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The Theology of Hospitality ˜ 327
Fear is very active and it’s a very good thing and it works
in us and tries its best to keep us alive and it fights with all it’s
got against this archenemy, death.
We cannot have faith until we understand this aspect of
fear—that fear will be overactive in us so long as it sees, anywhere
on the horizon, the specter of death. The clue, then, to
the triumphant faith of the early Christians lies in the power
of the resurrection. They did not go everywhere preaching the
ethics of Jesus. They went everywhere preaching that this Jesus
whom you slew, God has raised from the dead. Death had lost
its sting, the grave had lost its victory. ...
The life, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Jesus is
one package. I think the weakness of liberalism today is that it
accepts the life of Jesus, but shuns the inevitable consequence
of the Jesus Life, which is crucifixion, and it thereby denies the
power of the resurrection. When we are given assurance that
this Jesus and the kind of life that he lived can overcome
[fear], then we are freed from our fear. Then we can give ourselves
to this God and say, “Let all that we have go, even this
mortal life also.”
But the stories of that assurance are hard to come by. It is easy to tell stories
of fear, but those of faith—of the light shining in the darkness—seem rare in our
lives of sophistication, which mostly deny the Jesus Life. So it is important to
tell stories of faith, to recognize them in our lives, and to act as faithful, rather
than fearful, people.
For us at the Open Door Community, one of those faithful people is Billy
Neal Moore, who is on death row. He often writes for Hospitality, telling stories
from his life filled with faith in the saving power of God. A few issues back,
he wrote:
I face the struggle against the state that has spent millions of
dollars in their efforts to kill me. There isn’t a day that passes
when the forces of death are not before me. I know combat
soldiers face battle in worse situations for two or three years;
but it’s nearly sixteen years now that I have struggled in hope
that the same God in whom you believe will move in my behalf
and spare me.
It is amazing testimony to the power of faith that a man can sit in the darkness
of death for sixteen years and still let the light of faith shine through his life.