The Joy of Taking Meaningful Risks

“THE JOY OF TAKING MEANINGFUL RISKS”

Running On Empty: When You’re Out Of Joy

August 2, 2015

Cornerstone Community Church

Have you ever watched Nik Wallenda? He’s performed a number of amazing high-wire walks in the last few years. On June 23, 2013 Wallenda set out to walk on a tightrope strung across the Grand Canyon. The walk was 1400 feet long and 1500 feet high. Thirteen million people tuned into the Discovery Channel to watch Wallenda attempt this feet, and I have to confess that I was one of them. It was an incredibly risky venture. There was no safety net to catch him if he slipped. The winds gusted to over 40 mph during the over 22 minutes it took Wallenda to make the walk across a wire that was all of two inches thick. It was an incredibly risky thing to do, but Nik Wallenda made it safe and sound. And as you can imagine, when they interviewed him after he had completed his daring performance, he was on an emotional high.

So if you’re feeling a little down in the dumps, if you’ve lost the joyful feeling, maybe that’s what you need to do – take a risk. Do something to get the adrenaline pumping.

But I have my reservations about that approach. Nik Wallenda is a strong Christian, by the way, and is very open about that in his performances. But while I admire his abilities and his faith, whenever I’ve watched him perform one of these risky ventures my first thought has usually been, “What in the world is the point?” In fact, after I watched him do this sort of thing for the second time, I stopped watching because it stopped being interesting. And the reason it stopped being interesting is because there seemed to be no meaning to it. It seemed to be the taking of a risk simply for the sake of taking a risk.

And that’s not something God calls us to. Now the truth is that God does call us as his followers to do some risky things. Following Jesus can be a dangerous endeavor. It can get your adrenaline pumping. But there is a point to it all, a larger meaning, a purpose greater than ourselves that makes the risk worth taking. This morning I want to introduce you to someone who risked his life for the sake of the gospel and who by doing so brought great joy to many people. It’s likely you’ve never heard of him before. You’ve heard of Paul, of course, the apostle who wrote the book of Philippians we’re studying this summer. But the person I’m talking about goes by the name of Epaphroditus, a little-known friend of Paul that we read about in Philippians 2. Here’s what Paul tells us about this relatively anonymous Christ-follower:

But I think it is necessary to send back to you Epaphroditus, my brother, co-worker and fellow soldier, who is also your messenger, whom you sent to take care of my needs. For he longs for all of you and is distressed because you heard he was ill. Indeed he was ill, and almost died. But God had mercy on him, and not on him only but also on me, to spare me sorrow upon sorrow. Therefore I am all the more eager to send him, so that when you see him again you may be glad and I may have less anxiety. So then, welcome him in the Lord with great joy, and honor people like him, because he almost died for the work of Christ. He risked his life to make up for the help you yourselves could not give me. (Philippians 2:25-30)

The Greek word Paul uses to describe the risk Epaphroditus took is an interesting one. It’s the word “paraboleuomai” and it means “to hazard or to gamble your life.” We’re not sure of the details, but in one way or another Epaphroditus gambled his life to make the journey from Philippi to Rome to visit Paul in prison and to offer him help. It could be that the journey itself was dangerous. It could be that it was a gamble to try to get past the Roman prison guards to be able to see Paul. What we do know is that in his effort to reach Paul Epaphroditus got sick, so sick that he almost died. And Paul wants to be sure that the Philippians give Epaphroditus a proper welcome when he gets back home, that they welcome him with great joy and honor.

And that’s most of what we know of Epaphroditus. But while you may never have heard of him and we know very little of the details of his life, it turns out that his story plays a significant role in the spread of Christianity. It’s not a story you’ll read about in the Bible, so you’ve probably not heard about it, but there are clear echoes of the gambler Epaphroditus in early Christian history. Let me explain.

The superpower of the world for the first few hundred years of the Christian faith was Rome. And you probably remember from your history classes that Romans did not place a very high value on human life. Christians, on the other hand, became known for cherishing human life, including the disabled and the unwanted and the sick. Around the year 250 A.D. an especially virulent disease began to spread throughout the Roman Empire. It began in North Africa, then spread to Rome and the rest of the Western Empire. At one point 5000 a day were dying in Rome from this disease.

And from the writings of that time we know what the Roman people did for their sick citizens – nothing. In fact we read that if a family member contracted the disease, his family, instead of caring for him, would put the sick person out on the street to fend for himself and to die alone. This, we are told, was the standard method for dealing with infected Romans all throughout the Empire.

But there was one group of people who handled the epidemic differently – Christians. Sociologist Rodney Starks writes in his book “The Rise Of Christianity” that a major reason Christianity grew from a relatively small movement to a dominant force in the Roman Empire was because of the way Christians cared for the sick. For one thing, if a Christian got sick, his family didn’t throw him out; they devoted themselves to either nursing him to health or to standing by him in his death. But what really impressed the Roman people was what Christians did for the infected and highly contagious people who were thrown out on the streets. Rather than avoid them, Christians brought them into their own homes and cared for them as if they were members of their own family.

The epidemic, as well as devastating Rome, also devastated the city of Carthage in North Africa. One of the leaders of the Christian Church in Carthage, a bishop by the name of Cyprian, organized the Christian community to care for the sick of the city. He raised funds from Christians to buy supplies to help the sick, and he instructed church members to devote themselves to finding the sick, taking them in and caring for them. He made sure that Christians treated the dead with dignity by giving them proper burials when no one would come to claim the dead bodies for fear of being exposed to the disease.

And here’s where Epaphroditus comes in. Do you remember the Greek word Paul used to describe Epaphroditus? It was “paraboleuomai,” which means “to hazard or gamble with one’s life.” Guess what the early Christians called themselves, these societies of Christian men and women who went out into the streets to care for the diseased and the dying, risking contracting this fatal illness themselves? They called themselves “the parabolani” – the “gamblers.” Like Epaphroditus, they gambled with their lives in order to show the love of Jesus to people infected with a deadly disease. And historians tell us it was that kind of sacrificial love, repeated all over the Roman Empire, that turned the tide of opposition against Christians and led to Christians becoming the most admired of all people.

And those early Christians were hardly the last to risk their lives in their service to Jesus. It was just a year ago that the lead story on every news program was a disease – ebola. It’s a disease that began in West Africa. We in the U.S. wanted no part of it. Many wanted to make it a law that people who had been in West Africa not be allowed to fly to the United States. People picketed the White House with signs that said, “Stop the planes!” But there were, and still are, those remarkable folks who volunteered to go to West Africa to care for the diseased, to offer comfort to the sick. You probably remember that two such folks who went to West Africa with a ministry we support every year through Operation Christmas Child, called Samaritan’s Purse, contracted the disease they went to fight. Like Epaphroditus, they took a gamble, they took a risk, and they both got sick. Fortunately Dr. Kent Brantly and nurse Nancy Writebol were able to return to the US and to get the medicine they needed to stave off the disease. And their home churches treated them just as Paul told the Philippians to treat Epaphroditus – to welcome them home with great joy and to honor them for their courage and compassion.

Our family is taking a trip to Hawaii in about 10 days. On one of our first trips to Hawaii, to the island of Maui, I stopped in a little museum built in honor of another gambler for Christ, a priest by the name of Damien. I knew something of his story, but thought it time for me to learn the whole story, so I bought a book about Father Damien and spent much of the next two days in a chair facing the neighboring island of Molokai to read the remarkable story of this Catholic priest from Belgium who became the pastor to over 800 lepers quarantined by the Hawaiian government on Molokai.

Back in the 1800s medical science did not have a clear understanding of leprosy. There was certainly no way to cure it. The only logical way of dealing with lepers, people thought, was to quarantine them, to separate them from the general population so they didn’t infect everyone. Remarkably, Molokai maintained this leper colony until 1969. Back in the 1800s, as you can imagine, the conditions on Molokai were pretty desperate. In large part lepers were shipped off to Molokai and forgotten. The Catholic bishop of Hawaii wanted to send a priest to the leper colony to minister to their spiritual needs, but in his mind that would be death sentence for whoever went. So he asked for volunteers. And who should be first to volunteer but Father Damien. So in 1873, at the age of 33, Damien boarded a ship and headed across the beautiful blue waters surrounding Maui and made his way to Molokai.

Now the lepers there needed a priest, and Damien served them well as a priest, but he did far more than that. First, by himself, he built a church, a place for the lepers to celebrate Mass and to meet with their God. He built a reservoir; he built homes and furniture. He built caskets and buried the dead himself. As the lepers saw his devotion to them, they began to chip in and to paint their dilapidated houses and to clean up the land. Damien acted as well as their nurse, bandaging their wounds and cleaning out their ulcers. He knew he was risking his health; he knew he was taking a gamble. But in his letters to the bishop and to his family back in Belgium,you can’t help but notice how joyful Damien was.

Then, in 1884, Father Damien discovered he had in fact contracted leprosy himself. He had taken a risk, he knew, by living with the lepers, by touching their wounds, and by placing the holy bread of the mass on their tongues. But it was a risk he believed was worth gambling his life. Damien lived another five years on Molokai, building more homes, building an orphanage, and caring for the people he loved, before he died in 1889 at the age of 49 from leprosy. Father Damien, like Epaphroditus, was a “parabolani” for Jesus.

We are not called as followers of Jesus to take risks for the sake of taking risks. But we are called to take risks, to even gamble with our lives, for the sake of people in need. I mentioned a few weeks ago that on June 15th of this year one of the greatest Christian women of the last century died – her name was Elisabeth Elliot. She lived to be 88, but that she lived past the age of 30 is actually remarkable. It’s a story worth repeating again this morning. Elisabeth married Jim Elliot after the two of them moved from Illinois to Ecuador to be missionaries. Their mission was to reach a group of people, the Aucas, who had never heard the gospel before. They were known for being a violent people, even for being cannibals. But the Elliots and four other missionary couples were intent on reaching them with the good news of Jesus.

Jim Elliot and Nate Saint spotted the Aucas from their plane one day along a nearby river, and decided to go back to that spot with three other missionaries to wait for the Aucas to come back so they could establish contact. On January 8, 1956 the five missionaries eagerly waited for the Aucas to come out of hiding. But when they came, they did not come as friends; they came to kill. Within minutes, all five missionaries were dead. But as many of you know, that was not the end of the story. You would think the missionary wives would have packed up their children and their belongings and moved back to the United States. Not Elisabeth and not Rachel Saint. They stayed. And two years after the death of Jim Elliot, Elisabeth and her three year old daughter went even further – they moved in with the Aucas. They learned the language, they translated the message of the gospel into the language, they cared for the Aucas, and they shared the message of the gospel with them. And many of the Aucas gave their lives to Jesus because of it.

Talk about taking a risk. Talk about being a “parabolani” – a gambler for Christ.

But then that’s the kind of God we follow. We follow a God, who in the person of his Son Jesus, risked his life to come to this earth as one of us, to be exposed to disease and danger and death, in order to rescue us from our sin. And because of what Jesus did for us, because Jesus risked his life for us, it is possible for us to live our lives with hope and with joy and with confidence.

You’ve seen this acronym before – “YOLO.” It stands for “you only live once.” Risk-takers love that term. Since you only live once, they say, you’ve got to live with abandon. You’ve got to be willing to take some risks, to stretch yourself in order to experience all that life has to offer.

But the fact is that it’s not true. You don’t only live once. Jesus told us that; he told us that we all live more than once. Here’s how he said it: “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out – those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.” (John 5:28-29) This life is not all there is, not for any of us. And that fact should motivate us all the more to be risk-takers for God, to be “parabolani” for Jesus. When you think of it, it’s really not much of a gamble to risk your life here on this earth for the sake of Jesus. Because even if you lose your life, like Father Damien did, you gain so much more in the life to come. Listen to how Jim Elliot put it before risking his life, and ultimately losing his life, in his effort to take the gospel to the Aucas: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

My grandson Oliver is about six months old. He is a very curious little guy. My daughter tells me that Oliver suffers from “FOMO” – the fear of missing out. It can be a challenge to give Oliver a bottle because he always wants to see what else is going on. If you’re sitting on the couch feeding him, he wants to see what’s on TV. If Brenda or Ryan or Kelsey or Mom or Dad are nearby, he wants to see what they’re doing. He doesn’t want to miss out on something someone else might be doing. He wants to make sure he’s part of the action.

And as I thought about it, it occurred to me that this is a fear we as Christians need more of – the fear of missing out. We should be afraid of missing out on what God is doing in the world, afraid of missing out on the lives he’s changing, afraid of missing out on what God wants to do through us. But to experience all that God wants to do through us, we’re going to have to take some risks. We’re going to have to take financial risks so we can support what God is doing in the world through the church and through Samaritan’s Purse and through World Vision and numerous other organizations. We might well have to risk our health to get close to people who are sick. I don’t know what the risk might involve for you, but I’m pretty sure that in one way or another a risk is going to be part of God’s calling on your life. Even working in the church nursery is a risk, because you never know when one of those adorable little bundles of joy is going to throw up all over you. Serving is a risky business.