Sermon: Perserverance and Courage

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Perseverance and Courage

By Charles Rush

March 30, 2003

is morning I simply want to give a spiritual message on the nature of perseverance as the meaning of Lent, thinking of Jesus and Peter.

I couldn't help but think of the Generals- especially General Tommy Franks and Brigadier General Vince Brooks- this week from Central Command watching them every morning this week as they hold their daily press briefing. I pass no moral judgment for or against their presentation because that would be premature. I only empathize with their situation and many of us have been in their shoes at some point in our lives, trying to stay positive and on task in the midst of turmoil, facing hostile and cynical questions in public. They come out, state the goals of their campaign, review the last 24 hours, and no matter how pointed the question, sometimes even hostile or silly, they treat it seriously, answer it respectfully, positively and then stop. Unlike some of those hot head political leaders that they are working for or some of the hot head protesters that are trying to end it, they are unflappable. We are likely to look back on this era and have a great deal of moral critique for what is happening. But that aside, perseverance is not perseverance if you don't have to stick to your plan with very little public support in an ambiguous situation where you are not always sure that what you are doing is right all the time. You hope it is, but you don't know for sure because the situation is not all that clear. It is a tough place to be and it calls on spiritual character, which is the story of Lent.

But let me hasten to add what perseverance is not. It is not stubbornness, though many times they are difficult to distinguish from a distance. I recently waded through the 4-hour movie about the Civil War, God's and Generals, about the life of Stonewall Jackson, the famous General for the Confederate army. This movie unquestionably ought to be nominated for a special Oscar- ‘slowest, dullest 4 hour movie that needs 8 hours to finish.' (A category all it's own. I had a bad feeling when I saw that it was produced by Ted Turner. That bad feeling began churning when Ted Turner shows up in a cameo appearance in the middle of the film, yukking it up with General Robert E. Lee.)

The movie follows the interior thoughts of Stonewall Jackson, as well as a number of paternalistic soliloquies that the General offers repeatedly on the subject of honor, facing death, and one's destiny. Using the language of the bible and all the thought forms of Roman stoicism, Stonewall reminds us again and again that God has determined the height and breadth of a man and that there is nothing that one can do to alter this fate. Therefore, we must just accept what we have been given to do and ride straight into battle and be done with it. He has a little more nuance than that but it gets lost in the sheer repetition of the theme. He got his nickname Stonewall because this is really the way he behaved in battle, riding his horse through a hail of bullets, believing that fate was fate so fear and worry were irrelevant. Since all of these men were scared to death, they greatly admired the fact that their educated leader put himself in harms way like they did and lived.

The irony of his life, as you may know, is that he was accidentally killed in friendly fire, ambushed one night by his own men, after he had gone on a forward reconnaissance mission with some of his leaders under cover, and his own troops mistook him for the enemy. And isn't fate just like that? I don't know Stonewall Jackson well but if the real man was anything like the man in the movie, he was probably just a stubborn mule who found convenient justification not changing his mind in the providential language of scripture and the Stoic understanding of fate. God knows we have tolerated way too many people like that in the past and what they need is a little divine shaking up, like yet another General I met a couple decades ago.

We were attending a conference in Washington D.C. on nuclear disarmament and this General had been an aggressive advocate of the use of nuclear weapons in limited circumstances. And then we all heard a stunning presentation by Rev. William Sloan Coffin, the erstwhile chaplain at Yale and later Senior Minister at Riverside Church in Manhattan, who in his first life did a tour in the C.I.A., one of the few Americans to speak Russian at the end of World War 2. Typical Bill, he raised many winsome questions and he was very provocative. At the end the General got up to respond and gave what I thought was perhaps the finest compliment to a Minister I have ever heard. Said the General, “Reverend, when I came in this room, I had my mind made up. But the more I listen to you talk, the more confused I've become.”

That strikes me as pretty real. We don't just get a clear divine mandate that all we have to do is implement. Usually, we get confused to start off with, shaken out of our certainty, awakened for our dogmatic slumbers, so that we can genuinely listen.

What the story of Lent lifts up for us is that the call of God comes to us, generally speaking, in a way that we have to make a pledge to follow, then make it again in a different way, and again in a different way. Genuine spiritual perseverance is opening up in new ways and committing yourself again. It is not a one-time deal and, if the life of Jesus is any reliable guide on the subject, the only way that you are able to take in profound challenge like his suffering unto death, is because you have already made a commitment and a recommitment so that spiritually you are up to it.

Lent begins with the temptation of Christ. He is brought into the wilderness for 40 days to fast, to concentrate his spiritual focus. Satan tempts him with food, then with faith-daring Jesus from a great height, then with power and wealth-offering him all the kingdoms of the world. Each time, the bible says that Jesus countered these temptations with the priority of being in God's will, of following after God's path. The gospels depict this time of temptation and fasting as a turning point in the life of Jesus. He committed himself in a deeper way to what he sensed that God wanted him to do, to actualizing the Kingdom of God in his life.

And he went about teaching, healing, developing community in love and compassion, forgiving, empowering other people. That is what takes up the middle part of the gospel stories, different stories dealing with each of these.

Then we get an ominous portent in the gospels. They say, he set his face towards Jerusalem. Looking back on the life of Jesus, one hundred years after his death and resurrection, the Gospel writers remember this as the culmination of what he had come here for, to go to Jerusalem. There is a sense about the text, that what God wants for Jesus is unfolding before him again here, more fully, and he is making another commitment. There is some palpable sense that he knows that what he is about will bring him into confrontation with religious authorities, with political authorities, the center of power and authority that resides in Jerusalem. He would not just stay with the dispossessed in the country, he was moving in this direction.

Later, when he enters Jerusalem, he is hailed as the coming Messiah by the people, a story we remember on Palm Sunday, when they threw down palm branches and cloaks on the street as he rode by on a simple colt. But he doesn't fulfill what the Jewish Messiah is supposed to do and come in triumph. Instead he goes to the Temple and throws out the Moneychangers, everyone that was making trade that you had to make to fulfill your religious duties in Judaism. Now, he is unquestionably drawn the attention of the political leaders, who are worried then, as now about would-be Messiahs. And he has drawn the attention of religious authorities by making a scene suggesting that they are morally compromised. No commitment here is actually spoken, but it is implied. There is some palpable sense that he knew what he was doing, he was fulfilling what he had been sent to do and he knew there would be a price to pay for it. People around him were full of fear because of his actions. They weren't sure what they meant. His disciples weren't really sure what he was even about. Presumably they had some conversation about it that wasn't recorded in scripture because we have this undercurrent at the end of the gospels that they are concerned, following with him, but not really sure where this is really going.

And then at Gethsemane, he asks them to go with him. And he asks them to pray with him, to really pray. It is a scene that is full of pressure. He knows what is at stake and has internalized it. We are told he prayed until sweat ran like drops of blood. That is serious concern. He concludes his time in Jerusalem, like he is concluding his life, saying. “Let this Cup pass from me… but not my will but Yours, O God.” I don't want to go where I think this is taking me but I want to authentically be filled with God's purpose, come what may.

It is a commitment made again, and again, and again. The way that the gospel writers depict it, each time he made that commitment, he got spiritually stronger and he seemed to understand more deeply what was at stake for him and what it would cost. The spiritual life is like that and the virtue of perseverance comes from that sense of being more deeply committed, more infused with the transcendence of God, more aware of what is at stake, more able to endure suffering, loneliness, forsakenness, even ridicule.

The gospel writers give us Jesus to show us where we could head. But they also give us Peter, the quintessential would-be disciple, a kind of spiritual Charlie Chaplin, because the reality of our actual lives is that we are neither one nor the other but a curious mixture of both at different times.

Peter is filled with what the Greeks used to call pseudoandreia, false courage. It is a military term. The Spartans developed courage by drilling, drilling, drilling. Regularly, they would go into battle against opponents that didn't actually take the time to drill so thoroughly. Their leaders would try to whip them into a frenzy of excitement with a big speech just before the battle. They would get all worked up, charge out into battle, and proceed to dissolve in the face of superior training. Bravado cannot take the place of profound commitment, spiritually speaking.

Peter is so full of exuberance it is endearing. At the last supper, Jesus predicts that the disciples will all fall away and betray them. They all grumble and demur from Jesus' realistic depiction of their character. Leave it to Peter to stand up and say, “Lord, the others may fall away, but I'll not.”

The gospel of John has a parallel story. Jesus decides to wash the disciples feet to teach them about servant love and compassion. Jesus gets around to Jesus and Peter stands up and refuses to allow Jesus to wash his feet, as it is not right to reverse their authority roles. Jesus explains that if you don't let me do this, you miss the whole message. Only those whose feet are washed can enter into God. Again, Peter stands up and proclaims loudly, “Then not only my feet, but my head and hands also.” He just can't keep it from going over the top.

Peter, like all the other disciples, follows Jesus into the Garden of Gethsemane, to be with him. Peter, like all the other disciples, falls asleep rather than prays. Before he knows it the Roman guards are all upon them, just as he wakes up. Never one short for action, Peter pulls out a sword, swings it wildly, and cuts off the ear of one of the Roman Centurions. Jesus has to rebuke his earnestness, his over-earnestness. Peter was probably hurt, frustrated, misunderstanding, feeling misunderstood.

Jesus is arrested; Peter slinks out into the night, confused and licking his wounds. Someone asks him if he knows Jesus. He denies that he does. They recognize his hick accent from Galilee and they ask him again with a tone of ridicule. He denies it again. They keep it up and the third time, Peter curses Jesus and runs away in the cover of night. Real perseverance there. He is something of a Charlie Chaplin disciple. He is us.

The dialectic of our spiritual lives moves between the impulses of these two characters, the profound commitment of the Christ and the bluster of Peter. We ought to be reminded, in this season of Lent, that we worship the God of the second chance, and the point of our lives is not that we consistently get it right but that we eventually develop substantial character.

The reality towards which the story of the Passion of Jesus points reminds us of the real depth of challenge that actual character formation requires. These are challenges that we spend most of our life trying to avoid but if we are lucky to live long enough or deeply enough, they will inescapably seek us out.

Just now the press is covering the reality of human loss in warfare. Whether it is the loss of a soldier on either side, it is only small consolation that they died for a worthy cause or a patriotic cause. The reality for the families is just the blunt grief of the loss of a son, a spouse, a mother. None of us ever seeks out living through that profound difficulty in order to grow. We try to avoid it at all costs. And there is no medal for living through the loss of a spouse, the loss of a child.

But if we are lucky to live long enough or live deeply enough, we cannot avoid coming to these profound spiritual challenges either. We rarely get to choose the time and the place of our loss, our frustrations, or lack of control. The profound reflection in the season of Lent on the passion of the Christ is that these too are part of the process, that God is with us in the midst of suffering and loss, in setback. We have the spiritual resources to deal with it. Ultimately, our faith walks us up to and through the doors of death. It takes in the bitterness and tragedy. It does not dissolve them, it does not resolve them but through God, it does transcend them. That, unfortunately, is the spiritual profundity of human existence. My brothers and sisters, I pray for you too, this season, courage and perseverance.

Amen.