Fearing Bravely excerpt
It’s been a while since we featured a book excerpt here on the blog, but we’re thrilled to share this one from Catherine McNiel’s new book, Fearing Bravely.
Here’s what Fearing Bravely is about:
Jesus commands us to love our neighbors, welcome strangers, and love our enemies. Instead, so often we create enemies in our minds, seeing anyone who thinks, believes, looks, or lives differently from us as dangerous, a threat to our way of living. Fearing Bravely teaches us that as people of the Kingdom, we have nothing to fear. The Christian community exists to declare and demonstrate God’s love and to follow Jesus in practicing love over fear, even in unsafe times and places. It’s time to reclaim our brave fear of God and risk transformative love for the sake of our neighbors, the strangers among us, and our enemies. Catherine McNiel writes with conviction, wisely guiding us to recognize our fear and, with God's help, not let it limit us to love courageously all who are among us.
Enjoy this exclusive excerpt.
Do I, (Like Jesus) Listen to the Voices In the Margins?
Are we concerned lest we offend those with power?
What about the harm our silence is to those without power?
Do we worry more about offending powerful people with our stand than we worry about offending (or harming) less powerful brothers and sisters with our silence?
Why do we look to the powerful for our cues when Jesus repeatedly listened to the voices in the margins at the expense of the powerful?
Jesus put children at the center, rebuking his disciples for sending them away. Jesus carried on his longest-recorded conversation—a theological dialogue, no less—with a Samarian woman, to the great distress of his Jewish male disciples (and centuries of commentators since). Religious leaders were scandalized that he ate and drank with “tax collectors and sinners.”
Jesus sided with the vulnerable, powerless, sick, suffering, sidelined, imprisoned, and demon possessed again and again, irritating the leaders of society so entirely that they sought to kill him.
If we follow Jesus into unsafe places and to unsafe people, fueled by love rather than fear, I wouldn’t be surprised if we, too, end up befriending those with little influence and alienating those with religious and political power. We may not be publicly executed as Jesus was, but we may lose donors, power brokers, resources, positions, and social capital.
In her book Fire By Night, Melissa Florer-Bixler tells the story of Naaman from 2 Kings. Naaman is desperately ill and looking to a powerful person for help. That’s how things worked in his world (and ours): Miracles can absolutely happen— if you are a person of power and wealth. But God turns the story upside down. It is a little slave girl who points Naaman to the source of healing. You couldn’t get much less powerful in the ancient world than a slave girl. Working against every cultural narrative, God’s prophet tells Naaman to strip down all his symbols and ceremony that prove him worthy of a miracle and stand naked and bare. It is in weakness that the miracle becomes possible.
What a shock! Naaman expected God to be represented by the powerful and wealthy.
But God uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
God spoke to Naaman through a little slave girl and healed him by stripping him down.
Thousands of years later, an early critic of Christianity named Celsus leveraged the Roman cultural preference for masculine power to deride the Christians, saying:
[The Christians] are like this: “Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. . . . But as for anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone uneducated, anyone who is a child, let him come boldly.” By the fact that they themselves admit that these people are worthy of the God, they show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonourable and stupid, and only slaves, women, and children.
Celsus goes on and on, referring repeatedly to “stupid women,” “little children,” and various uneducated working-class folks of all kinds. To Celsus, and to many in his culture (and ours still today), it was inconceivable that the image of God be represented by a poor laundry woman. A common complaint of the Christians was that they associated with women, children, and slaves; in other words, they were emasculated, and their God was emasculated. Furthermore, they were infecting society with this attitude—the idea that God would embrace and embody people as unworthy as women and slaves. Surely God would reveal himself as the powerful, wealthy, influential male at the top of heap, the one able to call on servants and armies and prevail against his enemies. Surely God is not the child of an unmarried teen mom, surely not represented by a woman or a day laborer and carpenter, surely not a friend of peasants, shepherds, and fishermen.
Or, in our own context, surely God is not living in the area code full of crowded, roach-infested apartment buildings known for poverty, gangs, and drugs but in the nicer, wealthier neighborhoods. Surely God is not found among the homeless men and women searching the streets for shelter and daily bread but with the seminary-trained men who lead big churches and bring in large donors. Surely God is not with the refugees fleeing their homeland but with the lawmakers deciding how and when to open the borders. Surely God is not a slave, a child, a woman. Our stubborn belief that God associates with social power rather than the socially vulnerable—even with thousands of years of divine revelation to the contrary—leads us to value and admire those with power and ignore, hide, or dispose of the unwanted children, people with disabilities, women, working class, elderly, and all who do not earn wealth or impose power.
Florer-Bixler writes, “The ancient rabbis have a saying: ‘We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.’” Naaman assumed God works through the powerful because that is what we do—so we assume God does also. She continues, “I remembered that God is like that, too ... God does not see things as they are. God sees things as God is … What we learn from Naaman is that wealth and standing obscure belovedness. And when God sees u s— when God sees the smallness of our lives, when God sees each of us stripped of everything, with nothing left—God sees a beloved. God is leaving everything behind and running toward us.”
Yes, God sees us—all of us, all of creation—as beloved. Not because we are wonderful but because God is love.
This depth of God’s character is our foundation and our saving grace, for it is God’s kindness that brings us to repentance; it is God’s love that reaches out to us and changes us.
How do we learn to see this world that God calls beloved? If we see as we are … then what are we? These days, we often see a scary world because we are afraid. We look at our neighborhoods and country and see not what is there but what we are. We are afraid, and so we see reasons to fear. We are envious, so we see strangers coming to take what we have worked for, longed for. We solve our worries by turning to wealthy and powerful protectors and lose the ability to see the weak, marginalized, vulnerable, the essential workers, the children, the disabled, the elderly. We hide away those we don’t want to think about or threaten and remove those we fear. We create strangers out of brothers and sisters. We see danger and hatred coming toward us because we have allowed our fears to ferment, because we are drenched in hate. We see threatening strangers encroaching on our own rights and ways of life because we have lost the ability to see in our fellow humans the dignity of brothers and sisters made in the image of God.
Why are we afraid? How can we love and open ourselves up to be loved?
How can we learn to see what the God of love sees?
Taken from Fearing Bravely: Risking Love for Our Neighbors, Strangers, and Enemies by Catherine McNiel. Copyright © 2022. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
