Do Not Obey

“Do Not Obey”

I John 4:16b-21

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

December 24, 2009

Christmas Eve

Coming out of worship last Sunday morning, one of our members said to me in the greeting line, “The pressure is on you now, Tom. My young adult children are coming on Christmas Eve and you’ve got to say something that will reel them in.” Well, it might not be exactly the pressure of a surgeon holding someone’s heart in his hands or an air traffic controller trying to land a plane at JFK or La Guardia or Scott Norwood lining up for a win-or-lose field goal in the waning seconds of a Super Bowl, but it does up the ante a little bit.

Of course, I know that ultimately we ourselves are responsible for our spiritual and religious lives and how we come to worship often determines the kind of experience we’ll have. Come expectantly and there is a good chance that something will happen here that will move you or motivate you or at least open some doors and windows in you. Come apathetically and chances are greater that the hour will simply pass and that will be that. Come with an “I dare you to say something that matters to me” attitude and I probably won’t.

Preachers preach because they have experienced something good or graceful or life-giving that they attribute at least in part to God and Spirit and gospel and want to pass it on. So, in that way, good preaching is invitational. Like Jesus, a preacher essentially says, “Come and see. Come and see if what I have seen and experienced of God and God’s ways for my life also can be good and true for yours.”

Having gotten myself off the hook now for being solely responsible for your reaction to worship, what I want to invite you to see at Christmas 2009 is how expansive, hopeful, and fulfilling life can be when we do not live in obedience to our fears. If the primary proclamation of the Bible can be determined by the sheer number of times it is repeated, then the main message of scripture is do not fear. That phrase, or ones similar to it, appears, amazingly, 365 times, once for each day of the year. We are not being told never to be scared, not ever to be frightened, not to get alarmed. Life is sometimes scary. Even good things, like growing up and accepting new responsibilities or getting married or venturing a new pathway or perspective, can cause some trepidation. What the Bible means to tell us is not to obey our fears, not to live in obedience to them. Do not allow your fears to determine your beliefs or your courses of action or your manner of relationships or your life’s directions. Do not make decisions based on fear.

We do the One in whose name we gather tonight a huge disservice if we believe he never was afraid. It cheapens his journey from manger to cross if we think that Jesus had some special reservoir of courage that we do not have upon which to draw in troubling or fearful times. I think it was not one whit less scary for Jesus to face his inner demons out there in the desert than it is for us to face ours. I think it was no easier for Jesus to stand up to the heinous and dehumanizing powers of his day in the name of justice and love of neighbor than it is for us in ours. I think it was no less fearful for Jesus to cross the chasms of class, religion, and social circumstance than it is for us. St. Irenaeus once said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Jesus has been considered the glory of God by the church across the years because he was so fully alive and free. He refused to live in obedience to his festering fears that constantly were telling him as ours do us that he was not equal to the task at hand, that he wasn’t good enough, that he would upset others’ expectations of him if he lived in conversation with God rather than convention or convenience.

Martin Luther King admitted to being scared silly whenever he left his house to lead the protest marches and how the firebombs that were thrown through the windows of his house almost paralyzed him. But he determined every day not to obey his fears that would have shut him up and shut him down but to live in obedience to love manifested as justice, compassion, hospitality, generosity, joy.

In the coming year, the Christian community will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador , one of my all-time heroes and mentors in the faith. Archbishop Romero was appointed to his position during the time of conflicts and civil wars in Central America by a Vatican bureaucracy pleased with his conservatism, his propensity not to rock any theological boats, and his willingness to be a mouthpiece for the status quo. Romero was at first warmly embraced by the oligarchy ruling El Salvador in those days because he was a bookworm disinterested in politics and social affairs. And so the ruling elites could go on about their greedy ways without interference from the church. Until, that is, the oligarchy began killing Romero’s priests who were working with the poor, helping them to organize to demand a more humane life and a more equitable share of that country’s wealth and opportunities. Until, that is, the church members themselves began to be disappeared and killed by the government in an attempt to thwart by fear and intimidation the growing freedom movement.

But, then, strange as it sounds for a religious man, as if it should have happened earlier, Christ was born and grew in Romero’s heart and he became one of the most courageous and eloquent spokespersons the world ever has known in the struggle for justice and peace until he was killed one morning in March of 1980 as he lifted a communion chalice during Mass. He knew in his last months that he was a marked man, that his religious garb no longer afforded him protection from the oligarchy determined not to give up its life of privilege. He was as fearful as any of us would be by the threats, but he chose not to live in obedience to his fears, but in obedience to love. He became absolutely convinced of the power of love to accomplish its purposes for he said that if he was killed, he would rise in the Salvadoran people and, indeed, he did and the people exacted a liberating change in their society.

What about you? If Christmas is only the celebration of the birth of Jesus long ago, then we have robbed Christmas of any contemporary power and meaning. Then we have tamed it and restrained it and made a mockery of it. Christmas is wilder than that. Christmas is much more a verb than a noun. Christmas is something that happens in us. Christmas happens when we make way for Christ to be born anew in the mangers of our hearts and when our lives take on more and more of the character of the God revealed in Jesus.

It is not that we shall never be frightened by the changes we are called on to make in our thinking and doing as we live more and more in concert with Christ. In fact, if we are not a little fearful, chances are that we are not really growing and stretching in the direction of God in any significant way. But we do not have to obey our fears. Christ in us, God with us, enables and ennobles us to live beyond our fears, to live into love.

Many of our fears are expressed in the language of “what if?” What if I do not have enough money? What if I fail? What if I have to live on my own? What if somebody takes advantage of my kindness? What if I lose my job? What if the way I used to think about God no longer makes sense to me? What if I disappoint the expectations of others as I live into God’s truth for me? Fear causes us to close in and close off, to circle the wagons, to exclude, to grasp and to cling, to tighten up, to insulate and isolate. Can you call to mind any ways in which you live in obedience to your fears? How might your life change if you refused to obey your fears and began instead to trust God with your life? How might a church change if it refused to obey its fears and began instead to trust God?

Here is the meaning I find in Christmas this year. It is the story of Jesus the Christ who, according to the words of the book of Hebrews in the Bible, was like us in every way but who grew into such a radical trust in God that he did not live in obedience to his fears but in obedience to love. Christmas is the invitation for such trust to be born and to grow in us.

Keeping Christ in Christmas, the concern of a letter to the editor in Wednesday’s edition of the Post-Journal, has nothing to do with saying “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.” Keeping Christ in Christmas has nothing to do with whether a nativity scene is permitted on public property. Keeping Christ in Christmas has nothing to do with whether children are allowed to sing Christmas carols in school. Keeping Christ in Christmas has everything to do with whether or not we live in obedience to our fears because if we do we shall continue to demonize in our society those who struggle on its periphery in a quest to retain our privilege. If we live in obedience to our fears, then so much of what passes for religion becomes self-interest masquerading as piety and will keep us from serious engagement with the gospel. If we live in obedience to our fears, then our lives will be much smaller than otherwise they could be and certainly punier than the glory for which we have been made.

The magic of this night is that all of our hopes and all of our fears meet in the storied birth and life of the one named Jesus the Christ. Jesus the Christ so trusted God with his life that not even the threat of death could deter him from living into the largeness and liveliness of love. Following Jesus the Christ in his indefatigable obedience to love rather than obeying our fears is the Christmas gift that can renew the life of the world, and our lives.

As Jesus did in his life, allow the Christ of God to be born in you. Let yourself become Barb, a Christ… Don , a Christ…Jim, a Christ…Susan, a Christ. That is what it means to be a Christian, and so being, our love will become as wide as the world, as wide as God, “wider than wide,” and we’ll come alive as never before. A Merry Christmas indeed!

Amen.

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