FAITH AS COURAGE John M, Buchanan
I John 4:13-19 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
November 12, 1976 Columbus, Ohio

The American advertising industry, having long relied on the motivating power
of our sensual appetite, our materialism and need for status, and having recently
exhausted nostalgia, has now discovered, apparently, one of the oldest and most
powerful motivators of all - fear, Among the more offensive commercials on tele-
vision currently is a group which plays on rather straightforward physical terror.

A woman is in the shower, at home alone, apparently, An ominous figure lurks at the

front door and with a terrifying knife easily slips the lock, Anyone who saw Alfred

Hitchcock's Psycho is at that point shivering in kis or her chair and quietly calcu-

lating how to afford the foolproof burglar alarm which is the point of the exercise ~
a masterful and effective presentation,

The other group is more gentle, subtle, not quite as hysterical, The new life
insurance commercials are pointed at what the philosophers call ontological fear,
fear of nonbeing. Men are most vulnerable to this kind of fear, and so the commercial
eloquently dramatizes the reality of the husband's nonbeing, The widow goes to the
office to collect the effects, but not the life insurance policy he should have
purchased, The son drops out of college to keep the shop open, verbalizing ontologi-
cal fear: "We talked about everything, but we never talked about what would happen if
you weren't here,"

That is strong medicine, indeed, Fear is a powerful and often hidden human
motivator, It has frequently been the handmaiden of religion, The phenomenal
success of the evangelist Billy Sunday, it is said, was his ability to make the
horrors of hell so vivid that his listeners could feel the flames licking at the seat
of their chairs, Martin Luther testified that the most powerful early religious
influence in his life was the classic painting of the Last Judgment which portrays
the damned dropping into the lake of fire,

Adolf Hitler, in our time, was perhaps the most gifted politician in understand-
ing and exploiting the mass power of fear. There were plenty of things to be afraid
of in the Weimar Republic, Hitler knew that if he could focus fear on one object he
could unite the German people, He knew that fear automatically becomes hatred, and
that the combination of the two is the necessary ingredient for tyranny, With great
skill he took the raw material of anti-semitism and molded it into racial fear, and
it became irrational and powerful hatred, and it was the cement of the Third Reich,

Fear of Communism has motivated this nation for three decades, and persuaded it
to fight an Asian war against the best advice of its most knowledgeable political,
moral and militazy leaders, Do you care to imagine what the world might look like
today if love, not fear, had been the motivator; had the incredible investment of
American lives and skills in Soutieast Asia built hospitals and schools and roads,
and had American dollars been lcaned to businesses as development capital in Vietnam

and Cambodia and Laos? ;

Fear is powerful, It is often irrational, It is frequently behind the worst
mistakes men and women make, But it is a reality, a normal part of the human @on-
dition, In our primal innocence we are born with two fears - the fear of falling
and the fear of loud noise, All the rest are acquired - learned, Some of our
acquired fears are healthy and creative, Fear of hunger motivated early men to dig
a little ditch and plant a few seeds, Fear of drowning causes us to be cautious

~2-

around water, Sigmund Freud defined the difference as the normal fear of snakes
in the jungle and the abnormal fear of snakes under the carpet in one's apartment,

Our common fears are not terribly dramatic, Most of us, I think, are afraid of
sickness, debilitating, disabling illness. As a rational fear it motivates us to
take care of ourselves, get a physical examination yearly and live in moderation,
As irrational fear it can paralyze us inte never taking the baby out of the house,
for instance, to avoid exposure to a virus: or to ignore the small lump we discovered,
out of what has become one of the most irrational fears of our day ~- the fear of
cancer, We are afraid of old ame and the dependency on others which often accompan-
ies it. We are afraid of being alone, We, particularly we middle class Americans,
are deathly afraid of failure, And when that fear becomes iirational it can paralyze
us into inactivity and apathy and depression,

The psycholocsists tell us that there are deeper, more profound fears to which
we are subject, Otto Rank, an early psychoanalyst, talked about “Life fear" and
“death fear'', But perhaps the most helpful teacher in identifying the dark, sub-
conscious fears of our humanity was the theologian and philosopher, Paul Tillich..
Tillich was the one who taught a seneration of theological students about ontological
fear, the dread of nonbeing, Reading Tillich is not easy going, but for these who
have the tenacity he teaches us that this basic, elemental dread is part of our
humanity, whether ve are philosophers or bricklayers: that full humanity depends on
facing it, acknowledging it, and then affirming oneself inspite of it. There is a
point in the academic pilgrimage for most theology students when Tillich's ideas
about nonbeing are very important, worn like the badges of our nev intellectual
expertise, At that point in my pilgrimage I had the privilege of taking a course
under the legendary Professor, Enough time has passed that I am now able to admit
that I didn't understand very much, mainly because Tillich never learned to speak
English very well, In fact, it was not uncommon for him to launch into his lectures
in German until a student summoned the courage to tell him what he was doing. I
found myself, one day, standing on a corner in Hyde Park, Chicago, with Tillich
beside me - my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to exchange ideas with the greatest
Christian theologian of the twentieth century. My mind, fortunately, went blank,
And all I could come up with was, "Nice day, isn't it?"

But Tiliich did teach me something that is confirmed by most of us around the
age of forty; namely, that the thourht of cur nonbeing is shattering. He gave me a
name for something every pastor, physician, and psychologist learns every day: that
there is a dark night of the soul: that the fear of dying is not nearly as powerful
as the sense that one day I will be no more: that the world is coing to go merrily
on its way without me, Lucy, in Peanuts, is a consistent Tillichian, One time
Charlie Brown, after a series of devastating personal experiences, exclaims, "I wish
IT had never been worn,’ To which Lucy responds, "Why the theological implications
of that are stazzering."

And now to the text. I read this morning from the First Epistie of John, one
of three very bricf letters ascribed to John, the apostle of Jesus. Tradition has
if that John wrote the Epistles in his old age, when the years had refined his faith
and when he was the last person alive to have seen Jesus, ‘There is a lovely Robert
Browning poem about it, called "A Death in the Desert",

'.,.there is left on carth

No one alive who knew (consider this!)

~ sav with his own eyes and handled with his hands
That which was from the first, the Word of Life.
How will it be when none more saith, 'I saw'?"

-3-

The tradition is that John wanted desperately to get the essence of it down,
not the life of Jesus, but the essential stuff of the new life he had experienced,
He reduced it to leve, God is love - we abide in God and He abides in us when we
love, And then this exquisite, tiny sem: thig sentence so pregnant with meaning that
it speaks to us in a way we can't really describe, "There is no fear in love: perfect
love casts out fear," That is so good the preacher wants to leave it alone: let it
stand and speak in whatever ways it can to each heart, Love isn't afraid ~ of death
er dying, of suffering or persecution, of Living and loving and siving and risking
and failing, Love isn't scared,

There are echoes of it throughout the Bible. Faith keeps coming up looking
like courage. People of faith are brave, When we strip away all the descriptive
adjectives from faith it seems to rest in the person who looks into some ominous
darimess and marches right on in, The Old Testament Lesson, for instance: God's
people are on the banks of the Jordan, peering across the troubled waters into the
Promised Land, Moses is dead, Joshua is at the helm and God says, "Be strong and of
good courage, be not frightened, neither be dismayed; for the Lord your God is with
you wherever you so,"

Fear is a reality for us: vill we get sick? Will we succeed? Will our children
be all right? Are we making the richt decisions? Is our marviaste strong enouch?
Will our friends vespect and admire us? Beyond the fear of nonbeing, we're afraid of
the faet of chanse, Rumblings in the international monetary system, inflation that
persists, the dissipation of our noral will in the world, nationalism and Marxism
in Africa, and the literal disappearance of moral certainties within our common life:
it all ieaves us anxious - frightened, We know, personally, the meaning of the
Broadway invocation "Stop the World, I want to Get Off", Sometimes fear can be so
real that we want to jump in the nearest hole and pull it in after us, Sometimes
fear paralyzes us,

Commenting on the frightening new world in which we Live, Rollo May writes:
"We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no-man's land, to push into
a forest where there are no well-worn paths, To live into the future means to leap
into the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is ne
immediate precedent," (The Courane to Create, p.2).

Being a whole person today demands courage, a brave act of self affirmation in
the face of a Lot of very real fears,

The Shakespearean dictum "To Be or Not to Be, That is the question!’ is posed
with great intensity and poignancy, Fear backs away, Tear retreats, Fear lets
someone elise make the decisions, Fear tries to find meaning in the past and hopes
the future will jo away, Courage saya."E am, I will", JI shall never forget the
privilege of vitnessing the power and truth of that idea, when I took a group of
white, middle-class High School students to visit Operation Breadbasket in Chicago,
The Reverend Jesse Jackson was draving thousands of inner city blacks to Saturday
morning meetings in a theatre on Nalstead, Beginning early in the morning the
Format was always the same, A serias of speakers and entertainers would warm up the
audience, Finally Jackson would appear, He would stand at a lectern for a time and
then shout "I": the audience shouted back "I", "I am", Again the response, louder
now "I am'', "ZT AM SOMEBODY" ~ and ag one they rose to their feet and shouted, "I
am somebody,"

- 4 =

It was an excrcise in self affirmation ~ for people whose entire lives were
lived in an environment which told them they were nobody's, The product was
courage: the courage to stand up and be, Jackson always knew that problems of
racism and poverty would never be solved by well-intentioned povernment programs,
administered by middle-class whites, but by black people who knew they were some-
body and had the courage to stand alone,

Courage, as the philosophers have understood it, depends on a strong sense of
self worth, You can't affirm yourself if you don't believe you are worth anything,
You can't cope vith fear if you concede that the fear is bigger than you, The
philosophers have understood that frightened penple are almost always people who
don't feel very good about themselves,And we ecme row to the bottom line, How do
we get it? Talking about it helps us te understand but it doesn't make us courageous,
Determination helps a bit: stubbornness, physical strength seems to add to it, But
the fact is that courage comes as a gift: someone else has to give it to us. Love,
John knew, is what casts out fear, The courage to be comes finally from love
experienced and Love given.

Iwas moved this summer by the accounts of the trial of Anatoli Shcharansky,
Shcharansky, you will recall,is one of the Soviet dissidents who was arrested and
tried for treason, His crime seaws to have been that he was a member of the Helsinki
Watch Committee, formed to monitor Russian compliance with the Human Rights Accords
Signed in 1975,and that he had repeatediy applied to emigrate to Israel to join his
wife. The way out was to confess, which he refused to do through sixteen months of
imprisonment, This summer he went on trial, and to no one's surprise was convicted
and sentenced to thirteen years at hard labor,

His concluding statement to the court, just before sentence was pronounced, is
anew epistle of faith as couraze, It is a modern and dramatic illustration of the
truth that there is no fear in lave, Listen to it:

"Five years ago I applied to emigrate to Israel, Now, as never
before, I am far away from my dreams,

"Those close to me know that I wanted to exchange the life of an
activist in the Jewish emigration movement here for a reunion
with Avital in Isracl, For more than 2,000 years, my people have
been dispersed, Wherever Jews were, they would repeat every year:
'Mext year in Jerusalem', At present I am as far as ever from
my people, £rom Avital, and many hard years of exile are in
store for me,

"To my wife and my people, IE can only say, 'Next year in Jerusalem’,
To this court, which decided my fate in advance, I say nothing,"

{Time Magazine, July 24, 1978),

Love casts out fear. In homely little ways every parent and every
child has known it, One of the important tasks of parenting is to banish the fears
of a little one, We know intuitively that fear of the dark may be helped by
leaving a night-Light on, but the real remedy is the strength of a loving parent,
Sometimes a child's fears are authentically ontological: "What happens, Daddy? Why
do people die?" And we learn from experience that the answer that banishes fear is
not a well-reasoned treatise on eternal Life, but a strong and gentle hug,

5

Love casts out fear, We learn in marriage that all sorts of fears become
manageable in the strong haven of mutual love, In the hospital, facing surgery,
we know the courace that comes as a gift from somcone who Loves us enough to stand
with us, And sometimes, in the dark night of the soul, when we are utterly alone
and when we are consumed by self-doubt and fear, we have learned, mysteriously,
that God loves us,

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news that we are loved: Loved totaily
by a Heavenly Father who will stand with us; who will be with us wherever we go,
The Gospel is the story of a man of courage - who not only accepted His own death,
but seemed to reach out and embrace it: a man who literally climbed up on a cross
knowing He was loved and in love for all men and women,

There is a gift in that for you and me, There is in that supreme gesture of
love the courage to be, the courage to live,

The Gospel song which was popular a few years ago,put it simply but
eloquently:

"Put your hand in the hand of the man from GaLlilee,"'

An oid and very wise man, tventy centuries ago, said it this way:

"There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear,"
Anen,

God, our Facher, we confess our fears, We confess our inability to cope
with them all, alone, So, help us to know Your Love. Help us to tove,
perfectly, wholly. Grant us courage, En Jesus Christ our Lord,

Arnen,