Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · December 13, 2009

The Third Sunday of Advent

Litany of Praise and Invocation

From Psalm 126  

When we found our lives restored, it was like a dream.

            We could laugh again and find joy in our days and nights.

God has done great things in our midst.

            Those who sow the seeds of mourning will reap the harvest of healing.

Let us pray:                         

            We wait for the miracle of your harvest, Spirit of life,

when your song shall once again be in our mouths.  Amen.

Pastoral Prayer

Jacob Thorne

God of music, God of children, God of joy; we give you thanks for this morning. We seek to become more aware of your presence among us, and within us, and through us.

You call us, O God, to ponder the birth of hope that dawns before us, even as we wait, and watch, and worship. We come here today with a variety of emotions. Some are anxious. Some are confused. Some are hurting. Some are thankful. But no matter why we are here, we worship you because we know that the birth of your Son, our savior, reveals how deeply and intimately you love us. By the love that has been made known to us, we ask you to set us free from our anxiety, from our worry, from our fears. 

As we celebrate the season of Advent, help us follow the star. When we find ourselves staying off the path that leads to you, gently call us back. Let us not be burdened by the stress of the season, but rather, help us find the joy of new life and new beginnings. Help us rejoice like Mary. Help us follow our dreams like Joseph. Help us worship like the Magi. And let us praise you just like the shepherds. 

Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.

Old Testament Lesson

Isaiah 12:2-6

   Surely God is my salvation;

      I will trust, and will not be afraid,

   for the Lord God is my strength and my might;

      he has become my salvation.

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say in that day:

   Give thanks to the Lord,

      call on his name;

   make known his deeds among the nations;

      proclaim that his name is exalted.

   Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously;

      let this be known in all the earth.

   Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion,

      for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.

Message

Courage vs. Anxiety

Tim Carson

I was 16-years-old. I was a scuba diver – a fairly new scuba diver. I had only been diving about a year. I joined a dive club that was going to Table Rock Dam, and we were doing a group deep dive. That was in the day, many years ago, when people were less concerned and less cautious about depth and diving. I was young, and fresh, and stupid. There were nine of us. We divided into groups of threes, already a mistake, because if you are a diver, you know you don’t do that. It is only twos, because you are only accountable to one other person in a dyad. In a triad, it is uncertain. Our trio went down to the edge of the lake.

As you know, Table Rock Lake was just scooped out, and a lot of debris was left there. All manner of debris is below – trees, barbed-wire fences, structures. As you go down, it may look clear on the surface, but there is so much particulate in the water, that by the time you get to a deep depth, it is dark as night. It is so cold you can’t feel your lips to hold in the regulator.

On the way down, I experienced what divers do under great pressure of great depth. I had nitrogen narcosis. What that means is the nitrogen in your body, under pressure, “narcs” you out. You feel like you are coming home from one of the worst parties you ever attended. You go unconscious. You black out. I did. When I was on the bottom, I woke up, and there in the dark of under-lake night, I sat in a circle with two other divers with our dive lights starring at each other, with the fog that one has. I reached down and looked at my depth gage. It was 180 feet on the bottom. For those of you who are not divers, that is bad. Then I looked at my air-pressure gage. I had 500 pounds on the bottom. If you are not a diver, that means “really bad.” Suddenly, I was wide-awake. 

I roused my two other partners, and they sort of came awake.  We began the ascent. Somewhere along the way, I lost the other two, and I fled to the surface alone. My dive light had gone out, and I was sucking air out of the regulator. Finally, the water color turned from black to dark green and then lighter green. Near the surface, my BC (buoyancy compensator) vest expanded and took me exploding up to the surface. There was no time to decompress, only get to the air.

I remember, to this day, what that was like – to come out of the depths where I was uncertain about my survival and burst into the bright sunlight. It felt like my life, at that moment, had been divided into two eras – before breaking the surface and after. And I just said, and I remember it still, “O my God. O my God.”

That day not all of our divers returned to the surface – a sobering thing for a 16-year-old to face. I’m much more aware of my mortality than I was when I thought I was invulnerable as a 16-year-old. One memory remains to this day. It is this. It is the moment of breaking the surface, the moment of deliverance, release, liberation. I was snatched from the jaws of death.

I know you’ve had similar experiences, if not with diving, then something else. It may have been a health condition, or a narrow escape during an accident, or being set free after a long time of personal suffering, or fearing the worst when the worst did not materialize, or finding a new life on the other side of tremendous struggle. You broke the surface and exclaimed, “Oh my God. O my God.”

It’s a remarkable thing to breathe that oxygen after you’ve passed through all that. I remember the story of the Zen teacher who received a novice who was rather full of himself. The novice asked him what he must do to find enlightenment. At that, the master motioned him over to the river and asked him to wade in with him. When he did, the master took his head and plunged him underwater, holding him there. He held him as he struggled and fought and eventually writhed free of his grasp, bursting to the surface, gasping for air.

The master said to him, “What did you want?”

He said, “Air! Air is what I wanted!”

The teacher said, “When you want enlightenment as much as you did air, you will find it.”

Breaking the surface takes place where our urgent need intersects with the power of the Spirit to save, defend, protect, rescue, and deliver us. That’s the breaking the surface experience. God majors in it, and that’s what Christian hope is all about.

However, in the Scripture this morning, we find a very particular sort of deliverance. The children of Israel have been in exile, languishing in a strange land, their own way of life left behind in shambles. Then, as hope fulfilled, they were ushered home. Home again. It seemed so impossible, but there it is. In addition, what they did was something familiar to me from my own experience: They sang a song of praise and thanksgiving. When I broke the surface, I exclaimed, “O my God. O my God.” Their song was similar to it. It was…

Surely God is my salvation;

I will trust, and will not be afraid,

for the Lord God is my strength and my might;

he has become my salvation.

(Isaiah 12:2)

The core of this song is trust in the God who saves, God who is my strength and the object of my trust. This is the same kind of song that Israel remembers following the Exodus, as they were delivered from oppression and slavery in the Egypt:

The Lord is my strength and my might,

and he has become my salvation;

this is my God, and I will praise him,

my father’s God, and I will exalt him.

(Exodus 15:2)

There is a breaking the surface secret here and it is this: “I will trust, and I will not be afraid.”

Part one has to do with how we can trust, and that is grounded in the knowledge of the One who saves, delivers, and gives us the strength we did not know we had. We believe that the God that has been with us from the beginning of eternity will be so in our future. That is the trust part.

Part two, though, is how fear is addressed by that trust. If I can’t trust, the fear of my life can overwhelm me, and there is no shortage of things that might make us fearful.

So there is a direct correlation between our degree of trust and overcoming fearfulness. The more we trust, the more courageous we may become. “I will trust and not be afraid.”

Show me a courageous person, and I’ll show you a person who has a high level of trust in something – themselves, their equipment, their friends, their family, or their God. On a spiritual level, as in the Scripture from Isaiah, ultimate trust derives from unswerving trust in God.

The free person is the one who is not overwhelmed by fear. Only the courageous person can respond spontaneously, definitively and with integrity. You cannot guard your integrity unless you have courage.  You cannot be true to yourself and to your highest values and what matters the most unless you have courage to accompany that. Or else, you will fear that what you say or what you do will be so dismissed that you will be hurt for it so much that you back away from what your integrity might require. That’s why courage is essential to integrity.

Like many of you, I’ve seen the new movie, The Blind Side. What a stunning movie. It is based on a true story, of course, of how a rather affluent southern family ended up taking in a homeless black boy, and how his gifts and their faith in him took him all the way to the NFL. What occurred to me, throughout, was the overcoming of fear – on his part and the part of the family – as they came to trust more and more. The young man came to trust the loving intentions of the family, and the family came to trust that what they were doing was right, in spite of the social criticism they endured for doing so.

You tell me what you trust in and how much, and I’ll tell you about your courage and what you’re willing to do when it comes down to it. Because face it, most of the hard stuff in life we never anticipated. But just because we weren’t expecting it doesn’t mean less is required of us.

You may remember how, in the last century, the British colonized India. And up and until independence, they conducted their business and commerce there, always with a sizable civilian and military presence. One of their challenges was a simple one, and that was creating familiar opportunities for recreation. So along the way, some of them decided to build a golf course.

Golf in Calcutta presented an unusual challenge because monkeys would drop out of the trees, scurry across the course, grab the balls, and then play with them, tossing them here and there.

The golfers tried several strategies to stop them. They first built a high fence around the fairways and greens, but soon discovered that a fence is no challenge for a motivated monkey. They tried luring them away from the course by putting fruit and vegetables out in the jungle but after it was eaten, they all returned to the course. They even started trapping the monkeys and releasing them in another location - but for every monkey carted off, there was always another to take its place.

Finally, in exasperation, they gave up on the campaign to keep them away or remove them. Reality set in: If you’re going to have a golf course in Calcutta, India, you’re just going to have to change the rules. And this was the new ground rule:                  

“Play the ball where the monkey drops it.”

(Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It by Gregory Jones, Harper, 2001)

This is how life is: Some days, even some years, seem normal enough, whatever normal is. And then there are those intrusions, those conflicts and, yes, even those tragedies. None of these was included in the master plan and, as a matter of fact, master plans usually fall apart. Nothing works according to the plan absolutely. What intrudes is chaos, the unexpected and circumstances that were either hidden from us or feared by us. That chaos is often created by the behavior of others, sometimes by unpredictable forces of nature, and even by our own bodies.

The point is that we get to choose a great deal about our life, but we also don’t get to choose a great deal about our life. So, that’s where we live and die, at the intersection of free will and what’s out of our control. We can be angry that the monkey drops the ball somewhere that we don’t like; that it is inconvenient, or painful, or turns our world upside down, and that’s understandable, but the only question is how we’re going to play it.

And here is the short answer to that question: You have to play it with as much love, hope, and courage as is within you. The reason that you can is because you’ve seen how the God of all creation has been with you and others before, and you are confident that will be in the future.

Here’s what I’ve learned: You can stare and stare at the predicament before you.  You can say it shouldn’t be there, or you can say that you are unprepared. Well, whoever is prepared for the unexpected? Did you have another lifetime to work on this? We are improvising! We are going through it for the first time. Of course, we are unprepared. We can complain that it is not in the playbook, or people shouldn’t be so greedy, or people shouldn’t do bad things, or it doesn’t look like the happy ending to the fairy tale. But none of that really matters because it’s mostly out of your control. The only thing that matters is what you are willing and able to do in the face of it. You have to play the ball where the monkey drops it.

That takes courage, and courage comes from trust: I trust and I will not be afraid.

The late Helmut Thielicke was a German theologian who brought spiritual resistance to the Nazism of his native land. He used to have a photograph sitting on his desk in his office, and when people would come in, he would direct their attention to it and then ask them what they saw. It was a picture of a Christmas pageant. There were the expected characters all decked out in bathrobes. People would describe the picture, and then he would invite them to look more closely. “What you may not notice,” said Thielicke, “is the urgent expressions on their faces. Not a one of these people will ever miss being a part of the pageant. And what you may not have noticed is that all the cast of this Christmas pageant are all in prison.”

And he would continue, “This man here, this shepherd, has played his part year after year. And his lines are always the same: ‘I sit in the chains of my bondage and you came to set me free.’”

What the picture was really about was breaking the surface to a new life; to trust and not be afraid, to take courage against a sea of troubles, and to know that we have everything we need, wherever the ball drops.

Thanks be to God for the marvelous gift. Amen.

Benediction

Now, be filled with trust, be not afraid, and go forth in joy. Amen.