that threatens our hearts and frees us to live fearlessly.

Transcription

1 George A. Mason Fifth Sunday of Easter Wilshire Baptist Church 29 April 2018 Fourth in a series, The Beloved Community Dallas, Texas A Fearless Heart 1 John 4:7-21 Perfect love casts out fear, First John tells us. And isn t that something we would all love a fearless heart! I have been meditating on this the past few weeks since I got to talk with Amy Lewis Hofland, the executive director of the Crow Collection of Asian Art here in Dallas. We had a Good God podcast conversation about her being a cradle Episcopalian but learning from Eastern religions about how love changes us from the inside out. All religions are not the same, but God can often teach us things about our own faith by becoming more aware of the teachings of other faiths. It can drive us back to the heart of our faith and give us a new perspective on something we might have missed. Amy gave me a book by Thupten Jinpa, a professor of religion and a former Buddhist monk. It s titled, A Fearless Heart, and what he says in it reminded me of these words from First John about how perfect love casts out fear. Love that comes from God and is known through God s Son, Jesus Christ, drives away the fear that threatens our hearts and frees us to live fearlessly. But what does that mean and how does it happen? Well, first of all, it doesn t mean that fear is by itself a bad thing. Fear is an instinct God gives us for survival in this life. It tells us to be alert to danger. In the long development of biological life that Christians like me believe God guided in the creation process called evolution, single-cell organisms became complex beings and eventually leapt into consciousness as human beings. We carry with us the inheritance of the lifeforce that aids our survival. Did you know that, depending upon how you calculate, humans share 96-98% of our genes with chimpanzees? Of course, that 2-4% makes all the difference, although if you look at the behavior of some of us at times, the difference is hard to see. We even share about 90% of our genes with cats. That s probably why church members are so hard to herd, don t you know?!

2 Most of the human brain is similar to the brain of other animals. The hypothalamus, for instance, is located in the bottom part of our brain and operates to protect us. We commonly call it the reptilian brain. It s where our fight or flight instinct is activated when we feel threatened. It sends signals to our sympathetic nervous system that tells our bodies to spring into action. That in turn sends an alarm to our adrenal cortical system, which raises our blood pressure and activates our bodies for what is to come. It works beautifully for what it s designed to do. Fear, in other words, is a gift. A fearless heart is not a foolish heart. We take precautions. We don t invite burglars into our homes. (Which is why Kim is always on my case to lock the doors.) We don t send our children into the street to play in traffic. We teach them stranger danger. We warn them to be careful. All good. But like any good gift, fear can take over and possess us if we aren t careful. A fearless heart is by definition not a fearful heart a heart full of fear. To be truly human is to have the capacity to do more than live by our fight or flight instincts. There are greater considerations in life than just self-preservation. We can learn to stand over against ourselves, to think, not just to feel, to confront our fears with faith and not treat others like enemies. We can learn to look at strangers as potential friends. We can learn to feel the suffering of others and have compassion for them. Fear is a great teacher, but a terrible master. Unfortunately, fear drives too much of our lives these days. Our culture is rife with it. It s despoiling our politics and destroying our common life. The National Rifle Association meets in Dallas this week for their annual convention. Some of us will show up to pray and protest. The NRA started in 1871 to improve marksmanship after the Civil War and trained generations of gun owners in safety. Unfortunately, it suffered a hostile takeover in 1977 by a group that decided the NRA should become a political lobbying organization to fight gun control. That move was not so coincidentally inspired by the flight of Southern rural whites from the Democratic Party as things were changing in the 2

3 South through desegregation and the Voting Rights Act. Also, not so coincidentally, that was happening at the very same time the Southern Baptist Convention was being taken over primarily by Southern rural white conservatives. The tactics were similar. Liberalism was code language for fear of social change rooted in racial tension. The NRA uses fear as a motivating factor for fundraising. They tell people their right to own guns is endangered. Even the right to own weapons designed specifically to kill as many people as possible in the shortest time is God ordained. They oppose any attempts at real reform, worrying that any restriction will end up with the complete loss of the right to own any kind of gun, even for hunting or for recreational shooting. And so we end up with a culture of guns and violence that takes human lives time after time after time, and all we are left with is thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families. Last Sunday, a young man walked into a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee and killed four people with a semiautomatic weapon. That he was mentally disturbed seems beside the point. His father had taken away his guns at one point, but then gave them back to him. So, we talk about why his father gave them back, but not why he should be allowed to own them in the first place. Really? Just this week, we lost a dedicated police officer to a fatal gunshot wound in Dallas. We will mourn the loss of his life, call him a hero, and praise those who wear the uniform to protect us, but we will do nothing to prevent it from happening again and again and again. We would rather protect gun rights than love our neighbors enough to find a different way to live together that is free of fear that we think can only be countered by more violence. Does the church not have something to offer the world in the midst of this madness? The church exists to bear witness to a better way, a way that drives out fear rather than provoking it. And love is the only way to drive out fear, First John tells us. Twenty-nine times in our short passage today from First John we hear the word love or beloved. We ve been talking for the past few weeks about what it 3

4 takes for the church to become the beloved community. And the key, of course, is love. The word used for love in our text is the Greek word agape. This is not a sentimental love or a romantic love; it s not even the kind of love that brings about friendship. It s divine love, the love that comes only from God. This love goes by names like mercy and compassion, and it will always look like courage. It is always preoccupied with the wellbeing of others. Human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. We are capable of doing more than being consumed with fear. We can choose to love or we can choose to hate, but most often for most of us, the choice doesn t come down to love or hate; it s usually a choice between a love that is open-eyed, open-eared and open-hearted or indifference that is closed in all the same ways. Divine love doesn t emerge or evolve in us naturally. It s a supernatural gift that has to be received and nurtured. We can only cultivate a fearless heart by abiding in God s love, meditating on it, and allowing the Spirit of God to take control of us. A little more than a hundred years ago in Dallas, a black man named Allen Brooks was found in the loft of his white employer s barn with the family s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Mary Ethel Beuvens. She d been missing for nearly four hours. After a doctor examined both Brooks and the girl, he was charged with attempted rape. He was taken to the Red Courthouse downtown and while being arraigned, a white mob broke in and threw him out a second-story window into the street. They tied a noose around his neck and dragged him to Main and Akard streets where 5,000 people gathered to witness his lynching. One photograph of the hanging was turned into a postcard that was sent all over the country displaying Dallas as the kind of city that knew how to handle black people. One of those postcards read has been recovered. It read, Well John This is a token of a great day in Dallas, March 3, a Negro was hung for an assault of a three-year-old girl. I saw this on my noon hour. I was very much in the bunch. You can see the Negro 4

5 hanging on the telephone pole. Allen Brooks wasn t considered a human being with rights to be respected; he was a Negro to be feared, not a man to be honored. This is the dehumanizing work we do to justify hate or indifference. I would like to tell you that was then and aren t we glad we have progressed to a better day. But fear that produces hate and indifference persists among us still. The sad truth is that most of those 5,000 souls from the Dallas of 1910 were probably good church-going Christians like us, who had not yet learned the way of love that casts out fear. If we would claim we would do better, that we wouldn t defend memorializing people who treated black folks like that; we would memorialize black people who were treated like that. The church loses its moral standing to speak of the gospel of God s love for all people when we make anything but the firm foundation of God s love the aim of our hearts. A fearless heart is only fearless because it is filled with love. It is never fearless because it has armed itself or defended itself in worldly ways. Love makes the Lord alone our shield. It looks for ways to protect and cherish vulnerable human life rather than take it. This kind of love requires moral courage. And that moral courage begins by our willingness to deal with our fear. A beloved community is a courageous community. It honestly faces the unrighteous legacies of our history and doesn t try to defend them as righteous heritage. But more than that, it takes risks to become involved with people who have suffered while we haven t been paying attention. Love is a transitive verb; it always requires an object. It s not a time-release capsule you can swallow once a day to drive the fear away. The only way for love to be perfected is by actually loving someone. But here s the really good news. This is what God is ready and willing to do in each of us and all of us. God loves us from the inside out so that we will be able to love one another with fearless hearts. 5