When I first came to Cliff Temple, I had this strange habit associated with funerals that I didn’t really recognize consciously until after I had done it several times.  As a rule, after the service was finished in Bassett Chapel, I’d go get in my car and pull in behind either the lead car and follow as the cars make their procession out to the cemetery.

For the first two or three years I was here, sitting in my car behind the hearse, it would be my custom to pick up my cell phone and call Nancy, usually at work.  She would know, of course, that I was at a funeral that day.  When I would call, she would always ask, “You’re sitting behind the hearse, aren’t you?”

For some reason, there was some anxiety in me, some unresolved fear about my own death, that preaching a funeral always awakened in me.  I knew how to say words of comfort for others who believed in the Jesus of resurrection.  But, for some reason, I found very little comfort in those words for myself.  Funerals for others always awakened that discomfort in me.

It wasn’t so much that I didn’t trust God for what was on the “other side,” as we like to say, of the Jordan River.  I think it was more that I was afraid of not being here that bothered me.  As hard as it is to admit, this preacher, when he first started doing funerals at Cliff Temple, had very little peace about his own mortality.

Do you?  When it comes to the thought of your dying, how do you feel about that?  Are you hopeful?  Are you afraid?  Even if you believe those who have died are in a better place, when you attend a funeral, isn’t there a little part of you that secretly admits to yourself that you’re glad they, and not you, are in the casket?  Even if you say you have put your faith in the Jesus who said, as recorded in John 11, “I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25, NIV), if we were sitting behind a hearse right now, would you like to borrow my cell phone?

It’s amazing what the fear factor can do, to your life, to your faith, to your hope, if the fear factor is the dominant factor in your life.  As I did funerals, I realized that this preacher had some work to do about facing his own mortality because I have also discovered that, when it comes to fear, there’s more than one way to die.

In fact, may I be so bold as to say to you this morning that how you are living today, this day, February 26, 2006, how you are treating others (kindly, rudely, meanly, indifferently), how you spend your money (selfishly or altruistically), how you invest your time, all of those things. the very quality of your life today is actually shaped more by what you choose to fear than any other thing, even if you claim to be a follower of Jesus?  If you are afraid, you live one way.  If you are hopeful, you live another way.  The question comes back.  How is life going for you these days?  How are you treating other people?  How are you spending your money?  How are you investing your time?

Isaiah’s role as a prophet was to lead the children of Israel from the fear of slavery to a new place of hope in their faith journey.  He was trying to deal with the fear factor that kept the people of Israel enslaved, even when they weren’t in chains any longer.  Isaiah was dealing with people who had never known much of anything but slavery and oppression.  For many more hundreds of years than the United States has been a nation, the people of Israel had nothing but a history of slavery and oppression.

They were also a people whose history was marked and shaped by the promise of God that they were his special people, for whom he had greater intentions.  These Israelite people were people, nonetheless, who tended to live lives dominated more by fear than by hope.  Again, how about you?

Even in the days of Moses, when Moses first led the children of Israel out of Egypt, they had only gotten six weeks into the wilderness.  After generations of slavery, they’d only gotten six weeks into the wilderness when they began to complain to Moses that they would rather go back to something that was certain than forward to the uncertain, even if what was certain was slavery.  On two different occasions, in Exodus 14 and Exodus 16, we have that recorded.  This is from Exodus 16:2-3.  “In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron.”  These were people who had been in slavery.  Moses had set them free.  After all the plagues that God visited on Pharaoh, and the Red Sea experience, and all of that, these people turned on Moses and Aaron and said, ‘If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt!  There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.’”  Isn’t that something?

You see, the past can have such a powerful grip on us that, even if it’s killing us, we would rather go back, because at least it had one thing all human beings have craved and worshiped since Adam and Eve:  the comfort of familiarity.

Generations pass, and this is the promise of Isaiah to the people who have still known nothing much except oppression:  “‘Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.  I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert’” (Isaiah 43:18-19).

What would anyone fear so much?  What could be so comfortable about the familiar past, that it would make us not want to see the new thing God is doing?  What could that be?

Sometimes we fear letting go.  Letting go of things and places, even the ones that are killing us.  For all its faults, the comfort of familiarity can be such a powerful persuader!  It’s a dangerous thing.  It’s a dangerous thing if a place or a way of living becomes so important to us that, in fact, that place owns us, even if we think we own it.  Whether it be a piece of land, or a house, a job, or a church, or whatever it may be.

Worst of all, nothing is more dangerous than if we think we own our own lives, because ownership always creates fear.  When we think we own something, not only does it sometimes own us, it can enslave us.  Then, in an effort to protect what we think we own, but that in fact owns us, we become controlling and fearful and self-centered.  When we remember who really owns what, we are able to use whatever we own, or think we own, as the stewards we are, not owners we deceive ourselves to believe we are.

When I was in college, I had a preaching opportunity in the panhandle.  It was two hundred miles away from Abilene.  The only problem was, I didn’t have any way to get there.  I didn’t have a car at the time.  A friend loaned me his Volkswagen bug.  This was back when bugs were first cool.  The old-timey kind.  He let me borrow his bug to drive all the way up the panhandle to this little town where I was going to preach.  I was very careful driving that car, because I knew it wasn’t mine.  Even though I felt like I was driving a riding lawnmower just three inches off the pavement at seventy miles an hour, it got me where I needed to go and back again, all because I knew the entire time, I was borrowing something that didn’t belong to me.  Can you name anything you’re really not just borrowing from God?  Anything?  By the way, how are you at returning it to him? 

If we think we own this (gesturing to the sanctuary) because we paid for it, then, frankly, this owns us.  We are its slaves.  If we remember that we are only borrowing this, then we’ll use it a different way altogether.  In fact, as I understand the gospel story we read this morning in Mark, if we understand that what we have we are only borrowing, we might even be willing to rip a hole in the roof, if that’s what it takes to find a way to get people to Jesus who otherwise might find these four walls to be barriers instead of bridges.

We do know this, don’t we?  Am I wasting my time on this one?  We do know this?  Or, do we not know this?  We don’t own this!  If we think we do own “this,” whether that be our bodies, our church, our homes, whatever, then we’ll be protective of it and afraid of letting others take advantage of it.  We will try to control who can use it and who can’t.  We’ll even go so far as to be very specific about who can pray here and who cannot, and even what language they pray in and what language they don’t, because we think it’s ours.

It’s not ours.  If we think this church is something we own, we will find ourselves enslaved by it instead of launching out of it into a new wilderness where God has promised to make rivers in the desert.  If we think we own it, then what we have been thinking all this time is that our tithes and offerings are mortgage payments on a deed that entitled us to define who could come into this building and pray and worship, by color of skin, by race, by language, by sexual orientation, or whatever, when God says it’s his house, and anyone who wants to come and worship here may freely come.

This house, if it belongs to anyone, belongs to God.  Only he has the right to make those decisions about who will worship here.  When it comes to who paid for this place, as I understand the gospel and as we like to sing it, when it comes to mortgage payments, what do we sing?  “Jesus paid it all.”  And, all from him, we’ve only borrowed.

The Israelites were slaves even after they were free, because they kept wanting to go back to a place where, even though they were oppressed, at least oppression was predictable and familiar.  There are women today, maybe someone in this room, who stay in abusive marriages, even where their lives are being threatened, because, as threatening as it is, at least the beating is predictable and familiar.

I cannot name a time or a place in my life I want to go back to.  And here’s why.  When I stepped into this sanctuary this morning, more than anything else, songs and sermon aside, I came into this room fully believing that I was coming to worship the God who has promised, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:19).

Do you believe that?  For you?  For this church?  I don’t want to go back to a time and place where I was a prisoner of what once was because I believe God is doing something new.  I want to see that more than anything else I’ve ever seen in the world.  I have never seen Vermont in the fall.  I have never seen the Denali National Forest in Alaska.  I have never seen the Swiss Alps.  I would love to see all of those things before I die.  But, as much as anything, in fact, more than anything. more than all of those places combined, I want to see the new thing God is about to do in this community of faith!  How about you?

Fear is a terrible slavemaster.  I’ve been reading Taylor Branch’s trilogy of the life of Martin Luther King.  It is a phenomenal set of books.  I encourage you to read them.  In the summer of 1965, less than three years before he was murdered, Martin Luther King spoke these words, at a church, from a pulpit, to, among others, Baptist people:  “Deep down in our non-violent creed is the conviction that there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they’re worth dying for.  And if a man happens to be 36 years old, as I happen to be, some great truths stand before the door of his life – some great opportunity to stand up for that which is right.  A man might be afraid his home will get bombed, or he’s afraid that he might lose his job, or he’s afraid that he will get shot, or beat down by state troopers, and he may go on and live until he’s 80.  [But] he’s just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80.  The cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of spirit.  A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right.  A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice.  A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”  What Martin Luther King was saying is that a man or a woman dies the day they become a slave of their fears instead of a servant of hope, no matter how old they are.

I have to tell you a story that’s a little bit rough,  It’s actually PG-13. 

But, it’s true.  It happened in my life.  I’m going to tell it exactly as it happened, because I don’t want to “preacher it up” or sugarcoat it to make it sweeter.  This happened when I was about ten years old, and it led me from fear to hope in one area of my life.

I would not tell this story if my grandmother were still alive.  My grandmother, on my mother’s side, was raised her entire life in deep southeast Texas and Louisiana, a place in which racism was rampant.  When we lived in west Texas, she came to visit us.  She rode the train all the way from deep southeast Texas to west Texas.  One day, I was sitting on the living room floor, within earshot of the dining table, where my grandmother was sitting.  I heard her telling my father about how the train was very crowded.  There was one seat left, next to her.  As they were stopped at this particular station, a black man got on the train.  She went on to tell my father how she was so afraid that this black man was going to come and sit by her.  She said, within earshot of this young man’s formative ears, “I wasn’t about to let that black bug sit by me!”

Now, I don’t know my grandmother’s whole story.  But,s what happened next changed my life in ways I could not have known then.  I regret that I don’t know her story.  I wish I knew what she was afraid of.  I wonder if a person of another color had once hurt her, so that, the rest of her life, she assigned to an entire race the fault of one.  I don’t know.  Or, had she overheard her mother or father talking at the dining table once and heard them say something about a “black bug”?  Fear, you see, is every bit as much learned and caught, as it is anything else.

After my grandmother made that statement, my father said to her, very gently but very boldly, and loud enough for me to hear (I now know on purpose), “We’re not teaching our children to think like that about other people, but to believe that all people, regardless of color, are God’s children.”  I wonder to this day what kind of person I would be if my father had laughed when my grandmother said what she did.  Or, if he had said, “Yeah, you’re right!  You shouldn’t let somebody like that sit by you.”  I wonder where my life would have gone.  But, all I know is that the trajectory of my life with regard to social justice was altered that day because my father took a stand for what was right, and he knew his son was listening.

Please hear me carefully.  Please, as your pastor, hear me very carefully.  When we make comments about people of color, God help us, in his house, which he owns, we never know who is listening.  But, someone is listening.  And, if it’s not another child of God, then the God of all children is listening.  And, he’s taking account!  This is not our church!  This is the church owned by the Jesus who paid it all.  And, people who make comments about people of color in demeaning ways are saying, as those who grumbled to Moses and Aaron, “We’d rather go back, because, even though we were slaves, at least it was familiar.”

I feel this so deeply.  We have done so much.  We have come so far.  I’m not going back!!!  If you have to go back, you’ll go without me.  I’m not going back!!!  I’m more afraid of going back than I am of anything in the future.  And, I’m not going back!  We’ve come so far, folks.  We have one more step to take.  And, then we’ll have another one.

Week before last was one of the most remarkable weeks of my life.  Serendipitously.  Two weeks ago, a man died, and I went to the funeral where I finally, at 51 years of age, got peace about my own mortality.  Phil Strickland was the Executive Director of the Christian Life Commission for 25 years, and he died of cancer after a twelve-year battle.  I went to the funeral that day and was overwhelmed.  I’ve never been to a more phenomenal worship service in my life.  Just before I went to the funeral, I picked up Henri Nouwen’s Turn My Mourning Into Dancing (Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2001).  It’s a book about dying and living.  And, that morning before the funeral, I read these words that, coupled with the funeral, finally set me free from the fear of dying.  Can you believe that?  If they put my casket in Bassett Chapel this week, you can say, “He died happy.”  Henri Nouwen said:

“The final healing for all of us, means something more than a release from physical ailments or a deteriorating body. Our life span, whether thirty years or ninety, gives us opportunities to say yes to a hidden gift from God, to a reality that, while difficult, provides a place for divine encounter and deep growth.  To find healing means to belong completely to God, to be born into a life and love that is lasting.  It has to do more with seeking first God's kingdom and finding the deepest longings of our hearts fulfilled than the condition of our bodies.  Facing death [and I add in parentheses, death to myself, to old stereotypes about race, to old ways of thinking about God, to anything that has us enslaved], thought of this way, need not come as a maudlin exercise.  Instead it proves a way to celebrate our life as God's beloved sons and daughters so that we live our last days, be they few or many, as days of constant opening to what is to come."

You see, I have hope that, when this heart stops beating, my eyes will open to the rivers in the desert and the green grass of heaven that Jesus has been preparing for me since before I was born.  I won’t be dead.  I’ll be as alive as I’ve ever been, and then some!

Every one of us in this room has a choice today.  We can go back, or we can step forward into the future God has made.