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Getting Involved: Presbyterian Resources
The
Courage that Faith Calls Forth
a sermon by Tom F. Driver
First
Presbyterian Church
Baldwin, Long Island
October 23, 2005
Readings: Leviticus 191-215-18
1 Thessalonians 21-8
Text: "... we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who
tests our hearts." -- 1 Thessalonians 2:4b
In this text Paul writes as if God were a cardiologist -- because he says that
God tests our hearts. But we get his meaning, and it presents us with a question:
If we are Christians, have our hearts been tested?
And if you or I can say, "Yes, I know what it is to be under great stress,
and the faith in my heart has come through," then the text holds a further
question:
Has the faith in our hearts been tested in circumstances where we could lose
our lives, or be put in prison, or put our family in danger, all because we
were trying to follow the will of God?
---
When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, up there in their great seaport in Macedonia,
in the north of what is today Greece, it was dangerous to be a Christian. Unlike
him and them, most of us practice our Christianity in rather comfortable ways.
But there are people in this world for whom the practice of Christianity is
dangerous indeed. For them, Christian faith requires courage. I want to tell
you a story.
1.
Colombia, in South America, is is a land that has become famous for its violence, There I met a man named Jesus. A 40-year-old Presbyterian pastor, he has lived his entire life in danger. I need to explain that.
Colombia has suffered from internal violence ever since the Spanish Conquest. The danger is greater for those who are poor, especially those who live in rural areas. It is still greater for those of African descent, who are about one third of the population. Although Jesus is not black, and does not come from the poorest of the poor, he grew up among small farmers and eventually served as a pastor in a small farming village in one of the most violent parts of the country.
I don't know what you have heard about Colombia's violence. It is important to know that the violence is mostly NOT about drugs. Extreme violence was there before the drugs became a problem. Colombia's murderousness is about land, and money, and natural resources like oil and minerals. In Colombia there has always been conflict -- armed conflict -- between the rich and the poor.
All that is background. Jesus has still another problem: He is a member, indeed a pastor, of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia. Why THAT is hazardous I will ex-plain in a minute.
When Jesus was 18 months old, his father was assassinated. Jesus calls it "an act committed by the unjust who wanted to silence the voice of the oppressed." That is code language. It means that his father was killed by paramilitaries, otherwise known as "death squads." They are the ones who do most of the dirty work for the Colombian army.
So Jesus and his siblings were raised by their mother. When he was 16 he "fol-lowed her example," as he puts it, and was converted to Christianity. Since more than 90% of Colombians are at least nominally Roman Catholic, he probably means that he became for the first time a serious Christian as well as a Presbyterian.
One year after
his conversion, his older brother and sister were killed by illegal armed groups
-- whether the paramilitaries or the guerilla armies I don't know, and probably
Jesus doesn't know either. He has now lost to the armed conflict a father, a
brother, and a sister.
From that moment, Jesus has written, "I started an internal struggle in
my life... whether to continue in the walk of the Gospels, or the path of revenge."
Then he adds: "Thanks to God and the counsel of my adored mother, I was
able to desist from per-verse and iniquitous thoughts."
Listen to that! Listen to that, America! " ... whether to continue in the
walk of the Gospels, or the path of revenge." Which one do you think takes
more courage?
When I hear those words from Jesus, I think of another Jesus, whom we call Je-sus, weeping over Jerusalem and saying, "Would that you knew the things that make for peace." Revenge or "the walk of the Gospels." Which of those makes for peace? Don't talk to Jesus about terrorism. Don't talk to JESUS about terrorism. They know as much about that as anyone.
---
By the time he was 31 years old, Jesus had finished his studies at the the Pres-byterian
seminary and was called to pastor a church in a small town called Saiza in the
region where he grew up. The worst was yet to come.
He had been there three years when an armed group came into town and herded
all the men and some of the women into the town square. They told them to lie
face down on the ground. Children were told to stay indoors. The "armed
actors" as all mili-tant groups are called in Colombia, set fire to some
warehouses. It was clear that they planned to kill the 50 adults they had in
the public square. Jesus was one of them. He prepared himself to die.
Some shots were
fired. Children ran out of the houses to see what was happen-ing. Jesus heard
one of the gunmen call out, "Don't shoot the chidlren!"
And then one of
the men recognized Jesus. They had met before when Jesus was on some kind of
mission to rescue lost children. This man now came over to Je-sus, knelt down
and whispered into his ear: "Run! They are going to kill you. You should
run!"
Almost without thinking, he got up and ran. As he went, he grabbed two of the
children and put them behind him as a shield. The three of them managed to escape
the village and head into the woods, where they hid for 3 days. Most of those
in the public square were massacred. It was reported far and wide, even here
in the States, that Jesus was dead. But from his point of view, God had spared
his life.
After a period
of recovery from trauma, Jesus was sent to a church in Cartagena, which was
then a relatively calm city. He was pastor there for almost six years when terror
struck again just a few months ago. One of his sons was abducted, taken pris-oner,
and tortured. As of today,Jesus and his family are in hiding.
Listen to words that Jesus has written just recently:
In spite of ... circumstances I continue thinking that God is always at my side. I have always believed in the words of the great thinker who said "at night is when you have to believe in the light. ...
"Not all the days are clear, Lord. There are days when the sun is hidden .... The beautiful things I promised you, the lovely desires which animated me and the dreams which nourished me go away. At those times I see everything differently: the monotony of life, the evil in the hearts of men, the futility of the things of daily life, and the incomprehensible times which suddenly and unpredictably make me relive gray and dark moments .... But I know, Lord, that these hours pass. ... I know that in spite of the pain, the world is in your hands. Though it is difficult to believe, I know how to believe in a new world [even] when everything seems to speak to me of hate. I know how to believe in people [even] when I am certain that they are resolved not to live [in] love. Lord, I want to see the sun shine."
2.
We are apt to forget that the way of Christ and his gospel is fundamentally
at odds with the way of the world. A person who seriously tries to "walk
the path of the Gospel" is sure to get in trouble with the rulers of this
world. That happened to Jesus, who paid for it with his life. It happened to
St. Paul, who was thrown into prison. It hap-pened to people in the churches
Paul founded. And it is happening today to the Presby-terian Church of Colombia.
Jesus has said of the church he served in Cartagena, "There I worked nearly six years, building fraternity and fashioning a family. I say this with all my heart because ... I feel today, that they are a family I cherish and miss every day."
I'ts very much like Paul, who wrote to the Thessalonians: "We were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. 8 So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us." (NRSV 1 Thess. 2:7-8)
In Thessalonica and in Colombia, the apostle and the pastor encountered danger because of their work for Christ. In Paul's case, there was fierce opposition to his mes-sage from the Roman Empire as well as from the local synagogue, which lost some of its members to his preaching. In the case of Jesus, the opposition comes from the gov-ernment and from the landed interests who are trying to get rid of people whom they think are in their way. They want to use the land to drill for oil, build roads, and do other kinds of development.
We
heard a passage from Leviticus this morning. In it God says, "You shall
not profit by the blood of your neighbor." (Lev. 19:16)
In Colombia today that is exactly what is happening. That is why there are so
many massacres and assassinations. It is why ten percent of the entire population
have been displaced from their homes and driven into makeshift camps and shantytowns
where they die of malnutrition, disease, and hopelessness.
The
Presbyterian Church of Colombia is small in number but great in courage. It
has decided that Jesus's gospel, with its emphasis on bringing good news to
the poor, requires the church to defend the destitute displaced people who have
become their neighbors. In Barranquilla, where its own offices are, the church
helped to found a Cen-ter for Human Rights, which helps the displaced people
to understand their rights and to organize to obtain them.
But
in Colombia, just as in Rome in St. Paul's day, the head of government thinks
that if you are not with him you are against him. The Roman emperor wanted to
be worshipped. The President of Colombia just wants to be followed without question.
His government has a terrible human rights record. Therefore he has said that
human rights workers are terrorists. That is a signal to the death squads that
they may get rid of human rights workers with impunity.
A
year ago in August, my friend Rick Ufford-Chase, who had been elected that summer
as the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA), visited Colombia. He was
hosted by The Rev. Milton Mejia, the Executive Secretary of the Presbyterian
Church of Colombia and who is one of the bravest people I know anything about.
He and his fam-ily have received death threats many times because of his human
rights leadership. He comes to the States frequently to get away from the heat,
but he always goes back.
When
Rick came to visit, he took him to the regional office of the Ministry of Jus-tice,
so they could talk with officials there about the situation. As they sat in
that office, Milton's cell phone rang. When he heard what the caller told him
he turned ashen. A prominent university professor who worked closely with the
Center for Human Rights had just been assassinated on the street in broad daylight.
A few days earlier the prof-ressor had been arrested and taken to jail. The
charges were false, and a court ordered him released. He walked free, only to
be gunned down by the paramilitaries.
It
is a familiar pattern. If you are arrested for doing anything vaguely political,
the greatest danger will come when you are released. For although the courts
may say you are innocent, the government has henchmen who can get rid of you.
More than a year ago, the church in Colombia asked the church up here to send
persons to accompany them in their danger. Nothing happened until Rick Ufford-Chase
returned from his visit and told the church: "We have to help, and we have
to do it NOW."
Because
the church offices in Louisville commit their resources long in advance, they
could not move swiftly. So Rick turned to an unofficial group, The Presbyterian
Peace Fellowship, and asked us to find some volunteers who would go to Colombia
and give both visibility and moral encouragement to endangered Presbyterians.
They would be totally unarmed. They would be given their lodging in Colombia,
but they would have to pay their other expenses, including airfare.
Can you believe it? 35 volunteers (aged 23 to 73) have taken training; 19 have gone down, two at a time, for stays of one or two months at a time. Several have, at their own request, gone back for a second period of accompaniment.* They have ex-perienced what it means to put your body on the line for the sake of what Jesus calls "walking the Gospel," and it means the world to them.
Conclusion
This is the courage
that faith calls forth. It is, I think, nothing less than a gift from God.
In the immensely troubled world in which we live, let us be grateful to God
for the gift of courage, which sometimes calls people of faith to risk their
lives in peaceful ways so that others may live.
And perhaps some of us will find ourselves called in a similar way. So I end,
as I began, with a question:
What kind
of courage, if any, does faith in Christ call forth from us?
Prayer
God of grace and
God of glory,
On your people pour your power.
Yours is not the
power of guns but of love.
Grant us the courage to trust in your kind of power.
Instill in us the courage to defend the weak --
not with guns but with love, respect, and jusice.
God of wisdom,
grant us courage
For the living of these days.
Amen.
*These are the numbers as of April 2006.