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Did any of you, when you were a child, try to hide when you did
something wrong? I clearly was not one of the sharpest knives in the
drawer because I tried to hide in clear sight. That is, when I knew I
was going to be punished, I can remember hiding under the dining room
table. No sides, no tablecloth, just four legs and the tabletop. Don’t
ask me why I thought this would protect me; indeed, it didn’t. My mother
needed two seconds to drag me out of there and give me a no doubt richly
deserved scolding.
But isn’t that exactly what Adam and Eve did in the
Garden, after their sin? They hid from God, rightfully fearing their
punishment, but fig leaf or no fig leaf, they hid in plain sight.
Finally God found them, as we knew he would, because, after all, where
can you hide from God? God asked them why they were hiding, and Adam got
the ball rolling downhill for all humanity when he replied, “Because I
was afraid.” And ever since then, Adam’s descendents have lived their
lives by one code of conduct—they are afraid. They are afraid all the
time. To be human is to experience fear.
There seems to be no limit to our fears. One of the
classic setups from the comic strip Peanuts was Lucy’s psychiatry booth,
where she would dispense advice for a nickel. About what her advice was
worth most of the time. In this case, Charlie Brown comes seeking help
with his fear, and Lucy tries to pinpoint what exactly he is afraid of.
She asks, maybe you have hypengyophobia, which is a fear of
responsibility. No, Charlie Brown replies, that’s not exactly it. Well,
maybe you have ailurophobia, the fear of cats. No, that’s not exactly
right, either. Maybe it’s climocophobia, the fear of staircases. No, not
really.
Finally Lucy says in exasperation, you must have
pantophobia. Charlie Brown says “What’s that,” and she says, “That’s the
fear of everything.” Charlie Brown cries, “Yes, that’s the one!”
Sometimes we feel like we’re afraid of everything.
We’re afraid of ourselves, we’re afraid of other people. We’re afraid of
the future and we’re afraid of the past. We’re afraid of life and we’re
afraid of death. But we know two things about every person who draws
breath—everybody’s afraid of something, and everybody has to confront
their fears themselves. Even the Apostle Paul, who was brave enough to
sail all over the known world, had to fight his fears. He had fallen on
his face in Athens, and when he got to Corinth, he wrote, “For when we
came into Macedonia we had not rest, but were troubled on every side,
without were fightings, within were fears.”
Paul was terrified of not being adequate to do the
job, of falling flat again. Just like you and me. How many of us would
be brave enough to admit that sometimes we think we’re pretty inadequate
for the task at hand?
But one of the most surprising fears we face, and I
believe that many if not most Christians suffer this fear from time to
time, is the one that whispers, “God is not really on our side at all.”
We fear that God will leave us stranded out on a limb and just forget
us. It’s not a new idea. Ancient people of various kinds were afraid
that their god would fall asleep. When the prophets of Baal could not
get their god to rain fire on Mt. Carmel, Elijah mocked them. “Maybe
your god is asleep,” he said. On the other hand, the Jews took great
comfort to know that their god neither slumbered nor slept.
No one ever felt closer to God than David, yet listen
again to the psalmist’s words from our Old Testament reading this
morning: “In the night I meditate in my heart; I ponder and my spirit
broods. Will the Lord reject us forever, never again show favor? Has
God’s love ceased forever? Has the promise failed for all ages? Has God
forgotten mercy, in anger withheld compassion? I conclude, ‘My sorrow is
this, the right hand of the Most High has left us.” This is a picture of
a man, the same man who had killed Goliath and outfought King Saul,
drowning in his own fears and sinking fast.
People still get edgy about this idea of God falling
asleep, and then we’ll be on our own. But somehow, we’ve to get
ourselves turned around and control our fears, before they utterly
control us. One of my favorite Christmas carols, written by Longfellow
near the end of the Civil War, is “I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day.”
In the midst of the incredible suffering of America’s greatest war, it
was easy to despair and believe that hate had finally put a stranglehold
on the world, much like it is today. But listen to what Longfellow
wrote: “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: God is not dead, nor
doth He sleep; The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, With peace on
earth, good will to men.”
Over and over, the message of scripture is Fear not.
Don’t be afraid. Get out of the boat and try to accomplish what you
never dreamed possible. When Abram took his family from their home to a
land far away, he was afraid, but God spoke to him, saying, “Fear not,
Abram. I am your shield and your reward will be great.” When the Jews
stood at the banks of the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army bearing down on
them, they cried out that they all would be slaughtered. But Moses stood
firm and said “Stand still, fear not and see the salvation of the Lord.”
When the angel appeared to Mary and told her she
would bear a child without the benefit of a husband, the angel said
“Fear not, Mary. You have found favor with God.” And when Jesus beckoned
Peter out of the boat and onto the waves, he did so with the words, fear
not.
But still, it’s just not as easy to shed our fears as
preachers make it out to be, is it? We’d definitely like to live that
way, but sometimes our fears are like what happens when you get a cavity
in a tooth and you keep probing with your tongue to see if it still
hurts. You’d like to quit doing that, but you keep probing anyway. So
I’d like to offer three suggestions for dealing with fear.
The first is to confront your fears:
Did anybody watch the space shuttle go up last month?
Didn’t you hold your breath waiting to see if they would get safely into
orbit? Do you realize what we were watching? We’re all passengers on
this little boat we call Planet Earth—some of you aren’t doing your
share of rowing, by the way—and yet we watched these seven brave people
step out of the boat That’s just incredible to me, that someone could
confront their fears after two disasters with the space shuttle and
still want to explore the unknown. But that’s what we have to do every
day of our lives. Do we turn back from the darkness or plunge boldly
into it? I loved what the commander of the space shuttle told the press:
“Sure we were afraid, but we still believe in exploration. We still
believe we need to get off this planet and see what’s out there.”
The second thing is to understand that too much doubt
may sink us before we start. Here’s an interesting statistic: the vast
majority of people blink 25 times per minute. Now don’t start counting,
just take my word for it. What that means is that each blink takes a
fifth of a second. So if you take a 10 hour trip in the car, averaging
40 miles per hour, you will drive 20 miles with your eyes closed.
Charles Swindoll takes that a step further and says that some people
live their lives with their eyes closed. They refuse to believe what
their own eyes have told them: that we live under the care of an
awesome, all-powerful and loving God.
A helicopter pilot who was flying his chopper off an
aircraft carrier told this story: “I was flying the helicopter back to
the ship when a blinding fog rolled in. I knew that a single mistake
would plunge me and my crewmates into the ocean. Worse yet, I was
experiencing a complete loss of balance, which is common for pilots
flying on instruments. This loss of balance—known as vertigo—was so bad
that despite the instrument readings I was certain that I was lying on
my side. For 15 minutes I flew the helicopter by instrument, resisting
the urge to turn it according to my feeling.
“When we finally broke safely through the fog, I was
deeply thankful that I had been trained to rely on my instruments
instead of on my feelings.” That’s what people who live by faith do—they
refuse to let their doubts sink them. It doesn’t mean that the doubts
aren’t real. But they remember that doubt can be misleading, but the
truth of God’s word is reliable, trustworthy and consistent.
And third, we must remember that God will be with us,
regardless of what else happens . And here, at this table, we have a
visible reminder of that presence. On Wednesday I had the extremely
distressing experience of a closed MRI for the first time. I never
thought I was claustrophobic, but it’s hard to comprehend the experience
of sliding into that tube until it actually happens to you. Think Edgar
Allen Poe and being buried alive. At least that’s how I experienced it;
my fears shot through the roof. They give you a panic button to push,
and I came very, very close to using it. I actually started to
hyperventilate
But I was also praying very, very hard for Christ’s
presence with me in that tube, for Christ to put his arms around me and
keep me calm through the ordeal, and that’s exactly what I received. My
pulse and my breathing calmed down, which the technician confirmed
later, and heard Christ tell me, “You are my precious child, and I will
never, ever forsake you. Whatever else happens, I am going to bring you
home safely.” My brothers and sisters, you may not be freaking out in an
MRI tube this week, but who among us does not need that kind of
reassurance to conquer our fears? If Christ be for us, who can be
against us? That reassurance is why we come to this table over and over
and over again—to remember, to draw close, to let go.
What do you think is the best part of the story of
Peter getting out of the boat ? That’s easy—it’s the moment when Jesus
grabs Peter’s hand. Can’t you see that? Can’t you feel the fear leaving
Peter’s body as he finally gives himself into his master’s care? One
day, maybe one day soon, we’re all going to be the one sinking. We’re
all going to be the one whose faith is too small. That’s when we’ll need
to recall this wonderful scene when Jesus reached out his hand to Peter,
pulled him out of danger and brought him back to the safety of the boat.
Fear is transformed into awe; terror is transformed
into faith, and the disciples begin to praise the one who has saved
them. Amen
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