Years ago, sitting in a counselor’s office, I found myself taken back by tears that came uncontrollably as I recalled a childhood memory.  The counselor had asked me to recount for him my ten earliest memories.  To reach back as far as I could emotionally stretch and dredge them up, good or bad.  The tears surprised me because this particular memory was a happy and good one, one of my earliest.

In it, I’m about five years old and have just started school.  It must be toward the end of the day, about suppertime.  I’m sitting in my dad’s lap, we are face to face and I hear his voice, full of joy and pride, asking me to name the colors, red, yellow, green and so on.  That’s it.  That’s all I remember.  From beginning to end, just a few brief seconds of flash-point recollection.  It took me a long time to figure out why I was crying over a happy memory.  Of course, now, if I were sitting in my dad’s lap, he’d be the one crying.  But, now, I know why I was crying when I remembered sitting in his. 

Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that not everyone has warm memories associated with a father.  Those two little girls who were murdered by their father just five miles from here last Wednesday night would have almost certainly had no memories of a father they’d care to recall if they’d lived to adulthood.  And, I understand that if you are one of those people who suffered abuse at the hands of your father, sexual, emotional, physical or perhaps the abuse of abandonment, you probably feel the same way, too.  But, if you can bear to stay with me, maybe part of my story will be yours anyway.

I should tell you that I wasn’t in the counselor’s office because everything was going well in my life.  I was there trying to rebuild what was left of it at the time.  The past shredded.  The future clouded as though under a dark gray winter sky.  That’s the context.  And, that’s why I was crying.  I was crying as I talked about a five-second memory of sitting in my father’s lap because that was the last time I could remember feeling that safe.  As safe as a little child always feels when his dad is holding him in his lap and is speaking words of love and pride and reassurance with the voice the child always recognizes as belonging to his father.  In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that safe again even to this day. 

I couldn’t help but recall that memory yet again when I was reading the text for the morning in preparation for this sermon.  Jesus is being questioned in very threatening ways.  The Jews had “gathered around him, saying, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense?  If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.’”  Jesus knew where this was headed.  But, he always seemed to know, too, how to speak to the questions people were really asking behind the ones they were verbalizing.  So, he didn’t so much respond to their questions as he did speak to their fears.  They didn’t need answers as much as they needed reassurance. 

But, because they were listening for what they wanted to hear and not what Jesus wanted them to know, because they felt threatened by this “mere man” who claimed that “‘I and the Father are one,’” they “picked up stones to stone him (John 10:31).”  They were only doing what we tend to do when we feel threatened, lashing out.  Jesus was threatening their ideas about God and about people and about faith.  He shook the foundations of everything they believed.  (He still has a way of doing that you might have noticed).  In fear that was expressing itself as anger, they decided to destroy the one who had come to keep them from destruction.  As if throwing stones at love could change it.

We do some of the most destructive things when we are scared.  We jump too soon or too far or not far enough.  We speak too little or too much or too loudly or too harshly.  Some of the saddest, even dumbest things, I’ve ever done I’ve done when I was scared.  My worst sins have been sins of fear.  But, what I’m coming to see, even to feel, is that even when I’m at my very worst, God is always at his very best.  I’m wondering if that is why I found the tears coming back even this week when the truth of the scripture founds its mark in me.  “‘I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.  My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.  I and the Father are one.’”  I think it was about Wednesday or so.  I was sitting in a chair in the James Gallery at Wilshire Baptist Church participating in a preaching practicum when I would have been willing to swear that, for just a brief moment, I wasn’t sitting in a chair but in someone’s lap.  And, the tears that came too easily reminded me that God’s love for me is not, cannot be, altered, reduced or in any way changed by the ways I sometimes lash out or draw back in my fear, sometimes even at him.

Fred Craddock tells of growing up in the rural South.  On summer days he and his brothers and sisters would be playing outside when their mother would come out onto the porch and call them to lunch.  Craddock says that if they were really hungry they would go running home to eat.  But, if they were having a really great time, they would hide when their mother called so it would look like they didn’t hear her.  He said that what he came to learn later in life was that whether they hid when she called or came running had nothing to do with mother.

God has made a promise.  Those who are his are always his.  And, nothing can ever change that.  Nothing.  Our coming in faith or our running away in fear do not alter his commitment to us or his love for us.  Remember the Psalm?  Remember the Psalm!  “Shout for joy!  Know that the Lord is God.  It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.  Shout for joy!  The Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.  (Psalm 100:1, 3, 5).”  God’s faithfulness is never altered by our failure at faith.  God has made a promise.  He’ll change the north to the south and make the east wind blow from the west if that’s what he has to do to keep his promise.  Nothing in all of creation can keep the God of creation from keeping his promise to take very good care of you.

Friday evening, as I was taking Cameron to the children’s retreat at Mt. Lebanon, the storm clouds were rolling in from the southwest.  We were listening to the radio to trying to get some sense of what was coming and going in the weather.  Cameron asked me if there was going to be a tornado at the camp that night.  Of course, part of me wanted to say that there are always tornadoes at children’s camps.  Where that many kids gather, well, you know, the wind always blows and breaks - in many different ways and directions.  But, that is not what he was asking.  Like any child, he wanted to know if he’d be safe and he wanted to hear his father’s voice of reassurance.  So, I made a terrible mistake.  I promised him there wouldn’t be any tornadoes at camp that night.  Later that evening, when Steve Camp called to tell me that the sirens were going off and that they had gathered all the children into one room and piled mattresses on top of them I remembered the promise I’d made to Cameron that it was now impossible for me to keep and I wondered how safe he felt.  Human fathers sometimes make promises they can’t keep because their promises outstrip their resources no matter how much they love their children.  We may be in therapy for years!!

Our heavenly Father never makes a promise he cannot and will not keep.  He is the Lord of all creation, even of the tornados.  He is greater than all he creates.  But, he is also our Father.  If he says we’re safe we’re as safe as safe can be.  If he says he’s holding us tightly, he’s holding us tightly whether we can feel it or not.  If he says he won’t let go, he won’t let go.  Tornadic winds of fear and shame may threaten any day but not even Satan himself can ever take us away from our Father, the one who promised that he won’t let go.  His “love endures forever!”  We can’t always feel it.  But, what we can feel and what is are not always the same.

When I was at Hardin-Simmons I joined a fraternity that had a very unusual rite of passage for new initiates.  They took us out into the country, built a campfire and showed us a branding iron that was made in the shape of the fraternity’s insignia.  They told us that, in order to become a part of the fraternity, we had to have the insignia branded on our bellies.  Please understand, this is a guy thing.  At least they didn’t tell us we had to wear an earring in our belly button or on our tongue or in our nose or some other part of our anatomy.  But, by this time we’d paid too high a price to get in to back out.  So, blindfolded, we were laid on the ground and our shirts were pulled up.  The red-hot iron was brought from the fire and held close to our flesh until we were almost burned.  At the very last instant, they pulled the hot iron away and threw an ice-cold piece of beef, a calf’s tongue, onto our bare bellies.  The rush of raw feelings confused our brains and for the briefest moment, we thought we’d been burned.  In truth, what we felt and what was actually happening were completely different things. 

Faith is like that.  You have to learn to live beyond what you can feel or see at any given moment.  For now, “we live by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).”  God has promised us safety.  You can lick your finger and hold it up to see whether the winds will blow in favorable ways for you that day or you can keep taking your emotional pulse to reassure yourself that you’re o.k. or, you can take God at his word.  In him, you are safe, even if you can’t feel it.

Think of your loved ones who’ve gone on.  Think of how safe they feel right now.  All the things that frighten you don’t frighten them.  But, when you do, think of how safe you will someday feel because of something God has done to make you that safe right now.  This is present tense language.  “‘I give them eternal life,’” Jesus said.  And, because of something he is doing right now, giving us the security of his life, we “‘shall never perish.’”

Here is what this promise means to me and, I hope, to you.  I’ll someday see the hand that I only know by faith holds me now.  I’ll someday hear with new ears the voice my old human ones could never hear.  I’ll someday see face to face what I can only see by faith when my faith becomes sight and I will know as surely as I am now known by the God of all creation, my heavenly Father.  And, I will hear his voice of reassurance, just like Jesus did the day he was baptized.  I’ll hear it, too.  I know, by faith, I will.  “‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased (Matthew 17:5).”  “This is my son.  This is my son.  My son, whom I love.”  I know I’ll feel that safe someday.  George Mason said it best.  Hope is not knowing that everything will be o.k.  Hope is knowing that you will be o.k.  And, I know that coming to feel that safe has everything to do with being careful which voice you choose to follow.  The voice of inner fears or the voice of outer circumstances or the voice of God.  The voice we follow has everything to do with the safety we eventually find.

There was once a mouse being chased by a cat through the streets of New York.  Darting through busy traffic and around corners, the mouse stayed just barely ahead of the cat’s claws.  Finally, he rounded a corner into an alley and ran up into a trash bin.  It was quiet; he waited and waited thinking he might be safe.  Then, he heard a dog bark.  If a dog was that close, the mouse thought, the dogmust surely be gone.  So, he climbed down out of the bin and jumped into the alley only for the cat to come out from behind the trash bin and grab him by the throat.  Just before the cat took his first bite, the mouse said to the cat, “Wait!  I know I’m finished and done for.  But, I just have to know one thing.  How come you are still here?  I know I heard a dog bark.”  And, the cat said, “When you work the streets like I do you have to be bilingual.”

There is only one voice that leads to safety.  It’s the voice of Jesus, the Son of our Father, calling us to him.  “‘My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.’”  It translates well into any language.  People of faith know the promise as much by the voice as by the words.

“What’s the worst that could happen?”  Anyone ever try to reassure you with those words?  What’s the worst that could happen if you took the risk and lost?  We didn’t always know the answer before we took the leap.  We just held our breath and hoped for the best.  The promise of God, our Father, through the voice of his Son, is that the worst that could ever happen to you can’t ever happen to you now.  If you’ll only follow that voice.  The voice of Jesus saying, “Come to me.  Come to me.”  That voice stirring in your heart telling you how much you need Jesus and how much his love for you can never change.  And, how all you have to do is just trust him.  That he’s good for his word.  When you trust him that much then maybe you’ll know why I was crying, and still do, sometimes.  It’s because I know that the last time I felt that safe is not the last time I’ll feel that safe. 

I’m not there yet.  But, I’m on my way.  Care to join me?