Bravery in the Face of Fear 1.10.21

Bravery in the Face of Fear

by Griff Martin
A Sermon for the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
On Mark 1:4-11
For the First Sunday after Epiphany (Baptism of the Lord)

January 10, 2021

*This document comes from an oral manuscript.

Now Incarnate and Present God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing reality we can all together experience. Make us attended to your presence here in this space and in these words God, for if we are aware of your being here then nothing else will matter, but if we are not aware of your being here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.

Is the Bible relevant? 

I have a new answer for that question after this week. 

Epiphany…. 12 days after Christmas, it was Wednesday of this week, January 6, a day which will probably not be remembered as the 2021 Celebration of Epiphany but instead as the day in which our nation watched domestic terrorists mount an insurrection inside our nation’s Capitol, creating pandemonium and terror, the deaths of 4 individuals and harm and trauma that will long live within our national identity. It is a day of images that will forever haunt and shame us. 

It’s a day in which a weak and fearful President inspired his followers through lies and calls to violence, all to protect his own illegitimate power. In doing so, what has been sacred in our country was threatened. We saw fear and violence and rage and insurrection and domestic terror that looked like images of a horror film, it was like watching a real life horror movie. 

So much of what has been building for the last four years seemed to break -- all the lies, all the hatred, all the fear -- white supremacy was on full display in all its violent, fearful destructive lie. This is the sin of our nation. 

And even deeper, we have to question the role Christianity played in this… Through tears we saw so many of these insurrectionists and terrorists holding signs that said 'Jesus saves,' there are even images of one of these men walking through the halls with a Christian flag. I don’t know what to do with that right now. 

I don’t know what to do with any of these right now if I am honest…. I don’t think any of us do and that is okay… lament and grief take time and silence and stillness. 

There are a lot of questions that I don’t have answers to right now, but this one, Is the Bible relevant? We know that answer all too well this week. 

You know, Epiphany is often celebrated as the arrival of the wisemen to meet and greet the baby Jesus, but there is another side to it as well, a darker underbelly. It’s in the verses following the wisemen’s arrival. It’s a character we don’t put in our nativity scene but we might as well. 

He was not an elected official, he was king. King Herod. He was King in a time that was quite like ours… the world was changing and he felt threatened, old ways were dying and new ways were being born. The economy was shifting from agrarian to cities. Trade routes were making the world much smaller. Military power was shifting. 

And all he cared about was power, his throne. And then, as now, one of the most utilitarian ways to rule was to create fear. It’s the oldest play in the playbook for authoritarian leadership, create fear and a common enemy and the world is yours. It’s cruel but it has worked time and time again. 

Herod has created a climate of fear, he has power and you know what powerful people fear most, loss of power. So he is always aware of who is who in the power world, he sees the world as a March Madness tournament of power, Game of Thrones. 

So when he hears that there are these magi, these wise men, astrologists who are looking for the King of the Jews, he is most intrigued. Who are they and what do they want? He wines and dines them… if they are not the powerful or seeking to be powerful, he can put them on his team until he discovers who is the power. Dictators like this always takes pawns and followers who can quickly be thrown away or aside.

So after a dinner and two scoops of ice cream in his personal dining room, Herod tells them, “Go find this new king and then hurry back to me so I can join you in worshipping him.” 

And off they go, but they smell something fishy. They are seekers of the truth, after all, and this feels a bit too machiavellian. 

Now traditionally we stop the reading there, they find Jesus and they know the truth so they head home another way. And there is a sermon there this morning, if we know nothing right now we have to know that our old ways are no longer working. If the past 10 months have not taught us that, then we will never learn that and we are doomed to be destroyed by white supremacy and greed and power. The old ways are broken, they always were. 

It is time that we find new ways home, to make America be America for all people… and that is up to us church, all followers of the Way… we create the new roads home to freedom, equality and love. And if we are not doing that then we need to stop calling ourselves Jesus followers. 

This morning we keep reading, we don’t stop at verse 12, we go all the way to verse 18 under a heading that we cringe when we see, The Slaughter of the Innocent or The Massacre of the Innocent. 

King Herod realizing that the magi had not returned and raging over his loss of power and control to a newborn, issued a decree that in Judea all male babies under the age of 2 were to be slaughtered. 

“Kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under.”

You see this is what it will always come to when we are dealing with systems of power over instead of power with…. Systems of power over will fight to their death to stay in power and control, systems of power over end in violence always. 

We saw it with Pharaoh and baby Moses in a basket, we saw it with King Saul chasing after David to kill him and we saw it this week with guns and bombs and rallies around the country. We are shaken by it still this morning. 

So what are we supposed to do? 

I know we have to name it…. Fighting evil always begins with giving evil a name and we know the name, white supremacy and domestic terror.

And then what do we do? 

Well Mary and Joseph fled, Joseph had a second dream and this dream was less pleasant than the first, this dream was a crowded movie theater and someone yelling fire get out… he heard the dream and he got out. He woke Mary up and they headed to Egypt to protect their child, to protect God, to protect Love. 

Joseph was not fearful. He was brave, so brave that he took his child to Egypt -- the land where his people had once been slaves and treated brutally. 

Nadia Bolz provides great commentary here: “With fear cast out, Joseph was able to believe it possible that God’s redemptive work can happen anywhere -- even Egypt. With fear cast out, Jospeh no longer had to see everything through the lens of what it was in the past. With fear cast out, he was able to beat a king, protect his wife and child and preserve that which is good in the face of tyranny.” 

Maybe we can learn from Joseph and Mary once again. 

We do what needs to be done to get Love into a space where Love can grow.

Of course, we know more of the story… we are not fleeing with Jesus as a toddler, we have the Resurrected Christ. We have the Jesus who laid down his life to show us how ridiculously weak and immoral systems of power-over truly are, we have the resurrected Christ who rose in the face of an authoritarian government and system of power and greed, an empire that the New Testament tells us is evil. We serve the Resurrected Christ whose very life showed us that entire empire and system of power, fear and greed is nothing in the face of Love, paradoxically it is powerless in the face of Love. 

We hear Rachel weeping but we also hear Mary screaming with joy that the tomb is empty. 

So what do we do?

Someone asked me how I was going to give us hope this week… and I don’t know that I can because I don’t think hope is to be given right now, I think hope is to be worked and shown. I don’t think we as the church needs to receive hope as much as we need to be giving hope.

Mary and Jospeh were not sitting waiting for a word from the church to pacify their souls and put them at ease, they knew better. They knew sitting around doing nothing was going to get them killed. They knew hope was to be had in the doing. 

And church, we are the hope and we give hope in our doing.

We name what is broken. And that is going to be hard because that means there are conversations you are going to have to have with people in your lives to help name the brokenness but this is not the time to be scared to have those conversations because at this point we are at a moment of life or death. 

I have walked a lot of people to their death and one of the things they have taught me is the power of naming things. Let me tell you, people who have cancer are not scared to say cancer, they know naming it is their chance of changing it. They name it because naming it shows what has to be fought and changed. 

And you can do that with grace. One of you asked me early Wednesday morning, “how are we part of the change now and not appear condensing jerks?” Read the Gospels, Jesus did it time and time again. He told subtle stories to knock people off balance just when they thought they understood, he was witty and pointed out truths in ways that folks could not argue and he used the stories of the vulnerable because it’s hard to argue with pain and tears. 

We name what is broken and then we set about changing it. We let Love grow. It’s the only thing we are concerned about, letting Love grow. 

I don’t think Mary and Joseph worried about what they might lose in fleeing to Egypt or how their lives might change or what others would think, nothing mattered except letting Love grow. 

The same for us… nothing matters except letting love grow. 

We feed hungry people, we sit with those who hurt, we sit with those in fear, we fight for those no one else is fighting for, we name evil so that evil can’t win, we share our wealth, we labor for equality, we work towards systems of power with and not power over. 

This is the Gospel and the Gospel wants to the born again. 

Which means we need to be brave in the face of Herod. 

Jesus is counting on us, the world needs us, it’s our calling, now or never. Amen and Amen.