May 4, 2003

A little boy had just gone to bed when a thunderstorm rolled through and scared him, so he cried out for his mother to come.

The little boy said, “Mom, would you sleep in here with me tonight?” And his mother replied, “No, Tommy, I can’t. I have to sleep in the other room with Daddy.” And the little boy rolled over with a big “hmph” and said “The big sissy!”

Well, sometimes we can be a whole country of sissies, can’t we?

I read a good article last week from the Wall Street Journal over the Internet, and the author explained that America in the 21^st Century is the safest society that has ever been devised.

The odds that you die in an accident, or as the victim of terrorism, or even be the victim of a violent crime, are almost negligible. Life expectancy has grown 10 percent just in the last few decades, so that a child born today can expect to live into the high 70s for a boy and the low 80s for a girl.

So if you look at the odds of something bad happening to you, you ought to feel perfectly relaxed and happy.

But instead, we are as a people constantly looking over our shoulder as if expecting lighting to hit.

Now this latest disease called SARS has people afraid to travel. I was amused to read about the baseball players who have to play in Toronto, which has a number of SARS cases, and the players were quoted that they would stay in their hotel rooms when not at the ball park.

Guess what? A hotel ventilation system is an outstanding way to catch a communicable disease.

But there are so many things that people are afraid of today. Ann Landers used to receive 10,000 letters a week for over 30 years, and consistently the number one subject of her letters was fear.

Over 25 million Americans have a phobia or some kind of anxiety disorder severe enough to be considered disabling.

There are over 300 phobias identified by psychologists, and some of them have been attached to some famous, unlikely people.

For example, Sir Laurence Olivier, the great actor, was afflicted all his life by terrible stage fright.

The actress Joan Crawford was afraid of the dark, and, if you ever saw the movie “Mommie Dearest,” was afraid of wire coat hangers.

The great escape artist Harry Houdini was terribly claustrophobic—he couldn’t stand tight places.

Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator, feared being poisoned, and slept in a different place every night.

John Madden, the TV football commentator, hates to fly so much that he travels the country in a special bus. In face, he got out of coaching football because he hated to fly so much.

But rarely, if ever, do you hear about somebody in the throes of fear who also happens to be a person of deep faith.

 I would assert to you that the number one reason why people live in fear is because they refuse to live in faith.

They calmly and rationally reject the idea of a God who loves and cares for them, and instead embrace the notion of irrational fear.

The actress Jill Ireland, who was married to Charles Bronson, died of cancer several years ago.

She had surgery and came through it okay, but one night she work up in great pain and knew she was in trouble. She was terribly afraid.

She got up from her bed and went to her stationary bike and started pedaling furiously for an hour.

Then the next morning she got out her meditation tapes and envisioned her white blood cells as piranha fish devouring her cancer cells.

Not once in this story did she mention God, prayer, Jesus or faith. And she died, still in great fear.

Fear is such a pervasive part of modern life that I keep coming back to it in my preaching, and for the next four weeks I’m going to be talking about fear and what we can do to banish fear from our lives.

In fact, I want to make this church a fear-free zone.

We’ll be talking about people who conquered their fear, such as Abraham and Peter and Jesus himself, and the last week of the series, on Memorial Day Sunday, the subject will be people who rose above their fears to make the ultimate sacrifice, such as our military heroes.

So I hope you will enjoy this series, and find it helpful as you try to get the upper hand on the fears in your life.

Did you know that there are 522 mentions of fear in the Bible? The entire 66 books of the Bible are loaded with stories about fear, from Adam and Eve hiding themselves from God in the Garden to the Book of Revelation, which speaks about God’s anger being poured out upon the earth.

Every last one of those references to fear are the stories of human beings who learned to get over their fears with the help of divine power.

You know, there may be some people here this morning who need some help overcoming their fears. If you’re one of them, I want to remind you about the power of God that will get you through every difficulty.

I have several points that I want to share with you this morning about fear and overcoming it.

First thing I want you to remember about fear is that 99 percent of the time, our fears aren’t even real.

Our gospel lesson this morning focuses on one of the biggest scairdy cats in all the scriptures.

Anybody know who I mean?

Sure, I’m talking about Peter, big, bold Peter, the guy who sticks his foot in his mouth so often he ought to get athlete’s tongue.

In the middle of the storm on the lake, Jesus appears to his disciples, walking on the water, and they’re more scared of him than they are of the storm.

“Don’t be afraid. It’s me,” he says. And Peter calls out, “If it’s you, let me walk on the water too.”

You know what happens—Peter gets out of the boat and starts to walk on the water, and then he gets afraid and starts to sink.

Jesus rescues him, gets him back in the boat, and all the disciples worship Jesus, saying “Truly you are the son of God.”

What do we get out of this story?

Three P words. First, perspective:

The disciples saw Jesus and thought he was a ghost.

Then they realized that what they feared was not only harmless, he was the greatest source of strength in the world. Have you ever been afraid of something, like getting up to speak, and discovered that not only was there nothing to fear, but that you benefited from the experience?

Faith that things will turn out all right in the end keeps our fears in perspective.

The second P word is presence.

More than 100 times in the Bible the words “fear not” are used. Jesus knew how each man in that little boat would react.

He knew all about them, knew they needed to grow in their faith, and stood ready to help. And he does exactly the same thing for us today.

He is present for us. He helps our faith grow and conquer our fears, and he’s ready to catch us if we slip.

And the third P word is priorities. Who do you have your eyes on? Jesus, or your circumstances.

 Folks, I know your problems are real. I know your fears are real. But do you trust God enough to let him help?

Life is not Las Vegas—you can’t hedge your bets. If you start to doubt and try to have it both ways, you’ll sink.

Fear is contagious. When one person is afraid, another picks up on it, until you’ve got a regular buffalo stampede going.

Of course, there are many shady people in the world who love to get some good juicy fear going, and then prey upon that fear.

Usually the way they prey on fear is by selling something that’s “guaranteed” to keep you safe.

That’s all the Millennium scare was all about—a handful of people starting rumors, and one by one people stampeding towards panic.

A veteran gas meter reader was on his route one day, and was accompanied by a young man who was just learning the ropes.

They started to talk as they walked down an alley checking meters, and the older man related how he was a very good track runner when he was in college, and the young man said he, too, was on the track team in school.

“Tell you what,” the older man said, “how about a race to the end of the alley, and the loser buys lunch.”

“Oh, I couldn’t take your money,” the rookie said, and the veteran replied, “I’ll give you two to one odds.”

So they got set and the older man said, “Ready, set go,” and they took off running flat out down the alley and it was a neck and neck race when suddenly an old lady blows past the both of them down to the end of the alley.

They catch up to her as she’s bent over gasping for air, and the veteran meter reader says to her, “Lady, are you all right? What were you doing there?” The little old lady looks up and says, “Hey, when I see two gas meter readers running like you were, I don’t ask questions, I start running, too.”

Absolutely, the herd mentality definitely takes over when people start to be afraid.

 And the Apostle Paul, who had plenty of good sound reasons to be afraid, argued constantly against that herd mentality of fear, even when he wrote to his closest friends, like Timothy. Paul’s second letter to Timothy comes off as a sort of pep talk.

 Timothy was just a young man, and he may have been very reluctant to get up in the marketplace and preach, but Paul tells him, “The Spirit that God has given us does not make us timid; instead, his Spirit fills us with power, love and self-control.”

I remember once interviewing Syd Thrift, who was the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates back in the late 1980s and trying to turn this sad sack baseball team into a contender.

 He was a colorful southern character, and he liked to refer to his baseball problems by saying “It ain’t easy trying to resurrect the dead.”

When I interviewed Thrift I told him that some people felt he was too timid, and he hauled himself up all offended and said “I ain’t timid, I’m bold.” And that’s what Paul is trying to tell Timothy—don’t be fearful—the power of Christ has entered your life and victory will be yours.

So be bold and take your part in suffering for the Gospel, God gives you strength for today, and hope for tomorrow.

Third point about fear is written in scripture: There is no fear in love. Perfect love drives out fear.

An atheist traveled to Scotland to go fishing, and as he sat in his boat alone on the water suddenly the Loch Ness monster reared up and was about to swallow the poor fisherman whole. In desperation the man cried out to God “Lord save me!”

With that the voice of God boomed out of the sky, “I thought you didn’t believe in me.” And the man cries out, “Give me a break, God, until this minute I didn’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster either.”

What is happening in that story?

That atheist was pretty much convinced that he, not God, was the center of the universe, until concern for his own skin forced him to cry out for rescue, just like Peter when he was walking on the water.

Perfect love drives out fear, but love has not been perfected in the atheist yet—it could still happen—but it isn’t perfect yet because it remains a selfish love. The more mature our concept of God’s love is, the less we are afraid. When we’re no longer afraid at all, we’ll know the Spirit is fully at home within us.

Last point I want to make about fear is this: we fear out of loneliness. One of the big problems in modern life is that we have been lied to so much, we don’t trust anything or anyone anymore.

Think about this—when some of you older folks were growing up you always trusted the president, presidents like FDR and Truman and Eisenhower.

If Ike had told the nation the Moon really was made of green cheese, they would have believed him.

But then we found out that politicians lie, and now we don’t believe what anybody says.

And we’ve gotten used to advertising claims that are out and out lies. We are so cynical we don’t believe anything—including God, when he says that “I will never betray you or forsake you.”

Here’s the sad truth—people hear that and say, “You know what? People have told me they wouldn’t let me down. And they let me down. They said they would never leave me. And they left me. They said they would always love me. And they didn’t.”

They are afraid that God will treat them the same way, kicking them like slaves, instead of loving them like his children.

And that’s just what Paul is refuting in Romans 8:15, when he writes, “The spirit that God has given you does not make you slaves and cause you to be afraid, instead, the Spirit makes you God’s children, and by the Spirit’s power we cry out to God, “Father, my Father.”

Paul is saying that we who have received God’s salvation have been transferred from the family of Adam to the family of Christ, and we have all the rights and privileges of a royal child of God.

Would a prince be afraid of his father the king? No, We do not fear God the way a slave fears his master, we love God as a son loves his father. No slave could call God “Abba Father.”

Only a son or a daughter of God could use this term of intimacy. Now turn to your neighbor and say, “You are a child of God.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in an old creaky house on a dark night by yourself; I suspect most of us have. If you were alone your fears were magnified ten fold by every creak and moan and bump in that old house.

But if you were with a companion you laughed when one or the other would jump at some sudden sound, and soon your fears had vanished.

My brothers and sisters, you’ve got to grab onto this—you have a companion better than having the entire 82^nd Airborne on your side. Look at me--Jesus Christ never fails anyone, and he never will.

In the Broadway musical “Into the Woods” the story interweaves several different fairy tales, and near the end gloom has fallen over the baker, whose wife has been killed and now he must raise a baby by himself. The future looks bleak and cold, and he says “I don’t know how I’ll manage alone.”

And the song his friend sings is sweet and reassuring, “You are not alone. No one is alone.”

Thank God, we’re not. It is a long dark road we often walk, but no one must walk alone.

Maybe we can never completely rid ourselves of our fears. After all, we’re human and imperfect.

 But we can prevent fear from dominating our lives. We can refuse to let fear make us ugly and prejudiced.

We can get past our fear and let God’s love flow through us to our neighbors.

 If this is the way we approach fear, we will have all we need to deal with whatever we encounter on life’s journey.

 Please get out your bulletins again and read the first lines of the call to worship with me: “I sought the Lord. He answered me and delivered me from all my fears.” Amen.