Jesus and the Disinherited, Part 2: Fear

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

May 9, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Eternal God, in these moments of quiet we thank you for your presence in our lives. We thank you for all of the testimonies of your profound love for your children. We especially thank you this day for the holy one Jesus. We thank you for his humility. We thank you that rather than elevating himself above us he instead would lift us up and as with his disciples call us “friends.” We thank you for his many reminders that we are to love one another. But we confess that we have great difficulty following his command to love.

We become upset with others and find it easier to reject them than to seek to understand and to love them.

We struggle with the almost impossible command to love our enemies.

We become driven to meet our own needs and become blind to the needs of others.

We are driven to succeed which becomes all-consuming and trumps our command to love.

Forgive us our foolish ways. Help us to keep in our awareness this command to love which Jesus repeated so many times. Help us especially to hear it in those hard times when it is most difficult to love.

Help us to love others when they are power hungry.
Help us to love others when they are inconsiderate.
Help us to love others when they are angry and lash out blindly.
Help us to love others when they are selfish and insensitive.

Help us, O God, to love others so that we may abide in your love and act like the friends of Jesus. Amen.

 

John 15: 9-17

9“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command. 15I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17This is my command: Love each other.

 

A Message

“Jesus and the Disinherited, Part 2: Fear”

 

Friends, we’re now in week 2 of this 5 part sermon series based on Jesus and the Disinherited by the late, great Howard Thurman. As I told you last week, the most important part of learning how to be a disciple of Jesus, which I hope we all do, is learning the heart of who it is we’re following in discipleship. Who is Jesus, and what does he care about? Last week, we learned that Jesus is a vine through whom we grow, the one who feeds us the only truths that we need to grow. This week Thurman teaches us about fear, and how Jesus transforms the fears in our lives.

 

Thurman relates that fear is a constant factor in most of our lives. If we’re lucky, or privileged, then fear might be more of a background noise to you—you fear failing a class, displeasing your boss, losing a job, a turn in the market, suffering poor health, losing a friend, or something hurting our loved ones. If we’re less lucky, and more vulnerable, we might have much more to fear: an abusive partner, the throws of an addiction, the progression of a chronic illness, an unexpected bill that could destroy our fragile finances.

 

But if you don’t have the social advantages of belonging to what our society deems “the right groups”—white, male, cis-hetero, native born, able bodied—fear can control your every move. Especially in this ever-more-violent society, there may be no course of action that will protect you from attack. The whole system is rigged to cause you harm.

 

A few months ago, a man named David Gray voiced a painful reality like this:

 

"Preparing for Daycare" (by David Gray)

I need to drive my two-year-old to daycare tomorrow morning. To ensure we arrive alive, we won't take public transit (Oscar Grant). I removed all air fresheners from the vehicle and double-checked my registration status (Daunte Wright), and ensured my license plates were visible (Lt. Caron Nazario). I will be careful to follow all traffic rules (Philando Castille), signal every turn (Sandra Bland), keep the radio volume low (Jordan Davis), and won't stop at a fast food chain for a meal (Rayshard Brooks). I'm too afraid to pray (Rev. Clementa C. Pickney) so I just hope the car won't break down (Corey Jones).

When my wife picks him up at the end of the day, I'll remind her not to dance (Elijah McClain), stop to play in a park (Tamir Rice), patronize the local convenience store for snacks (Trayvon Martin), or walk around the neighborhood (Mike Brown). Once they are home, we won't stand in our backyard (Stephon Clark), eat ice cream on the couch (Botham Jean), or play any video games (Atatiana Jefferson).

After my wife and I tuck him into bed around 7:30pm, neither of us will leave the house to go to Walmart (John Crawford) or to the gym (Tshyrand Oates) or on a jog (Ahmaud Arbery). We won't even walk to see the birds (Christian Cooper). We'll just sit and try not to breathe (George Floyd) and not to sleep (Breonna Taylor).

 

The oppressor has taught our marginalized beloveds, and especially our beloveds of color, that if only they can be “good enough” they will live a long, happy, free life. Yet the oppressor changes the definition of “good enough” so conveniently often that our beloveds never seem to fit. Thus they die, and the oppressor taunts that they deserved death because of their own actions.

 

Jesus is, at every turn, the antagonist to the oppressor. Every time we draw a line in the sand between ourselves and another, Jesus chooses the side of the person who didn’t draw the line. And Jesus, in his perfect love, disintegrates fear down to its very fabric.

 

It would be easy for me to just say that the opposite of fear is love, and that our very perfect lectionary-appointed Gospel reading for this morning commands us to love one another. But Thurman charges us to go deeper. Thurman teaches us that the oppressor has us live in constant fear. But he gives us a sacred identity, and combats fear by restoring our dignity and worth.

 

Jesus is, and will always be, the one to remind us to hold our heads high because he loves us and no one has anything on the ones he loves. But our scripture reminds us that, as disciples of the one who loves, it’s not enough to just let him go around loving everyone, or even to proclaim that Jesus loves all the world. We need to go out and do that loving ourselves.

 

As we think about this, it’s impossible for me to ignore that it’s Mother’s Day. Some of us are hearing this beautiful words from John, and imagining how they describe a healthy relationship with our mom. But some of us aren’t, or can’t, and this day can cause its own fear, and deep pain. Some of us didn’t have a mom, or know her, or we lost her. Some of us had a toxic mom, a mom who couldn’t love us like she should have because the drama in her own life was too great to allow that. Some of us aren’t parents and bristle under days like this that remind us that the world expects otherwise. Some of us couldn’t have children, or lost our children, or have a difficult relationship with our children.

 

So the stock sermon that I’ve heard a few too many times before, about how God loves us like a mother, might be the Good News you need to hear today. But if that doesn’t jive with your soul, then let me share something that might: God’s love doesn’t need to reach you through a traditional, biological mother. Find the person in your life who affirms your dignity and worth. That person loves you like the Divine Feminine.

 

As it so happens I have a great relationship with my biological mom, who’s probably watching this service right now (hi mom!). But I also wasn’t raised in a family that I would describe as traditional. I lived with my parents and my two sisters, but my Grandma, my mom’s mom, lived with us for the last eight years of her life, from the time I was eight until her death when I was sixteen. And she not only affirmed my dignity and worth, she embodied the ferocity of a woman who doesn’t take any baloney, and she taught me how to do the same.

 

My grandma, Clarice Eleanor Gulbrandsen, was born on November 6, 1911 in Norwood Park, Chicago, Illinois. She lived her entire life in the Chicago metro, and navigated it with confidence. When she was a young girl she also had her Grandma living with her. Her Grandma was an immigrant from Germany, and taught Grandma so much, including the language. Grandma graduated from high school in 1929, mere months before the stock market crashed. I gotta imagine that if e’er there was a time when it would be really hard to be just out of school and looking for a job, that was probably it. But Grandma not only survived, she thrived. She scrimped, and saved, and pooled together food resources with her friends and family when her earnings as a secretary weren’t enough. A lot of women in that era were taught to marry quite young and then depend on their man for everything, but that wasn’t Grandma. She stayed single until her 30s, and didn’t have her children until she was in her 40s. She paved her own way and did what she wanted.

 

Fast forward a few decades, and my Grandma, now in her mid 80s, widowed, in declining health, and wary of living in the city alone, moved into our house and fashioned a bedroom, sitting room, and a bathroom as her own, and put a door at the entrance so she’d have her own little “Grandma Crib” in our house. I spent hours and hours with her every day, and she taught me some of life’s most important lessons. She taught me her lifelong Methodist faith. She taught me how to do word searches and crossword puzzles. She read the paper cover to cover every morning—she insisted on getting first viewing—and she never lacked an opinion on current events. She taught me how to cook vegetables, but also how to swear. In German. Because you’ll sound scarier that way. When she passed she left a huge hole in my family and in my life, and we struggled. But she lives forever in our memories of her, and in what she taught me. She breathes her unquakeable energy into my lungs, and I breathe out dignity, worth, and strength.

 

So rather than worrying focusing in on your biological mother, think bigger: Who is your Grandma G? Who taught you how to exude a confidence that not even the more fearsome bully could shake from you? And when you can identify from whom you have received that kind of love, then you can model it, and give it. Because Jesus commands that love from us, and employs it to subvert the Empire of the Oppressor into the Kingdom of God. And the perfect love that we can share with one another casts out fear.

 

Amen.

 

 

I Invite you to receive the benediction:

Go now, and bear fruit for God, fruit that will last.
As Christ has loved you, so love one another,
and abide always in God is love,
that your joy may be complete.

And may God give you all you ask for in Christ’s name;
May Christ Jesus reveal to you God’s ways and call you his friends;
And may the Holy Spirit confirm the truth within you and make your joy complete.

We go in peace to love and serve the Lord,
in the name of Christ. Amen.