find this comforting, in fact, and I’m not going to say it isn’t true.  But I think there are certain assumptions built into this idea that provide the comfort, and if you want to keep those assumptions intact, you probably shouldn’t read past verse 5 in the passage we just heard from Jeremiah.  “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you,” God says to Jeremiah.  And that sounds awesome, right?  God has had a plan for your life since before you were conceived. And that’s where we usually stop consulting scripture and just move forward with generalized assumptions, namely, God loves you and wants only good for you, so that plan must involve blessing and greatness and happy endings.

But if we were to read a little farther in Jeremiah, we would see that this isn’t really where God was going.  ‘Here’s what your job is going to be,’ God tells Jeremiah.  “See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” And I imagine Jeremiah was thinking, ‘Oh cool.  That sounds awesome.  Everybody is going to love it when I do that.’  And the rest of us may be thinking that it’s best to leave God having plans for lives to the professional prophets, because those plans sound a little hairy.

Can you imagine poor Jeremiah on Career Day in junior high?  ‘Um, yeah,’ he says, his voice cracking a little, ‘I’m hoping to find a way to make a living as a Bearer of Bad News.’  His counselor struggles to find a way to tell his parents that Jeremiah’s skills assessment pointed toward gifts in muckraking, institution-demolition, and bizarrely, gardening, although that might not have been what it meant by ‘plucking up/planting’.  Did they know that had been the plan since before he was born?  Can you imagine that they might have even been grateful, in a long-suffering sort of way?

You see, it’s impossible to evaluate Jeremiah without some sense of his historical context, and his historical context was not pretty.  Times were hard.  People were barely making it.  Wars were rampant.  Rulers were corrupt.  God’s people were repeatedly unfaithful.  Even those who hadn’t been appointed to it might have wished for a little institution-destruction.  So even if the plan God announced for Jeremiah’s life seemed a little unpleasant, it may have also sounded long overdue.

Can you imagine God’s increasing anticipation?  God had laid this plan before Jeremiah was born and then had to wait until Jeremiah was old enough to get started.  And how old was old enough to get started?  The scriptures don’t tell us an actual age, but it was young enough that Jeremiah could claim to be “only a boy” but old enough that God could say, ‘Don’t give me that “only a boy” stuff.  We’ve got this.’

And that last bit is probably the most important part.  ‘We’vegot this.’  Not you, we. Or as scripture puts it, “You shall speak whatever I command you.  Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.”  And finally, here, we have arrived at our final theme for this sermon series, “Abiding in Courage”.

Since our General Assembly last month, we have been sitting with this metaphor of “Abiding in Christ,” inspired by the verses from John 15 that shaped the Assembly. We talked about how abiding in Christ is to abide in mercy, and in anticipation, and in justice.  We have clearly seen that abiding in Christ, as a metaphor for Christian living, is not just about our prayer lives, as we might have first assumed.  Beyond this sermon series, we have been given many suggestions for how to abide in Christ, through the resolutions adopted at the Assembly, which we’re in the process of exploring, in classes and small groups and youth group, and potentially even District-wide trainings.

Once we accept the challenge of abiding in Christ, in ways that impact and influence how we live every aspect of our lives, it becomes apparent that ending with courage is a good thing.  Abiding in Christ requires courage.  Blessedly, it also generates courage.  The two sides are nicely illustrated by what we just observed going on with Jeremiah: “You were born to do this hard thing.  But I’m doing it with you, says the Lord.”

What did that look like by the time Jesus was living it?  The story we read from Luke gives us a good idea.  There are three parts here that can give us more clues as to what abiding in Christ looks like in real life.  First of all, there is the response of compassion.  The story starts with Jesus doing what he was “supposed” to be doing: teaching in the synagogue on the sabbath.  (Why that isn’t considered “work” I’m really not sure!)  But then the scene is interrupted by the arrival of a woman with a debilitating physical ailment.  For eighteen years, she hadn’t been able to stand up straight.  It’s a testament to her courage and strength that she was even there, because if she couldn’t stand up straight at all, there’s no way walking was pain-free either.  But she’d gotten herself there.  Had she heard the rabbi from Nazareth, the one they called “the Son of Man” was going to be there that day?  Had she come hoping beyond hope for healing that particular day?  Or did she always try her best to get herself to the house of prayer on the sabbath?  Regardless, when Jesus saw her, he didn’t hesitate.  He immediately responded with the compassion of God, calling her over, laying hands upon her and declaring that she was “set free”.

When we are abiding in Christ, compassion is always our first guide.  Love becomes an instinct, a habit, our natural way of being in the world.  We don’t stop and weigh the consequences, or worry about what others will think, or consider that if we help this person, everyone else will demand we do the same for them.  When we are abiding in Christ, our response to the world is compassion, first and foremost.

The second thing we need to notice here is Jesus’ courage.  He was not naïve.  He would have been fully aware that someone was going to have a problem with what he did. Not only was he healing on the sabbath, but he touched a woman to do it, and a woman whom seemed to be seriously cursed at that.  Compassion that is not accompanied by courage wilts into utterly useless good intentions. Today is not the day we’re going to discover why there are so many people with so many objections to treating people compassionately.  Suffice it to say, we know that these objections are legion, and some of them reside in our own hearts.  Only by abiding in Christ, drawing upon the True Vine, can we find the courage to love God’s world regardless of the consequences.  When we abide in Christ, we are continually reminded that we’re not in this alone; we are connected.  God is with us.  We do not have to be afraid.

Thirdly, I want us to notice the neat trick of re-interpretation Jesus pulls off in this story.  He was moved to respond with compassion, and he had the courage to do so.  In doing so, he acted out a new understanding of the Sabbath, a concept at the center of Jewish identity at the time.  He wasn’t meddling in trifling things, but in the very deepest core of who his people were and what they were about.  There were those who had hi-jacked the faith for their own purposes.  They were using it to prop up their own power, without regard for the cruel impact it had on others of God’s children.  Jesus combined his compassion and his courage and showed just how wrong that was.  How can you worship the God of Love if you gather here to do so while ignoring the pain of God’s beloveds right in front of your face?  How can you claim to revere the God of your Exodus, if you insist on keeping people in bondage even one day longer?

And again, even as he drew upon the strength of God to stand up and speak these new truths, his courage was renewed as he did it, for the truth did, indeed, set him free, and the woman who was bent over, and the crowds all around him, who were “rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.”

When we abide in Christ, courage is a self-perpetuating cycle.  If we can get connected, and get just a little bit of courage, then we can act on it, and it multiplies!  We live in hard times, just like Jeremiah.  Wars are rampant; rulers are corrupt.  We have been afflicted for years, like that bent-over woman.  It’s amazing we managed just to get ourselves here. But we are not alone.  We are the branches connected to the True Vine.  God is with us.  We do not have to be afraid.

To live as channels of God’s mercy, constantly anticipating the presence of Christ and the work of the Spirit in our midst, continually seeking justice, is a tall order. If we’re going to attempt it, we have to stay connected, so that we can simultaneously be cultivating our courage and fanning its flames in the hearts of our comrades.  We are not alone.  We abide in Christ.  Do not be afraid.  Alleluia and Amen.