Confident and Unafraid

Fifth Sunday Easter - A Sunday for Graduating Seniors

I John 4:7-21

I play tennis on Tuesday evenings.  Someone asked me between points what I was preaching on this week.  I said, “I John 4 – God is love.”  He said, “Everyone already knows that.  What are you going to do so that it’s not boring?”

I had just written the sermon that day and felt pretty good about it.  But that question kind of took a sledge hammer to the fragile little sermon!  Of course he’s right, folks who come to worship shouldn’t be bored.   And while preachers aren’t entertainers, we do want to find some fresh perspective, some new angle, some crisp language, so that something heard many times before can become lively.

 

But I can’t worry too much about a boring sermon.  I can only help you pay attention to what’s already going on in your life, and what’s already true about you.  Our reading says, “We love God because God first loved us.”  And it’s true.  God is always already on the scene in your life.  God’s love is always already at work in you.  And so when I attempt to preach that “God is love,” I am only telling you again something you already know down in the deepest parts of who you are.

Today we celebrate our graduating seniors and send them along with a blessing into the next phase of their lives.  And today’s Scripture reading from I John is perfect for the occasion.  So here’s your charge, graduates (you others are welcome to listen in): be confident and unafraid. 

Be confident and unafraid.  This is hugely important if you are going to become the people God has called you to be.  But it won’t be easy.  Those of us gathered around you today don’t always manage to live this way.  We frequently lose confidence in the face of life’s challenges.  And our hearts are host to more fears than we care to name.  But when we are at our best; when we live in the Spirit; when we allow ourselves to really hear the good news of God’s love – we live with confidence and free from fear.

So your charge is simple: be confident and unafraid.  But the world you’re inheriting from the rest of us is anything but simple.  You’re coming into adulthood in a world complicated by many troubles.  And based on today’s reading, I’m going to mention just two.

First, our reading reminds us that life with God is not some personal and private thing.  God might be invisible.  But the needs of others around us aren’t.  Those people and those needs are in plain sight.  And you can only love the invisible God by tending the visible, ordinary needs of others. 

Our culture is sentimental about faith.  Like an old aunt from Des Moines that pats you on the head and says, “Aren’t you cute.”  She meant well, but it still felt condescending.  Our culture will even cheer for you to have a religious life . . . as long as you never fight for anything ferociously.  As long you don’t make others uncomfortable by talk about justice or peace or sacrificial generosity.  As long as you don’t ask too many questions about how we make our money or point out who’s telling lies.

Our culture assigns religion to a private realm, to the interior space of your life, to the heart or soul, or to a list of beliefs that exist in your head.  We Americans love faith as long as it doesn’t make any difference in the hurly burly world of bodies and sex and politics and work and child-rearing and marriage and friendships and neighborhoods and the well-being of the planet.  But you have been called by God to be confident and unafraid as you love the plain old world you can see.  There’s no need to sail out into some different life.  Just live yours.  Wherever you are.  Bake someone a cake.  Wash their dog.  Rake their leaves.  Visit with older folks.  Sit by the kid no one wants to sit by.

Here’s a second way our world is troubled.  The world is troubled by hate and fear and indifference towards other people.  Sometimes those others are a different color, and that’s called racism.  You are called to share God’s love in a world where lots of people are suspicious of other kinds of people.  It’s a diverse world now, whites and blacks now learning to share space with browns of every hue in between.  But don’t be silly.  White people still fear black people.  And black people don’t trust white people.  And bad things still happen.  The death of a black man named Freddie Grey at the hands of police in Baltimore is only the most recent version of a very long story. This dynamic of mistrust and hate and denial is poisonous and tragic.  It’s a world that calls you to love others by listening.  Really listening.  If you’re white (and last time I checked, most of us are), you should probably focus on listening to the stories of black people who are frustrated and tired of the system.

Graduates, you go out into a world that can be a harsh and inhospitable place.  We have sophisticated strategies for shutting certain kinds of people out of our lives, and on top of that we’re quite skilled at denying any such thing.  But it might help you navigate the world if we just told you the truth: Most of us don’t like ourselves.  We are angry about a thousand things.  And we’re not very good at sitting still long enough to get clear on all this.  And so we harm and hate one another, because this is easier than coming to grips with all the ways we are disappointed with ourselves.  And so I hope that that you learn to love yourselves like God loves you.  I hope that you accept all the parts of who you are like God does.  But from time to time, when you struggle with anger or regret, it helps to practice the kind of prayer where you can sit still and ask for God’s clarity about it.  That way, you’ll be a little less dangerous and mean towards other people.  And sometimes, that’s about all we can hope for.

So be confident and unafraid, yes.  But it won’t be easy.  I realize now that I’ve been talking about confidence and freedom from fear like it’s a one-time decision you make.  As if bam, God does something magic and it just miraculously happens.  But that’s not very realistic.  God usually leads us deeper into love by teaching us through our relationships and our experiences.  God lets us bump up against hard things.  Lets us stub our toes.  Confessing Jesus as the Christ is a life-long project of learning to love others, learning to recognize urgent needs, learning to become the kind of person who pays attention, and learning to find delight and satisfaction and contentment in that kind of life. 

The person who cultivates a life confident and unafraid is a person who is learning to love in a way that resembles the way God loves.  God’s love is specific.  It’s action oriented.  It’s visible.  It’s the story of how God has come to us in our need and loved us in Jesus Christ.  Listen to our reading’s description of God’s movement towards us, and if you listen you’ll hear hints of how we can get better at loving others. 

Verse 9, “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.”  

Verse 10, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” 

Verse 14, “We have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.” 

By sending Jesus Christ into our midst, God isn’t sending some low-level deputy.  By sending Jesus Christ, God arrives where we live and shares our space.  God leaves the serenity and safety of God’s own life in order to be with us in our distress.  You can sometimes love others simply by sharing their space, being where they are.  We love others by refusing to abandon them in their distress, even if the mess they’re in is of their own making.

God loves in a way that is profligate and unhinged.  God loves everything.  God loves it all.  And God sends the Son not as the Savior of a few, or a slice, or a piece, or a pocket.  But as Savior of the World.  God loves the blind fish at the bottom of the Marianas trench; the moss on Japanese rocks; the debris from colliding galaxies.  God doesn’t love some of us.  God loves all of us.  And all of you, even the parts you don’t like.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. Austin.  Now I admit, I liked to chit chat.  And Mrs. Austin did not like kids who like to chit chat.  We didn’t get along.  For the entire year, my desk was right beside her desk, just two feet from the front chalkboard, several feet in front of the first row of desks.  Mrs. Austin was nearing the end of her teaching career, and I do believe that she had taken her ill-feelings towards every troublesome student she’d ever had and focused them like a punishing laser beam on me.  I do not know what terrible things had happened to her that had twisted her soul and created such fierce anger towards a sweet but talkative child like myself.  

It felt like she came to school each day, flung a bunch of worksheets at us, then spent the bulk of her energies on surveillance, waiting for me to do something wrong.  Which, to be honest, occasionally happened.  Twenty-nine times that year I was deprived of recess, serving a detention and writing out an apology for something I’d done.  The whole year felt like an exercise in not getting caught.  Rather than learning, I was developing strategies for avoiding detection.  I spent all my energies calculating possible punishments.

It’s possible I’ve exaggerated the menace of this dear woman.  It’s possible Mrs. Austin was an amazing and kind woman.  But maybe some of you have had teachers like I’ve described.  Or parents.  Or friends.  Or religious leaders.  Or maybe even God feels that way sometimes.  And if you have, you will need to hear this.

God is love.  And when God’s love grows to fullness in us, we will be confident and unafraid.  There will be no fear of punishment.  Confident love is free of fear.  Free to risk and gamble.  Free to experience disappointment.  Free even to lose and to fail.   In fact, it is precisely when your life takes on risk and gamble, welcomes disappointment, and gladly accepts loss and failure – it is precisely then that you have begun to love like God loves you.  Amen.