 Dr. Carl Price |
Courage
at 3:00 a.m.
Sermon:
Scripture: |
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Three a.m. has a special way of testing nerves. I will always remember one night in Korea at about that hour. I was relieving a tall, lanky Texan on watch at the machine gun bunker on a ridge above a wide valley. As I came through the trench and up to the position, I saw that he was lying flat on the roof of the bunker, crouched behind the brush that we had put there to keep our silhouette from being easily outlined against the sky. When I crawled up beside him, he nodded into the darkness and in a barely audible whisper, said: "There’s someone out there." We were on the front lines, and anyone ‘out there’ was either Chinese or North Korean and they weren’t stopping by to pass the time of night. You understand this was long before night vision goggles or any of the ‘see-in-the-dark’ technology they are showing being used in Afghanistan. The only way you could cope with the dark was to let your eyes adjust to darkness as best you could—and hope for a little moon or starlight. We had a little of both that night, but I could not see anything except the slightly darker clumps of brush that I had made note of earlier to try to remember where the shapes would be that belonged there. Everything looked okay to me. But Tex had been standing watches longer than I had, so I unclipped a grenade from my belt, clamped the spoon, pulled the pin and asked him, in a similar low whisper: "Where?" He sensed my movement and heard the slight sound the pin made and knew what it meant, and it seemed to sharpen his sight, for after a moment he whispered back, "I guess it’s just a bush." We remained unmoving for a few more minutes, just to be sure. If you have never tried to put a pin back in a grenade and re-crimp it in the dark, you have missed one of the great adrenaline experiences of life! But we made it, and we made it through the night; but those hours between 3:00 and 6:00 a.m.—what the Greeks called the fourth watch, the time referred to in the Scripture reading for this morning—can be trying times. Perhaps you have noticed something of that truth yourself. Situations often do look more difficult when we try to view them in that hour of the night. It is as if there is a more malignant force roaming the earth then. As the little boy said when his father switched on the lights to show him that there were no bears in his bedroom, "The kind of bears I’m scared of only come out in the dark." It was the soldier in Napoleon that led him to say of this time, "There is no courage like courage at 3:00 a.m." It was at that witching hour, Matthew tells us, that Jesus came to the disciples on the stormy sea. And while someone walking on the surface of the sea is a sight to give you pause whenever it happens, I am sure that such an experience is even more arresting when it comes at 3:00 a.m.! Matthew says as much. "When the disciples saw him walking on the lake they were so shaken that they cried out in terror: ‘It’s a ghost!’" If we were to reconstruct that scene, I would suggest that some fear was present before the appearance of Jesus. The Sea of Galilee can be a lovely, peaceful body of water much of the time, with gentle waves caressing the shore line so softly that a child could use it for a wading pool. It is only about fourteen miles long and about half that in width, which certainly is not a large lake by Michigan standards. But the Sea of Galilee is over 600 feet below the level of the Mediterranean, which is only a few miles to the west, and it is surrounded by a steep rise of mountains. The 10,000-foot summit of Mt. Hermon is only a few miles to the north and the Golan Heights rise abruptly to the east and south, so when the cold currents of air settling from the higher ground meet the warmer currents flowing in from the Mediterranean through the wide valley between the hills rising above the city of Tiberias, fierce storms can come up. This was evidently what had happened to the disciples that night and we are told that they were fighting the wind and the waves. They did not need a ghost in order to be afraid. The tossing waves, the rising wind, their fragile boat—and 3:00 A.M.—would have been enough! As I mentioned on the front page of Steeple Notes, Rembrandt’s painting of this scene—adding an extra person to the number that would have supposedly have been in the boat and painting his own face on the extra figure—is a vivid reminder that every life has its fourth watch of the night, as it were. For some it is the loss of the companion with whom you had linked your life and with whom you counted on living out your days, or the death of a parent, a child, a friend. Divorce or separation can be a terribly dark time, as can disappointments in career, the breakdown of some personal relationship, a serious health problem, a limiting injury, emotional problems that entangle our lives for a time. Our nation has seen—and is seeing—dark times: the specter of terrorism, the concern about air travel, anthrax, smallpox, all the demons that the media can conjure up for their evening news or special report. It seems like a long fourth watch. So does this story of Jesus coming to the disciples in the darkness say anything to our lives and our darkness besides the fact that we are in the same boat? First of all, note how fear kept the disciples from recognizing that what seemed so fearful was their salvation. They screamed in fear because they thought Jesus was a ghost. Haven’t you noticed how the dark has a way of doing that to us—of distorting reality and magnifying anxiety until we are almost immobilized? We may think that the discovery of fire was important because it brought heat for warmth and cooking to primitive people, but I suspect it was just as welcome for its light. If you have ever done much camping, you have surely noticed that the building of campfires is not dependent on the temperature of the air or the need to cook something. We say that we like to watch the flames and the coals; but I suspect, deep within the memory of the race, there is also the longing to hold back the night. We may pride ourselves in being sophisticated and unafraid of the dark, but we usually say that when the light switch is handy. How goes that old line about "things that go bump in the night?" They still do, even in an age of neon. But the fears that are so magnified by the dark are often found to be quite different in the light of day. The unknown is what lies at the heart of our greatest fear, is it not? And darkness magnifies our lack of knowing. Sometimes the deliverance is not that there is nothing there, but rather that what we previously didn’t know becomes known and we can deal with it. Ask anyone who has waited for the reading of the angiogram or the retake of a mammogram or a biopsy report or the surgeon’s account of the surgery. Knowing the name of the terror takes some of the terror away. And sometimes, what we thought was added terror turns out to be our deliverance. Clarence McCartney tells a story out of his childhood of coming home from a late afternoon errand, hurrying so that he could be through a particularly dark patch of woods before nightfall. He trotted most of the way, but even so, by the time he reached the woods, the sun was down and the dim light of twilight was lost in the shade of the forest. The path ahead of him was arched over by the trees and cloaked in gloom. Dr. McCartney describes the experience this way:
How many have faced the dark monsters of surgery or chemotherapy or psychotherapy or hard decisions in career or relationships and found what Dr. McCartney said to be true! Often it is those very things that we most feared that brought us healing and help; they came to us at our most vulnerable times—at some 3:00 a.m. of the spirit, as it were—and the darkness made them into something that they were not. What we thought to be the demons turned out to be our deliverance. There is another notable lesson in this story. Not only does Christ come to us in our darkest hour, but when he comes we are encouraged to try our own strength in ways that we have never done before. Simon Peter says, "Lord, bid me come to you on the sea!" Jim Fleming of the Jerusalem Institute for Biblical Studies used to say that it often seemed that Simon only opened his mouth to change feet, but Jesus, never one to squelch even the faintest faith, bids him come. Simon had sailed on the sea all his life; but he never have tried walking on it until he saw Jesus do it that dark night! Can you imagine what it meant to step over the side of that boat and into— excuse me—onto the sea? Never mind at the moment the fact that he soon began to sink; the point is, he found the courage to get out of the boat. How many of us cling to the certain and the safe all our lives and never risk anything for God? Some years ago, Pat and I visited mission work in what was then Zaire and India. One of the places that we visited in India was a home for orphaned children. At that time, at least, there was not much being done in India for abandoned children except what was being done by the church. A culture rooted in the doctrine of "karma," the law of fate, does not concern itself very much in changing the circumstances of someone’s life, believing that it may well be a punishment on the sufferer for wrongs done in an earlier existence. As a result, the few such homes that the church had begun were crowded and the conditions under which the workers labored were incredibly difficult. But we saw smiling and happy children and workers seemed to see only the joy they brought to those lives, not the supposed impossibility of their task. They worked in the name of Christ; they had stepped out of the boat and stepped forth at the invitation of Christ. In recent weeks we have heard tale after tale of courage coming out of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center—firefighters, police, people who worked there or were nearby when it happened. It should never be thought that firefighters and police had never risked or lost their lives before. That had happened many times before, in many places. But there was such a horror and evil about that attack that even though it came in daylight hours, it seemed as dark as any fourth watch ever did, and the courage that men and women found in that darkness shines all the brighter. There is another lesson in this story. When we do try at the invitation of Christ and fail, Christ is there to lift us up. We who cling so tightly to the ship have little reason to criticize the fact that Simon Peter started sinking! Jesus might rebuke him for his lack of faith, but most of us have little cause to be critical of him; he did get out of the boat! Some have suggested that Simon’s motivation may have been a little egocentric, and it has often been noted that he began to sink when he took his eyes off of the Master. But I like to underscore that there is something to be said for trying, even if the effort does not always bring perfect results. I remember a young lad in the Scout troop of which I was a member who had great difficulty advancing in rank in scouting because he could not swim well enough to pass the First Class requirements. He had all the merit badges that he needed for Star and most of what was needed for Life and Eagle, but two of the few that he was lacking had to do with swimming. One afternoon, one of the life guards invited him down to the swimming area for a private lesson. He told him that the main reason he didn’t swim was that he was holding his breath while he tried instead of breathing as he swam and since he was always in shallow water, when he ran out of breath, he just put his feet down. His theory was, if he were in deeper water, he wouldn’t do that and he would be just fine. What he proposed to do was to tow him to the float in the middle of the river and have him swim towards the shore. "If you get in trouble, I’ll pull you out," he said, and the lesson proceeded on that basis. He towed the boy out to the float and they started swimming. And sure enough, he had to pull him out! But the courage to try came because he trusted the one who promised to be there, and the courage to fail gave him the incentive to try and try again until he accomplished what he needed. The promise of the Gospel is not guaranteed success; it is the courage to try and the promise that Christ will be there for us if we try and fail. Christ comes to us at our darkest times, and that which seems most fearful is often our deliverance. Christ gives us the strength to try more than we would ever try alone, and Christ will be there for us if we start to sink! Even at 3:00 a.m. Thanks be to God.
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