Fear Not

"Fear Not"

Matthew 10:26-39
June 22, 2008

“So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and
nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the
light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those
who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and
body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the
ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do
not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. “Everyone therefore who
acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven;
but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven. “Do
not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace,
but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against
her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be
members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not
worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who
find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

I know that this is probably hard to believe, but I know a lot of ministers that have a fear
of public speaking, and to be frank, I am one of them. Even more than public speaking,
just simply being in front of a large crowds still sends my blood pressure up, even after
some 10-12 years of doing this on a somewhat regular basis. When I preached one of
my first sermons in front of Gail O’Day, who was my preaching professor at seminary,
and a well-known scholar on the Gospel of John, her one page, single spaced
comments on the sermon were pretty positive, except for a couple of things, mostly
mechanical stuff, and one big thing: “you might actually want to look at the people you’
re speaking to.” I had kept my head down, reading the text of my sermon, without
making any contact with the rest of my class. I think I believed that if I looked up, it
would confirm, that yes, indeed, I was speaking in front of other people, and, well, that
would begin a panic attack. In fact, one Sunday right at the time I had just joined the
staff of the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, where we would regularly have 700 plus folks
in each of the two Sunday morning traditional worship services, plus another 400 or so
in the contemporary service, I had a panic attack as we were processing into worship—
there were always these elaborate processional to begin worship. I could feel the fear
sweep over me, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe, as I was marching along right up to the
altar. I kept saying to myself, “get it together, get it together” because I had to deliver
the invocation, which came up next, right after the processional. The good news: no
ambulances were called, no fainting spell took place, and I got through it, but I do admit
that I went to my doctor, asking for some anti-anxiety pills for me to take right before the
service. I never did take them, but the fear, the fear I had about public speaking is still
there, though it has obviously diminished over the years.

But as a minister who preaches on a regular basis, you’ve got to get over your fear of
speaking, right? You can’t do this work if you can’t or won’t speak to groups of people.
The best advice I can give anyone on this issue or any issue related to a phobia they
might have: you just have to get up and do, and then get up and do, and then do it
again, on and on, until the fear is no longer crippling, until it no longer controls your
life. If fear controls us, it makes life a nightmare; it would make every Sunday morning
a nightmare for me, if I had to go through what I did some 8-9 years ago. There is an
old New Yorker cartoon that shows a very scared, masked burglar trying to rouse a
sleeping couple. The caption reads: ‘Wake up, wake up. There's a noise downstairs
and it's not me.’" (Homiletics Online) You don’t want fear to make it impossible to do
your work, right?

Now, of course, fear is a natural response, and sometimes there are things to fear in
this life, but we also know that fear can give off false signals, false warning sirens, and
when it does that, it makes the ordinary moments of life very hard to get through.
Jesus knew this as well—he was constantly telling his followers not to fear, not to live
their lives in fear, because he knew that it would stop them cold in their tracks, stop
them right in the middle of a processional in full view of 700 folks, so to speak, if they
weren’t careful. Last week we heard Jesus tell the disciples to first go home to the
places and spaces that were most familiar to them, not to the Gentile places, at least at
first, but to go to the emotional places that they were most familiar with, back to the
Jewish people, their brothers and sisters in the faith. In between that passage from last
week and today’s passage, Jesus tells them that they will be persecuted for telling their
stories of the Gospel, of how God has met them through this Jesus of Nazareth, by both
parties, by both Jew and Gentile, the home folks and the occupiers—there will be no
place where their fear won’t actually be justified, where their emotional alarm bells won’t
have good reason for going off.

And then this text comes before us today, where Jesus tells them not to fear, and he
doesn’t just tell them this once, or twice, but three times: he tells them to fear not,
amidst the coming persecution that will surely be coming their way. Fear not, he says,
because everything is going to be out in the open soon enough—don’t let these bullies
intimidate you into silence. Tell your truth of how God has met you in this world,
because in the end, they—whoever “they” is, in their lives, in our lives—they can’t do
anything to do of any real consequence, Jesus says. Only God really has the power to
fully hurt us, body and soul—all others simply threaten with a force that cannot touch
that which is most eternal in us, our souls, our spirits, that piece of God within us goes
on forever. And yet even though God may have the power to hurt, God chooses not
to, for this God knows everything about us, knows us intimately, knows the hairs on our
heads, even if those hairs are thinning, as in my case—its less for God to count, I
suppose. Look at the sparrows, like the ones on your bulletin today, the sparrows,
another one of his favorite metaphorical devices, look at how even the lowliest of the
birds is taken care of God, because you see, this is a God who is on your side, not a
God who is against you. And if God is the ultimate audience we are speaking to, in our
truth telling about how God has met us in the life, and this is God is on our side, then
we can speak, we can tell our truth about how God has been with us in this life, has met
us in this world, even if our experiences our different from each other. And I want to
point something beautiful about this passage—it says that God loves us because God
knows us, knows us intimately, and because of that knowing, God can’t stay away from
us, even with some of the shadows we carry within us.

“There is a story about the great sixth- century Arab poet and robber-prince Antara el
Abse. Once a crowd shrank before a huge wild bull. One man cried to Antara, "Only
Antara can deal with that bull." Antara el Abse nodded in seeming agreement, then
answered: "Ye-es. Ye-es. But does that bull know I'm Antara?"” (Homiletics Online)
Well, I don’t know about that but I do think God knows who Antara is, and that is all that
really matters, in the end. If God knows who he is, and everything about him, then he
can do what he is called to do, and what we are called to do, which is to face down our
deepest fear and go forward, knowing that we are in God’s hands. Kathleen Norris, in
her wonderful book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith one of my favorites,
actually, she writes these words: “In the middle of "The Tennessee Waltz" at the weekly
sing-along in the nursing home, I become convinced that we are praying with our out-of-
tune music, corny lyrics and all. And sometimes ordinary conversations reveal
themselves as prayer. I was once with a group of church women, who, after serving
refreshments at a nursing home, began speaking of their fears of old age, of ending up
senile. One woman wondered out loud: "Maybe it's not so bad. After all," she said, "they
make no distinction between the living and the dead." Another woman spoke up. "It
must be like eternal life." And our conversation let us pray our way through fear, a fear
that is often strong enough to keep people from visiting nursing homes at all. (New
York: Riverhead Books, 1998, 350-351). That’s the kind of fear that Jesus asks us to
confront by telling us to “fear not, fear not, fear not, because I know you, you are
known, and if I know you, there is nothing to fear, nothing to keep you in those places
that make you feel vulnerable, or scared, or defenseless, for that matter.”

Last week I shared with you that I thought one of the reasons why we are so reluctant
to share our faith with others, to do what Jesus asks us in the whole of chapter 10,
which is to go forward and tell that story, the story of the Gospel and how it has
effected our lives, I said that one of the reasons was because of how others have often
shared their stories of faith with us. We sometimes have balked at the way we were
told that their experience of Christ had to become our experience, that their story had
to become our story—or else, the often unspoken threat went. We feared we might be
perceived the way those folks are often perceived by us—authentic and well-meaning,
surely but also too dogmatic, too self-assured, too rigid and unyielding, and lacking the
humility that needs to be present when people talk of the divine on this side of eternity.
We often fear to tell our story of faith because of the way others have told their stories
and so we are silenced by that fear, like I was almost was when I had that little panic
attack processing up to the chancel in Dallas years ago. What if I had that panic
attack, and stopped cold at the very moment I was supposed to pray the invocation in
front of 700 people? It would have been a fear that stopped me from doing what I was
called to do in this world, which was to lead congregations in the worship of God.
Likewise, if we allow others who tell their stories of Christian faith very differently than
we do, if we allow that fear that we might be perceived like we perceive them, to stop us
from telling our own stories of the Gospel, then we too would have been stopped from
doing what we are called to do in this world. William Sloane Coffin, in his book The
Courage to Love, wrote that "Fear distorts truth, not by exaggerating the ills of the
world . . . but by underestimating our ability to deal with them . . . while love seeks truth,
fear seeks safety." (60)

And of course, safety is not promised, not ever, especially when we share our truths
with those we love and those we struggle to love. Even the latter part of this passage
reminds us of this—“do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not
come to bring peace but a sword” Jesus says. Not the sword of war—we humans don’t
need God’s help on that—but the sword of conflict within families, because of what that
truth-telling might do, especially as it conflicts with an ancient belief that family was
everything—beginning and ending, in the belief system of the Jews and other ancient
peoples. To share our truth of how God has met us in the world, as diverse as they
might be even in this place, and how different they might be from our families stories,
well that is probably going to get us into a bit of conflict. But as I said last week, humility
is key to telling our God stories, taking nothing with us, so to speak, on the journey, not
an ounce of pride and arrogance, nothing in our bags, no staff, no extra coat. And yet
fear whispers into our ears that it won’t be enough, that we won’t make it without being
like the folks who claim to have all the answers—but, as usual, what fear tells us is
wrong. We are God’s own, and we do have a story worth telling, a story of how God
has moved us and shaped us, and how God is still with us, even in this moment, as
God has been with us in every moment. Fear not, fear not, fear not, Jesus says to us.

“Albert Schweitzer in his African Notebook tells the incident of an African houseboy
journeying to Europe with his master. It was the first time the young African had been
away from the tropical climate. On the first cold morning, his employer was awakened
by the screams of the boy. The man rushed upstairs and found the lad in bed, wailing
as if he were going to die. He kept saying: "I'm on fire inside. I'm on fire inside." The boy
did not have a fever. The man soon realized the boy was frightened as he saw his
breath coming out in the cold air. The boy thought he was on fire inside because he
could see [his] breath coming out of his mouth [for the first time].” African Notebook
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958, 139-40). I hope that is never the case
for us. I hope that we never fear the fire we carry within us, the Spirit of God within us,
and I hope we never fear telling the story of how deeply that fire burns within us, the
God who blazes within our lives, this divine yearning to be set by free by fearless
people who are willing to tell the stories of how they have been loved and held and
made whole by this Jesus of Nazareth. Amen.