Sermon: People of Courage

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People of Courage

By Charles Rush

September 7, 2003

love talking to our kids. Last Christmas, I noticed one of our three year olds hugging an elderly woman, so I said to him, “Is that your Grandmother?” After a long silence, he nodded yes. Then I said to him, “where does she live?” He replied, “at the airport. I said, ‘the airport'. ‘Yep,' he said, ‘whenever we need her we just go pick her up.'

Or my Mother-in-law, ever the educator. One of our nieces was with her for the day, so Nana thought she would help her with her colors. As they were walking around the house, Nana would point to the refrigerator and say, “What color is that?” “White” my niece would say. What color is the bed spread? “Tan” my niece would say. On and on this went through the morning. Finally they are outside in the garden and Nana says “What color is this flower? My niece, tiring of this game, looks back at her and says, “Nana, you really need to figure some of this out for yourself.” Please get a life.

Kids are very endearing. But they don't stay innocent and cute forever. In fact, for some of them that phase is a relatively short tenure. Before you know it they turn around as budding adolescents and they are independent, they don't want you in their business, and almost anything you do- other than take them to the Mall and buy them something- is met with rolling eyes. Occasionally there are flashes of open hostility. And to be fair, many of us parents are not able to rise to our more creative selves during these years. Most of us could stand to review reruns of the Cosby Show for examples in parental demeanor. No situation, however dire at the time, ever got Bill off his game.

We have the new movie Thirteen to review in graphic detail every parents inner anxiety horror show. Holly Hunter, a single mother, is more comfortable being her daughter's friend and banker than she is her structure provider or boundary limit. At the same time, her daughter drifts away under peer pressure to follow the crowd she thinks is hip. Introduce older boys, with their inordinate appeal to this budding young woman, stir in a mileu of moral aimlessness, spice it up with an introduction to sexual exploration largely disconnected from the soul, confuse the whole backdrop with reefer and alcohol, the next thing you know, the mother feels like she has lost her child and the child internally is lost to herself, surrounded by morally rudderless, equally confused and alienated teenagers that almost celebrate the venture into the heart of darkness. Even for our best kids, under the best of circumstances, adolescence is a dangerous time, just as it is also great fun, adventurous, and exploratory.

The oft repeated banality is nevertheless true despite being over-worn. It does take a village to raise a child. It helps enormously if that village begins with two parents that are doing their job in concert. But it takes more than that.

This is where the Church comes in. One of our primary tasks collectively, is to give our children the resources to develop moral consciousness that leads to moral integrity. You have to start that at home, you can model it at home, although most of us are spotty on the day in and day out. But even if we are pretty consistent, we still need the support of the community of the Church and the examples that come from the wider tradition of Church history and the Bible. Examples alone cannot make us moral but moral examples are an important antidote to the prevailing drift of our children's peers that tell them in so many different ways that being slothful and immoral is titillating and cute- a la Beavis and Butthead. It is as though cynical humor and aloof detachment are enough to carve out some kind of negative identity.

Surely that is a dimension of the adolescent critique of the hypocrisy of our world, but it can only be a dimension. It is a movement in the song but it cannot be the whole of the music. Negative spiritual energy alone cannot get us to what is real, what is intimate, what is genuine, what lifts others up, what can lead, what generates hope. It is important for all of us parents to remember that our primary job as parents is not to be the bank and it is not to be our children's pals. Our most important job is to give our kids substantial values. Our kids need solid values that they can bounce their ball off. They need something substantial that they can rebel against, wrestle with, define themselves over against. And you know what, by the time they are in their early twenties, they work through the rebellion and they reject a couple of the values, but the most of them they make their own because they figure out that this is what makes for a genuine life, an authentic existence, a life of integrity where they can live with themselves.

This year, in our educational cycle, we are looking at ‘People of Courage' from the Bible, people who not only had opinions, but developed convictions as well. Having those convictions threatened, they went on to deal with their anxiety and their fear. They went on to live out of their convictions anyway. We are looking at Daniel, a young man who found himself exiled in Babylon, what is modern day Iraq, who was in the inner circles of the King's palace with all of its perq's of power and lavish living. But he was asked to essentially stop practicing his religion, to stop being Jewish, and he chose not to do that. He chose to risk losing material wealth, being in the right circles, and eventually he endured torture but through it his integrity became an example for other people.

We are looking at Esther, a young Jewish woman, who married in exile to the King of Persia, modern day Iran. Through a series of events, she had the opportunity to save the Jewish people in Persia from being executed. She risked her life, she showed quick thinking; she was savvy, she knew how to read people and keep their dark sides under control. As a result of her fearless integrity, a holocaust did not happen.

We will look at Nicodemus, a man who had the courage to search for the truth. He had the courage to think outside the box, and come talk to Jesus, despite the fact that the religious authorities essentially threatened people who would do such a thing. Nicodemus was a man after the truth, more than popularity or conformity.

We will look at St. Paul, who had the courage to rethink his religious heritage and devise a new theology for himself after thinking through his experience of God. He wasn't afraid to call religious tradition into question and he made his faith his own. He was not content to simply rely on what his grandfather told him was true. We have a stained glass window in our church devoted to St. Thomas, the doubter. We may be the only church in the country that has raised doubt to a spiritual virtue but it can be. In the corner of that window is also St. Paul because he rethought theology in light of his new knowledge of the Christ. In another corner is Albert Einstein because he rethought cosmology in light of his new understanding of relativity. Creative thinking takes moral courage.

Every generation needs the courage of their convictions. Every generation needs the courage to think outside the box of the previous generation. We don't know what the issue will be, that is always new and surprising. But I can garuntee that some issue will track down the next generation too.

I was watching the PBS series “Eyes on the Prize” which was recently documenting the March on Washington in 1963, forty years after the fact. On that occasion, Martin Luther King gave one of the most important speeches in American history, a speech which came to be known as “I have a Dream”. It is interesting to listen to the leaders of that march looking back on the event because none of it seemed so certain to them, none of it so destined for success.

Just pulling the event together was the first time that a whole bunch of people that were involved in Civil Rights actions across the South had been brought together. The whole organization of the event had the feel of controlled anarchy, as many of these people were frist time organizers.

And the marches across the South were far from a unilateral success. They involved skirmishes with the police, over reaction by the police with dogs and firehoses. When the good citizens of Washington heard that all these people were coming to the nations capial, their first reaction was to plan to board up all their businesses so they wouldn't be destroyed. No one could envision a peaceful protest.

And Dr. King himself, just in his thirties. He was to give the principal address that day. Some years earlier he had been drafted to lead the bus boycotts in Montgomery Alabama, largely because the other leaders were afraid of repercussions from angry white people. These other leaders owned businesses or were dentists and had lived in Montgomery for a long time and were afraid of threats against their families. Young Martin, just out of graduate school, wasn't from Alabama. He was new to town. They drafted him to be the sucker… to lead.

His first speech on television that night, he had only 10 minutes to write his sermon. Up til that time, every sermon he ever preached was written out and it took him 15 hours a week to finish them. But he rose to the occasion because he spoke from the heart. And the boycott was started. It was long. It finally succeeded but it was long.

And as these marches spread from city to city throughout the South, some were wonderful examples of non-violent resistance, some were not. Dr. King had been arrested. He had been lauded. He had been spit on. Death threats had been made against his family. Through all of those off camera situations, the actual stuff of your unromantic lived life, he learned about courage again, again, and again. He got stronger because of it.

One way or the other, very few people had really heard of any of the leaders of the movement. President Kennedy actually knew very little about Dr. King before that day, when, with the rest of the nation, watched the march broadcast on all three television stations.

As you might imagine, Dr. King was working on his speech even the night before the march. He picked up on a theme from Abraham Lincoln since they were standing at the base of the Lincoln Memorial that a promise had been made, a check had been tendered to African-Americans that came back marked insufficient funds. He read through his speech that day in front of the monument. And it was a very good speech.

Towards the end of the speech something interesting happens to him. He looks up from his speech. He puts down the prepared text. He looks over all the people gathered and he takes the moment in. He leaves the text behind and he speaks from his heart, something I imagine he had thought about during many boring nights sitting in jail, something he thought about late at night in his bed digesting the hateful encounters of the previous day, something he had thought about early in the morning when no one else was around. And he said, “I have a dream that one day…” And he just laid it out there, all his hopes, his vision. That is a vulnerable moment. It takes a leap. But, as we preachers would say, God was in it. The Spirit moves like that. He was prepared for that moment, but the Spirit also moved through him in a new way. The word went out and it did not return void. That simple vision – that one day our children will be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin- transfixed the movement, transfixed the nation, and it continues to inspire us today. We call it the “I have a Dream speech” because the part that people really remember is the one part he spoke from the heart, his core convictions. And it is the vision that makes our country great. They are noble ideals.

It is noble ideals, spiritually fulfilling ideals that are the foundation, as Socrates used to say, for the excellent life. It is noble ideals that keep us human and point the way towards becoming integrated in our soul. It is noble ideals that pull us together as a community and give us something worth living beyond our individual needs and wants. We need that vision and example. Our children need that vision and expectation. They have plenty of opportunities to express their cynical humor and aloof detachment. Let us together lift up people of moral and spiritual courage that they may have examples of substance as well. Let's give them something substantial to rebel against. Amen.