I think we were all impressed by the grace with which Sen. John McCain faced his own death. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, once remarked “My people die well,” and it could certainly be said of this courageous Senator that he “died well.” Comforted by his faith, his family, his friends, and by a grateful nation, he ended his life every bit as heroically as he lived it a half-century ago, during the five and a half years of torture and solitary confinement he endured in a Vietnamese prison camp. 

In two days, we’re going to be reminded again of another event that seventeen years ago tested our nation’s mettle and tried its capacity to endure real evil. With the hijacking of four jet planes by a group of Muslim extremists- two of which slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, one that flew into the Pentagon building, and another attack that was thwarted when a group of courageous passengers rose up and overpowered the terrorists, we found our collective shock and sorrow mitigated somewhat by accounts of great heroism. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Twin Towers, I found myself playing and replaying in my mind the heroism of those policemen, firefighters, and medical technicians who, without much thought to their OWN safety, ran up those stairwells to rescue as many people as they could. I tried to put myself in their shoes, wondering whether I myself could have shown that same kind of fearlessness and courage under similar circumstances, but there’s no way to know until one finds oneself in just such a situation. I can only HOPE I would. I guess that’s when you find out what it is you’re REALLY made of, what kind of strength of mind and character you have. When asked what had compelled them to ascend those steps at great risk to their OWN lives, surviving first responders said repeatedly “We had a job to do, a duty to perform. That’s what we were trained for.”

The APOSTLE PAUL knew about “duty” and “courage” and this is clearly reflected in our New Testament lesson this morning. It occurs towards the end of his third missionary journey in which after two years and three months in Ephesus, he summons the elders for what would be his valedictory, his farewell address to them. Here he delivers one of the most moving speeches of his ministry. He begins by speaking of his own past ministry, that from the time he arrived he served them with humility and tears which was not often easy because of the frequent plots by the Jews to undermine him. However, wherever he went, he preached and taught the same message- that Jews and Gentiles alike should turn from their sins and receive the love and mercy that only comes through Jesus Christ. In obedience to the Holy Spirit, he is now leaving for Jerusalem, not quite sure of what awaits him there. He only knows that in every city, the Spirit warns him that prison and troubles are sure to await him. But then in verse 24, he makes an extraordinary admission. He says he reckons his own life to be worth nothing to him, that he only wants to complete his mission and finish the work the Lord Jesus gave him to do which is to declare the Good News about the grace of God.

Paul is not saying that he hates his existence or that life has become meaningless or worthless to him. Rather, he asserts that in light of the mission Jesus had prepared and entrusted him with, threats to his life were to be expected. If he survived, he survived; if he died during the course of his duty, then he died. But for Paul, the main thing was to be obedient to his master by remaining faithful to the task at hand- the rest would have to be left up to God. Here, after all, was a man who had been shipwrecked three times, repeatedly assaulted and imprisoned, and on one occasion had been stoned and left for dead- all on behalf of the gospel. He was anything BUT a masochist but he would gladly give his life if it furthered the cause of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

A few years before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. was asked about the escalating number of threats made by the Klan upon his life. The group had already been linked to the bombing deaths of four little girls in a Birmingham church; the murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner; and the assassination of Medger Evers. King explained that when he was about to visit Mississippi, he had been warned by Negro leaders in Mobile about a plot to assassinate him. He was strongly urged to cancel the trip but after thinking about it, decided that he had no other alternative but to proceed with it. When asked by the interviewer “why,” his response was unequivocal. He said:

Because I have a job to do. If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn’t function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically. I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause.

Like Paul and like those heroes of 9/11, King possessed that same selfless determination, that same single-minded devotion to complete the task before him and fulfill the duty he’d been commissioned for. He had a job to do and he was not going to let such concerns deter him.

Of course, what makes such courageous acts involving heroic decisions so difficult is that they involve an internal struggle- between the compassion one feels for someone in need, on the one hand, and the instinct for self-preservation, on the other. The decision is never an easy one and often you don’t even have the luxury to think about it- it’s just a split-second reaction to an immediate situation. But from somewhere deep within, REAL HEROES find the courage to “do the right thing,” that is, to take a significant risk or make a great sacrifice to achieve a noble goal. That was certainly the situation when Todd Beamer, the airline passenger who rallied the others to stop the terrorists en route to Washington, D.C., said, “Let’s roll.” That was clearly the case when John Cerqueira of New Jersey helped carry a disabled woman down the World Trade Center stairway even though he could hear his mother in the back of his head telling him to get the heck out of there. Still, he did it because, as he said, “I had to help.” Such was the case when cab driver Dave Boyd chased down a man who robbed one of his passengers in downtown Syracuse when I was pastoring there- he didn’t consider that he could have been hurt; he just took off after the guy. “It was like second nature,” he said afterwards. 

On this past Friday’s NBC Evening News with Lester Holt, it closed with an inspiring story about a man who helped fulfill the dreams of hundreds of students. His name is Dennis Frandsen, an 84-year old multimillionaire who owns numerous banks and companies in and around the small town of Luck, Wisconsin. Realizing he can’t take his money with him, he decided to do something much more productive with all his wealth- he offered to pay the first two years of college for all the senior graduates of Luck High School this past year. Raised on a dairy farm, he never had the opportunity to go to college himself so he thought he might give others the chance he himself had been denied. When asked why he did it, he simply told the interviewer, “Because I thought it was the right thing to do.” He is now expanding his generosity to include another high school in the area. By changing the lives of these young people, he’ll be a hero to them FOREVER.

Friends, when you analyze the heroic actions of persons like the Apostle Paul, Martin Luther King, the soldiers of past wars, and our current-day police and fire fighters for whom each day involves placing themselves in harm’s way, what unites each of them is that they are all common people who in a moment of decision transcended themselves to accomplish something very “uncommon.” They all had a mission to carry out, an obligation to perform, a duty to fulfill, and they responded without personal regard for their own safety. They were more interested in doing the “right” thing rather than what was momentarily “expedient,” more concerned about helping others than they were in saving themselves. And though their work might not often seem “heroic,” by remaining faithful to their calling, by rising to the challenge in a moment of need, their actions have seemed to make the world a bit nobler and kinder and safer for us all. 

But where does such strength of character come from? Where does that something special which enables a person to rise up in moments of crisis or need to selflessly do “the right thing” originate? The fact is that such behavior is never innate; rather, it is learned and cultivated. It is the result of a continuous process of character development and moral education. You see, heroes are MADE, not born. Somewhere in their past, whether at home or in school, at church or in their synagogue, real heroes were taught the sacredness of human life; they were instructed in the importance of tolerance and respect for one another. Virtues like honesty and generosity, solidarity and trust were a significant part of their life curriculum, and when taken together, contributed greatly to their expansiveness of heart. 

In fact, what makes such persons heroes to us in the FIRST place is not that they are willing to die but that they’re willing to die for the RIGHT REASONS, to give their lives for certain ideals and principles without which life would have very little value or meaning. If life has any significance for us at all, it is because it has been enriched by such ideals as love and truth and justice and mercy. Remove them from our vocabulary and our lives and we’d all be wishing we were dead instead; life would be a veritable hell on earth- life without honesty, life without truth, life without beauty, life without relationship. Thus, what we call “life” is really nothing more than the stage upon which such ideals are played out on- where “faith” is practiced and “love” is experienced and “justice” is striven for.

For Christians, the most important factor in the development of character and moral education has to be our faith in God and obedience to Jesus Christ. When we know that the Almighty God who made heaven and earth loves us with an everlasting love and that nothing in all of creation can possibly separate us from that presence or that love, then we can march through that valley of the shadow of death without fear. “If God be for us, then who can be against us?” asked Paul. As God’s beloved, we are equipped with spiritual resources that enable common persons such as ourselves to reach down deep into ourselves and accomplish some very uncommon things. With Jesus Christ, through his Holy Spirit, now making our heart his home, his life now becomes OUR life and his nature OUR nature. After all, who was ever more sacrificial than Christ himself, who surrendered his throne in heaven to become a servant on earth. Therefore, EVERY Christian has the capacity to rise up in the face of great opposition and take a stand for what is right and true and just; EVERY Christian is supernaturally equipped to be a hero.

In the late 1980's, Taylor Branch won a Pulitzer Prize for writing what has since become the standard account of the American Civil Rights movement, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963. One of the most poignant moments in the narrative occurred during the famous Montgomery bus boycott of 1956- when southern Blacks refused to use the transit system in that city due to its blatantly racist policies. A young Martin Luther King, over-wrought with deep doubts, agonized over his participation in that struggle. It wasn’t that he didn’t think the cause was a righteous one for he did. Rather, he had doubts as to his own ability to lead the boycott; he wondered whether he could withstand the beatings and the jailings that would ensue; above all, he was afraid of the endless stream of threats to his life and those of his family. You see, all he ever wanted was to be a simple pastor and an academic- not a hero and certainly not a martyr for any cause. Yet, as the pressure for him to assume that mantle intensified from WITHOUT, and as the conflict he felt for personal reasons increased WITHIN, the author tells us what happened next:

King woke up the next morning to a fresh day of pressure. For him, time was fluctuating too rapidly between moments of deep fear and those of high inspiration. Late the next night, his mind was turning over as he lay in bed. Coretta had fallen asleep. The phone rang again. ‘Listen, nigger,’ said the caller, ‘we’ve taken all we want from you. Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.’ King hung up on the angry voice. Hope of sleep receded further. He paced the floor awhile before giving in completely to wakefulness, which drove him to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee...The sensations of the incoming images pressed in upon him--the hatred of the whites, the burdened, offended rectitude of the middle-class Negroes, the raw courage or neediness of the plain folk...There was no idea nor imaginable heart large enough to satisfy all of them, or to contain them. The limitless potential of a young King free to think anything, and therefore to be anything, was constricted by realities that paralyzed and defined him. King buried his face in his hands at the kitchen table. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left, that the people would falter if they looked to him for strength. Then he said as much out loud. He spoke the name of no deity, but his doubts spilled out as a prayer, ending, ‘I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’ As he spoke these words, the fears suddenly began to melt away. He became intensely aware of what he called an ‘inner voice’ telling him to do what he thought was right. Such simplicity worked miracles, bringing a shudder of relief and the courage to face anything. It was for King the first transcendent religious experience of his life. The moment lacked the splendor of a vision or a voice speaking out loud...For King, the moment awakened and confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not a grand metaphysical idea but something personal, grounded in experience--something that opened up mysteriously beyond the predicaments of human beings in their frailest and noblest moments.

That moment became for him one of the great epiphanies of his life. He had grown up in his father’s church, had years of college and seminary under his belt, and there was even a Ph.D. with honors from Boston University in his resume, but not all the learning from the finest schools in all the world could have educated him to what he discovered that day, sitting in the “classroom of the Cross.” Within this terrible crucible of death threats and concern for his family, plagued by a sense of inadequacy and a terrible loss of faith, he helplessly thrust himself upon the mercy of God and God faithfully responded with what was for King the first transcendent religious experience of his life. For the first time, he could hear an “inner voice” ever so plain and unmistakable telling him to do what he thought was “right”- an answer that brought him relief and endued him with a new-found faith and courage that would undergird him for the rest of his days. 

Church, to live heroically is to live courageously and “do the right thing;” it is to take a major risk or make a great sacrifice to achieve a noble goal. Well, we as the Body of Christ have been called and trained and equipped to be heroic when the occasion arises and never to shrink with timidity and fear. We are summoned to speak the truth in the face of lies and deception, to embody Christ’s love when confronted by hatred and hostility, and to demand justice when people are dehumanized and discriminated upon. As Christians, we have a mission to carry out, a duty to perform, an obligation to fulfill. However, the heroic attitude is never proud or arrogant or self-assertive but meek and humble. It is a helpless dependency on Christ so that, like King, we too may hear that “inner voice”--a voice transcending all our creeds and dogmas--the voice of Christ himself. And as he speaks to us, it calls to us, it comforts us, it reassures us, it strengthens us. It reminds us that he loves us with an everlasting love and that nothing in all of creation will ever be able to separate us from his presence or his love. Let us pray...

Father, give us a real courage born of deep faith. Help us to be willing to take the great risks that such faith demands, knowing that that is what Jesus did and what he no less demands from those who would call themselves his followers. In his name we pray. Amen.