February 1, 2009 Des Moines

Hebrews 10:23-25, 32-39

 

Discipleship in a time of FEAR

So, what are we going to be afraid of today?  I mean, there are so many frightening things constantly around us that we can’t possibly be afraid of them all, all the time.  So let’s try a different strategy and just pick one out.  Which one should we be afraid of today? 

·         The “bird flu” stirred us up a few years ago, but I don’t hear much about it these days. 

·         Anthrax was all the rage not long after that when envelopes leaking suspicious powders started showing up in various mailboxes around the country. 

·         Then, of course, there are those malicious CEO’s terrorizing our economy and prospects for retirement. 

·         And given our national weight crisis and all the health maladies associated with being overweight, most of us are walking around as ticking time bombs waiting for the next blood pressure spike, sugar surge or clogged artery. 

·         All that, and there are sexual predators lurking under every rock,

·         crazed drug addicts desperate for money to score their next hit,

·         and patches of black ice just waiting to skid us into oncoming traffic. 

·         Global warming is in the process of destroying life as we know it – although our experience this winter could lull us into believing it’s all just a cruel hoax;

·         and perhaps most threatening of all, the next really cool cell phone could come out before our current contracts are up, forcing us to wait maybe even months before we can have one. 

All the while, the Department of Homeland Security is helpfully keeping us updated on how fearful we should actually be through their creative and decorative color-coding system.  But of course since airports seem to be the only places where the current threat level is posted, unless you do a lot of flying you probably have a hard time keeping up with the “danger du jour”.  Just in case you are interested, then, the current national threat level is Elevated, or Yellow, while for all domestic and international flights, the U.S. threat level is High, or – my personal favorite – Orange.  

Homeland Security also suggests that everyone develop an emergency plan for yourself and your family, and create an emergency preparedness kit that includes such things as fresh drinking water, a three-day supply of food, a first aid kit, flashlight with extra batteries, a dust mask, local maps, popcorn, and a whistle.  All right, I made up the popcorn part, but you might as well have some fun while fretting about the end of life as we know it.  And as a general routine, they urge that we all be vigilant, take notice of our surroundings, and report suspicious items or activities to local authorities immediately.  Which means we also need to be afraid of each other because all of us, sooner or later, do something that will look suspicious to someone.

I know I really shouldn’t be making light of all this, and the many genuine threats that face us, but given the constant avalanche of menacing prospects, humor may be one of the few reliable ways of fighting back.  Humor, and that popcorn I mentioned a moment ago. 

Not that fear, itself, is always bad.  In fact, fear is a basic, natural response to the perception that we are in danger.  As participants in the small group Bible studies just getting under way have read:

 “fear is designed to be protective, animals use it to sense genuine threats to their survival.  Fear evolved because it promotes survival by triggering instant responses to a threat. Faced with a charging elephant, the brain detects danger and swiftly acts without deep analysis.  Fear is a natural reaction to the unknown and is part of a built-in defense against a potentially hostile environment.  According to a Newsweek article on the roots of fear, the evolutionary primacy of the response to fear makes it more powerful than the brain’s reasoning faculties. “The brain is wired to flinch first and ask questions later.”

The problem, of course, is that not everything triggering our fear response these days is really a threat, because though the ability to fear may be innate in the human physical and psychological make-up, what to fear, when to fear, and how to fear are largely learned.  And what our culture is teaching us about danger has gone a little haywire. 

Fear, in other words, can become irrational.  Add to that the fact that our protective responses are beginning to cost us more than they provide us in return.  Our anxieties are draining our physical health, stifling our social interactions, and poisoning our political engagements both nationally and globally. 

Some of this, we know, is the result of calculated political cultivation.  Candidates for public office learned a long time ago that fear gets votes, having taken to heart Richard Nixon’s axiom that “People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach that in Sunday school,” he mused, “but it is true.” 

But the antidote to all this psychological paralysis isn’t a blind and simple fearlessness.  Some things, after all, really are dangerous.  We can delude ourselves into believing that we are bulletproof, or that “all is right with the world,” but that won’t make it so.   We will still be vulnerable to economic turmoil and disease and the ill will of others turned to violence. 

So what is an aspiring person of faith to do?  If fretful paralysis is untenable, and willfully oblivious denial is both impractical and dishonest, what’s the alternative?  The writer of the letter to the Hebrews – in the midst of times at least as nettlesome and perilous and transitional as our own – presses into that very idea of faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (11:1).  Assurance.  Or consider its related word, “reassurance.” 

We typically read the 23rd Psalm as a paean of bucolic ease brought about by the companionship of God so constantly in evidence.  But I can’t help but suspect that the 23rd Psalm was in the first place what it has been to anxious disciples ever since:  words of reassurance to recite in the very presence of vulnerability – in the midst of moments and circumstances when one badly needs the reminder that “the Lord is my shepherd;” that “even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you, God, are with me.“  Faith, in other words – the “conviction of things not seen.”

But the writer to the Hebrews goes on.  Let us hold fast,” he urges his readers, “to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.

And then, as if to suggest a strategy, he recommends that we “consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

What he is saying, I think, is that in days like this – in seasons such as this when perils both real and imagined are coming at us from so many directions – we need each other more than ever.  We need each other’s encouragement, each other’s moral support, and each other’s spiritual support.  Left to our own devices we waver.  We doubt our convictions.  We lose confidence in our strength.  We begin to hear with more compelling clarity the sound of our personal demons nibbling away at our foundations than the better angels of our nature gently reminding us, as biblical angels seem always to do, not to be afraid, that the God of all life is with us.   

And we begin to forget our own faithful experience.  “You have endured hard struggle with sufferings,” the writer recalls, “ sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated, at other times  cheerfully accepting the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting.”

Well, we certainly know what it’s like to have our possessions plundered.  Whether you are an institution dependent upon endowment funds, or a retiree dependent upon your savings, or a weary worker clinging to the promise of your 401K, you have, in recent months, felt plundered.   

But we can help each other – perhaps with concrete assistance; perhaps with advice or broader perspective; perhaps with encouragement; perhaps with nothing more than a supportive, empathetic hug.  But whatever our mutual contribution, we need each other. 

And we need the God who holds us –

·         the God who leads us beside still waters, but who also sets a table for us in the presence of our enemies;

 

 

·         the God who did not give us a spirit of cowardice, Paul reminded his protégé Timothy, but a spirit of power and love and self-discipline;

·         the God who, according to the writer to the Ephesians, “by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine”;

·         the God who, according to the Psalmist, is our refuge and strength, a very present* help in trouble.  2Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; 3though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains – and even the economy -- tremble with its tumult.

 

                We can, of course, simply give in – can hunker back into our deepest cave and be completely and debilitatingly afraid.  Or we can be disciples in this time of fear:  remembering what we’ve already been through, holding one another’s hands so as to hold one another up, and trusting in the faithful conviction that God is really God, and that by God’s grace we possess something better and more lasting than anything the markets or the terrorists or the cancers or employers can take away.  Thanks be to God.