How Love Casts Out Fear

Judges 4:1-7

Matthew 25:14-30

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about courage.  The material in Joshua and Judges raises this theme for us.  These stories confess that life with God is a gift.  It is God who takes the initiative by creating a people through Abraham.  It is God who delivers us from threat.  It is God who leads us through the wilderness and settles us into a new kind of life.  Yet God’s powerful and gracious activity does not leave us passive and complacent.  Instead, God calls for a faithful, energetic response from us that will often take the form of courage.

Courage is the ability to move forward even though you’re afraid.  It’s doing what needs to be done, even in the face of towering threats and seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Bob Eckles loaned me a book titled, Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans.  The book chronicles the lives of nine people who lived through hurricane Katrina.  One character, Joann Guidos, owned a bar called Kajun’s Pub.  The bar was a welcoming second home for lots of people who didn’t fit in anywhere else.  When the hurricane hit, Joann was tempted to leave New Orleans for the safety of her family’s home further inland.  But she was the only business open for miles around.  And lots of scared and hungry people gathered there for safety.  On the national news, all we saw was the devastation, the chaos, and the bumbling government response.  But there were all kinds of courageous acts during the storm.

So what do you need to live with courage?  Do you need to be born with it?  Do you need years of training?  Is it available to certain personality types – people naturally confident in themselves?  Can you live with courage if you’re poor?  If you’ve failed at a few things?  What if you’re naturally shy or cautious?

According to Scripture, God makes courage available to everyone and anyone.  The good news is that all of us are loved by God in Jesus Christ.  And this experience of being loved by God makes possible in us a new kind of courage. 

You’ve been adopted into a new family by God’s grace, shown to us in Jesus Christ.  You don’t have to succeed, or achieve, or perform, or win, to be a part of this new family.  You don’t get kicked out of the family for failure.  When you’re loved in that way you never have to worry about not being good enough, or not qualifying.  It frees you to live your life, to be yourself, and to take risks.

There is a biblical verse that expresses this connection between love and courage perfectly: “Perfect love casts out fear” (I John 4:18).  Being loved by God removes you from fear’s grip, and allows you to face life’s challenges with courage.

Both of our Scripture readings show us a person who is afraid.  The army commander Barak is afraid.  The third servant is afraid.  Yet both stories suggest that God makes a new kind of courage available to us.

The courageous people in these stories live from a kind of sixth-sense that is attentive to the hard-to-see ways of God in the world around them.  God’s liberating, victorious power is always at work in us and around us.  But it’s often difficult to see.  People who live and act with courage are people who can see the glimmers of light through the negativity around them. 

The book of Judges tells the story of Israel’s life after they had settled the land but before they became a nation-state ruled by a King.  During this time they were a loose band of tribes in a series of skirmishes with their neighbors.  And they were led by regional figures called “judges.”

This ancient culture was patriarchal – men ruled families, villages, tribes, and kingdoms; men were perceived as closer to God, physically stronger and mentally more capable than women.  And so the character of Deborah is an unexpected outlier in a culture dominated by men.  What business does this Deborah-lady have leading these tribes in a threatening world?

Now Sisera was a man’s man, the brave and intimidating commander of an army outfitted with superior war machinery.  The story gives particular attention to the 900 chariots fitted with iron.  The sight of this sophisticated weaponry on an opposing hill - 900 stallions with the latest and most sophisticated chariots - would have made any rival group weak in the knees.  If you’re on the other team, a foot soldier with a garbage can lid for a shield and a little sword, you don’t stand a chance.

But Deborah showed courage.  She summoned an army commander from one of Israel’s tribes, a man named Barak.  She instructs him to find 10,000 fighting men and gather at the Kishon River.  “So here’s the plan, Barak.  We’re going lure Sisera’s ferocious army into a battle.  And then God will deliver them into our hands!”

Barak the Commander stands there, quiet, rubbing his hands together, running through in his mind all the reasons this sounds like a terrible idea.  Do you blame him?  He’s afraid.  He wants to believe that God is on his side.  But he can’t find the courage in his heart.  He’s paralyzed.

What he says to Deborah is this:  “If you go with me, I will go; but if you don’t go with me, I won’t go.”  Now maybe the guy was just seeing whether Deborah really believed what she was saying. 

“Certainly I will go with you,” said Deborah.  “But because of the course you are taking, the honor will not be yours, for the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman.” (Judges 4:8-9).

So God bestows the honor of killing Sisera on a sneaky housewife named Jael.  She welcomes him into her tent, promises him a safe place, serves him warm milk to calm his nerves, tucks him into a pallet on the floor and pulls the blankets over him as he dozes off to sleep.  She put him to sleep all right.  She drove a tent peg through his temple, pinning him to the ground like an insect against Styrofoam.

Now the point of the story is not to glorify this grisly scene in Jael’s tent.  The point is that God’s kingdom is arriving and becoming effective on earth as it is in heaven.

In the upside down, surprising reign of God, the most unexpected people will step forward with courage.  Life in God’s kingdom goes not to the powerful.  Nor to those timid and afraid.  Life goes to those who are crafty enough to see the kingdom of God at work in the world around them.  This story calls to each of us and all of us together: who will come forward with courage in the face of challenges to lead us forward?  Who can identify and acknowledge their fear, yet refuse to be paralyzed by it?  Who can set their fear aside and act with the courage that comes from a life rooted in a deep trust in God’s surprising way of being among us?

Now turn to the parable.  In the parable it is the third servant who is afraid.  He says it himself, “I was afraid” (v. 25).

Jesus tells the parable in order to teach us what God’s kingdom is like.  And there are several surprising features of the parable.

There is a wealthy master who plans to travel and he leaves his considerable wealth in the hands of his servants. 

He leaves with them surprisingly enormous sums of money . . . A “talent” equaled 20 years of a day laborer’s wages, so let’s call it $400,000 in today’s money.  So the first guy got $2 million.  The second guy got $800,000.  And the third guy got $400,000.

The first two servants surprise us by their aggressive investing.  They have a high tolerance for risk and failure.  They gambled with it, and ended up doubling the wealth entrusted to them.  You don’t double your money by playing it safe and conservative.  These guys chose investment strategies that were high risk, high reward. They put the wealth in play and it paid off. 

The master, upon returning, commends them for their risky investments.  Yet the story leaves open the question: What would have happened if these first two had gambled aggressively and lost everything?  What would the master have said then? 

The guy who got one bag of gold immediately went out, dug a hole in the ground, and hid the money.  Why did he do this?  Because he’s afraid.  But before we verbally abuse him, let’s imagine why he’s acting this way.  He had witnessed his master’s way of doing business.  He put it to his master like this, “I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you haven’t sown, and gathering where you haven’t scattered seed.”  In other words, he’s been around his master long enough to see patterns: his master is aggressive, ambitious, and wants to keep expanding both his influence and his wealth.

But here’s the rub of the story.  The third servant assumed that the worst-case scenario would be to risk the wealth and lose it.  By fearfully burying the gold in a hole, the third servant removed the wealth from circulation.  But the landowner wanted the wealth in play, not buried in the ground.  “You could have at least let the bankers use the money and earned interest,” the savvy landowner says.

Jesus tells this parable in order to invite us to reflect on how we ought to live in God’s new kingdom.  Are we being creative and courageous with what we have on loan?  Or are we living like people who are afraid of taking risks, afraid of losing what we have?

The parable isn’t about literal money and wealth.  It’s about a bequest or trust that has been left in your care to put in play.  What is it?  It’s the kingdom itself.  It’s the good news that the grace and mercy of God are the truest realities there are.  It’s the surprising, life-giving truth that the poor and powerless, the vulnerable and overlooked, the friendless and despairing have had their fortunes reversed.  The secret of God’s kingdom is that the rich and powerful aren’t the most important.  Those humbly serving their neighbors are the greatest.  The secret is that those living with failure and regret and shame and guilt have been welcomed and forgiven and celebrated as God’s beloved and newly adopted children!

This is the gospel.  This is salvation.  This is Jesus Christ and joy.  This is God’s new kingdom.  And it’s been given to you.  Now what are you going to do with it?  You’re part of a people who have been loved beyond measure.  How are you going to put this wealth into circulation?  What kinds of aggressive risks are you going to take in order to multiply it? 

How is our congregation going to keep the good news of God’s surprising kingdom in circulation?  How are we going to live with the courage it takes to keep making risky investments that might fail?  What bets are we making on people and projects that would be nonsense without trust in the always fresh and new activity of God in our midst?

You have been loved perfectly.  And perfect love casts out fear.  Amen.