From Fear to Grace
#BeUMC - Part 2
Sunday, July 2, 2023
Romans 8:1-17
You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “Abba, Father.”
Romans 8:15 (CEB)
Listen to this Week’s Sermon here:
The sound of crashing metal echoed through the dark cavernous sanctuary as a stream of light flickered on a small collapsible screen. A reel-to-reel whirred from the back of the room projecting gruesome images of human flesh run through with huge rusty spikes. Screams of agony drowned out the film reels and the clanging hammer, followed by a few guttural words in some foreign language I would later come to know as Aramaic.
“Father, forgive them,” the dying man cried as he was hoisted up on a cross. “They know not what they do.”
In all honesty I don’t remember the words first hand; only the graphic sounds and images flooding the consciousness of my seven or eight-year-old mind. It wasn’t until middle school that I even began putting the pieces together, but the jumbled nightmarish images haunted me for years with little to no real meaning.
My childhood experience in the Catholic church left me with the confusion of mixed moral messages and a general fear of God and religion. Looking back, I can appreciate many things about the Catholic faith, especially its positive influence in my grandmother’s life as one of the most devout prayer warriors I know. Attending an occasional mass or Catholic funeral as an adult, I am struck by their rich heritage and their overwhelming reverence for the Scriptures. I am even moved on occasion to go and light a candle for friends who are grieving the loss of loved ones. But in elementary school, I did not have the wisdom or discernment to separate the anxiety of my personal experience from the whole of the Catholic church or even the whole of Christianity.
The film we watched on the death of Jesus did not even come close to the graphic depictions of Mel Gibson’s, “The Passion of the Christ”, but at the time I felt as if I were actually there in Jerusalem, cowering away so the blood would not splatter on my face. Like Peter, I would likely be huddling by a fire in the courtyard, unwilling to admit that I even knew the unrecognizable man on the cross.
I made straight A’s in school. My intelligence and imagination always ran high. Yet no matter how hard I tried, I could not wrap my brain around why this man would have to suffer the way I saw that night. I couldn’t rationalize how anyone could inflict such a horrifying punishment on anyone, not even a mass murderer.
Still reeling from the shock of it all, I heard the nun explain that Jesus died because of my sin. The horror I had just witnessed was all my fault. OK, maybe not ALL mine, but I couldn’t stomach the idea that I needed forgiveness as much as the ones who nailed him to that cross. I never even had a poor conduct mark in school. How could my wrongdoing cause this man to die nearly 2,000 years before I was even born?
I don’t remember hearing anything about resurrection or the hope of eternal life. Maybe they taught it later on, but after that night, I was too scared to hear anything else. Being a good kid would never be good enough anymore. I had to be perfect. I couldn’t live with his blood on my conscience but I didn’t understand how to remove the stain. I couldn’t even figure out how I ended up being responsible in the first place…
… and so begins my journey from fear to freedom...
For the rest of the story, listen to this week’s sermon here.
Also be sure to check out Rev. Tangela Cameron’s UMC story as shared at Shiloh on June 25th to kick off this series. You can see the video here.