What Kind of Courage Do You Need?                               7/12/42

 

Scripture:  Mark 11: 1-11a  (to be read at beginning)

 

Of all demands made upon all of us there is none more insistent or more important than that for courage.  Where there is fear, there lurks ultimate defeat.  Where there is faith and courage, there is ultimately achievement and triumph.  In one instance, life becomes negative and turns sour.  In the other, it becomes a grand affirmation.  In one instance the question sooner or later occurs “What is the use?”  In the other, men and women declare with fine confidence, “Life is very much worth living.”

 

It is true that the advance of ordered enlightenment has helped to rule out many of the things that have caused fear.  Plagues that terrorized mankind have been checked or prevented by the knowledge of modern medicine.  People can protect themselves by clothing, shelter and travel from the cold of biting winters.  Superstitions give way before demonstrated truth and higher faiths.

 

But not everything that inspires fear is ruled out of life.  People fear the loss of livelihood - a job or a supporter gone.  The scourge of war brings quaking of heart to those helpless in its path.  People fear loss of “face,” of friends, of honor.  Now and then the coward in us urges us to run away because life is so hard.  But courage whispers persistently, “You can’t escape what life brings to you, you can’t run away from it; stand up to it and master it!”  Life that is gloriously worth living does not come at bargain prices!

 

There are two kings of courage - or perhaps, two ways in which courage operates.  We all stand in need of the courage that will enable us to face the things that can not be avoided - life’s inevitables (once we have determined that they are inevitable.)  There are some experiences that come to everyone.  They come in varying proportions, but some of them surely come in pain, suffering of body or mind, loss of health, loss of loved ones, sorrow and disappointment and frustration and finally the end of earthly life that may seem dear.

 

The only effective way to meet these experiences is with courage.  Our first reaction to these experiences, when one or more of them suddenly falls upon us, is the thought that our life is uncommonly hard.  You and I have heard someone say, “I don’t know what I have done to deserve such suffering!”  And perhaps we ourselves have said it, feeling that fate has it in for us.

 

We must each remind ourselves again that the coming of night is no respecter of persons.  Fate may strike upon the rich or the poor, the healthy or the sick, the proud and the humble.  “The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.”  Some people know what to do with their rainy seasons.  Others do not.  It all depends on the inner resources of your soul.  Are you and I willing to face life’s inevitables with courage?

 

Here is the great essayist, Charles Lamb, who returns home one day to find that his sister, in a fit of insanity, his injured his father and killed his mother.  What could be more devastating, more ghastly?  What could he do?  Well, he sat down and wrote a letter to his friend Coleridge in which he says, “Thank God I am very calm and composed and able to do the best that remains to do.”  He devoted himself to his stricken sister, finally won her back to health by his tender ministrations, and all the while kept on with the writing of his fine essays.

 

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend, “For fourteen years I have not had a real day’s health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary --- I have written in bed and out of it; written in haemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam from weakness.   I was made for a contest and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle.”  And we know what he did about it!  He kept right on writing tender poetry; tales of strength and heroism.  He refused to let the grim row of medicine bottles and the blood on his handkerchief be the chief facts of his life.

 

You and I need and must have that kind of courage!

 

But there is another kind that we need as well.  We must have the courage to face things that are not inevitable but which ought nevertheless to be faced - the injustices, the cruelties, the tyrannies, the selfish discriminations of the little worlds and the larger world where we live.

 

You need the kind of courage which is willing to leave safety and shelter for the adventure of high causes.  And I need it.  The world is full of the possibility for adventure in kindlier, nobler, better living for all peoples; for justice for all, flowing like a river of life; for understanding, for the exaltation of that which is true and beautiful and good.

 

There are, as a matter of fact, people who have fine courage in facing what fate requires of them personally, but who lack what it takes to tackle the sins and cruelties of the community.  A man may be able to weather the death of his little boy who has been the pride of his heart, and still find himself hesitating to take a stand on child labor which affects the physical and mental health of hundreds of the boys and girls of his precinct.

 

Dr. W. M. Clow, in a book on “The Cross in Christian Experience” offers a fine discrimination between the words “burden” and “cross.”  We find the word “burden” often in the Old and New Testaments.  And by it is meant all of the inevitable care and strain of earthly life - our wearing daily tasks; duties which exhaust us by their difficulty and monotony; responsibilities which wear on our nerves; sorrows of loneliness, poverty, disappointment; anxiety of weakness or illness or age; consequence of sins.  These burdens must be born, and they are best borne with the kind of courage we mentioned first this morning.

 

The other word, “cross,” is a word constantly on the lips of Jesus.  And it differs from the Biblical meaning of “burden.”

 

People often speak of their toil, their losses and sorrows and uncertainties as “crosses.”  One speaks of failing eyesight as a “cross;” another refers to the loss of a beloved friend as a “cross;” still another speaks of constant lack of employment as his “cross.”  This is a confusion of thinking and of words.  These are burdens.  They are the inescapables of life.  All people have burdens.

 

But many never carry a cross at all, unless it be a tiny gold cross on a necklace chain.  The heart of this matter is contained in one of Dr. George Buttrick’s sentences:  “We are conscripted for our burdens; we must volunteer for our crosses.”  A burden may have moral or social meaning.  A cross always has those meanings, and a profound religious significance!

 

Whenever a man or woman, for love’s sake, takes upon himself the burdens of others and the sins and griefs of the world in which he lives, then he takes up a cross in the correct sense of the word - in Jesus’ meaning when he said, “Let a man .... take up his cross and follow me.”  Jesus, like everyone else who walks the earth, had burdens - burdens of weariness, disappointment.  They are the price of being human.  Even he could not escape.

 

But he might have escaped his cross had he chosen to do so.  He was not required by any agency or law of the world to go to Jerusalem amid the shouts of an expectant population and the threats of deadly enemies.  He might have turned toward Nazareth or Capernaum, or the borders of Palestine.  He might have retired to writing from a safe distance instead of preaching amid danger.  But, instead, he chose to go to Jerusalem, down its main street, through the Garden of Gethsemane, through the judgment hall of Pilate, and out to die with thieves on a cross with a prayer of forgiveness on his lips.  That took a moral courage, the kind of courage that is always required when one volunteers, for God’s sake, to set himself against ugliness and greed and lust - against sin.

 

That kind of courage has been made flesh again and again.  Did not David Livingstone manifest it when in Africa, he wrote in his journal, “I am pale, bloodless and weak, from bleeding profusely ever since the 31st of March last ....”  (that was 11 days previous).

 

Did not David Hartley demonstrate that kind of courage when in 1776 he stood up in the House of Commons and moved that “the slave trade is contrary to the laws of God and the rights of men” only to be hooted and jeered when his motion failed?

 

Did not the fathers and mothers of some of the people sitting here in this room, and perhaps some of these here themselves, manifest that kind of courage when they took an enlightened stand for Jesus Christ and joined the forces of righteousness represented in this church in the face of bitter opposition?

 

There is one further observation: courage doesn’t just happen.  No one can say: “Go to, now, I’ll be brave.  I’ll be heroic.”  At least such a blustering bluff will soon spend itself.  The courage which lasts is born of profound faith - the faith that the world and this life have profound meaning and purpose; faith in the eternal core of goodness; faith that the cross of Christ is no accident, but the deliberate symbol of redeeming love!

 

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dates and places delivered:

 

            Pilgrim Church, Honolulu, April 2, 1939  AM  (Palm Sunday)

            Wisconsin Rapids, July 12, 1942