March 30, 2008, "Do Not Be Afraid"

Douglas Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church

John 6 begins with the fourth of Jesus’ signs in John’s Gospel, the feeding of 5,000 people. Jesus performed this miracle during the Passover which commemorated Israel’s deliverance from Egypt under Moses’ leadership. Moses was the most important miracle working prophet in Israel’s history. Deuteronomy 34:11 says there had been no one like him “for all the signs and wonders which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt.” In the wilderness God told Moses, “I will rain bread from heaven for you,” and in the morning the people discovered manna on the ground (Exodus 16:4, 14, 31). Now Jesus has fed the crowd with bread and their response is to want to make him king by force (even though they couldn’t), so Jesus withdrew to a mountain by himself to get away from them and to get some solitude with God. That brings us to today’s gospel passage which begins on the evening of the day when Jesus fed the 5,000.

“When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them,

“It is I am do not be afraid.” Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.

The next day the crowd that had stayed on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there. They also saw that Jesus had not got into the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone.

Then some boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus.”

The Gospel tell us when evening came, when it got dark, the “disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum.” They left on their own initiative with no word from Jesus.

Trouble usually begins for followers of Jesus when we start something without Jesus. The disciples experience an incredible day with Jesus – an amazing display of God’s power and compassion - and their response is to leave without Jesus. This may be hard for us to imagine, we think we wouldn’t do that. But have we? Any time we embark on a new venture, on a step of faith without Jesus in our boat, we’re in for trouble. John says it was now dark and Jesus had not yet come – which means the good news is Jesus will come to us sometime, he just hasn’t yet. It is bad enough to leave without Jesus, it is worse to do so at night when it is more dangerous to be on the water – especially in the days before radar, sonar, and global positioning systems. Almost everything can look more treacherous in the dark. And then the water starting getting rough and a strong wind began blowing. Can you picture the scene? There is no Jesus, no light, no calm, no peace. There is darkness, a rough sea, strong wind, and growing fear. We left without Jesus.

Two of the primary fears many of us have in childhood are fear of the dark and fear of deep water. The disciples are rowing into deeper darkness and rougher water that is way over their heads and perhaps they are questioning the wisdom of not having Jesus with them in their boat. I imagine they are anxious and afraid. At a pool like the one at the YMCA one can see a scene played out all the time: a mother already in the water and her little girl in a life jacket on the deck of the pool trying to jump in. The child approaches the edge of the pool very slowly, fearfully. Tiny steps. She gets right to the edge and starts squatting down as if she is about to spring into the water. But instead she stands up, backs up, and grimaces. Her whole body saying, “Do I really want to do this?” Again and again she is poised to jump and then stands up and stares suspiciously at the water. But all the while her mother is in the pool right in front of her. Her mother starts reaching out her arms, saying, “Come on, Honey, I’m right here, you’ll be fine.” And finally the little girl springs into the air and comes down in the pool with a splash. Her mother catches her and the two of them laugh with delight. The girl’s fear disappears in the arms and presence of her mother, even in the water.

Many of us relive the pattern of that little girl when we face what is unfamiliar and frightening: a new stage in life, a new location, a world that seems so different than the one we grew up in, a financial crisis, an unforeseen challenge to live out our faith in ways and in situations that unnerve us. Perhaps the disciples were so unnerved by the experience of Jesus feeding the 5,000 that they just wanted to get back to familiar territory. Perhaps they are sensing in Jesus the power and presence of God. And when God acts, it can be scary, even frightening. C. S. Lewis wrote, “I wonder if people who asked for God to intervene in our world, really know what they are asking. Will they want to be there when God really does intervene?”

I think one of the best films of the 1990’s was Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 film Forrest Gump starring Tom Hanks as a slow witted but good hearted man from Alabama. While serving in Vietnam, Gump saves the lives of several men including his superior officer Lt. Dan Taylor, who lost both his legs below the knees and who laments he should have died in the field with his men. Eventually Lt. Dan comes to Alabama to work with Forrest on his shrimp boat. Knowing nothing about shrimping, trying and failing, praying, going to church, and singing in the choir, Forrest trusts in God and believes things will work out while Lt. Dan continues to drown himself in a bottle of alcohol laced with self-pity. Finally one day with an ominous sky, Lt. Dan asks Gump sarcastically, “Where is this God of yours?” Forrest says, “Just then God showed up.” Riding out Hurricane Camille is a transforming experience for Lt. Dan and along with their subsequent success he is finally able to say to Forrest, “I never thanked you for saving my life.” And he made his peace with God.

In this passage from John’s Gospel, Jesus also shows up unexpectedly on the water in the midst of a storm. The description of Jesus walking on the water is very difficult for many people to believe. Some folks say we don’t know if he literally walked on the water, others suggest Jesus ran along the shore, maybe he just knew where the rocks were. Maybe he did it and we just can’t explain how. John doesn’t focus so much on that as he does on this – when we seek to row the boat of our lives apart from the guidance, wisdom, and living presence of God – we are likely in our independence to take ourselves into stormy seas. And in the midst of the storms we face, Jesus comes to us. Sometimes in ways that seem miraculous, sometimes in places or ways or people that we never expect God to show up – Jesus comes to us. In the midst of the darkness of our grief, loneliness, sin, despair, and need, through stormy waves of pride, disobedience, and doubt, not even the strong winds of selfishness and self-satisfaction, can keep Jesus from showing up and saying, “It is I am (ego eimi); Do not be afraid.”

Among John’s first audience those familiar with the Scriptures would have recognized that “I Am” (ego eimi) was a form of God’s name. When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, God said, “I Am who I Am…say to the people of Israel, I Am has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14). The “I am” here shows that Jesus was the one in whom God’s name and identity were revealed. Jesus says, “Do not be afraid.” When God shows up in the Bible, God often comes to take away someone’s fear. When Abram was an old man and his hope of having a child as God promised seemed to be dimming, “The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, ‘Do not be afraid Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great (Genesis 15:1).”

God comes to Isaac in a time when he is a semi-nomad during a famine and there is enmity and contention between Isaac and other herders over wells of water.

“The Lord appeared to Isaac and said, “I am the God of your father Abraham, do not be afraid, for I am with you (Genesis 26:24).”

God comes to Gideon at a time when his people are being oppressed by enemies who are stealing their food. In the midst of economic hardship and oppression God comes to a man who is the least in his family, whose family is the weakest in the tribe of Manasseh. There is no way this guy can deliver Israel, well, there is one way. The Lord said to Gideon, “I will be with you. Peace be to you; do not fear, you shall not die” (Judges 6:23).

The night of Jesus’ birth, the angel said to the shepherds (Luke 2:10), “Do not be afraid; for behold I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.”

The Sunday morning after Jesus death on the cross, when the women come to the tomb, an angel says to them (Matthew 28:5), “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified.” Then Jesus met them and take a wild guess what he said to them (Matthew 28:10), “Do not be afraid.”

Think about the circumstances of these appearances –

When like Abram and Sarai we are giving up hope of having a future, God says,

Do not be afraid.

When like Isaac and Rebekah, we are hungry and thirsty and longing for direction but find only confusion, contention, and conflict, God says,

Do not be afraid.

When like Gideon our enemies appear poised to swallow us alive and our own strength and resources seem pitifully weak and insufficient, God says,

Do not be afraid.

When like the shepherds we are in the darkness and our vision is limited and we think God is concerned only about me, my family, my business, my church, my town, my party, my nation – God sends an angel to say, Do not be afraid, I’ve got good news for all people.

God shows up when we are grieving like the women at Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning and says, Do not be afraid, my death means life for you. And in John 6 Jesus himself comes to us in the darkness, on deep water, in the face of death and says, “It is I Am; Do not be afraid.”

We’re told that when the disciples heard Jesus say this, they immediately “wanted to receive him into the boat” (John 6:21). They receive Jesus as the one who comes in the name of God, the I Am.

This gospel story reminds us that our circumstances are not the final word. Your problem isn’t too big. It doesn’t matter how far we may have sailed away from shore, how high the waves, how strong the winds. Jesus comes when and where he is needed and wanted.

I find it very significant that unlike Matthew and Mark’s account, John doesn’t say Jesus stilled the storm. John says Jesus comes to us in the storm and rides out the storm with us until we reach our destination.

There are few storms in life that are as bad as being involved in combat or a prisoner of war. Perhaps you saw the obituary this week for Jacob DeShazer age 95, who served as a bombardier on Doolittle’s raid during World War II.[1]

On April 18, 1942, crewmen in 16 Army Air Forces bombers, commanded by Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, flew from the carrier Hornet on a daylight bombing raid that brought the war home to Japan for the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The raid resulted in only light damage to military and industrial targets, but it buoyed an American home front stunned by Japanese advances during the war’s first four months.

Corporal DeShazer, a native of Oregon and the son of a Church of God minister, was among the five-member crew of Bat Out of Hell, the last bomber to depart the Hornet. His plane dropped its bombs on an oil installation and a factory in Nagoya but it ran out of fuel before the pilot could try a landing at an airfield held by America’s Chinese allies. The five crewmen bailed out over Japanese-occupied territory in China and all were quickly captured. In October 1942, a Japanese firing squad executed the pilot, Lt. William G. Farrow, and the engineer-gunner, Sgt. Harold A. Spatz, along with a captured crewman from another Doolittle raid plane. Corporal DeShazer and the other surviving crewmen from his plane, Lt. George Barr, the navigator, and Lt. Robert L. Hite, the co-pilot, were starved, beaten and tortured at prisons in Japan and China — spending most of their time in solitary confinement — until their liberation a few days after Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

During his misery in prison, Corporal DeShazer had one source of solace.

“I begged my captors to get a Bible for me,” he recalled in “I Was a Prisoner of Japan,” a religious tract he wrote in 1950. “At last, in the month of May 1944, a guard brought me the book, but told me I could have it only for three weeks. I eagerly began to read its pages. I discovered that God had given me new spiritual eyes and that when I looked at the enemy officers and guards who had starved and beaten my companions and me so cruelly, I found my bitter hatred for them changed to loving pity. I realized that these people did not know anything about my Savior and that if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel.”

Corporal DeShazer was no longer afraid and gained the strength to survive, and he became determined to spread Christian teachings to his enemy.

Upon returning home, he enrolled at Seattle Pacific College (now Seattle Pacific University) and received a bachelor’s degree in biblical literature in 1948. He arrived in Japan with his wife Florence, also a graduate of Seattle Pacific and a fellow missionary in the Free Methodist Church, in late December 1948. A few days later, he preached his first sermon there, speaking to about 180 people at a Free Methodist church in a Tokyo suburb. Mr. DeShazer spent 30 years in Japan doing missionary work, interrupted only by a sabbatical to earn a master’s degree at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky in 1958.

In 1950, he gained a remarkable convert. Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese naval flier who had led the Pearl Harbor attack and had become a rice farmer after the war, came upon the DeShazer tract. “It was then that I met Jesus, and accepted him as my personal savior,” Mr. Fuchida recalled when he attended a memorial service in Hawaii in observance of the 25th anniversary of the attack. He had become an evangelist and had made several trips to the United States to meet with Japanese-speaking immigrants. Over the years, Mr. DeShazer met on several occasions with Mr. Fuchida, who died in 1976. “I saw him just before he died,” Mr. DeShazer once told The Salem Statesman Journal. “We shared in that good wonderful thing that Christ has done.”

Can you imagine enduring 40 months of brutality as a prisoner of war and then becoming a missionary to that same country spreading the message of Christian love and forgiveness? That is only possible for one who has received Jesus into the boat of his or her life, and trusted Jesus through all the storms that life may bring. Have you received Jesus into the boat of your life?

Are you a follower of Jesus but find yourself in the midst of a storm?

Jesus will come to be with you in the midst of the storm and he will ride it out with you. Whatever your situation this morning, Jesus has a word for you:

Do not be afraid.

Prayer by St. Augustine:

God of our life, there are days when the burdens we carry chafe our shoulders and weigh us down; when the road seems dreary and endless, the skies grey and threatening; when our lives have no music in them, and our hearts are lonely, and our souls have lost their courage. Flood the path with light, run our eyes to where the skies are full of promise; tune our hearts to brave music; give us the sense of comradeship with heroes and saints of every age; and so quicken our spirits that we may be able to encourage the souls of all who journey with us on the road of life, to Your honour and glory.

Some Scriptures about Courage and Not Being Afraid:

Psalm 27:1 The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

Deuteronomy 31:6 Be strong and bold; have no fear or dread of them, because it is the Lord your God who goes with you; he will not fail you nor forsake you.

Isaiah 12:2 Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation.

1 Corinthians 16:13 Keep alert, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong.

Ephesians 6:10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.

Psalm 18:2 The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

Isaiah 41:10 Do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.

[1] March 23, 2008, New York Times, Jacob DeShazer, Bombardier on Doolittle Raid, Dies at 95 By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN