Proper 22, Year C,
2016
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
Oct 2, 2016, St.John’s Sharon
I
want to talk a bit about fear this morning. Well, more precisely, I want to
talk about overcoming fear. Paul’s second letter
to Timothy this morning says: God did not give us a spirit of fear, but
rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline. (The
translation we heard this morning mentions a spirit of cowardice and other translations
use “timidity”, but the King James talks about a spirit of fear, and all these
words tend to work out the same in the wash.) Fear is so important that Paul
includes this sentence in his commendation to Timothy about his faith. What Paul knows is that fear causes the
embers of our faith to die and prevents us from using the gifts given to us by
God for the building up of his people.
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous has this to say about fear: “This short word somehow touches about every
aspect of our lives. It was an evil and
corroding thread; the fabric of our existence was shot through with it. It set in motion trains of circumstances
which brought us misfortune we felt we didn’t deserve. But did not we, ourselves, set the ball
rolling?” (Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, Fourth Edition, 2001.Page 67).
We have
so much misfortune corroding away every aspect of our lives if we live in a
spirit of fear. Yet God did not give us
a spirit of fear. God gives us a spirit
of power, and of love, and of self-discipline.
God gives us what we need to overcome fear and live lives of faith.
Many of
our fears can be summed up in three basic fears. We fear not getting what we need. We fear that we are not good enough. And we fear other people’s opinions.
First,
we fear not getting what we need. We
need a lot of things. Maybe not as many
as we think we do, but we need food, water, a place to live, some money,
transportation, a Bible, a church home, and maybe some other things. Thinking about not having these things is
scary. What would happen if we lose our
jobs, or if the utility bill spikes, or some new medical condition arises that
interferes with the basic aspects of our lives?
How we react, not to the reality of these occurrences but our own
imagination about them, has a lot to do with how much we have been overtaken by
a spirit of cowardice.
The
power of fear and cowardice is that they take us to a small place. We get pulled back to being a little kid
overcome by things we don’t understand and can’t control. We are suddenly back in those times of our
lives when we were powerless. Even if our
minds don’t remember the circumstances, our emotions remember the fear and
terror we felt. But God does not want us
in that cowered space. God wants to
break that seductive draw of our past immaturity by giving us a spirit of
power.
This
spirit of power can be thought about from a variety of perspectives. One is described in today’s gospel – if you
have even a little faith, you can say to a mulberry tree, “be uprooted and
planted in sea” and it would obey you.
But this power isn’t a magic wand kind of power where we point at the
tree, mumble some Latin sounding words out of a Harry Potter book, and the tree
moves. This spirit of power is the
ability to overcome obstacles to God’s purposes being fulfilled around us. It is flicking a light switch and having the
darkness flee away. It is recognizing
that none of the difficulties or depredations of life can withstand the awesome
onward march of God’s plans and purposes.
When our hope and our faith are aligned with God’s plans and purposes, we
can withstand anything because the spirit of God’s power with us can weave the
challenges of today into the glorious tapestry of God’s tomorrow.
Or, to
use another analogy, this spirit of power is like the scene in The Lion King
when the young lion Simba is surrounded by hyenas.
They are going to eat him, but instead of
backing down with a spirit of cowardice, he steps forward and lets loose his
best roar. His roar is small and week,
but what the hyenas hear is the deep, bellowing roar of Simba’s father, the
reigning king of the beasts, who is behind him.
When we step forward with the spirit of God’s power and give our own
roar, our fears flee because God is behind us roaring along, and his bellow is
even stronger than James Earl Jones’s.
We may still face troubles, like Paul, who was in prison then and would
eventually lose his life. But we can do
God’s work in the midst of troubles. And
we can trust that God will give us what we need to do that work even if it is
not what we thought we needed. When can’t
do God’s work is when we are hunkered down in a spirit of fear.
The
second overarching fear that we have is the fear of not being good enough. This fear that is rooted in our deep
insecurities is also expressed in our fear of not being liked and not being
loved. When we are awash in a spirit of
cowardice, this fear prevents us from engaging other people. We assume that we aren’t good enough for
them, and that if we try to build relationships with them, they won’t like us. We might be rejected, and we can be terrified
of rejection because it reinforces all of our fears that we totally inadequate
in the first place.
This
fear gets compounded because we spend so much time comparing our insides to
other people’s outsides. We know every
issue that we have, and how scared and awkward we are. Yet we look at other people who seem to have
it all together. If we really knew them,
however, and all the things they are struggling with, we’d realize that most
people are having as much difficulty keeping it all together as we are. They are dealing with many of the same things
we are. They feel as insecure around us
as we do around them. They feel as
inadequate as we do. They fear not being
loved by us as much as we fear not being loved by them.
While
being able to understand that we are all in the same boat may be helpful, the
only real way to overcome the fear of not being loved is with the spirit of
love. As Scripture says: perfect love
casts out fear. We don’t have to
fear not being good enough because God loves us. One of the most revolutionary beliefs of
Christianity and Judaism is that God loves us.
He made us out of love. He
sustains us out of love. He redeemed us
out of love. He will bring us into the
fullness of eternal life with him out of love.
He sent his Son into the world to live and die to reconcile us back to
him out of love. He has adopted each and
every one of us as his children out of love.
I was at
clergy conference this week, and two of my colleagues were discussing how our
baptismal service talks about us being adopted children of God. One of them was adopted and one had adopted
two children. They were visibly moved,
because they felt in a deep way just what it meant to be adopted, and the
transforming power of that act. We don’t
have to be afraid that we aren’t worthy to be loved, because God our Father has
adopted us as his children. Even if the
entire world rejected us, or, as Isaiah says, even if a mother would forget her
child, God will not forget us. He loves
us, and he gives us a spirit of love so that we can know that love and live as
beloved children of God.
Once we
know we are loved, we can share that love with others. Instead of worrying about whether we are good
enough, we can reach out to others and let them know they are worthy of love,
as well, by meeting their needs, by building loving relationships with them,
and by sharing the good news of God’s love with them. Instead of withdrawing in a spirit of cowardice,
we can love our neighbor.
Our
third overarching fear is the fear of other people’s opinions. What other people think about us is really
none of our business, but it sure does bother us. To be more accurate, though, what other
people think about us doesn’t bother us, but what we think other people think
about us bothers us. We really don’t
know what other people think about us, but we are generally pretty quick to put
together a working hypothesis.
The spirit
of cowardice takes our fear of other people’s opinions and uses it to build all
sorts of barriers. We shouldn’t do that
because of what these people might think.
We can only do that when those people aren’t around. We don’t talk about such-and-such around
so-and-so. And we just pretend some
things don’t exist. At its worst, we
stop living into aspects of God’s call to us because of what others might think
about it. We can become like the
Dostoevsky character who wanted to give away everything that he had to the
poor, but when he saw all his comrades only give a little bit, he decided that
was what he had to do, too. Instead of
seeking first the Kingdom of God, we seek first the latest Gallup poll results
and do what they tell us.
Instead
of this spirit of fear, God gives us a spirit of self-discipline. Certainly self-discipline provides many
benefits, such as the capacity to control our appetites. But self-control also keeps us from being
other-controlled. We don’t want to be
controlled by the need for another slice of pizza, but we also don’t want to be
controlled because we think that if we make donations to a worthy cause in
someone’s name as a Christmas gift instead of buying some unnecessary plastic
gadget found at the mall, people will think we are weird. God’s spirit of self-discipline gives us the
appropriate boundaries we need to do what God has given us to do. We aren’t spending our energy trying to
control other people or make them do what we want, but we aren’t letting our
fears about their opinions control us, either.
Instead, we are taking responsibility for sailing our own ship along the
rivers of God’s love and justice. While
figuring out what God wants us to do usually involves listening to the wisdom
of other people, we can live our lives according to our own godly values
instead of our anxiety about what other people think.
We
do not need to be afraid of other people’s opinions. We do not need to be afraid that we are not
good enough. We do not need to be afraid
that we will not get what we need. For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but rather a spirit
of power and of love and of self-discipline.
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