SEVENTH SUNDAY after PENTECOST

July 31, 2011

Text: Matthew 14:13-21

Pastor Dale G. Bauer

Fear. It is as much a part of being human as breathing in and breathing out. I’m going to say that all of us here have experienced it, and for some of us it is the reason we are here. Every generation tries to describe itself. We have the Greatest Generation. We’ve had the Age of Anxiety. The Hippie Generation. We’ve had the Me Generation. And even the Generation Me. If I had to try to describe the time we live in, I would call it the Age of Fear. The Age of Fear began on September 11, 2001—9/11—with the destruction of the World Trade Center. That’s enough to keep any generation fearful, but then we had the financial and mortgage meltdown in 2008. I must confess to a certain level of fear about the U.S. debt-ceiling deadlock, because since 2008 I’ve had enough financial insecurity to last me for a long time. (And I suppose there is some fear banging around my brain and body because I am barely ten months from completing twenty-three years here as pastor and opening an entirely new chapter in my life.)

Fear has its place, of course. It is an immediate reaction of the reptilian section of our brain to a perceived threat. The heart rate spikes, adrenaline courses through the body, and muscles tighten. The fight-or-flight response is what I’ve heard it called. Without it, a lot of us here would be dead. I know I would.

That’s the upside of fear. There is, as you know, a downside. If we live only by our reptilian brain, function only out of chronic fear, we don’t think. We just react. In time it is disabling.

Jesus, completely human except for sin, knew fear. On the night of his arrest, he was at Gat-shemen—Gethsemane as we know it—and he was fearful of what was coming his way. One of the Gospels tells us that he sweat blood. I believe we get another look at a fearful Jesus when he hears of his cousin’s beheading.

Fear. Let’s talk about it. Using an acronym: F.E.A.R.

Let’s start with F. It stands for Focus on God. Chronic fear and anxiety derail our relationship with God. We confess that God is creator of heaven and earth. We call God Father; and God calls us children. We call him the Good Shepherd and we are the sheep. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. What we believe about God is the place to live. But it is ruptured in the face of chronic fear. Prayer is difficult, if not impossible. Trust in God gets shaky. The promises of God sound hollow to us.

We get a glimpse of that in Jesus.

Now when Jesus heard about the beheading on John the Baptist, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.

Wanting to be alone in the face of grief is something humans often do. But it seems that on hearing of the death of his cousin and knowing the blood-thirsty Herod would kill without compunction, his “flight” reaction took place. But he went to a deserted place to pray because fear was separating him from the Father. In the face of fear, he
reestablished his close connection with the Father through solitude, silence, and prayer. Chronic fear is disruptive to our focus on God, but it is a focus on God that can deal with chronic fear.

E is next. Expecting the Worse. It’s the Chicken Little response. Chronic fear makes everything seem worse than it is, or as Chicken Little announced, “The Sky is Falling.” Chronic fear has a way of darkening our future and making it happen. That happens to us as individuals. Our problems just seem overwhelming. We can’t get a handle on them. And we get stuck. The value of a good listening ear or a counselor is that we can sort out reality from our fear. It happens to nations. It was, in the middle of the Great Depression, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced in his Inaugural Address as president that all we have to fear is fear itself. It was Ronald Reagan, who as president, when we were panicked that the Japanese economy would outstrip ours in the 1980’s, suggested that our best years were ahead of us. Not behind us.

A. Avoiding Help. Chronic fear is isolating. We try to go it alone. Fear becomes the floor, ceiling, and walls of our life. You’ve probably been there. Hope diminishes or
disappears. What breaks this cycle? Neither avoidance nor denial helps. What breaks the cycle is reaching out. Deciding not to fear fear itself. When I was a little guy and had the wits frightened out of me, I had the good sense to run to the arms of my father or mother. Put fear in God’s hands. And then reach out to others. One of the most important functions of this community, and especially Koinonia Groups, is to be a place where fears can be shared and then divided by the number of participants in the group.

And finally R. Renewing Us. The question is not whether we can avoid chronic fear. It is part of the human condition, whether we acknowledge it or not. The question is what shall we do with it? It might renew our relationship to God when we realize we’ve got to trust him. We might take those words of Jesus literally when he suggests we not worry about what we will eat or what we will wear. Maybe fear can help us turn to God and trust God.

Perhaps our chronic fear can allow us to be a “wounded healer,” someone who can empathize with the fearful. When Jesus returned to preach after going to the deserted place, he talked to a crowd of 5,000 all day. The disciples figured out that the crowd was getting hungry, so they urged Jesus to send them away. You can hear the fear in the voices when they said, “All we got is five loaves and two fishes.” He had the crowd sit down and he fed them. If we turn to God and to others with our fear, they will feed us. And fill us. And renew us.

F.E.A.R. It’s real. Sometimes it saves us. And sometimes is disables us. But not if we ask God to be part of it.

Amen.