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Joshua 1: 1-9
Hebrews 13: 1-8, 15-16
God’s people stand on the border of The Promised Land. They’ve wandered the desert forty years, and over that time they’ve been led by Moses. But now Moses is dead, and Joshua, son of Nun, is in charge. Joshua is no stranger to physical courage. He’s a warrior; he was one of the twelve spies sent to investigate Canaan when they first came upon it.
But in our passage, God is calling Joshua to a different kind of courage.
Certainly it will require physical bravery, but that’s not the challenge. First of all, God is calling Joshua to lead the people. Leadership takes a special kind of courage, the courage to inspire, and the courage to believe in your purpose, in spite of all the obstacles that are before you. It takes the courage not to lose heart. That is what God is telling Joshua. He’s saying, “Believe. Don’t give up. It will come to pass.”
A specific line jumps out: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”
Discouragement is the opposite of encouragement, and note that the root word of both is “courage.” They derive from the French “cour,” meaning heart—to have heart. To be discouraged is to lose heart. To have courage is to have heart. What is heart? It is confidence. When we’re discouraged, we’ve lost heart, and we’ve lost confidence—whether in ourselves, or in the goals we’re pursuing. Aristotle lists courage as one of the four moral virtues, and says the courageous person is “confident” and “is marked by a hopeful disposition” (The Nicomachean Ethics, 3:7). This confidence is driven by hope that the goal toward which one strives is worthy and attainable. It could be something real and concrete, as in the case of Joshua—a Promised Land for him and his people. Or it could be something abstract but still important—Aristotle speaks of honor as something that drives many people to be brave, even if it means their own death. But it has to be something worthwhile enough that we’re willing to face terrifying obstacles to get to it.
But the confidence that gives us courage doesn’t simply come from hope. It also comes, as Aristotle points out, from training. “We learn to be brave by doing brave acts,” he writes in his Nicomachean Ethics (1: 1). Indeed, Aristotle points to practice over and over again as key to developing all of the virtues, whether justice, or wisdom, or temperance, or courage.
What makes bravery difficult is that there is no bravery if we aren’t also afraid. Fear and courage go hand-in-hand. Years ago I read Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road, a science fiction novel about a Vietnam Nam vet who is recruited by an inter-stellar princess to be quite simply, according to the job description, a hero. And he does a lot of extraordinarily brave things, but to him they aren’t brave–they’re normal, par for the course. He says the only courageous thing he does as a hero is crawl through a dark narrow tunnel in which he can see the glowing red eyes of rats everywhere–and he’s deathly afraid of rats. Even to a hero, there’s no courage unless you are also afraid.
Practicing bravery is especially difficulty because We are forced to face our fears. And none of us like to face our fears. Many of us can fake bravery. Someone may be a great athlete. People may think she’s brave, but actually, she’s not afraid of physical effort—so there’s no real bravery required for her in being a great athlete. What she’s afraid of is not being smart enough in school. So the real bravery happens every time she enters a classroom, every time she has to study for a test, every time she has to ask someone for help and is afraid they’ll think she’s dumb, every time she brings her report card home.
To be truly courageous means that first we must know what we’re afraid of. The student athlete I mentioned could be afraid that she’s not smart—or she could be more afraid of how she looks to others when she admits she has a hard time in school. Those are very different fears. It’s important for her to know which of those it is, or if it’s both, if she’s seeking to be really courageous.
In many ways, courage is the most daunting virtue to develop because we are all afraid of something, and to be courageous requires us to name that fear. Often we may resolve to be courageous, but without first taking the time to figure out what we’re afraid of. Then we sort of bull forward blindly, doing things that may be brave, but they’re foolish. Aristotle warns that this “rashness” is the vice that attends too much bravery, just as cowardice is the vice that attends too little bravery. Both result from the same thing: an unwillingness truly to examine oneself to determine what it is you truly fear.
In order for us to live truly happy and joyful lives, we have to live courageously. We have to be willing to face our fears, to name them, so that they are not controlling us. A clue for us is what we are discouraged about. Are we discouraged about ourselves—about our abilities, about the way our lives are going? Are we discouraged about the future—of ourselves, of our families, of the nation, of the world, of the church? That discouragement plays out as fear of taking risks, a desire to hunker down and protect ourselves and those we love. Discouragement plays out as unwillingness to pursue the Promised Land we dream of, because we don’t feel we have the gifts or because we feel the obstacles are too great.
The opposite of discouragement is, of course, encouragement. Encouragement is “enheartening” someone. To encourage is actually to make someone courageous–brave! It is instilling bravery, and heart, and confidence within them. And it’s something that can be taught. When Margaret and I were parents of young children, we took classes that were based on Adlerian parenting theory and stressed encouraging children—teaching them confidence. For instance, they recommended to parents that we have a set training time with our kids, once or more a week. Train your pre-school child to make her own sandwich for lunch. Train your elementary age child to cook eggs for breakfast or to sew. Let them make their own mistakes, and use them as teaching moments. Sometimes it’s hard—they may resist, or they may have a hard time. But stay patient with them and don’t give up. This is encouragement—it is giving them heart. They’re learning that they are competent to do things for themselves. It’s not so much training in skills as it is training for life, so that when they face new obstacles and new challenges, when they’re confronted by the frightening or the unknown, they have learned over time that “I am capable. I can learn new things. I can do hard things.”
That kind of training enables people to have confidence, and confidence, Aristotle says, is courage. It gives us the courage to face and overcome our fears. It still applies to us as adults. Now of course we don’t have the good fortune to have that older mentor who can catch us when we fall, so we have to resort to other means, and for us as Christians, we return to the assurance of faith: God is with us. God loves us when we fail. There is nothing in heaven or earth that is stronger than the love of God we have found in Christ Jesus our Lord. As Paul tells us, “we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us” (Phil. 4: 13)
And the first brave thing we must do, and must never stop doing, is to look honestly at what we’re afraid of. Our Scripture gives us some hints. For instance, in our Hebrews reading from the Lectionary, the author advises us “to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” Now let’s be honest—that’s something we’re fearful about. There are some strangers that frighten us. We need to face that fear, because it’s keeping us from doing what the Gospel commands of us.
On the other hand, that fear is not entirely unreasonable. There really are risks involved in showing hospitality to strangers. If we just bull ahead, and start inviting complete strangers into our houses and lives without any thought, any consideration of the real risks, then we’re going to be guilty of the vice of rashness, of extreme, unconsidered, unreflective bravery that puts ourselves and others at needless risk. Aristotle says the brave person knows the difference between reasonable and unreasonable fears: she “faces and …fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and from the right time, and… feels and acts according to the merits of the case.”
Likewise in Hebrews we are advised, ‘Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?”
The author equates love of money with fear, and likewise equates being content with what you have with confidence in God. He’s not saying put yourself and your family at risk by giving everything away. We’re being challenged here to look honestly at the fears we have associated with money—fears that often make us hoard money, fears that make us hesitate to be generous to the church and to others. He encourages us instead to trust God, and to be content with what we have, and to be generous.
Courage , like all the virtues, can be learned. But since it involves facing what we fear, it’s not always easy. As Christians, we trust that God is with us, that God encourages us, and that we “can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.”