The Courage to Be: Facing Our Fear of Rejection or Ridicule
January 24, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
I Thessalonians 2:1-8

We’re continuing our series on courage today and we’re talking about talking about the courage to be yourself. Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” I think it’s a great line, and we’re going to talk about how we share ourselves with the world. Let’s listen to the reading of the Scripture from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians.
You yourselves know, brothers and sisters,that our coming to you was not in vain,but though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated in Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition.For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery,but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed;nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others, though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.
Let’s pray. O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear what it is you have for each of us and for us together as a congregation. Open our hearts that your word might fall in. And then, Lord, open our hands that we might serve you. Amen.
There are a lot of people running for President of the United States, a lot of them, lots of people running. In fact I saw yesterday someone else is going to run. So I keep thinking to myself, “Why do all these people want to be President?” Here’s the thing that would be really bad about it. You get a nice house and people drive you around in the cars, and all that stuff but if you’re wildly successful 60% of the people like you and 40% write nasty things about you all over the Internet. All the time. Constantly talking about how terrible you are. If you are wildly successful. And if you’re not as successful it’ll flip the other way.
Here’s the truth, and I guess it’s maybe really not just true about the President. The truth is that no matter who you are or what you do, there will be people who don’t like you. There will be persecution.
The Scripture here begins that way, doesn’t it? It says, “You yourselves know, brothers and sisters that our coming to you was not in vain,but though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi…” There will always be opposition.
Here’s one of my favorite stories, and I’m sure I’ve told you before because it makes me laugh every time. We were interviewing a young pastor to be ordained. This is the Board of Ordained Ministry, and they interview these candidates for the ministry. We talk about theology and ask them questions about that, and about all sorts of things. But usually we ask them about conflict resolution. How do you deal with conflict? They need to know that.
So near the end of like three days of interviews, the interviewers get kind of bored and try and figure out ways to make it more interesting. So in one of the interviews this other fellow on the committee looked at this young pastor who had come in. He asked, “Where are you going to be appointed? Do you know where you’re going to be serving?” And the candidate said, “Yes I do. I’ve heard I’m going to be at this little town…” I can’t remember what it was but it was a little tiny church. And the guy who’d asked the question just went, “Oh you know in that church there’s a woman who is mean, mean, mean! She’ll make your life miserable. Now how are you going to deal with her?”
I don’t even remember how the guy answered. He gave some appropriate answer. And at the end he looked at the guy who’d asked the question, and said, “Can you tell me her name?” And the guy said, “Oh, I don’t know her name, I just know there’s that woman in every church.”
Not that any of you are that way. I’m not saying that.
But you know there’s a truth to the fact that no matter where we go or what we do… Jesus was very clear. He said, “Blessed are you when you are reviled or persecuted, or people say all sorts of terrible things about you in my name, because it happened to the prophets before you.” Paul writes to Timothy and said, “Anyone who lives a godly life in Christ will be persecuted.” Not if you live a godly life in Christ you might be persecuted, but anyone who lives a godly life in Christ will be persecuted.
Jesus says it in really more direct language in the Gospel of John. He says to the disciples, “If they hate you, take heart, they hated me first.” In our lives there will be people who don’t like us. So what do we do in the face of that?
I want you to move from that first verse to the last one, because it’s kind of the heart of what we’re looking at today. Verse 8: “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” We’re going to have the courage of God. It’s going to take courage. It says that up there in verse 2. It says, “So as you know we had the courage in our God to declare to you…it’s going to take courage, and we’re going to share with you the Gospel, what we believe, and second, our very selves – who we are. We will share with you what we believe and who we are.”
Sometimes it’s hard to share what we believe. We think we don’t really know enough to say it. We think that we don’t want to be that “salesman for Jesus” guy on the corner, who annoys us. We are afraid it will make us sound arrogant. We are afraid we’ll offend somebody.
But the courage to say what we believe acknowledges that we don’t have all the answers. We’re willing to say that – “I don’t have all the answers.” And you know what, it takes courage to say, “I know Christians mess up all the time, and I know the church I go to isn’t perfect.” To just sort of tell it is, to say, “This is the truth.” But I believe. It takes the courage to say what we believe, and second, to share our very selves – who we actually are.
Some of you have read, as I have, a book by a Houston sociologist, Brene Brown called Daring Greatly. She now world wide conversations about her work. She talks about the shame many of us feel. Her work is in shame and vulnerability. What she calls shame is that sense that maybe we’re just not enough, “You know what, who I am just isn’t enough, I need to be somebody else, or I need to pretend I’m somebody else.” And vulnerability is that willingness to say, “I’m going to push through that, and I’m going to share with you who I really am. I’m going to engage. I’m not going to sit on the sidelines, I’m not going to pretend. I’m actually going to be vulnerable enough to be able to share with you who I am.” That takes some courage – that takes daring greatly.
So the Scripture here gives us four components that I want to lift up that I think are important. Three are clearly in the Scripture and one it kind of points to.
The first is this. He says in verse 4 and again in verse 6, “Even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.” Then again in verse six, “Nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others.” The first thing we have to do is to decide not to live our lives to get the praise of others.
Now if you’re one of those people who says, “I don’t care what anybody else thinks. I don’t care what the neighbors think. I’m going to do whatever I want to do,” I don’t believe you. They have a word for people who don’t care what anybody else thinks and that’s sociopath. That’s because a sociopath says, “It doesn’t matter the customs, the laws, what hurts other people, I’m going to do what I want to do.”
We’re not made that way. We’re part of a community. We have roles within a community. We are part of the Body of Christ. We are components in the Body of Christ. So we are formed, we are shaped by people around us. We’re part of a community. So we can’t simply say to ourselves, “I don’t care what anybody thinks. I’m going to just do what I want to do and say what I want to say.”
But on the other hand when it comes to deciding what’s right and wrong, about how we’re going to actually live out our faith, we can’t follow the whims of our tribe. Just to say, “Okay, what do you guys think I need to do?” There’s a sense in which we connect ourselves to the God who tests our hearts. And follow that God who leads us.
I looked again at a book I had to read. I think it was in college. I was a political science major and the book was Profiles in Courage by Senator and later President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was a Senator when he wrote about eight people who took very unpopular stands. And one of them was our own Sam Houston. Which I found that interesting when I went back and looked at it again. Sam Houston we think of as the leader of the Texas Revolution, who led us to become the Republic and then to join the Union. He indeed did do that, but he became a Texas Senator, when the Kansas/Nebraska Act was proposed, that would basically divide the country into two. It would divide the union and lead to the Civil War. He opposed it greatly. He was one of two senators from the South who was willing to speak out against it. It was just an unpopular stand he was defeated in his next election. Sam Houston, the guy who founded the state was defeated in the next election.
It ended up later that he was elected governor and when in fact Texas was asked and voted to join the Confederacy, Sam Houston refused to be inaugurated as the governor. The story talks about him pacing the floor at night, the night before the vote, because he so loved his state, he wanted to do what he thought was right.
The courage to live our lives not based on what will be a popular stand, not based on what our tribe, the people we usually agree with all the time, think. The people you usually agree with all the time. Then when you need to take a stand against something it becomes unpopular.
The second thing it says is in verse 3: “For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives, or trickery.” Later he says, “With words of flattery, or with a pretext.” There’s a word in the Greek New Testament that is not translated. This is nerdy, I know, but I find that so interesting. It’s not translated. The word is hypocrite. So if you’re reading along in the Greek New Testament and you come to the word hypocrite it doesn’t get translated into what it really is. The translation is actor. It has become so much a part of our English language that you don’t even translate it anymore.
The hypocrites were the Greek actors who went on stage and wear masks often and play a part in a comedy or a tragedy and people would go see them. It was a profession. Now we don’t think of an actor as somebody who’s terrible, but the word hypocrite has such a negative connotation and its saying, “There’s a hypocrite within us that we have to push aside so that we can live the real us and not put on these airs.”
As I was reviewing Brene Brown’s book this week, I was reminded of the scene in “Wizard of OZ” where the four of them go into the big throne room. They see the little guy behind the curtain, and he says, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” Out here you have the “Great and Powerful Oz,” but he’s really this little meek fellow back there.
If you were to ask him why he had to put on this great show as the Great and Powerful Oz, it’s because that’s what the people in Oz wanted. They didn’t want a little guy behind the curtain. They wanted a “Great and Powerful” one.
Brene Brown goes on to tell the story, the painful, heartbreaking story, about a man who was laid off. She interviewed him, and here’s what he said, “It’s funny, my father knows, my two closest friends know, but my wife doesn’t know. It’s been six months, and every morning I still get dressed and leave the house like I’m going to work. I drive across town, sit in coffee shops and look for a job. She doesn’t want to know. If she already knows, she wants me to keep pretending. Trust me. If I find another job and tell her after I’m back at work, she’ll be grateful. Knowing would change the way she feels about me. She didn’t sign up for this.”
Now I don’t know if that’s really how she would have responded or not, but it’s clearly how he feels. That even for the people who love him the most, he has to put up a façade of being competent and confident, having it all together. How often do we feel we have to do that?
Here’s what’s sad. Sometimes it’s in this very place that we feel we have to do it the most. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. This should be the place where we’re comfortable saying not, “I have my spiritual life all together.” This is the place where we can say, “O Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. I am a sinner, and I fit in really well here with all the other ones.” As Isaiah said, “I’m a man of unclean lips, and I dwell amongst a people with unclean lips.” I don’t have it together, and I am tired of pretending. We have to find out how to push that hypocrite aside and to live the real us to be willing to share our own selves just as we are, with the people around us. Boy that makes a difference.
Bill Denham was telling me about an encounter he saw one time where an older woman said demeaning things to a person who was serving her at a restaurant or cafeteria. Afterward he went and spoke to the server and said, “I’m so sorry. That woman was so rude to you. I can’t believe it.” And the woman who had received this insult, was so gracious. She said, “You know, we go through our lives holding up masks in front of our faces. And as we get older sometimes our arms just get tired.”
Sometimes the filter just goes away. But the flip side of that is sometimes we become who we really are. We don’t have to pretend anymore. We don’t have to put on shows, and we can say, “This is who I am. Take it or leave it. This is it. I don’t have to fake it anymore with you people. This is who I am.” How awesome is that – to be able to grow into who we really are. So we have to choose not to live for other people. We have to put aside the hypocrite, the mask, the play acting within us. Third is this. One of the reasons we don’t know share who we really are is that we don’t know who we really are. And we have to go on this journey of discovering who we are.
We had a man come work with our staff some years ago. His name was Jim Mosher, and he was from North Texas. He showed us this interesting exercise. He said, “Pretend you’re in a meeting, and you’re going to make introductions in the meeting.” Here’s how we do it at St. Luke’s. Everybody introduce yourself and every person goes around. Unfortunately here’s our typical first meeting. “My name is John, I’ve been a member of St. Luke’s for eight years.” Then someone else says, “My name is Frank, I’ve been a member of St. Luke’s for twenty years.” Or someone else says, “My name is Sarah and I’ve been a member for two years.” What incredible information we’re gathering! But it’s the easiest thing.
So he suggested that instead we do our homework ahead of time as leaders, and we introduce the people, but we say what they bring to the table. We might say, “This is Sarah, and she doesn’t put up with any baloney. She just cuts to the chase. So we’re glad to have her here because we’re going to get through the baloney because of her. And this is John, and he cares mostly about outreach. What really makes him tick is us not being only about ourselves but being about the world around us and he’s going to hold us to that fire.”
Now of course maybe you don’t have that figured out very well. Here’s what I want to invite you to do. Pretend that you’re in that kind of meeting and your very best friend, or your spouse or your child or someone who knows you better than anyone else, is introducing you. What would they say about you? What is it that is the real you? What has God poured into your life so that the rest of us can experience it? What are your spiritual gifts? What are you good at? What is it that matters to you that might not matter to the person sitting next to you? What is it that makes your heart really beat? And when you begin to come to understand your own life - and it’s a journey, a discovery. You don’t get it in one afternoon. It comes through a life time of growing and learning and searching.
Have you ever had your caricature done? That’s where they pick something about you, so if you may have a kind of a big nose, all of a sudden in your caricature it’s really evident. Or your ears are giant. And when you look at it afterwards you laugh haltingly. I wonder what your spiritual caricature would look like? If you looked inside you at what you have to offer us, what is distinctive that you could share? And it’s there – that’s the way we’re made. Paul makes that really clear, “To each is given a manifestation of the spirit for the common good.” Everybody is gifted, and we are to discover that and be honest and share it with the people around us.
That’s the third thing and here’s the fourth. I want you to listen to the tone of this last verse. I’m going to back up a bit actually to the verse before that. It says, “But we were gentle among you like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become so dear to us.”
Do you hear the tone there? Sometimes we get confused between being brash and rude and being bold and courageous. We think that in order to be bold and courageous you need to be brash and rude. You need to say, “I don’t really care what anybody thinks. I’m going to say what I think, and you know, it may make people mad. I read in the Bible that it says, ‘There will be persecution.’ I’m going to get people mad, and I’m going to get after it. I’m going to make people mad and be like a bull in a china shop, but I just don’t care what anyone thinks.”
And that’s kind becomes the way that we decide to be bold and courageous. But that’s not what you see here in the Scripture. No, our boldness is you-centered, not I-centered. It’s I-centered when we say, “I don’t care what anyone thinks. I know what I think, and I’m tied to God and I’m right.”
Courage and boldness is you-centered, it’s built on love and caring for others. Yes, you do care how they receive your message. Did you hear it? It’s like he’s pouring it on. He says, “I do care how you receive my message. And I do want you to understand it, and I do want it to be flavored with love. So I’m going to share with you who I am honestly and openly, gently and full of love and care. Indeed, you may not like it, you may not accept me for who I am, but I’m going to share it with love.”
Let me close with a story I heard on a pod cast recently. It was an incredible interview. It was by a woman who had emigrated from Russia when she was four, she and her sister and her parents. Her parents had snuck out of the country, lost their passports at the border and had to stay in Europe for a while. After at least six months in Europe they came to the U.S. and were received as political refuges.
So they grew up here, smart kids, went to good schools. Ultimately she went to Harvard, and her sister went to Stanford. Her sister went on to medical school and became a surgeon. She was going to be an attorney and be involved in politics. She said she took the LSAT prep class when she was in college and really intended to do that. She said that one day whatever was gnawing at her heart she gave in to and said, “I remember when I sat down with my parents, and I told them I wasn’t going to go to law school, I was going to wait tables and be a writer. I trembled.” I put myself on the other side of that. She said, “My mom looked at me and said, ‘We did not come to the United States so that you could be a lawyer or a doctor. We came so that you could be you. Who you are. So you go be a writer.’”
There’s a path of least resistance that we’re going to do what everyone wants us to do. But what this says is that the world doesn’t need us to do whatever the worlds wants us to do. The world needs us to share our very selves, what we believe, and who we are.
Let’s pray. Gracious and loving God, we know that there will be opposition, that people won’t always like who we are, or what we say, or what we believe. We ask, God, that you give us courage in the face of that to be who we are, to take away all of our masks, and pull them down to discover just who you created us to be and to share it with the world, what we believe and who we are. In the name of Christ. Amen.