Courage

The scriptures referred to are Psalm 51:1-13.

Over 100 times the Bible records the words, “Do not be afraid.” Most often it is God or an angel assuring a human being who is understandably freaked out by the encounter. But fear cannot be made to disappear on command. In fact, frequently when someone does something brave they will confess afterwards that they didn't feel brave or heroic at the time. They may have been overwhelmed by another emotion, like anger or love or loyalty; they may have gone numb, feeling neither fearful nor courageous; or they may have been afraid the whole time. Which makes me wonder if courage is actually an emotion. After all, we don't tell ourselves or others to “Feel brave” but to “Be brave.” I think courage is not actually a feeling but a decision to act in spite of an awareness of the danger your action exposes you to.

Aristotle and C.S. Lewis said the virtues are not the opposite of one specific sin but lie in between 2 opposite types of bad behavior or attitudes. Thus love is not merely to be distinguished from hate, which, like love, is a strong feeling about someone, but it must also be distinguished from indifference, which is not really having any feelings about the person. Similarly, the ethical treatment of other human beings lies between abuse on the one hand and neglect on the other. And courage lies between cowardice, too much concern over danger, and recklessness, which is too little concern about the danger. The person who hangs off the side of a tall building just to get a selfie for their Instagram is not courageous but foolhardy. The person who goes into a burning building to save someone is brave.

Courage is the 5^th element that RN Caroline Kingdon says is necessary to treat her patients with ME/CFS. She writes, “Courage enables us to do the right thing for the people we care for, to speak up when we have concerns.” And that is the essence of courage: doing the right thing even when doing so is scary. As C.S. Lewis said, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

Oddly enough, one of the things is that you can't really say of movie heroes is that they are brave. Most of them can take a lot more punishment than a normal human being. They may feel pain but they are usually able to shake it off. After the action sequence that opens each James Bond film, 007 ought to be in the hospital for months. And some superheroes, like Wolverine or the Hulk, are practically immortal. If you can't die, does it really take courage to fight some other superpowered being? Yeah, they usually care about saving lives or upholding morality but they rarely have much at stake personally. Which is why the supervillains always kidnap their loved ones and use them for leverage. Because if you have nothing to lose, you have nothing to fear.

In the West we Christians don't have to worry about suffering physically for the faith. Our risks are being embarrassed or ostracized for our stands on certain issues. Recently popular Bible teacher Beth Moore left the Southern Baptists because of their growing pushback to her advocacy for sexual abuse victims, of whom she is one. Her denomination has been complacent about the issue and even complicit with abusers within the leadership. In response she has been subjected to sneering and cruel attacks by Christians, who forget that our chief command is to love with a love that is patient and kind, not arrogant or rude, not irritable or resentful, and which does not insist on its own way, as Paul reminds us. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)

Moore's stance, unlike her critics, is biblical. While the sexually abused are not specifically mentioned, the Bible does proclaim God as the champion of underdogs. As Psalm 103:6 says, “The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.” Note that he works for justice “for all the oppressed.” Psalm 146 expands on that, saying of God, “He upholds the cause of the the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free, the Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.” (Psalm 146:7-9) And we are to do the same. In Isaiah, God says, “Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:16-17) Proverbs tells us: “Speak up for people who cannot speak for themselves, for the legal rights of those on the verge of destruction. Speak up, judge fairly; defend the cause of the poor and needy.” (Proverbs 31:8-9) Speaking up for and helping the powerless and disadvantaged is not political; it's biblical. But to do so takes courage.

You know what also takes courage? Asking for forgiveness. It's at the heart of a recent British miniseries starring Dawn French called The Trouble with Maggie Cole. And the trouble is that when a bit tipsy she spills all the village gossip to a journalist. When what she says ends up in the local paper, on the radio and on the internet, her friends are offended and she is mortified. But rather than crawl into a hole and die, she seeks out every person whose dirty secrets she has spilled, and asks forgiveness. Often she finds out that the rumors she had repeated were wrong. But I was enchanted, not just by the humor and sweetness and accuracy of what it's like living in a small community, but also the fact that it was about the damage gossip can do, and the necessity of fessing up to one's faults and seeking forgiveness from those you hurt. How often do we see that in entertainment? Or, for that matter, in real life?

Psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists never confess to doing wrong or ask for forgiveness. Nor do they forgive others. And, coincidence or not, we have seen the emergence of the non-apology by celebrities and politicians. “I am sorry if anyone was offended...” they say, rather than say, “I am sorry for causing offense to...” “Mistakes were made” they say, rather than “I made mistakes.” And because they don't admit to being wrong, or express regrets, they don't learn from their mistakes. Even Sherlock Holmes, hardly a humble man, once messed up so badly in a case in Norbury that he says to his friend, “Watson, if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.” And indeed when Holmes did something thoughtless that offended Watson he did apologize to him and at least once asks his forgiveness. And he is fictional. We may not have to face Professor Moriarty in a life and death struggle on the edge of the Reichenbach Falls, but surely real people should be capable of summoning up the courage to admit their faults and ask for forgiveness.

There is an additional component to Caroline Kingdon's definition of courage. “It means we have the personal strength and vision to innovate and embrace new ways of working.” She's not talking about change for the sake of change and novelty. She treats patients with ME/CFS, a condition with at present no known cause and no reliably effective treatments. The test to definitively detect it hasn't been invented yet and most doctors don't understand it. Many think it isn't even real physical disease but treat it as a mental illness. It's literally taken decades for doctors to admit that approach didn't work. But it's real hard for most doctors to say the words, “I don't know.” I think they are afraid to admit that. But now long-haul Covid, which so closely resembles ME/CFS, is forcing many to admit that they need to take seriously diseases that don't fit into the neat categories in their medical textbooks.

It takes courage to make changes. What's strange is that it takes courage even when those changes are obviously needed. They say that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insane. I say it's stupid. After enough unsuccessful attempts, you should have enough data to know that what you're doing isn't working. James Kraft kept trying to figure out a way to keep cheese from spoiling. Mind you cheese is almost as old as mankind and for about that long, once you cut into a wheel of cheese, the process of it drying out and growing mold began. Kraft tried a simple technique of putting a wedge of cheese in a sterilized jar and that extended the life by days but it didn't make it shelf-stable. He tried pasteurizing the cheese but that resulted in a gooey mess that separated. He finally tried adding emulsifiers and that did it. And when he convinced the army to send his canned cheese to the troops in Europe in World War 1, men came back loving the stuff. Now for better or for worse it's what most kids think of as cheese. I can't get my granddaughter to eat any mac and cheese that doesn't come in a blue and yellow container.

Today we face a lot of problems in the world with no easy answers. We keep trying the same things. They aren't working. And I think it's a failure of both moral imagination and courage. It takes courage to try something new. It take courage to go into unfamiliar territory. Like the apostles did.

They were ordinary Jews, whom Jesus sent all over the world to spread the good news. They were proclaiming an unfamiliar message and some in power didn't like it. They didn't like the message that Jesus, not the emperor, was King of kings and Lord of lords. They didn't like a message that said that God loved folks they deemed unlovable and forgave folks that they thought were unforgivable. They didn't like the message that the kingdom of God was a state where the last were first and the first were last. They didn't like that the church was a community in which there was neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female for all were one in Christ. That message was threatening to those in power and most of the apostles were martyred.

Today the unfamiliar territory we are being sent into isn't geographical so much as domains where power is used to oppress and to perpetuate injustice. We need to venture into areas of life and society where they need the good news of God's love and grace and transformation.

Like race. When Jesus told the parable of the good Samaritan, he showed that loving your neighbor transcended race and religion and that anyone could be an agent of mercy and healing. And Jesus' followers, once shown by the Spirit to expand their horizons beyond their fellow Jews, brought in people of every race and tribe and tongue. And missionaries have translated the entire Bible into 704 languages as well as translating the New Testament into 1551 additional languages. In some cases they had to invent a written script for a purely oral language, making the culture one that could be recorded.

We need to venture into areas like government and business. When Jesus invited himself to the home of Zacchaeus the tax collector, he showed how following him led to honesty and the end of corruption. And, maybe not so surprisingly, most whistleblowers are deeply religious people.

We need to venture into areas like economics. In Jesus' parable about the vineyard owner who keeps hiring workers later and later and still pays them a good wage, he illustrates both the importance of paying people a fair wage and how some still will see that kind of generosity as wrong. Sociologist Rodney Stark traces capitalism to the monasteries of the Middle Ages. If so, it appears to need a reformation.

We need to venture into areas like healthcare. In Matthew 12:15, we are told “Great crowds followed him and he healed them all.” (emphasis mine) Which reminds me: in the West, public hospitals did not really exist until the church started them in the late 4^th century, after Christianity was legalized in the Roman empire. Thereafter they spread wherever the church went.

The modern university was also an innovation of the church, as were its forerunners, the cathedral school and monastic school, which date back to the 6^th century. How else would people be able to understand God's Word and God's creation without being educated? And because the most educated people were usually clergy, many of the first scientists were clergy.

Contrary to popular belief, the church did not inhibit science for most of its history. In fact it usually advanced by having the courage to innovate. And to use the latest technology. The church has always been among the earliest adopters of communication technology. Martin Luther's reformation might never have gotten traction had it not been for Gutenberg's movable type printing press. By the way, Gutenberg's first complete book was the Bible. The first films were shown to a paying audience in 1895; the Salvation Army made the first Christian film in 1899. The first commercial radio broadcast was sent out by KDKA in Pittsburgh on November 2, 1920. The same station sent out the first religious radio broadcast, which was a service held at Calvary Episcopal Church, on January 2, 1921. Though the first TV station began broadcasting in 1928, it wasn't until the wave of prosperity after the Second World War that the average family could afford a television. And the first regular religious broadcaster on TV was Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, whose program Life Is Worth Living began in 1952 and got better ratings than Milton Berle. But Sheen was no newcomer to the technology. He had presided over the very first religious service ever broadcast on TV, an Easter service in 1940. Most people first got access to the internet in the 1990s. Today there are thousands of Christian websites and 55% of churches have one. Which means our church's messages can reach the world.

The church started as a dozen men following Jesus, to whom he said often “Do not be afraid.” Once they were empowered by the Holy Spirit, they displayed courage not only in the face of danger but in the face of the new and unfamiliar. And look where it has led. A woman asked a pastor who was not wearing his collar what he did for a living. He said, “I work for a global enterprise. We've got outlets in nearly every country in the world. We've got hospitals and hospices and homeless shelters. We do marriage work. We've got orphanages. We've got feeding programs, educational programs. We do all sorts of justice and reconciliation things. Basically, we look after people from birth to death and we deal in the area of behavioral alteration.” The woman said, “Wow! What's it called?” And he said, “It's called the church.”

And it never would have happened if the church had decided to play it safe. Because courage is a key element of following Jesus.