Courage (Click on the sermon title for a .pdf copy)
Genesis 12:1-3, Romans 12:1-2
June 10, 2018
But now they desire a better Country
that is an heavenly: wherefore God
is not ashamed to be called their God:
for he hath prepared for them a city
Do you recognize these words? They are printed on the plaque that hangs in the South Street entrance of our church, honoring our six charter members: Abram Hosford, John Leavitt, Joseph and Cynthia White, and Levi and Mary Worcester. I have often wondered when the plaque was placed and this week while doing my research, I found the answer. It was placed in 1912, in December or possibly November.
1912 was the church’s fifty-sixth year. Walter Rollins was in his seventh year as pastor, and it was the year that the church published J. O. Stevenson’s history of the church in his honor.
Joseph White attended church on the Sunday the plaque was dedicated. He was the only one of the six charter members still living. He had been quite ill for several years, but made the effort to be there that Sunday. He died two months later, in February, 1913.
Joseph White was born in Massachusetts. I am guessing his wife, Cynthia, was born in Vermont, because they were married in Vermont. Joseph came to Waterloo in 1854 and brought his family west in 1856, the year he and his wife helped start the church. They were farmers and in the year of the church’s founding, he was thirty-five years old and she was thirty-three.
Abram Hosford was forty-five, the oldest of the six. He also came to Waterloo in 1854, making his way slowly west from Vermont where he was born, with stops in Buffalo and Toledo and Lasalle County, Illinois. He made his way between Toledo and Lasalle on foot, walking thirty-five miles a day for seven days!
Abram was the only one of the six charter members who did not remain in Black Hawk County, moving on after just a few years to Clinton County. He owned a lumber yard and operated a saw mill and may have dabbled in banking as well. He was married three times, widowed twice. His second wife, Priscilla, who was born in Maine, did not join the church with him.
Levi and Mary Worcester came from Ticonderoga, New York. In 1855, they ventured west to Illinois and later that year, to Waterloo. After a year in Waterloo, they moved to a farm in Cedar Falls, where they spent the rest of their lives. They are both buried in Hillside Cemetery in Cedar Falls.
Levi was a farmer, and a poet. His obituary calls him “a man of unusual literary ability” who loved to quote poetry to his farmhands after dinner. In 1856 when they helped found the church, Levi was thirty-six years old and Mary thirty-four.
John Leavitt was born in Franklin County, Massachusetts, and came to Waterloo in 1854 when he was just twenty-three years old. He became a prominent banker and a leading citizen of the town, serving a term in the state senate. But when he joined Joseph and Cynthia and Levi and Mary and Abram one hundred and sixty-two years ago in founding this congregation, he was not the eminent figure of the painting hung across the hall in the Friendship Room. He was a fresh-faced lad of twenty-five!
These were young men, young women, brave young men, brave young women, pioneers, pilgrims, leaving behind homes, leaving behind relatives, leaving behind the land of their birth for a strange new country. Like Abraham. Leaving behind all they knew for the sake of possibility, for the sake of a promise. Like Abraham. Trusting themselves and their way to God. Like Abraham.
And, like Abraham, they did not live to see the promise fulfilled. Oh, yes, like Abraham, they were settled and happy in the new land. Like him, they prospered. Like him, they were blessed by God. And yet there was more they longed for. As the scripture quoted on the plaque puts it, they desired a better country, the city that God was preparing for them, a heavenly country, God’s country, God’s kingdom. This is why God claims them as his own, and this is why God claims any of us as his own, because we will not be satisfied with anything less.
There is always among God’s faithful people, among people like Abraham, and like Joseph and Cynthia and Levi and Mary and Abram and John, a kind of restlessness. They are always pilgrims, always on the way, not there yet, not home yet, and, as long as they are here, they are like strangers, like foreigners and refugees.
It takes courage to be a refugee. Think about it! To be removed from your homeland, voluntarily or involuntarily. To leave behind everything you know, and most everyone you know. To go to a new land where all is strange to you — language and customs and culture and people — and you strange to them.
Think of Thawng Khan Lian, bringing his family from Burma to Waterloo, finding a job here, starting a church here.
Think of Jonathan Yarngo, coming to the United States from Liberia, making a new home in Waterloo, making a new church home with us.
Think of the African-Americans brought at the turn of the twentieth-century to Waterloo by the Illinois Central Railroad, traveling far from homes in Mississippi to a strange new land and strange new neighbors, who, more often than not, were not ready to welcome them.
It takes courage: courage to go, courage to hope, courage to try, courage to be. How do you do it? Where do you find the strength, the endurance, the patience, the will? What sustains courage? Vision. Only vision can sustain courage: vision that sees the world not only as it is, but as it can be, as God promises it will be.
We are the descendants of Abram and John, of Joseph and Cynthia, of Levi and Mary. We are the kinfolk of Thawng and Jonathan and our Burmese and African and Bosnian and African-American neighbors. And we are, together with them, the descendants of Abraham, called like him to listen to God, called like him to obey God, called like him to go where God leads, called like him to live with courage. Like him, like them, we are pilgrims, pioneers, always on the way, not home yet. We are like strangers, we are like refugees in this world.
Do not conform yourselves to the standards of this world, but let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind.
A complete change! We are called to see differently, to think differently, to choose differently, to live differently. Completely different! Seeing what God shows us. Choosing by the light Christ give us. Living by the strength the Spirit builds in us, in us not one by one by one, but together, as we worship together, as we work together, as we be together.
It takes courage, courage to resist conformity, courage to let let your mind be changed by God. The opposite of courage is cowardice. It is cowardice not so much to run from danger, but to freeze, to offer no resistance, to go along, to go with the flow, to do what makes no waves, ruffles no feathers, upsets no apple carts.
It takes courage to welcome strangers, to welcome, to accept, to make an effort to know people who do not look like you, talk like you, believe what you believe. It is easier to conform to the standards of this world which put a priority on personal security and personal well-being, on protecting borders and protecting one’s own way of life, which say it is only natural to prefer the company of those like you. It takes courage to think and act differently, and it takes vision, a vision of the world as God intends it.
It takes courage to be patient and generous with your enemies. I think of Jews and Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, of Israelis who feel justifiably threatened in the face of Palestinians who deny their right to exist, and of Palestinians who suffer the indignities and cruelties of an apartheid foisted on them by interlopers in their the land of their birth. Both sides are right, both sides have rights, and both sides are wrong, both sides have done wrong. For them, to give an inch is to lose, not to retaliate is to show weakness, to invite more abuse. It is only natural, a most natural standard, to defend yourself, to fight for your rights, to refuse to give way when you are attacked. But then injustice is heaped upon injustice, and violence is added to violence, and the proverb comes true: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole blind.” It takes courage not to retaliate, and vision, vision of the shalom God intends, and it takes an unwavering commitment to that vision and a willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of that vision.
It takes courage to love God, with everything, with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind! It takes courage to love God to the extreme, because the world doesn’t like an extremist. The standard of this world is everything in moderation. Sure, you can worship as you choose and love God as you choose, but don’t make it your life!
The world believes that extreme religious devotion leads to exclusivism and hatred of the other and eventually to violence, but it is exactly the opposite. So called religious extremists act as they do not because they love God too much, but because they do not love God enough. The closer you get to God, the more you know of God, the more you love God, the more you become like God, who is love. Don’t be lukewarm, Christian! Don’t be so lukewarm that you easily adjust your temperature to whatever happens to be around you. Burn hot! Let God change your mind and heart completely!
It takes courage to be, to be who you are. Do you know who you are?
Abraham did. That’s why he could leave home and family and country behind, because he knew he did not belong to them, but to God.
I think Abram and John, and Joseph and Cynthia and Levi and Mary did. I think that’s why it was important to them to start a church, why it was important to them to start a church committed to the emancipation of African-Americans, because they knew that before they were adventurers or pioneers or citizens — or white people — they were children of God. They knew that we together are children of God.
Do you know who you are? Do you desire a better country, the city God is preparing — for you, for us? Do you know that city? Can you see it, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God? Coming down because it will be here! This is our destiny. This will be our world, God’s world, this world, not as it is, but as it will be!