May 14, 2023

What are we afraid of, what are we intimidated by?

When I was about four or five years old, I was home alone with my stepfather and the poor man had no idea what was about to happen.   I was watching the Disney movie Bambi and (spoiler alert) when his mother was killed it triggered a strong emotional reaction.  I went tearing into the kitchen where he was making himself a sandwich or pouring himself some iced tea and was just crying as ugly as you can cry.  The thought or idea of being without my mother terrified me.

As I looked at this week’s text, the part that kept coming back to me was “do not fear what they fear.”  Leading up to Mother’s Day it was pretty simple to answer the question what is it that I fear.  It’s actually something I no longer fear for myself since my mom has passed, but instead I would be gutted and crushed to think about my children having to grow up without their mother.  Even though this is a day reserved for celebrating mother’s I think we can extend that fear to the loss of any loved one.  We have members in this church who have recently lost a mother or a father, even a child and some who are facing the mortality of those people in their lives right now.

It is not easy to think about or to deal with or to live through, but God has been preparing us for this conversation especially over these past several weeks as we have studied the Scripture.  Think about what Jesus has been telling us through his interactions with others in the texts that we have read.  Just last week we heard the words do not let your hearts be troubled, but how do we turn that from simple words into the true hope that we are to have as Christians?  

The Scripture tells us a story this morning of both hope and of perseverance and I want to share with you the story of Jean Dominique Bauby.  He was the editor of French Elle Magazine and wrote a book called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  To make it to editor of such a big magazine by his early 40’s was quite an accomplishment, but it was nothing compared to becoming an author.  You see, Bauby was 43 years old when he suffered a massive stroke.   He awoke from it 20 days later only to find himself completely paralyzed with the exception of one eye lid.  Yes, a single eye lid is all he had control over.   He was suffering what some call “locked in syndrome” where he was fully conscious without the means to communicate with the outside world. That’s where the author part gets impressive.   He wrote the book after the stroke…a stroke that you need to know he never recovered from.  The text was painstakingly transcribed by Bauby to his speech therapist and interpreter using hundreds of thousands of blinks over ten months. The interpreter had to capture each spelled word laboriously while reciting a frequency-ordered alphabet through Bauby’s blinks. 

In the book Bauby recounts his memories and his dreams and looks at issues like love and loss as well as the enduring love a father has for his children. 

Bauby died of pneumonia only two days after the book was published. 

One review I read said this:  “Of all the famous stories of hope, this short novel is the most hard-won and remarkable.”

Close….the most hard-won and remarkable story of hope is that given to us by Jesus and we have it in this glorious book we call the Bible.

Even more remarkable is that with the hope bought for us by Jesus, we also get a promise, which is what we hang that hope on.  

We need only re-read verse 18 of our lesson today and what a powerful piece of Scripture it is:

¹⁸ For Christ also suffered for sins once for all,^[l]
the righteous for the unrighteous,^[m]
that He might bring you^[n] to God,
after being put to death in the fleshly realm^[o]
but made alive in the spiritual realm.^[p]

For the last two weeks Jesus has been making sure we know where to get that hope and how there’s only one way to get it.  Remember him telling us that He is the way, the truth, and the life.  Thomas helped us twice, once in his doubt and then again when he asked how will we know the way?  Jesus was confirming to them the hope and the promise that we will be together again, but Thomas was unsure about how he was going to get to that place.   Again, we don’t know where it is you’re going, how can we know the way?  The way is simply through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who Peter proclaims the divinity of in the final verse of the Scripture.

The words of 1 Thessalonians 4: 13-14 ring in my ears.   Remember what Paul wrote:

¹³ Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. ¹⁴ For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 

There it is folks, there’s our promise, but more importantly the hope we need to get not only through the day to day, but also all the terrible losses we talked about at the beginning of the message.

Peter mentions Baptism in today’s reading and reminds us of the covenant that we made with God when we slipped below those waters to push our heads up above and breath a different air.  The be a new creation in Christ Jesus.  Turning our lives over to God, that is what saves you Peter says to us today and it has nothing to do with the flesh but everything to do with the Spirit.

You hear the phrase heart and soul and this morning lets separate those two things for a moment.  I want you to know that your earthly, your human heart can be smashed, but your soul perfectly intact.

That’s why It is Well With My Soul is our closing hymn.   Some of you may know the story behind that hymn and for those who don’t it perfectly illustrates what I’m trying to say here…

Horatio Gates Spafford wrote the hymn.  He and his wife Anna were active in their church, and their faith in Jesus was well known.  They were even friends with the world-famous evangelist, Dwight Moody. They were blest with five children, and well off. Horatio was not only a lawyer, but also owned a great deal of real estate.

Not unlike the Biblical character Job, tragedy struck his home with crushing strength and devastation. Their son, Horatio Jr., died suddenly of scarlet fever at just four years old. A year later, many of Spafford’s real estate holdings were destroyed by a massive fire in downtown Chicago.

Two years later, Spafford decided his family should go to England, but business would delay Horatio and he sent his family ahead: his wife and their four remaining children, all daughters, ranging in age from 2-11.  While crossing the Atlantic, the ship Anna and the girls was on crashed and sunk, with 226 people losing their lives.

All four of Horatio Spafford’s daughters died, but Anna survived and once arriving in South Wales she sent a telegram to her husband, which included the words “Saved alone….”

Horatio set off immediately to reunite with his wife and during the trip the captain summoned him to the bridge and showed him on the maps that they were passing over the very spot where the crash and sinking had taken place.  The very spot where his four precious daughters had died. The story goes that Spafford returned to his cabin and wrote the hymn.  There are other accounts which say that it was written at a later date, but either way the experience was the clear inspiration of the moving and well-loved hymn. Horatio’s faith in God never faltered. He later wrote to Anna’s half-sister, “On Thursday last, we passed over the spot where she went down, in mid-ocean, the waters three miles deep. But I do not think of our dear ones there. They are safe….. dear lambs”.

Anna would give birth to three more children after the boat tragedy, but she and Horatio were not spared even more sadness, as on February 11th, 1880, their son, Horatio (named after the older brother who had died, and also after his father), also died at the age of four.

In August 1881 the Spafford’s left America with a group of other Christians, and settled in Jerusalem. There they served the needy, helped the poor, and cared for the sick, took in homeless children, all in the effort to show others the love of Jesus.

Horatio Spafford died of malaria on October 16^th 1888. Anna Spafford continued to work in the surrounding areas of Jerusalem until her own death some 35 years later.

It is safe to say that we all fear going through the nightmare that the Spafford’s lived through, but the second verse of the hymn sums it up.  Despite all the turmoil that surrounds us and the tragedies that leave us grief stricken, we have that blessed assurance.  While we can feel helpless, God has us in mind.  As we’ve been talking about these past few weeks, he walks with us in both the sunlight and the darkness.  The blessed assurance and that thing that God has in mind for us came when Jesus took to the cross for you and for me.  As Horatio Spafford wrote “…and hath shed his own blood for my soul.”

As bruised as our hearts and minds can be at times, don’t fear what others fear.  Your souls are perfectly protected, and I stand here this morning proclaiming that Jesus Christ is the reason that all should be well with your soul.

I normally pray after my sermons, but let's instead lift up these words of our closing hymn as a prayer to our Lord and Savior.   A-men.