Midweek Lent, 2024 ☩ Love One Another ☩ Week 4: Encourage One Another

Vicar Lauren Mildahl
Texts: I Thessalonians 5:4-14, John 16:12-15, 32-33

Beloved children of God, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

For the last three weeks, we’ve been diving into some of the tougher aspects of the command to Love One Another. 

We’ve talked about agreeing with one another, confessing our sins to one another, and not judging one another. We’ve been dealing with brokenness in our relationships – broken by conflict, and isolation, and superiority. 

But this week, we finally get a fun one: “Encourage one another!” 

This is the kind of instruction that a smiling, optimistic, positive person like me can really get into. I even like all the different ways that you can encourage. You can give compliments, reminding people of their unique gifts: “You’re amazing! You’re so strong!” You can offer optimism, sharing your faith in the restoration that God promises: “Everything will turn out all right! It gets better!” Or you can really lean into the confidence we have as God’s beloved children: “You’ve got this.” “You can do it!”

These are nice things to say and really nice things to hear.  Who wouldn’t want to spend their time offering encouragement and being encouraged? It almost seems silly that we would need to be commanded to do it. And even Paul admits that the Thessalonians are already on it:  “Encourage one another,” he writes, “as indeed you are doing!” 

So what am I going to preach about?

Well, unfortunately, there is a darker underbelly here.  

Because just like you don’t need to be told to agree unless there is conflict, and you don’t need to be told to confess unless there is violation, and you don’t need to be told not to judge unless you are judging, you don’t need to be told to encourage one another unless there is discouragement. 

Because even in a community of faith–even as we are experiencing the love of God, the grace of Jesus Christ and the communion of the Holy Spirit–we sometimes feel discouraged. Dis-courage-ment. 

Sometimes we are robbed of our courage. 

Often by fear–fear of losing the people or the things we love. Fear of the unknown, fear of pain, fear that there won’t be enough, fear of guilt or fear of judgment–we are anxious and afraid and dis-couraged. 

Or sometimes it’s doubt that discourages. Doubt in ourselves and our ability to bear the weight of living. Doubt in each other – will you all really be there for me? Or doubt in God. Doubt in God’s promises or God’s love or even uncertainty about whether God is there at all.  And when we doubt in this whole project of faith and hope and love and life, it seems a lot safer to look out for ourselves, to retreat from each other. Doubt robs us of the courage to believe that God will use the hands of those around us to catch us when we fall. 

And sometimes it’s despair that discourages.  On days when it’s hard enough just getting out of bed, how can we stand boldly in faith and face it all?  When everything seems so hopeless–we keep hurting each other and burning the Earth and we know we’re doing it but nothing ever changes–what’s the point of courage? It’s all lost anyway.

That’s the dark underbelly: Fear and Doubt and Despair. 

That’s why we need our courage back and why we need each other to be en-couraged.  

And we need real encouragement. En-courage-ment isn’t just plucky pick-me-ups or stock sayings about silver linings–maybe that can buck us up when our hearts are a bit faint, but what about when our hearts aren’t even in our chests anymore, but have fallen all the way to the ground?

Compliments and optimism and “You’ve got this”–those things don’t really work then.  Not when fear and doubt and despair shatter our illusion of control. Because no matter how many times I tell you that “you’ve got this,” the truth is, you don’t. And you never did.  No matter how many times you tell me “you can do it,” the truth is, I can’t. I never could.  We were never in control.  And no matter how many times we are told we are children of the light, we still fall asleep. 

But we have a God who never sleeps. And that’s where the real courage comes from. 

I remember two things about the summer camp I went to in high school. 1) I hated doing the high ropes course. 2) I loved rappelling. Which seems weird. Both of those activities involved heights, involved wearing a harness and a helmet, and all of your friends standing around on the ground staring at you, shouting, “You can do it! You’ve got this!”

In both activities you are up high, strapped in, and completely safe.  But I remember clinging to the high ropes course, shaking and trying to will my feet to move for what felt like hours, absolutely petrified, and then the next day, leaning over a cliff to rappel down the side of a mountain in seconds, with no trouble at all. 

Because the crucial difference is that with rappelling, you can feel the rope holding you the whole time.  From the very first moment you lean back over the cliff, you feel the rope tighten and support you. With high ropes – you only feel the rope when you fall off. The rope is the back up, to jerk you to a stop when you fail.  And most of the time you are supposed to pretend it’s not there, and just trust in your own strength and balance – and I hated that. 

Either way the rope was there. But only one of them gave me courage. 

And it wasn’t the one that held me so loosely that I was supposed to forget about it as I figured out how to get through the course under my own power.  It was the rope I could feel the whole time, trusting it with my weight as I descended.  That gave me courage.  

God is our rope – but much better than a rope. God will not let us fall.  And the best, real encouragement that I can give you, that we can give to each other, is not “You’ve got this!” but a resounding “You don’t got this! God’s got this.”  That was the encouragement that Jesus offered his followers, in their last conversation before he died: “In the world you will have distress and trouble, but take courage: I have overcome the world.” I’ve got this.   And it’s the same encouragement Paul offered the Thessalonians: “whether you are awake or asleep you live with him.” It doesn’t matter what you do – whether you’ve got it together or you’re falling apart – you live with Jesus. Who’s got this. Who’s got us. 

So, we need to offer one another better encouragement than just retelling each other the myth that we can do it on our own, that we can be in control. 

The myth that we’ve got this.  Because we’ll just need to be jerked back up again when we fall.  Instead let’s encourage one another, let’s hoist one another up in the Spirit, reminding each other that to lean back and feel the rope, to let the God that will not let us go take all the weight, until we feel lighter than air. 

Until we relax into the peace of Jesus, who has overcome – overcome all the fear, all the doubt, and all the despair that the world can throw at us. 

Dear siblings, this is your encouragement: You don’t got this. God’s got this. 

In the name of the Father, of the  ☩  Son, and of the Holy Spirit.