Are You a Child of Encouragement?
Sermon by James W. Crawford
May 9, 1999
If there is one thing more than another that many of us need in this world, it is encouragement. We live or work in environments where critical faculties seem to be the order of the day and critical minds the measure of intelligence and insight. So we catch it from all sides. And in addition, we tend to be pretty tough on ourselves, sensing inadequacy here or there, wondering if anyone really cares about us, walking around with tough hides, preparing always to retreat from someone's cheap shot, disapproving glance, or subtly negative judgment confirming our own. In that condition, most of us receive an encouraging word almost as manna from heaven.
And in many ways it is. Encouragement, it seems to me, expresses more closely the Spirit of Christ than dour, harsh, judgments. To be sure, our lives do not always meet the mark. They are loaded with error, misjudgments, oversights, outright mistakes and self indulgence. Sin besets us all. We desperately need someone to urge us on, to buck us up, to hang in there with us.
And just as we need encouragement to enable us to cope with the challenges we face, so others need it from us. I have often thought if the Christian Community is anything, it is a community of grace and hope, of forgiveness and encouragement.
I
Now, that is the kind of community, and in many cases the kind of people, we meet in the Book of Acts. Luke writes Acts and he gives us a saga describing the progress of Christianity from Jerusalem to Rome.
Acts tells a story replete with challenging incidents, describing difficulty surrounding and fortitude emerging from many lives. Acts introduces us to the faith of Dorcas, Lydia, and Priscilla; it continues the faith-biographies of Peter, James and John.
And yes, Acts thrusts before us, the Apostle Paul. There he stands, a towering figure, who with faith, fire, passion and incredible forbearance breaks down the barrier between gentile and Jew amid implacable adversity. Paul dominates Acts, just as he dominates so much of the new Testament reflection about the meaning of Jesus.
But hold it! Who is that lurking in the shadows? Who is that grasping Paul's hand, speaking to him with a sense of urgency, humoring him, calming him down, strengthening him for the tasks ahead? We have spoken about him before. I cannot keep my own eyes off him. He is my favorite character outside the Gospels. Luke, in this Book of Acts, introduces him to us, first of all, as Joseph, a Cypriot. But because of a radiant disposition, an obviously conciliatory and joyous approach to life, his friends in that early Christian community give him a nick-name more nearly descriptive of his character: Bar-nabis. Barnabas, meaning, "Son of encouragement."
We first learn of this splendid figure when he learns of the poverty of the Jerusalem church, sells his real estate in Cyprus, comes to Jerusalem and contributes the proceeds to that bankrupt enterprise. Later, in both Luke's record and Paul's correspondence, we discover a remarkable human being, whose leadership, indefatigable goodwill and personal integrity permeate the early church.
The City of Antioch, for instance, harbored one of the earliest, most intense and courageous resurrection communities. Matthew composed his Gospel there. In Antioch followers of Jesus were first called "Christians." Who was that church's most inspiring and dogged leader? Barnabas!
Paul's first missionary journey took him to Cyprus, the home of Barnabas. He and Barnabas took along a young man named John Mark. No doubt Barnabas played a most hospitable host in his home territory.
This tight and synergistic tie between Paul and Barnabas began while Paul was still known in the early Christian community as Saul. Remember? This venomous, Christian-hating fanatic from Tarsus? You will recall on the Road to Damascus, through an explosive experience, Saul changes from an enemy of Christ to an ally. Those Christians who know Saul or who experience his fury and hatred of Christians cannot believe the change. No one changes from virulent enemy to passionate friend overnight. The Church in Jerusalem finds itself cynical and shocked into utter disbelief at the news of Saul's conversion. To be accepted in Jerusalem, Paul needs an advocate, a reference, a friend in court. Barnabas makes the necessary appointment for Paul. Barnabas accompanies Paul to Jerusalem, stands by his side, puts his own credibility on the line, vouches for Paul's integrity. Barnabas takes Paul under his wing, serves as his mentor, runs his interference. Barnabas, if you will, serves as Paul's letter of introduction, and persuades that Jerusalem church, the "Vatican" of its day, that Paul is the real thing.
Unfortunately, Paul and Barnabas split. The division comes over that young man, John Mark, they took on their first journey. Mark fizzles out, gets homesick, cannot take the incessant traveling into harm's way. His leaving infuriates Paul, and later while planning another trip, Barnabas urges they take Mark again. "No way!" says Paul. "Give him a break," pleads Barnabas. Paul's refusal sticks and Barnabas disappears from the pages of the New Testament.
Who dominates our memories? Paul, of course. We remember Paul, as one commentator observes, a "young scholar of tempestuous force, brilliant, iron-willed, tireless." And Barnabas? Gracious, diplomatic, magnanimous. Paul launches the smart bomb; Barnabas heals the wound. Paul strikes the lightning; Barnabas extinguishes the blaze. I wonder sometimes if Barnabas ever regrets Paul's conversion. It is a shame they disagreed over the character of John Mark, Barnabas simply fading from the story. I have occasionally wondered who I might choose to go spend a couple of nights camping with in New Hampshire's Presidential Range. Paul? Barnabas? Are you kidding? Barnabas, hands down.
II
Now friends, it seems to me the Christian community is adept at supplying the Barnabas kind to this world. To be sure, we need and want both Paul and Barnabas types, but a few Pauls are plenty; we can never have enough of Barnabas. What a difference they can make!
I was reading, this last week, some of the comments of the young people from Columbine High School out in Littleton, Colorado. It seems those two boys who went on the rampage received little support, little encouragement. Listen:
One male friend says, "Dylan Klebold was one of my best friends. And when I hung out with him, there was just something that happened. I mean whether they were wearing jeans and a T-shirt, or whether they were wearing their black trenchcoats, people would give them looks. Just like, 'you don't belong here, would you leave?' . . . They hadn't done anything physically wrong to people. I mean they dressed differently. So? They wore black. So what? It's just, they were hated and so they felt they hated back. They hated back."
And another female classmate: "They call them freaks, weirdoes, faggots. It was just stupid name calling, acting like little children . . ." They were hated and they hated back.
I don't suppose anybody here knows Amber Richardson. She is an 18- year-old senior at Danvers High School, and last week, according to a story in The Boston Globe she sat down "next to the quiet boy who wears Metallica T-shirts and gets picked on by others in the school. 'He said he's given up on this school. He said, nobody will ever like me in this school. He said, 'I try so hard to make friends, but there's something about me people just don't like.'"
We learn it is the first time Amber Richardson, as the article says, "realizes how hurt and deflated the boy feels. Amber says other students treat the boy in a nasty manner, purposely not laughing when he cracks a joke and avoiding eye contact with him. Once, after he had been ridiculed, Richardson says he remarked in class, 'I want to rip out a gun and shoot everybody.' But a popular student quipped back, 'Shut up. You'll never do that.'"
Amber says, "If students talked to him they would discover that he is a sensitive and interesting person. But he's already been labeled as unwanted, which makes even quiet students avoid him."
Of course. Now, we dare not attribute that high school massacre to any one source. A constellation of factors, including some we will never know come into play in such macabre incidents. But as one Seattle English teacher, talking the incident over with her students, speculated, "We talked about, what if someone sometime had just reached out and said something great to one of these kids. Would it have done something great? Would it have made a difference? I had boys in my class with tears in their eyes. They're getting it, that we are part of this community, that we have responsibility for each other."
Oh, how encouragement tips the scales in our own lives and the life of our world. Mildred Fielding, for instance. Most of us do not know her, but there she is in Warsaw, Indiana, in the mid 1880s, telling a miserably impoverished and struggling child of a shattered, nomadic family by the name of Theodore Dreiser that he possessed "a fine mind," that someday he could leave that gossip-saturated and numbing town, and later assured him while at Indiana State University that "you have the capacity for rising high in [your] world and I want you to do it. . ." Dreiser writes, "I felt that I was one of the most important youths that ever was."
Or Agnes Boyle O'Reilly Hocking, who did not tell her students about poetry, but made them live it, right here in Cambridge at the Shady Hill School, encouraging, inspiring, compelling the poet May Sarton to exclaim of Agnes Hocking, "She opened a door onto a land where everything seemed gathered together and harmonized." Poetry in her class became a "a kind of music which is physiologically right, not something told, but something happening to us all the time."
Or Trevor Huddleston, a white Parish Priest in Johannesburg's Black Sophiatown , who in the early 1940s raised his huge black hat in courtesy to Mrs. Zacharia Tutu, overwhelming her 12 year old son, Desmond, who had never seen such a thing in South Africa, a simple gesture, leading to a magnificent friendship encouraging that boy to become one of the great liberators of our own time.
And Anne Mansfield Sullivan. Talk about encouragement! We all know her story, but it still shines brilliantly. Would you allow me to read to you about deaf, blind, brilliant Helen Keller's first encounter with Anne Sullivan?
The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old.
On the afternoon of that eventful day, I stood on the porch, dumb, expectant. I guessed vaguely from my mother's signs and from the hurrying to and fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen, so I went to the door and waited on the steps. The afternoon sun penetrated the mass of honeysuckle that covered the porch, and fell on my upturned face. My fingers lingered almost unconsciously on the familiar leaves and blossoms which had just come forth to greet the sweet southern spring. I did not know what the future held of marvel or surprise for me. Anger and bitterness had preyed upon me continually for weeks and a deep languor had succeeded this passionate struggle.
And then Helen Keller asks this poignant rhetorical question:
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog? When it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbor was. 'Light! Give me light!' was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.
I felt approaching footsteps. I stretched out my hand as I supposed to my mother. Someone took it, and I was caught up and held close in the arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and more than all things else, to love me . . .
You remember the drama telling this story of Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller. "The Miracle Worker"—and that is exactly what those who invest in encouragement are all about: making miracles of others where discouragement, defeat, cynicism and fear tend to creep up and overwhelm us.
May I tell you something personal? Do you know what makes ministry in this church for me—for me—a vital, enduring, sustaining vocation, what an old mentor of mine insisted was "the most rewarding work in the world?" It is you! You!
I live because you are an encouraging, sustaining, persevering, never-say-die, encouraging Christian community. My soul! After all these years together you know my blind spots, my shortcomings, the errors of omission, the failures of commission, the ghastly oversights and painful misjudgments—and still you hang in there showering grace on this wounded healer, worshipping and planning, celebrating and commiserating in solidarity with one another, wanting this church to remain faithful, eager for it to reflect the grace and the spirit of Christ. Do you know what an encouragement that is to me? Men and women working together from early morning to late at night to make this house welcoming, hospitable, a radiant representative of Jesus Christ to new people who walk in our doors for the first time, men and women on the phone in their homes, at their desks working out complicated usher schedules; touching base on the ill and dying; struggling with plans to maintain and beautify this marvelous building; seeking to leverage personal and financial resources to make this city livable for everyone; thinking compassionately, responsibly, imaginatively about money, mission priorities, this congregation's future; mediating truth through the arts, serving as windows on the Divine through music; managing that front desk with its million and one things and people peppering you all the time, and the thousand other things you do here to make this interdependent, dynamic and caring organism the Body of Christ. Children of encouragement, that's what you are!!
And do you know what I believe keeps us going? It is a conviction, finally, that we live not at the whim of caprice and circumstance or in the turmoil and chaos of everyday events. They surely play a role, but finally, what carries us on and through is trust in the promises of Christ's future, a sturdy belief in the rock-bottom security of God through everything that might batter us around, a sure loyalty to one another as we pass through whatever crisis meets us on our wilderness trek, a sure sense of purpose inviting, beckoning us, pointing us onward beyond all the routine resistances and petty obstacles that might divert us. As the author to the Hebrews insists we are citizens of another country, whose loyalties lie there, lifting us above and out of the fits and starts of lesser commitments. We are saved from discouragement and despair by surrendering to a heavenly vision that releases us from discouragement and despair.
So friends, if anyone here this morning is ready to divert from the course, give up the fight, lose heart and count the moral struggle a fraud; if any of you today are discouraged about life in general or yourself in particular, I beg you take sustenance, first of all, from this congregation around you, then listen for the voice of that undiscourageable and irrepressible figure, Barnabas, as it comes ringing down to us through the ages: "I may not know much about the structure of the universe or possess an accurate picture of the destiny of our common life, but I do know that in this world I've been offered a life to live and I propose to live it for God's sake. I may not bring many gifts to the table, nor possess overmuch to offer to the unity of the human family, but what I have to give I will keep on giving with steadfast faith and undaunted hope.
"I bet my life on the love of God, the grace of Christ, the promise of a new creation in this capricious, sometimes sad and tragic but ultimately glorious world of God's; and I will stand by to the end no matter what befall, for I am a child of encouragement."
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