Overcome by faith

On November 8, 2016 my twenty-year-old daughter, Hannah, and I went to the polls together so she could vote for the very first time in a presidential election. These parenting moments are special under any circumstances, but going to the polls with your only daughter, and the two of you voting together for a candidate you were sure would become the first woman president of the United States was an amazing experience for us both, capped off with a few funny selfies taken together right after we voted.

It did not occur to us, as it had not occurred to many others in this country and around the world, that the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, would actually win the election. It seemed a possibility too crazy even to consider. But that night in the living room, as we watched the election returns, we, like so many others, saw the impossible unfold right in front of our eyes. And we were afraid.

The next morning, I walked into the church building and got on the elevator with a group of college students who were meeting for a class in our facility. We were silent together, as we rode up, except for the occasional sniffle. Everyone was crying or on the verge of tears. The fear was palpable.

I gathered my colleagues immediately in a church conference room and we sat around the table, stunned. I know many colleagues who pastor congregations and are part of staff teams with divided partisan leanings, and different churches across the country experienced election day in different ways. Our congregation at Riverside is comprised of many immigrants, LGBTQ folk, African Americans, and so many other vulnerable communities, as is our staff. We all felt afraid, and we knew our congregation was terrified. As their pastors, it fell to us to act, to create a gathering that would help all of us to feel less alone, and less hopeless.

First, we began by voicing our own fears. One by one we went around the table and shared what we were feeling and what had changed for us with the news we woke up to that morning. Some shared fears for their lives—their very lives—and the lives of those they loved. Others expressed anger and anguish, not that the country had elected a candidate who espoused harmful and derogatory rhetoric toward women and people of color, but that this was a side of the country that they had been experiencing already on a daily basis and no one would believe them. They were shocked and angry at those of us who were shocked. We named our fears so that later that night we could help our congregation name theirs.

That night the nave of The Riverside Church filled with congregants and neighbors. We sang and prayed together, sharing our fear with each other. Many of us cried, some silently, and some wailing out loud. We wanted to provide the reassurance of our faith, the assurance that love will always be the final word, but we were also careful not to rush to consolation. That night was a night of lament, a necessary first step in overcoming fear.

It is undeniable that we are living in a time when a patina of fear seems to cover all the surfaces of daily life. And, perhaps, for the most vulnerable among us, this has always been the case. But now, the crises we are faced with loom too large for even those privileged among us to look away. And if I did not know this truth about humans before, the last year has certainly taught me: when people are afraid, they behave badly. When fear motivates our thoughts and actions, we cut off our relationship with others and our worlds steadily shrink until we can only see through the narrow lens of our own eyes. This is, of course, no way to live. And it certainly is not a gospel way of living.

We typically read the passage in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 17, verses 1–9 on Transfiguration Sunday, as these verses tell the story of Jesus taking a few disciples up a mountain, appearing to glow brightly and have a conversation with the prophets Elijah and Moses.

It is curious to note that this event, recorded in Matthew chapter 17, happens in the exact middle of the story of Jesus’ time on earth. It occurs every year in our lectionary cycle at the very end of the season after Epiphany, the part of the church year that begins with Jesus’ baptism, when the heavens opened up and he heard God’s voice (which also, by the way, should have inspired fear in anyone who was paying attention).

During the weeks following Epiphany we read the stories of Jesus and his disciples and we experience what a friend of mine describes as the knob on the dimmer switch being slowly turned up. We have been following Jesus and his disciples around, listening to what Jesus has to say, watching him bless and heal and feed people, and with every story we read, the light grows just a little bit, letting us in on more and more of the story and the message that will transform the world.

On Transfiguration Sunday, the exact middle point of Jesus’ earthly ministry, that light reaches its brightest setting and we stand on the edge of Lent, when Jesus was required to set his human face toward Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die because of the message he preached.

Recall in the story of Jesus’ earthly ministry, by the time we get to Matthew chapter 17, the political situation surrounding Jesus and his disciples was getting tense. Jesus had known for some time, even if the disciples did not, that he was soon going to have the spotlight of legal scrutiny fixed upon him and his followers with an intensity the disciples had not experienced up until that point and, frankly, for which they were totally unprepared.

Chapter 17 begins with Peter, James, and John joining Jesus on a hike up a very tall mountain. Maybe asking the disciples to go on a strenuous hike was just what Jesus needed to do then . . . perhaps it was symbolic of this life-cycle event for Jesus, during which he needed to assess who among his disciples had the stamina and courage it would take to stick with him in times like this one, at the very top of that mountain surrounded by all kinds of tangible evidence of God’s presence and plan … all the way down the mountain, to the dusty streets of Jerusalem, up a winding path to the place of the skull, and down then to the lowest place any human being can go—the place where we look death straight in the eye and where God seems utterly, totally absent. Talk about fear!

But for the disciples, following Jesus up until that time continued with the same adventure and possibility with which it had been laced since they first laid down their fishing nets and left everything to follow him. They seem flattered, giddy almost, to be included in what seemed to them like a very special club. They were close friends of the young rabbi making such a splash in Galilee and surrounding areas. If he led them where they thought he was leading them—toward political power of some kind—they would have it made for sure.

You can see it in Peter’s reaction to their experience at the top of the hill. You will recall that once they had hoofed it all the way to the top of the mountain, they had something of a vision. Jesus suddenly began to glow, to shine like the sun, and his clothes were dazzlingly white. Moses and Elijah—two of the greatest Hebrew prophets—appeared in person and began talking with Jesus.

Well, Peter was not about to let this miraculous event pass by without proper acknowledgement, so he suggested what any good Jew would suggest: that they build three shelters—tents, monuments, something permanent—to mark the place where this great appearance had occurred. That way they would never, ever forget it.

And then they could go back to life as they knew it.

But the next thing they knew a bright cloud enveloped them and they heard God’s voice, of all things. It was utterly, completely terrifying, and in that moment if they had not realized it before, they knew that their lives had changed … that nothing would ever be the same again. There they were, cowering on the ground; they could not even think straight. In the silence that followed God’s voice, they remained there, quaking, “overcome by fear,” the text says … until Jesus reached down and touched them. He told them to get up. And he told them not to be afraid. Jesus says that a lot—“Don’t be afraid.” But I think what he means when he says it is not that fear is wrong or bad or even to be avoided, but rather that we will always behave badly when we are overcome by our fear. “Do not let your fear dictate your behavior.” That is extraordinarily difficult for any human being at any time.

When the disciples finally managed to stand up, brush the dirt off their robes, rub their eyes, and look around … well, they saw the top of the mountain as it had been when they had arrived after their long hike. Moreover, the text says, they saw Jesus, alone. Only Jesus … nobody else … only Jesus and the decision before them: would they remain there, overcome by fear? Or would they return, would they hike back down the mountain, would they face the changes that were coming with courage and conviction, overcome, instead, by faith?

While they do not universally include the appearance of famous biblical heroes, moments like this are woven all throughout human life; moments where we are overcome by fear, just knocked down and kicked to the curb with the breath-taking terror of human living. The disciples felt it that day—an unknown future stretched out before them, fear sucking the breath from their throats, and Jesus standing at the edge of the path back down the mountain—toward an uncertain and fear-filled future—and beckoning them to get up and follow. And it was this—Jesus himself—that helped them finally to get up, overcome by faith that was stronger than fear.

Any preacher worth her salt will tell her people on Transfiguration that this is yet another moment of decision for us—will we go with Jesus? It is going to be a journey filled with sorrow and suffering and death and fear—and none of that should ever surprise us. We owe it to our people to help them understand what Jesus’ disciples seemed to perpetually miss: following Jesus is dangerous business. It has always been a dangerous business, right from the moment an angel came to visit Mary. But perhaps in our current political climate we are feeling the fear a bit more sharply. And if we are not talking openly about the risks involved in gospel living then we are not giving our people the information they need to make the critical decision to follow Jesus—a decision that demands making over and over and over again, especially when we finally know that our decision will always require us to face down the fear that comes with it.

Not long after the presidential inauguration, I received a text message from a pastor friend who lives in another state. Her text read, “What do we do with fear? I am scared we may be called to give up our lives with this administration. That scares me and keeps me up at night. I am wondering what my limits will be—how will we get through this?”

I wish I had easy answers to questions like this. Most days I only have my own questions and fear to grapple with. But no one should think about faith and fear, about the cost of being a disciple of Jesus, without thinking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And with the current political climate in which we are living, I do not think we can remember his story often enough, and especially from my perch on this corner of Manhattan, where Bonhoeffer spent so much time in the 1930s.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who spoke, wrote, and pastored in the 1930s and early 1940s in Germany. Recall that the German people were demoralized after the defeat of World War I and the resulting depression they suffered; right then, the charismatic Adolf Hitler appeared on the scene. It was not as if Hitler began spouting hateful rhetoric writ large; he, instead, carefully built an enormous structure of pure evil and hatred one shocking statement or action at a time. In general, not many people spoke up to oppose Hitler; perhaps they experienced what we are experiencing today—a kind of outrage fatigue. Or maybe they did not know. In any case, there were not many Christians who publicly questioned Hitler’s rhetoric. One who did was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who found the politics of Nazi Germany completely counter to the gospel message.

Bonhoeffer had been born into a nominally religious aristocratic family, his father a prominent neurologist and professor of psychiatry at the University of Berlin. After graduating from the University of Berlin in 1927, he came to Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, right across the street from The Riverside Church where I now pastor. As the story goes, he attended church at The Riverside Church a few times, but found it a bit “dead” for his tastes. He underwent a huge personal theological transformation just down the street at Abyssinian Baptist Church instead.

After finishing his studies at Union, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany where Hitler was quickly rising to power, becoming chancellor of Germany in January 1933, and president a year and a half later. As Hitler’s anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions intensified, Bonhoeffer was particularly concerned that Christians in Germany were not speaking out loudly or clearly enough against the rising tide of Nazism. Together with other pastors and theologians, Bonhoeffer organized the Confessing Church that announced publicly in the Barmen Declaration (1934) its allegiance first to Jesus Christ, not the German government or the Nazi party.

In the meantime, Bonhoeffer had written The Cost of Discipleship (1937), a call to more faithful and radical obedience to Christ and a severe rebuke of comfortable Christianity: “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” ¹

By this time, Bonhoeffer was teaching and training pastors in an underground seminary because the government had banned him from teaching openly. But after the seminary was discovered and closed, the Confessing Church became increasingly reluctant to speak out against Hitler, and moral opposition proved increasingly ineffective, and increasingly costly. Raw fear had begun to take over as Christians in Germany faced the landscape ahead of them and were overcome by fear.

It was during this time that Bonhoeffer had returned to my neighborhood to teach at Union, but he could not shake a feeling of responsibility for his country. Within months of his arrival, he wrote, “I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.” ²

It was a moment in his life when he had a choice: would he be overcome by fear? Would he allow that most basic and primal of animal instincts—that of self-preservation—to dictate his movement through the world? Instead, he was overcome by faith.

He did, in fact, return to Germany, and eventually his resistance efforts, including his involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and his role in smuggling German Jews to safety in Switzerland, were discovered. On an April afternoon in 1943, two men arrived at his home in a black Mercedes, put Bonhoeffer in the back of the car, and drove off with him. He was imprisoned at the Flossenburg concentration camp, and on April 9, 1945, two weeks before American forces liberated the camp, he was hanged with six other resisters.

This story of resistance, of speaking up for the way of radical love against political policies that exploited and destroyed the weak and the vulnerable, cost Bonhoeffer his life. His story is not an ancient parable, nor is it remote to the very place where I live and serve as pastor. Just a few decades ago, this man walked down Claremont Avenue, watched the sunset over the Hudson River, and listened to jazz in Harlem, just like I do. And the truth he lived—the decision to insist that faith overcome fear—must not be foreign to our own realm of experience, as we face the human question of how to handle fear in our daily lives, amid the darkening of our own political skies.

There has been much talk in recent years about the decline, and even the obsolescence, of the institutional church. People fear that the church is dying, its social influence diminishing, and frankly the evidence for this is incontrovertible. The church as we in our lifetimes have known, the church we have grown up with, is dying, and I think that is not a fact that should make us feel overcome by fear. Human beings will always long for communities in which we can ask hard questions, be confronted by difference, and where we can feel the warmth and the challenge and the power of being, together. But the church will look different going forward, and it should. The church of the future should be leaner and edgier, more prophetic, and significantly more risk-taking. We should become what Bonhoeffer in his life’s work tried to create: a radical community of Christ that does not allow itself to be overcome either by the fear of the Other, which demagogues among us will always seek to exploit on their path to power, or by the very real fears associated with authentic gospel living, but which instead allows faith to power its every decision. I reiterate this most urgent point: when people act out of fear, they behave badly. But when we choose to be overcome by the power and prophetic mandate of our faith, then we can change the world for the better.

The day after the election I was sitting in my colleague’s office, wondering aloud what the results of the election meant for our work as the church. He said something I will never forget. He said: “You know, we’ve been working together here for two years, giving everything we have to help this church get healthy. All this time we thought we were working so hard to ensure the health of the institution—both this one and the Church with a big ‘C.’ But maybe that is not what we have been working for after all. Maybe this election has created a moment in which we will have to decide whether we really believe what we say we believe as Christians. Maybe this is the moment we’ve been working for our whole lives.”

During the campaign season, I would regularly hear my colleagues explain why they were not talking about the issues raised on the campaign from the pulpit—separation of church and state, they would say; or they are called to be pastors, not politicians; or they were in red or purple congregations in red or purple areas of the country—the chance of losing their jobs and livelihoods was high.

I am not unsympathetic to these voices—some of them coming from dear friends. But as a Baptist, I want to remind us that the separation of church and state does not limit the ability of religious institutions or leaders to critique the state or the people who occupy positions of leadership in government.

As a pastor, I say there are too many important issues affecting the lives and well-being of so many Americans, including our congregants, not to speak. We ministers are on the front lines, triaging the trickle down impacts of our national policies. This means, yes, we must make the hospital visit when a congregant is beaten up on the side of the road. But are we really doing our jobs if at some point we do not also stand up and call for safer roads to keep our people from being assaulted in the first place?

For too long we have allowed polite dissension and fear of offending to dilute the religious voice, almost to the point that it has no significance in any national conversation. And if you are wondering why the institutional church is in decline, maybe it has something to do with the fact that what people are hearing in the pulpit has nothing to do with what is going on in the rest of their lives.

And as a Christian, if fear of the loss of our livelihoods—or even our lives—is preventing us from preaching the gospel, then it is time to reexamine whether we can really call ourselves followers of Christ. As my colleague said to me, this may be the moment in which we will have to decide whether we really believe what we say we believe as Christians.

As Christians, we cannot allow some of what we are hearing proposed to become normalized. What, you ask? Inequitable amassing of resources, for one. Were Jesus here he would surely take issue with American excess. He stretched a little kid’s lunch to feed 5,000 people after all, and I do not recall him ever expressing concern over limited resources and whether or not he would have enough for himself. Jesus would speak up—and as a matter of fact, he did—over laws and policies that line the pockets of the rich and cripple the poor. We cannot say we are his followers unless we do that, too.

Disregard of neighbor. I do not recall one incidence of Jesus excluding, demeaning, or marginalizing anyone, especially anyone different from him. By contrast, he spoke of and lived an ethic of welcoming the stranger and including the outcast, even when he was criticized himself. As Christians, we fundamentally believe that welcoming and caring for our neighbors is part of following Jesus, so we will not participate, either by our endorsement or our silence, in any efforts that hurt our neighbors or put them at risk.

Rather than being misogynistic, Jesus never talked about women as objects, sexual or otherwise. By contrast, he welcomed women into his inner circle, he listened to them, he healed them, he gave them positions of respect and leadership—all within a society that did not value them for anything other than property. As Christians, we must not stand by while women are sexualized, or language demeaning, violating, or dismissing of women is used by our leaders or reflected in our laws.

We currently find ourselves living in a political climate in America where every single day we hear of policies that exploit and destroy those who are weak, vulnerable, and different—our brothers and sisters. And what is more, though it may pain us to say so, many of these political realities—including mass incarceration, police brutality against African- and Indigenous-American communities, the surveillance of American Muslims, the criminalization and deportation of immigrants—predate the current presidential administration.

The message of the gospel, the Jesus we claim to follow, will allow us neither to hide behind our privilege nor to cower under the weight of our fear, to stay silent when we should be speaking up, to assume—even for one moment—that living the gospel is without risk, is a simple or a straightforward task.

Perhaps, with me, you are feeling the witness and presence of so many guides and teachers who have gone before us, and asking similar questions to those of my friend: “What do we do with fear? That keeps me up at night. I am wondering what my limits will be—how will we get through this?”

We will get through this by doing what Jesus’ first followers and every faithful follower since then has done. We will feel ourselves overcome by fear, but we will then fix our gaze on Jesus alone and allow faith to overcome our fear. Then we will turn and walk down the mountain into the darkness of this world, toward the reality of the cross—even our own—and in the way that leads to life.