"DO NOT BE AFRAID" By The Rev. Gary Miller John 12:20-33 Please pray with me. Gracious and loving God, as we enter these moments of meditation, may you take the imperfect words of my mouth, the meditations of each of our hearts, directing them to a perfect understanding of this song of peace and blessing set before all of us this very hour. We pray this in the name of the God who loves us all. Amen. Grace and peace be to each, and to all. My dear friends…. May I correct three mistakes? First of all, in my excitement over that birthday greeting, I failed to introduce our Stephen Minister this morning. The Stephen Ministry is very important to us. Pam Palmer is serving as this morning’s Stephen Minister. She will be available to speak with you and to pray with you at the conclusion of worship this morning at the main door to our church office. Secondly, Aida Mansoor is not spelled Ida. It’s how it’s pronounced, but the correct spelling of her name is Aida. And, Aida, we are so very sorry to have misspelled your name. Finally, those who were frantically looking through their Bibles to find the second Old Testament lesson from Exodus…first of all, there is no 43rd chapter of Exodus. And the reading was from Isaiah, the 52nd chapter, verses 7-12. All of those errors were due to inaccurate information that I gave to office staff. It was not a malfunction of their work. Do not be afraid! What an important message for us to hear this morning as we look and as we celebrate a model that is so absolutely critical for God’s world to become as God has created it to be…that all of us can gather together. We can learn from the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible. We can learn from the wisdom of the Koran. We can learn from the wisdom of our Gospel. We, together, can explore the good news, which God has set before us. I don’t believe there is a person here this morning, who doesn’t want things, circumstances of our world, to be better. But frequently when a model is set before us that can, if we will only support and work with it, when that model is set before us, we are so frightened by circumstances that we are afraid that it might just be too good to come true. There are very few things you can take for sure in the Miller household. One of the things you can take for sure is that on Saturday evening, early evening, when I return from the five o’clock worship service, the radio will be on in our house and my wife will be listening to Garrison Keillor and will be chuckling, frequently uncontrollably. Garrison Keillor recently did a piece on his program about wanting to get to perfection and about how our faith, our religious faith, calls us to a sense of heavenly perfection, a sense of Paradise that God has created for us. Keillor says this: “My people aren’t Paradise people.” Of course, Keillor is talking about the people of his fictional hometown of Lake Woebegone. He says, “We have lived in Minnesota all our lives and it took a lot out of us. My people aren’t even sure if they will like Paradise. They’re not sure that perfection is all it’s cracked up to be. My people will arrive in heaven at that state of perfection and stand just inside the gate shuffling around. We’ll think it’s a lot bigger than we thought it was going to be, and we’ll say, ‘No thank you; we can’t stay for eternity. We’ll just sit and have a few minutes of bliss with you and then we have to get back.’” We are so afraid of what God has promised us that we fail to move and act on the promise, even when that which is before us beckons us to life more full, more filled, with God’s promises. In the story from the Gospel, the disciples are frightened. Even when they begin to recognize Jesus, they still are frightened. We are frightened of so many things on our journey. All three of our peoples … Muslin, Jewish and Christian … are fearful. Yet the scripture says clearly, “Do not be afraid.” And there are no words that Jesus speaks with more repetition than those four… “Do not be afraid.” Rizek Abusharr was a great dreamer. He dreamed that a YMCA in downtown
Jerusalem could be one-third, one-third, one third. That from pre-school
through all of their programs, there could be a unity Jerry Geiss is also a dreamer. Jerry heard about Rizek’s dream and believed in that dream. He convinced others that they could dream as well. The International YMCA, the YMCA of the United States of America, believed in the dream. The NCCJ, the National Conference for Community Justice, believed in the dream. Hartford Seminary believed in the dream. People from throughout this community began to believe in a dream that could bring people together and begin to create a model for world peace. And it starts person to person, people to people. The promise of the Hebrew Bible, the promise of the Koran, and the promise of our Gospel is Do Not Be Afraid! I would not have set this dream before you if I had not entrusted you the power to bring it to life. Do not be afraid! Next year I hope there are ten cities, ten coalitions, of people who have come together to model MVP (Moderate Voices for Progress), to bring people together for the purpose of peace, to return persons to their neighborhoods and their communities to live models of peace, that somehow we, all of us, might discover that an eye for an eye leads to blindness for all of God’s people. Do not! Do not … be afraid! In a moment we’re going to break bread together and we’re going to share a cup, the cup of God’s rich blessing for us. This morning I’m going to ask you to think about communion, not only as a ritual of Christianity, not only as a love feast of the Christian family, for in all three of our traditions a sacramental meal takes great significance. Let us then, as Jews, as Muslims, as Christians, commit ourselves to break bread together, to share a common cup of peace and justice for all of God’s people. Do not be afraid! Let us break the bread of life.
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