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The Spirit of Fear

Romans 8:14-17
May 27, 2007

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a
spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When
we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are
children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if,
in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

This week has been an interesting one for me as a preacher because the text before
us, the Romans text, has really hit home for me, during this season of Pentecost. Of
course, Pentecost is the time when church is born, on the day when the spirit quite
literally swept through a group of women and men in Jerusalem and the world some two
thousands years ago, and the world from that moment on was never the same. In the
book of Acts, chapter 2, the description goes that tongues of fire appeared above
these disciple’s heads as the spirit rushed into them, as if out of a violent wind. I’ve
always loved this story, but the Spirit this week didn’t speak to me out of that text as
much as it did out of the Romans text, this snippet taken out of Romans 8, where Paul
is writing about what it means to live as people who have now received this Spirit, this
gift that comes out of the violent wind, and causes flames to roar above the heads of
those who first received this gift of God within them. What struck me out of this text was
the word “fear,” and Paul’s reminder to us that the Spirit is given to us to address that
shadow that haunts so many of our lives, that spiritual dread that seems to dictate so
many of our actions, and even our in-actions.

Fear, for so many of us, is the primary spiritual challenge we face in our lives—it haunts
so many of us, causing us to worry about what will happen or what will not happen in
our lives, to worry about not having enough of whatever we think we need in our lives,
or having too much of something, to the point of not being able to handle the
responsibility of it all. Even when it comes to worrying about having too much to
handle, I think fear is rooted in loss, in our fear of loss—loss of our loved ones, loss of
our homes or our money, of our security, whatever. Beyond the object or person or
feeling we fear we’ll lose is our even deeper fear that if we do not have that thing or
person or amount in our checking account, we will ultimately lose ourselves. I and you
and we will no longer exist, or have a reason to exist if we do not have that thing or
person to root us and give us safety.

I know so many of us have lost much in our lives, family, friends, daughters and sons,
and maybe even our livelihood, or financial security, but I suspect most of us can
remember the first time we experienced the possibility or the reality of real loss in our
lives. When I was 13 o 14, a few years after my family moved from Indonesia back to
the States, my father had his second heart attack, a fairly massive one, in our new
home, Oklahoma City. I remember that night as if it was yesterday. I remember my
mother calling 911 when my father began to feel as if someone was literally sitting on
his chest, and he couldn’t breathe well, and I remember being calm, almost looking at
this disaster in the making at arm’s length, and I remember the paramedics bundling
him off to the hospital, and us following him in my mom’s little Ford Chevette, and
finding out that the first hospital we arrived at was full, and couldn’t handle him, and I
remember looking in the back of the ambulance at that point and seeing my father laid
out there, with tubes and oxygen flowing into him, and suddenly being hit by what was
really happening, and then finding myself bursting into tears like I was 6 year old
again. And I felt it for the first time: real fear, real panic at what could happen, at what
could be, at who I could loss in that moment.

I know that its nothing new to you, because I suspect we could all share stories of real
fear, that moment when we thought we might lose our lives, or the lives of those we
love, or something that gave us a sense of who we are: a job, a relationship, a
friendship, a great love. As a seminarian who once did part of his training at Emory
University Hospital in Atlanta, I’ll never forgot the first times I entered into rooms where
the air was thick with fear—the fear of patients and family. And over the past 10 years
now, I’ve been in a lot hospital rooms where the very thing that was feared most came
into being: the loss of a loved one to the other side of eternity. I was reading an article
in Harper’s magazine this week entitled Chemo World: Surviving The Cancer Unit
(Adobe Reader required), written by Sallie Tisdale, an oncology nurse, who shared with
her readers her own fear of a cancer diagnosis, despite being so intimate with the
disease on a daily basis. She writes:

So many people in my circle of family and friends have had cancer that not to be one of
them feels strange. On 5-K [the cancer unit she works on], this circle has expanded to
include many strangers. Sometimes it seems as if everyone has cancer, that having
cancer is normal, and we’re all just used to it. I know a lot of healthy survivors, but
often the magnitude of the disease asserts itself. My mother’s early death from breast
cancer raises my risk of the disease significantly, so I have a mammogram every year.
Last year, the technician took my films and left me in my drafty gown. She came back
a few minutes later and said I needed to go down the hall for an ultrasound as well.
She couldn’t explain why; I’m sure she didn’t really know. The ultrasound technician
would only tell me there was a “shadow,” and then she left with her own set of pictures.
I waited in the dim, cramped room; I waited in quivering fear that had a life of its own.
When the young physician arrived, I almost tackled him. “Look,” I said. “Look, I work
on 5-K. You tell me what the hell is going on, right now.” “Oh, we’re not thinking a
malignancy,” he said, surprised. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to yell: You tell me that
FIRST. Harper’s Magazine, June 2007, 64-65

And yet, its not only the loss of life that scares us, but the loss of the many things we
have come to believe that define us, that place us and root us in this world, that provide
security and safety to us, that we fear losing as well. I think of my parents again and
how much the loss of our upper middle class lifestyle affected us, especially my
parents, around the same time as my father’s heart attack, and how difficult it was too
recover from a lifetime of believing that what we had in terms of money defined us, and
gave us meaning and placement in this world. We all have had those moments when
our fears became real, as well as those moments when our worst fears didn’t come
true, but we’re not likely to ever forget them.

And yet so many of us live our lives in fear of what we could lose, of what we wouldn’t
be without that that thing or person or belief in our lives. Some of us have planned our
lives in such a way as to minimize the risk of loss, and so we have taken no risks, no
gambles because we feared the losses more than we imagined what we might win
through the risks we might take. Sometimes that has been the smart thing to do, and
sometimes it has been the stupidest thing we could have done, but what we gamble,
what we risk in this world reveals what we value on this side of eternity, and there will
always be a moment, at least one moment, when it was the right time to gamble, to risk
it all, for the sake of having it all. But so many of us, me included, have not taken
chances because we feared what we would lose more than what we might gain in the
gamble. That is hard way to live a life, to never take chances because the odds might
be against us, and I really don’t think it’s the way God wants us to live in this world.

Let me explain what I mean. The passage today from Romans is all about that new
Spirit God has poured out into the world through the church, through this One whose
life and death has changed the world, the Christ. In the larger context of the passage,
Paul is telling the Roman church that their lives are to be rooted, not in the flesh, not in
the old ways they once lived their lives, the greediness, the bitterness, the anger, the
deep suspicion of others and the universe. Now, now they were to be rooted in the life
of the Spirit, this very presence of God that dwells within them, a Spirit that meet their
fear, that could answer fear itself. Paul actually uses the ancient Roman household
model to make his point—you did not receive a spirit of slavery, you do not have to fear
the master of your household, you are an insider, because God has adopted you, has
made you fully a member of the household, you are family now, and you do not have to
be afraid anymore. Even though a slave in a Roman household was considered a part
of the master’s house, he or she still lived in fear, as any slave would, because one
was, after all, still the property of the master, so you lived in fear, since you could be
disposed of at the master’s whim.

But something new has happened…we are not slaves anymore, and we do not have to
live a life of continuous fear anymore, wondering whether or not the world or the
universe, or God even, was on our side. We are home now, we are adopted, brought
more deeply into the household, children of God, and the Spirit of God speaks to each
of our spirits, to our souls, to that which is eternal in us, and says, “you are mine, flesh
of my flesh, and love has brought us together.” No longer is the household of God a
mixture of slaves and free persons—now, we are all free and we are all family, Paul
seems to be saying, and this truth, this truth, he believes, can meet our fear, can make
life livable, can stop the pattern so many of us have developed over the years which is
to live our lives as if the point of it all was not to lose what we have, rather than being
able to gain even more from life and love in this world. If this Spirit, if God’s very
presence is now within us, working within us, not only walking beside us, as Christ did
with his disciples thousands of years ago, but actually walking within us, is there really
anything that we cannot do, or any fear we cannot face, or any loss we cannot
survive?

Even as I say those words, I recoil from them, because there have been moments when
I thought I would not survive a particular loss, the first time I loved someone who did not
love me back, the time I lost a parent, my father, the time I realized what the losses
might be if I go into Christian ministry living the truth as I know it, the first time I lost a
good friend to the next world. All of those times were moments when that Spirit Paul
speaks of was not easily felt, nor easily visible. I didn’t feel much of anything but
loss…and yet, I survived…and you survived, and something within us, surely God’s
Spirit, kept telling us, kept reminding us that even this, even this moment, is not the
end, that there is more to the story, and surely time, slow but inevitable time, will
unravel it for us. This loss, my loss, your loss, is not too great, and our fears, whether
founded or not, cannot and will not define us because of something that God has done
in this world, which is to give us a God’s own self, which is to make every place safe,
every moment doable because of who is within us, because of who dwells deeply within
us. As the text says, we suffer with Christ, and he too suffers with us, and yet we will
also be glorified with him and so we too will taste of resurrection.

We are home now, forever adopted by God, brought into the family of God, and so we
are safe, forever safe, because home is no longer a place in this world, somewhere out
there, but is now inside of us. We carry home within us, we carry safety within us,
because of who is within us, this One who has met every fear, every loss, even the loss
of one’s own life, as experienced in the Christ, and still knows that everything is
survivable, that everything can be done, that all loss can be endured—truly this Spirit
speaks to our spirit and whispers words of hope to us. Its not that fear will not
challenge us again, or that we won’t have more moments like I did when I was 13, or the
writer of Harper’s article did with the cancer scare, but it does mean that you and I know
that we aren’t ever left by ourselves outside the ambulance carrying our father, scared
out of our minds, or in a cramped waiting room, wondering what the technician and the
doctor aren’t telling us about the ultrasound that was just taken. We aren’t alone
because of this gift that came to us on Pentecost, this gift of God within us, forever
within us, forever making our fears now faceable, something we can look at knowing
that life can now be embraced rather than feared. May it always be so. Amen.