Be Courageous!

July 19, 2020 • Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Reading: Acts 4:1-6, 18-31 (recommended: The Message)
Pastor Jeff Wells

What happened to Peter and John? Where did that newfound boldness, that courage – that chutzpah! – come from? Let’s remember that after Jesus was arrested, Peter denied even knowing him, let alone being one of his closest followers. And he denied Jesus three times in one night. Where was his courage then? After Jesus was crucified, all of his male disciples – including Peter and John – hid out in a locked room. (Although, not the women disciples, we should note). 

Now here in the story Amar just read for us, which took place not long after Jesus’ death, we see his followers defy the religious leaders, courts, and police. “Try to scare us all you want,” they implied, but “we can’t keep quiet about what we’ve seen and heard.” 

What had they heard and seen? They had heard Jesus teach about the love, forgiveness, and justice of God. They sat at Jesus’ feet as he explained to large crowds that they should not only love their friends, but love and pray for those who persecuted them. They had heard him challenge experts in religious law and leave them speechless. They saw Jesus bring healing to many who were suffering. They saw him value the well-being of people over religious rituals and rules. They observed him break through barriers that kept religious groups, peoples, and genders separated. They experienced their teacher and leader humble himself to wash their feet, as a lesson for how they should serve each other and the world. 

Jesus’ passionate followers – men and women – experienced and believed in him as the promised messiah – anointed and sent by God to bring good news to the poor, release to prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind, and liberation to the oppressed (Luke 4:18-19). They came to believe in the spiritual and social transformation to which Jesus gave his life. They also knew that with Jesus gone, they had to take responsibility for carrying this Gospel of love and transformation forward. This Jesus – this messiah – and the movement he started had become the call of their hearts. It was not just a decision they made in their heads. Their hearts told them “we can’t keep quiet about what we’ve seen and heard.”

That was not easy. Peter and John and the others had to struggle against their deep fear and doubt. Imagine the terror they felt as they sat in the locked room, knowing they too could be arrested and crucified at any moment. They were human like us and our normal drive as human beings is to stay alive. 

But their belief in Jesus and his message of love and justice was multiplied and amplified by the work of the Holy Spirit. They felt that Spirit well up in them at the Pentecost event when they were inspired to leave their hiding place and begin to publicly proclaim the Gospel message. The passage from Acts says that when Peter spoke to the religious leaders and scholars, he was “filled with the Holy Spirit.” That helped him find the courage to speak with boldness and declare, “we can’t keep quiet about what we have seen and heard.” 

Jesus spent three years teaching and preparing the disciples for this moment of leadership. Yet, they were not quite ready. But when they saw Jesus murdered, something shifted in their hearts. They became more open to the leading of the Spirit of God in their lives. And the Spirit elicited from them the courage to speak out, speak up, and act up. God used the particular circumstances to help them tap into the courage that was already there within them.

As we heard in our Centering time earlier, courage is about letting what we know in our hearts to be true to get expressed in our words and our actions. That is especially true when doing what we know is right entails a personal or collective risk to ourselves. 

On Friday, we lost two courageous fighters for justice: Rev. C.T. Vivian and Rep. John Lewis. Both were heroes of the Civil Rights Movement and elders in the ongoing struggle for racial equity and justice. They epitomized the courage demonstrated by Jesus’ original small group of disciples. Vivian and Lewis drew upon their deep faith, the convictions of their hearts, and the Spirit of God in them to summon the courage to risk their lives repeatedly in the 1960s to dismantle Jim Crow segregation. They then continued in that struggle throughout their lives. They could not “keep quiet about what they had seen and heard.” They could not help but speak out the liberating message of Jesus. In doing so, they inspired thousands of others to get into “good trouble,” as John Lewis liked to call it. 

Imagine the fear and doubt and even terror they experienced on the freedom rides in 1961, when one of their buses was fire-bombed and they were repeatedly beaten bloody with with baseball bats, iron pipes, and bicycle chains. Yet, their courage overcame their fear. They got back on the bus and continued on to the next stop. Part of courage is feeling the fear and going ahead anyway. Courage is not denial of the danger, it is confronting the danger and the fear.  

What’s in your heart? What do you know in your heart is right? What do you truly believe in with a passion that impels you to act? When you can answer those questions, then, with God’s help, you can find the courage to speak up and to act up. 

Of course, courage is not just about struggling for justice – it is also about practicing radical love. Love also requires courage – especially when God calls us to love those whose speech and actions we oppose. Right now, the movement to affirm that Black lives matter is the most dramatic example I see of God drawing courage out of a wide swatch of humanity. God has been preparing us and calling us to courage in this struggle all along, but right now, God is using our particular circumstances to summon the courageous potential within us.

As we witnessed George Floyd murdered under a policeman’s knee and saw the immediate response of mass protests across the U.S. and around the world, the Spirit of God emboldened many of us and so many hundreds of thousands of other people to take stronger action, to speak out in stronger ways, and to advocate for more radical change. 

It’s hard to express your courage on your own, especially when what you are expressing is dangerous or risky or controversial or even if you are just new to it. Maybe you’ve never done something like this before before. But there is strength in numbers and we elicit courage in one another when we are able to join our personal, tentative courage together in collective courage and action.

Before George Floyd’s murder, Shiloh Hershey, a 24-year-old transgender woman, had never been involved in any kind of protest. But within days, she and her mother, Amy Stewart, walked downtown with placards and a mixture of baking soda and water to pour in their eyes if they were tear gassed. With courage in their hearts, they formed the first Black Lives Matter protest in the small town of Chambersburg in south central Pennsylvania. Those protests have steadily grown and continued. 

God is always calling us to courage, but God is using this particular historic moment to reach into the hearts and minds of a very large number of people who have previously been willing to stand on the sidelines or remain silent in the face of white supremacy and police violence. 

More people are taking stronger stands than we/I have seen in my lifetime. We’ve seen that in our own region of the UMC. For example, the chapter of Black Methodists for Church Renewal, a group founded in the late 1960s to work against racism and white supremacy in the denomination, had been pretty inactive for many years. But two weeks ago, BMCR issued a powerful list of demands toward dismantling racism in the New York Annual Conference. Many clergy and lay persons have signed on. 

Personally, I have to confess that, while I have spoken out about racism and have written anti-racism legislation for the the Annual Conference, I have not always protested forcefully enough when I heard about Black, Brown, and Korean clergy colleagues suffering racist treatment from congregations they served and watched the Conference leadership seem to do nothing in response. But I feel more courageous, more hopeful, and more committed than ever to this work in the New York Conference and beyond. 

This work is not going to be easy or quick. We need to push hard for the most fundamental changes in policy and behavior we can conceive, but we know this race will be a marathon, not a sprint. In 2018, John Lewis wrote, “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year. It is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

If we are to finally see the changes we need to address racism and other forms of oppression, to create a society with a more equitable distribution of wealth, to reverse the causes and effects of climate change, we will need to have courage and act boldly. 

The Church of the Village, along with so many others, is seeking to speak God’s desire for love and justice with boldness in the midst of so much suffering, violence, and destruction. We do not face the kind of threats Jesus’ followers faced from the ruling powers nor the risk to our lives that activists faced in the Civil Rights Movement. Yet, we come together for some of the same reasons. We are attracted to a congregation like this one because its values and virtues resonate with our hearts – values like a progressive theology that focuses on love and affirmation rather than judgement and condemnation; like a radical inclusion that affirms and celebrates each person for who they are and who God is helping them to become. Together, we are striving to overcome racism, sexism, and all forms of oppression. We join a community like this to collectively find courage for living, striving, growing, and “speaking what we have seen and heard.”

Courage is the foundation for being the kind of people Jesus taught us to be. The writer and poet, Maya Angelou put it this way: 

“One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”

Jesus taught that our most basic call is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. To do that fully takes courage because to really love our neighbors demands that we oppose the powers, privileges, inequities, violence, and forms of oppression that harm our neighbors and prevent them and us from flourishing and thriving to meet God best hope and expectation for us. 

Friends, God is in the midst of all that is happening in and around us – encouraging us, inspiring us, raising up leaders, helping us to be bold in speaking up, speaking out, and taking action. I pray that God will continue to summon courage within us. May we, personally and collectively, get into “good trouble” and “not keep quiet about what we have seen and heard.”

(c) 2020 Jeff Wells
All rights reserved.

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