Scripture:  Acts 27 -   The Storm at Sea
Sermon:  Courage as the heart of faith.
By: Rev. Brenda J. Faust
Resource:  Weavings, Nov/Dec 1995 “Discerning the Spirits”

A savage nor’easter broke upon the ship carrying Paul, requiring major efforts to maintain the ship’s integrity and raising the danger that they would be wrecked on the shoals of North Africa.   Tacking was unknown and rudders were primitive ­ the crew and boat were losing control to the storm.  As one dark day followed another, at least some of the cargo had to be jettisoned.  Unable to navigate, their mission in ruins, the crew gave up.  So also did the passengers.  At this last and gloomiest moment, Paul intervened.  Despite difficulties raised by wind and wave, loose gear and howling storm, he gained the attention of all.  Following the briefest “I told you so, “ he offered a message of hope for all, anchored in a vision that God would lead them to safety.  But this was not the end. Two weeks of drifting across the sea without eating followed.

Throughout, Paul continued to be a beacon of hope. Paul carried within him a persistent knowledge that they would make it.  God had a plan for him and a storm at sea wouldn’t stop that plan. The heart of Paul’s courage was faith based in trust in God.  Paul told the crew,  “Take heart, men!  I trust God; it will turn out as I have been told;”

What is courage?

I asked a friend what courage is.  “It means doing what you have to do, and being surprised that it looks like courage to others.” But what makes courage courageous?

Paul’s courage was based on his faith.  Within each of us are stories of daily courage based upon our faith.  I asked a friend the other day if, in trying to make her life or the world a better place, she had any stories of courage.  No! was the answer.   I disagreed.  I mentioned a time when I thought she had made a very courageous decision about her life in order to heal her relationship with her family.  “Oh!” She responded, “ I thought you meant something like jumping off a bridge to save someone.  In that case, then yes there are two such stories in my life.”     I suspect there are many more.

We confuse courage with bravery.  The root word for good courage is heart, characterized as trusting.  Bravery, by contrast, is rooted in boasting, bragging, or being vicious.   While bravery denotes the idea of action, courage means acting from a faithful, trusting heart.  Bravery is determination against external odds, as when the coastguard rescues passengers from a shipwreck.  Courage, in contrast, entails facing odds that are largely internal.  In The Wizard of Oz, the lion sought bravery, only to discover he needed courage---to face his self-doubts.

We do not think of ourselves as courageous.   We feel that we simply do what we have to do. We downplay what we all experience that sadness is the ground level on which every Christian stands.  The human condition is tragic.  The wealthy, the young, or those seduced by society’s ready diversions can perhaps dodge this fact, at least temporarily. Honestly seen, life is perimetered by death and interlaced with suffering.    Whatever we see, animate or inanimate, is caught up in the struggle of being with non-being.  Metal rusts, wood rots, everything wears out.  Permanence is an illusion.  Sigmund Freud noticed that this struggle is also within us—a life wish battling with a death wish---as we are haunted periodically by the thought that keeping on is not worth the struggle. To live life requires deep courage…. or intense self-deception.

Yet as Christians, courage is the heart of our faith. How often have we prayed, “Oh Lord give me courage.”  Each spiritual issue is a search for courage  -- for doing the difficult, gambling on the unlikely, or facing the undesirable.  The search for courage and the pilgrimage called faith are inseparable sides of the same reality.

There are many stories of courage in everyday living.  In some lives, circumstances are so precarious that the most ordinary acts may be great hymns of faith.  When others with hearts less stout would shrink from carrying on, they go forward.  And few realized the price paid just to meet the hours of the nights and days.  The stories I am going to tell your reflect courage as faith’s lifestyle.

Stories:  by Gerrit Scott Dawson in Weavings, May/June 1997

• Baking Bread in the Dark (Seeing without sight)

An elderly woman lives on her own.  She lost her husband, and worked in furniture factory to raise her children:  She spent her life moving toward God, resolved to act faithfully.  God supplied her the strength to carry on.  In later years there was a deterioration in her eyesight.  Macular degeneration had left only peripheral vision, and now that was fading.   For years, she baked bread as gifts and to sell.  How can she cook now when she can’t see the dials on the stove or the lines on a measuring cup?   She continues and mixes from memory.  In effect she is baking in the dark, but refuses to give up, although that temptation is always present.  But she holds to the witness of her years and of her spiritual experience.  God is still there for her.  The reciprocal relationship remains.  As she moves toward God, admitting her need while still trying as hard as she can, God moves toward her, granting her strength equal to the movement.   She moves through the grief of diminished vision and now recovers sight through her imagination.

• Daring to Laugh Again:

A high school student spoke of events that had knocked her back to a raw reliance on God until she discovered a faith far stronger than she knew she had.   While she was in junior high school, her brother was in a car accident and the woman he hit was killed.  He couldn’t have prevented the accident.  She remembers that night the blue flashing of the police light and singing “Amazing Grace” in her head “through many dangers, toils, and snares…..” It was as if God had taken her family under his wing and given them a feeling of peace as the storm still continued outside his arms.

She went back to school, though her brother stayed home, and defended the accidental nature of the event.  Three days later, her best friend and companion died in a car accident. He was intelligent, nice to all people, and had a close relationship to God, which he shared with others.   She felt numb and empty.  Why had God taken him?  She began to wonder about this God.

The next day she was with her youth choir, and sang “Amazing Grace” again.  Her mother was in the church and she found her peace again.  She stopped laughing for a long time.  And when she did, she was seized with guilt.  How could she laugh with all that had happened?   Because of her friend, her main goal was now to leave an impression on someone as he left on her. Yet she knew at the same time that for the sake of her brother and her friend, she had to live again.  She was brave enough to take the step into joy, and discover that the integrity of her grieving was not compromised.  Rather, the grief strengthened the joy.

• When you don’t want to leave your room:

The scene is a small town ­ a young man dies.  It deeply affects his stepsister, who a few months after his death loses her fiancé in an accident at work.   She had been a person who planned how life should be.  None of this was as it was supposed to be.  Two years later, the hours of feeling overwhelmed have not lessened.    Anger, fear, questions, and a sense of futility swirl around each other in such times.  She rejects the pious advice that God caused these things to happen for some heavenly reason.  Yet she has not rejected God. In spite of the circumstances, and even with her full range of emotions, this woman has known God’s sustaining love.  She said, “I’ve had to give it to God.  That hasn’t come easily for me.  I’ve had to learn how to do it.   To entrust something to God.  God did not will these things to happen.  God gives me strength.”

Sometimes she feels like staying in her room, and never coming out.  But she hasn’t given in to her fear, even though she says it is tempting.  Last year she made a decision to leave her stable job and return to reaching.  She wanted to make more of a difference to others in her life.    This woman has lived with courage, not just to leave her room, but to enter more deeply the risk and the turbulence of life.

• As Nothing to the Love God bears

A woman struggled with multiple sclerosis.  She was an artist and writer, just entering her thirties.  Her faith flourished in the midst of an unmovable obstacle.  Her church responded with prayer and support but this did not cure her illness. It took her courage to continue to live independently when any hour a fall might send her crashing to the floor, far from help.  Her hands didn’t want to respond.  She had days when she was angry, days when she was depressed.  The great sucking draw of the illness was, as she put it, to lie down and give in.  Courage was as simple as not collapsing when everything in her wanted to quit.

She wrote:
"I live because what else is there to do?  Is that courage?  I do what I must do, sometimes with resignation, sometimes with a matter-of-fact attitude or frustration, often with tears and cries to God.  And closely following these cries comes mysteriously genuine praise… Mourning for a body that doesn’t work correctly beats in every cell of me.  So does knowledge that I am made in God’s image.  The two don’t conflict: they are both parts of who I am.    Each sorrow acknowledge and dumped on God’s shoulders becomes praise.  I must throw every sorrow on God ­ this one of my main jobs."

Our owm stories also show courage:

•  My leaving the security of a government job and going to VST
•  A husband with TB, raising children on her own
•  Struggles with addiction
•  Care for a dying husband over many years
•  A dying man’s love of God and his church until the endcame- and our love for him
•  A person struggling with chronic back pain
•  A family who lost their house to fire, and the community response to this tragedy
•  A blind man becoming a priest
•  A man losing his brother and helping his sister-in-law.

Courage is awakened when we experience our dilemma as rooted neither in others, nor in ourselves, but in the fabric of existence itself.  This is why faith is the only adequate courage---it enables us to resist self-deception and live in the full face of life as tragic.

Christian courage does not explain away suffering.  Faith is the courage to act as if we were cosmically not alone.  But such courage is not of our own making; it is not some grim, lip-biting obstinacy.  Rather, it is rooted in a trusting heart, a heart confidant that in Christ, god so enters the struggle of life with death that the ongoing Divine/human crucifixion can be lived under the hope of resurrection.  Christian courage is the heart of faith experienced as trust.

So Paul characterizes faith as courage:  “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” (Rom. 8:35)

Only faith as courage can connect “My God why have you forsaken me”  with “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”  (Matt. 27:46)

Amen