Sermon – December 13, 2009: Do Not Fear
Sermon for Sunday, December 13, 2009 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Do Not Fear
Isaiah 12: 2-6; Zephaniah 3: 14-20; Philippians 4: 4-7; Luke 3: 7-18
We tell ourselves something that I’m not sure is true. Sometimes, when we read the
Biblical accounts of wonders and miracles, we think, “Oh, in that pre scientific world, full of
mythic religion and no distinction drawn between astronomy and astrology, people just
naturally believed astonishing things and accepted spiritually overwhelming signs and
marvels as a matter of course.” We say that to let ourselves off the hook, as though we
have become too sophisticated readily to believe in God’s presence in our world.
Pretending that people in the ancient world were like those small children who supposedly
experience the outside world as magical, however, doesn’t entirely fit the way the Bible
tells us things went when ordinary people encountered messages from God.
Consider the angels in the Christmas stories. What’s the first thing they tell the
people they meet? They tell them, “Don’t be afraid.” They say “Fear not!” Is that because
Mary minding her own business or the shepherds on the hillside were all overwrought with
apprehension and needed a divine word to realize how unnecessary and unproductive fear
was? Not at all. They were fine before their everyday reality was invaded by heralds of
God. They were terrified by the appearance of the angels themselves.
The angels in a Christmas pageant really can’t convey that, because everyone
knows they’re coming. In addition, the artistic tradition renders angels luminous and pleasant
looking, trying to convey something that seems appropriately innocent, attractive, and good
with regard to the realm of heaven. People put sweet-looking angel figurines in their
homes, so we’ve domesticated these unpredictable apparitions. Even so, most of us,
most of the time, would react exactly the way people in the Bible stories react. We’d
wonder if what was happening were real, and once we felt it must be, we’d go into that
“fight or flight” response characterized by quickening pulse and physical tension and strained
nerves.
When you feel compelled to fight or flee, it’s a poor time to understand anything.
Your gut reaction is that you are in terrible danger and you have to rely on your body to get
you out of it–by running away or by battling whatever is before you. Your frame of mind–
if you can call it your mind at that point–is that anything else is a distraction, and so an added
danger–so it is difficult to calm down and listen. It’s very hard to shift gears and open
yourself up to the possibility that your first instinct was misleading, that you have to deal with
whatever’s going on in another way.
This is why peace is much more easily attained before a conflict than after it. It’s not
just that the conflict creates resentments. It’s that the way people feel in conflict blinds them
to reasonable alternatives. Energetic, instinctive responses tend to be self-perpetuating,
and the difficulty of putting away war, even when war has proven counterproductive for
both sides, is exacerbated. God’s appeal to the human heart to listen to a message of
hope is easy to ignore when people are frightened. Frightened people, because they feel
they must do something, trust calls to action. Calm people can hear invitations to rely on the
Almighty.
Which is at least a minor problem in the Christmas story, because in order really to
get the attention of the people involved, God sends angels, and angels scare people. It’s
similar to what happens when God sends prophets to really get people’s attention.
Prophets scare people. Nobody has the power, at first, to say to himself or herself, “the
loving, forgiving, just and good God is trying to get my attention so I know it will be in my
best interest to listen carefully.” People go “oh no!” which usually gets translated “woe is
me!” in the Bible, and the angel or the prophet has to say, right away, “fear not!” God is
scary–God is scary because we’re not used to God, we don’t expect God. God knows
that: those who speak for God have, as their very first message, “Do not fear.” Once that
gets said and people have a chance to take a few deep breaths, then what God really
wants to say has a chance of being heard.
I want to notice how angels and prophets scare people in the Bible accounts
because that helps us recognize the people in the Bible as like ourselves. They aren’t just
hanging around expecting marvels, and capable of being unfazed by miracles. They are
overwhelmed by the things that would overwhelm us. But I’ve overstated how fine and
calm they are before God’s word comes to them. They’re fine the same way we are;
they’ve learned to live with the tensions and anxieties of their lives. They’ve found a way to
cope by focusing on the little things they can do something about, like their domestic duties
or private pursuits. They don’t let themselves dwell on their powerlessness in the face of
political scheming, or their weakness before human malice or mischief, or their vulnerability to
illness, accident, and death. As bad as it is to live in an occupied country with a corrupted
leadership and discontented and potentially violent people all around you, survival requires
that you get used to it. So angels, when they appear, obviously are going to be heralds of
a redeeming heaven, but that’s not the first reaction they get. They panic people.
It’s not just that they are uncanny. Anything otherworldly is frightening because we
don’t know how to react to it. That’s not the whole story with the disturbing quality of God’s
announcements. Part of the scare is that this corrupted and precarious world with which
we’ve made our peace is going to be changed by something God is doing. That means
that the unknown to which we’ve gotten accustomed, the “anything can happen” and “you
just never know” uncertainty of life to which we’ve resigned ourselves, is not the only threat
to our hard-won equilibrium. Now God is going to be doing something, and the world as
we know it is going to change, and we are going to have to adapt to that.
Being rescued, which is what all these texts are about, is wonderful, but it does
require something of those who are saved. I don’t mean that they have to do something to
earn being saved, although the gospel lesson with John the Baptist’s warnings sounds that
way. I mean those who are saved are delivered into a new reality, to which they are
strangers, and they have to learn how that works. You can have your life saved by having
surgery, but you have to learn to live differently afterwards, at least for a while and perhaps
for the rest of your life. When you no longer have to be in thrall to the ways of this world,
and instead can live for a God who is more meaningfully in control, you will have new
attitudes and actions and assumptions as part of your life.
This is most evident in the gospel passage. We always read about John the
Baptist at Advent, because John’s job, in the gospels, is to announce the arrival of Christ.
Jesus’ arrival is a crisis for the world. It’s that thing that’s going to change everything, and so,
like every word from heaven promising change, it’s not easy to hear. It’s not easy for us to
hear John saying that opening ourselves up to what God wants to do for us is a matter of
fleeing from the wrath to come. It’s not easy for us to hear that the axe is being laid to the
root of the trees, and that the worthless trees are to be cut down and burned with
unquenchable fire. We resist thinking of ourselves as being asked to escape from a corrupt
generation, we hesitate to think of all those things with which we’ve learned to live as things
to leave behind, to learn all over again how to be God’s people. That’s almost too much.
The people, just like us, react that way to what John says. They are frightened, they
don’t know how to respond, so they say, “Then what should we do?” Then those who
would heed God hear the “don’t be afraid” message. Don’t be afraid, because there are
things you can do. If you are in a position to exploit a position of power in order
dishonestly to seek your own gain, don’t do it. Don’t abuse your advantages. If you are in
a position to enjoy comfort and security, and have more than enough already to secure your
ease, then take care of someone else less blessed than yourself.
God’s way for the world to be is not a mystery. We have, in our accommodation to
the ills of life and the frailties of the flesh, gotten used to a world contrary to God’s will, a
world of selfishness, but we know better. John the Baptist, despite the scary nature of his
preaching, gets a big following because down deep people know there’s a better way.
When John tells them what it is, it sounds a lot like what they’ve been being told right along.
That world of God’s, of justice and mercy, righteousness and compassion,
generosity and courage, always remains obscured by events around us and our own poor
ability to perceive. That’s where Paul’s advice to the Philippians helps. We have some
choice about what we pay attention to, and Paul reminds us to continue to pay attention to
what God offers and represents in the midst of our earthbound circumstances and
sometimes world-weary days. By saying our prayers and then keeping in mind what is
noble and excellent and gracious, we can habituate ourselves, at least a little, to heaven.
Then when God breaks into the world, as the baby in Bethlehem or the one tempted in the
wilderness or the healer or the one who weeps alongside the brokenhearted, it will be
easier for us to hear him.
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