|
This morning we’re continuing our month-long series on fear, and as
we get started I want to ask, How many of you watch David Letterman? If
you do you know that he has for years and years done a bit he calls his
top 10 list. I happen to have here the top 10 things that people are
afraid of in America. I want to poll my audience and see how many of these
you get. 10—dogs; 9—loneliness; 8—flying; 7—death; 6—sickness;
5—deep water; 4—financial problems; 3—insects; 2—heights; and the
number one thing that people are afraid of in this country—speaking
before a group.
How many of you find yourselves on that list? Sure, we all do. People
have to spend their entire lives battling their fears. A couple weeks ago
you may recall me saying that we can never completely eliminate fear from
our lives, because we are, alas, human beings with all the weakness that
implies. And our Great Enemy loves to come at us in all kinds of disguises
and circumstances.
But his message, one way or another, remains the same through the
centuries: “Nobody cares for you. You’re all alone in the darkness. Be
afraid. Be very afraid.” I can’t stress this too much, folks: our
enemy wants to separate us from the church and get us alone, so he can
pick us off, one by one. He wants us to fear. He wants us to despair.
Divide and conquer. Make sense?
So every generation faces the same dilemma, just under different names
and guises: how do we deal with our fears, our anxieties? Jesus Christ,
who I like to call the great psychologist because no one has ever had
greater insight into human behavior, made a point of repeating the words
“Peace. Don’t be afraid,” whenever he appeared to the disciples
after his resurrection. At the very heart of the Gospel, the Good News of
Jesus Christ, the very essence of what we know and believe, is this: No
matter what our circumstances in life, we don’t have to be afraid of the
future. What Christianity has to offer this generation and every
generation is life lived with confidence and the end of domination by
powers that make people afraid.
So again I ask you, what are you so afraid of? Let’s go back to that
top 10 list for a moment. Psychologists tell us that there are only two
fears on that list that all humans are born with. Anybody guess what they
are? One is the fear of heights, and the other is the fear of abandonment,
or being alone. Every other fear you have to learn. Now I can’t help you
much with the fear of heights. I know I’ve got that one big time, baby.
Up in Indiana County they’ve got a bunch of power plants and the one in
Homer City has a chimney that stands over a thousand feet in the air.
I’m told that it once was the tallest free-standing chimney is the
world. Somebody had to build the thing, and Bob Swenk, a photographer
friend of mine once told me about going up in the elevator that was
installed during construction. He got out at the top and wanted to get a
panorama shot of the view from up there.
One of the ironworkers on the construction crew volunteered to get him
the shot, so he took the camera, walked out on a beam a thousand feet up,
snapped the picture, walked back and handed Bob his camera. Can you
imagine that? I’m sure Bob was glad he didn’t drop the camera.
As I said, fear of heights is one fear that we’re all born with. The
other is fear of abandonment. It’s one of the main reasons why babies
cry, especially when they’re put down for the night. How about it, moms
and dads? Ever have that problem with your babies? But you know what? Some
people never get over this fear. It only mutates into another
manifestation of the same problem, which is fear of our past. Now this is
going to sound like nonsense to many of us. Why should we be afraid of the
past? What’s done is done. But this is a very naïve point of view. The
past is a breeding ground for the demons of fear.
One of the things that psychology showed us is that what happened
yesterday is very much alive today. Nobody really outgrows his past, and
it amuses me when I see people trying to pretend that they are something
different than who they are, putting on airs, trying to assume new
identities. Folks, nothing is ever really forgotten, for good or bad. And
sometimes this sense of our past pops up as guilt. Now guilt can be a good
thing. It can motivate us to clean up our act and live in ways of love
before both God and our neighbors.
But guilt can also be a very destructive impulse. Guilt can separate
us from our sense of being loved by God. That’s subtle, so I want to
repeat it. Nothing can separate us from God’s love, but guilt can make
us feel like we have been. I’ve seen it in my own life and
in others, sometimes we think that we have some secret in our background,
some sin so terrible that God can’t love us any more. We fear that
we’ve been abandoned—and it’s our fault. But that’s exactly
what the psalmist was talking about. Some 3,000 years ago he wrote that
our God “forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases. He blesses me
with love and mercy. He does not punish us as we deserve. As far as the
east is from the west, so far does he remove our sins from us.”
I remember when I was in college I fell in love with a girl, and she
had the temerity not to fall in love with me. Can you imagine? Well, I
fixed her, boy. I resolved that I was going to punish her and just not
speak to her any further. Later on when I had finally grown up a little we
talked about that time and I confessed that I wanted to punish her for not
loving me romantically. And you know what she said? Two words, very
softly. “It worked.” Boy, did I feel like a jerk. But guess what? I
punished myself, too. I was separating myself, building a wall, denying
myself a wonderful friendship.
Here’s the good news in that story. God doesn’t act that way. No
matter how many times we reject him, no matter how often we withhold our
love from him, he never withholds forgiveness from us. Catholics
experience confession one way, Protestants another, but always there is
the God to whom we may confess. There is always the God who will remove
our sins as far as the east is from the west. This is the meaning of
forgiveness. However you define it or how you experience it, forgiveness
always comes as a release from the intolerable burden of guilt.
If we have been forgiven, we can go on and we can live with ourselves.
This is what Christ has done for mankind, and at the heart of the
testimonies of the saints you will find this incredible joy of being
released from the fear of our past.
But what about the fear of the future? Once again this week we saw the
foul hand of terrorism in the world with attacks in Saudi Arabia and
Morocco, and our fear of such evil roaming the world is ratcheted up once
more. Sometimes we get so afraid of the darkness closing in on us that
it’s amazing we can make it out of bed at all. How do we get past our
fear of tomorrow?
In Luke’s account of the incident on the Emmaus Road, the disciples
that Jesus encountered felt first of all abandoned. The Christ in whom
they had invested all their hopes and dreams had been executed like a
criminal—like the most despised and loathsome of criminals, like an
enemy of the state, a traitor. “We had hoped that he would be the one
who would set Israel free,” they said. And now even his body had been
stolen from the grave.
And Jesus, whom they did not recognize, patiently explained to them
that all these dreadful things had to happen so that this Jesus could
truly be the Messiah, that he really would bring freedom to all captive
humanity. And he explained all the scriptures and all the prophets as they
walked along the road to Emmaus.
But when they got there, what happened? The hour was late, the
darkness was closing in, and they urged their new friend to come in with
them and dine. The road in the darkness was too dangerous, an evil place
where the unwary could lose their life. And so Jesus enters in, takes
bread, breaks it and gives it to them. And then their eyes were opened and
they recognized him, but he disappears. Suddenly the meaning of all that
Jesus had said was made clear. Suddenly their faith was like a burning
inside their hearts. Suddenly they wanted to share this incredible good
news with everybody.
So they go back outside, out in the darkness where it’s supposedly
so dangerous and go tearing back to Jerusalem where they tell the eleven,
“The Lord is risen indeed,” and as they do, Jesus appears in their
midst and says “Peace be with you.”
How do we get over our fear of the future? The Bible constantly speaks
of a God who is great, who is huge, who is transcendent, who makes our
world and its disturbances quite insignificant by comparison. The Bible
talks of a God in whose eyes the nations are a drop in the bucket, and all
our lives like grass that grows one day and is thrown into the fire the
next.
This is said not to make us feel small but to make us understand how
great God is. God looks down at the pretense of kings and armies and
laughs. The Bible tells us that there is a God who is in charge of the
universe, and yet he knows us by name. He cares. Will a God that awesome
not protect us? Things may seem out of control to us, but in the last
analysis God reigns. He really does hold the world in his hands.
But there is yet one other problem before us. It’s all well and good
to have faith in a good God who loves and protects us, but it’s not
enough to just sit back and relax and be dependent on that goodness. God
calls us to be active in the world and to preach the good news, just as
the Emmaus disciples did. To do that, we have to be willing to confront
our fears, not just sidestep them.
Most people know that after Moses led the Hebrew people out of Egypt,
they had to wander in the desert for 40 years. But they may not realize
why. Once the newly freed people left Egypt they marched rather directly
to the promised land, where Moses sent out scouts to see what kind of
people inhabited the land. Two reports came back. One was from the bold
Caleb, who insisted that the Hebrews could conquer and occupy this
promised country. But the other was from the fearful and timid side of the
people, who said giants lived in this land and the Hebrews could never
win.
When the people heard about the giants they started to wail and cry
out, “We should go back to Egypt. We’ll die out here.” And God said
to Moses, “Enough is enough. These faithless people don’t deserve the
land.” So he decreed that they should wander in the desert 40 years,
until all these cowards had died off and a new, worthier generation was
ready. What’s the message here? You’ve got to confront your fears and
conquer them. You’ve got to claim your destiny. It might be waiting just
out of sight, but you’ll never reach it by sitting on the couch. God’s
got something wonderful in mind just for you, but you’ve got to meet him
halfway.
Paula Friedrichsen tells the story of being out on a walk when she
encountered a large German Shepherd that was feeling pretty grumpy, all
snarling and snapping and growling. The dog came closer and closer and
looked like he meant to bite Paula, teeth showing as he snarled. Paula
looked around for the owner, and saw nobody. The street was deserted. And
suddenly she thought, “Wait a minute. This is my neighborhood. This is
my street. Who does this dog think he is, coming to bite me in my own
area.” So she took a step toward the dog and hollered “Back Off!”
Well, they say that you should never let a dog see your fear, and it
must have worked. The German Shepherd took a few sullen steps back and let
her pass without incident. “That was a real victory for me,” she
wrote, “because as a child I had been bitten by neighborhood dogs and I
had a real fear of dogs. And it’s only been in the last few years that I
had felt some relief from these fears. But this was the pinnacle of my
success, the interesting part being that my fears seemed to diminish when
I allowed myself to become outraged and angry at that stupid, ugly dog
(and at my stupid, ugly fears.)”
Fear is a bully that preys on the wounded—and we are all wounded.
Fear will take something from your past—something that caused trauma,
hurt, injury, a broken heart—and capitalize on it until the fear is
blown so far out of proportion that it doesn’t even resemble the
original event.
When I was little I fell into a swimming pool and nearly drowned, and
it took me years to get over my fear of the water sufficiently to learn to
swim.
For years Paula Friedrichsen felt like an idiot, a grown woman running
in terror from a big friendly golden retriever.
The tail-waggingest puppy in the world would make her heart pound and
her palms sweat.
But we can overcome our fears—not if we cower and quake before them,
but if we confront them and say “Back Off.” The spirit of the reigning
Christ is within me, and in that spirit I will prevail over any untruth
that masquerades in my life. Just like that stupid, ugly dog got in the
way of Paula Friedrichsen’s progress and took over her territory, I
wonder what other fears in your life may have taken over territory that
rightfully belongs to you. God has given you all the courage needed to
deal with your fears, but it is up to you to unearth it and put it into
action.
Maybe it’s time to start putting our foot down when our fears begin
to loom large, threatening to cast large shadows over our days and nights.
Yes, we live in scary times, but our fears do not have the power to
dominate our hearts and minds. Say it with me: My fears have no power. Say
it again: My fears have no power. And because we do live in a frightening
world, let that be the catalyst that drives us deeper into the arms of
God.
And here, at the
communion table, is where his arms embrace us.
God is the source of all courage and bravery. God is our refuge and
strength. God is the one who has removed our sins as the east is from the
west. I once saw a sign on a coach’s desk, “God is first, my family
and friends are second, and I am third.” I have been as guilty as
anybody at getting the order backwards in my life, but when we determine
to put God first, we will find ourselves fortified and able to say with
confidence to those lying, looming, ugly fears, Back Off!
|
