Do Not Fear

Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Sermon by Burton Cooper

Thus says the Lord ...
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you ...
When you pass through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned ...
Do not fear, for I am with you …

“Do not fear.”  What a thing to say to us, to tell us humans who are full of fears, both small and great ones, do not fear.  And Jesus, who in today’s gospel reading is declared the Son of God, the one with whom God is well pleased, Jesus tells us the same thing, in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus says: “Do not fear, only believe … do not fear,” he says, even “those who can kill the body but who cannot kill the soul.”
What can Jesus mean in saying to us, “Do not fear,” when nothing is more natural, more common, for us human beings, even us Christian human beings, than to have fears.  Are there not real things to fear, things for which it’s a healthy reaction to fear --- even Jesus implies that we should fear those who can kill our soul.  But there are, of course, unhealthy, destructive fears, irrational fears, fears that are stoked up in us, feeding on our dark imaginings, our insecurities.  We say, for example, that we are a Christian nation, and in so far as a large majority of us identify ourselves as Christians, that statement is, more or less, true, and what is also true is that, nowadays, this nation is full of fear, and we have an abundance of politicians and pundits and superpacs and websites stoking up these fears, and these stokers of fear are the very ones who tell us that this nation is losing its Christian identity.  Would that these stokers of fear remembered Jesus telling us he is in the poor, he is in the stranger, he is in the imprisoned, so that they might become more afraid that what truly threatens our Christian identity is our toleration of the high rate of poverty in this country, our toleration of the ever increasing numbers of our homeless,  our toleration of our record breaking numbers of the imprisoned.  But the fear that is being stoked up by our public figures, and on our news outlets, radio, TV, the internet, relate to our illegal immigrants, the fear that these strangers are taking away our jobs, changing our culture; or the fear of Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives from their homeland, the fear that amongst these strangers are terrorists, or the fear that their Muslim faith will undermine our way of life; or the fear that the government wants to take away our guns, our freedom, so no gun regulations can be allowed, even though we have more deaths by gun violence than any developed country in the world. 
OK, I got that off my chest.  I didn’t mean it in a partisan way, so forgive me if it seems that way.  I do mean to say that despite what Isaiah and Jesus say, we are full of fears, fears of all sorts,  rational and irrational, constructive and destructive, that fear is natural, normal, common, built right into our DNA, built right into the interstices of our chemical driven brain, and the reason is that we human beings, in mind and body, are vulnerable, limited, inherently insecure in our being, so that we live inevitably, universally, amidst uncertainties, unknowns, that undo any ease of mind.   So when Jesus tells us, “Do not fear,” he is speaking against what comes natural to us, given who we are, and the kind of things that go on in the world in which we live, the kind of things that make us fearful, distrustful, sometimes even of our friends and neighbors, let alone of strangers, other ethnic, racial or religious groups, other nations and peoples, some of whom we brand as our enemies, even branding them enemies of God, incorporating our fearfulness, our distrust of others into our religious life and faith, even into our idea of God, so that we create a warrior God who sides with us on the battlefield and not with our enemy, who celebrates with us our victory over our fallen foe as even in the biblical story of the drowning of the Egyptian army; so that we create a merciless God who separates the sheep from the goats, throwing those goats into outer darkness where they weep and gnash their teeth,  or if not that we imagine God destroying those goats in a great final battle, Armageddon; so that we create a vindictive God who sends sinners and unbelievers and heretics down into Hell, into eternal torment; so that we create a murderous, legalistic, intolerant God who inspires us to terrorize those who deviate from anciently written sacred laws, beheading people, blowing up men, women and children in public places.  So what shall we call a religion, any religion, all religions,  which, for all their validity in recognizing a transcendent ground to our existence and to the whole of creation, and yet incorporates into itself, into its belief system, our natural fearfulness, our natural distrust, our natural seeking of security against surrounding threats.   Shall we not call our religions, Natural Religion, for it has elements within it that come natural to us, natural to us vulnerable, limited human beings who for all our goodness and intelligence and creativity, are, as Immanuel Kant liked to say, (we human beings are) a crooked piece of timber.   It is natural for us to distinguish between us and them: between our family and those other families, between our people and those other peoples, between our religion and those other religions, between our race and those other races, even between our sex and that other sex.  So it comes natural for us crooked timbers of humanity to think that God is the god of us and not of them, that God favors us and not them, that God will protect us from them, indeed, that God will protect us from evils, from bad things, as we find even in that great prophet, Isaiah, who tells the Israelites in this morning’s reading that God will keep them from being overwhelmed by rivers and burnt by fires.  I will not speak of the sufferings and persecutions that century after century fell upon the descendants of those ancient Israelites, but tell a simple story, preached by one of my pastors decades ago when Blanche and I lived in Louisville.  The pastor’s teen age daughter had gone to a party in the distant suburbs.  In the course of the night, and just when the daughter would be making the long drive home, it began raining heavily.  The pastor and his wife began to worry, became fearful, and they began to pray, and they prayed until they heard their daughter’s car pull into their driveway.  “We had prayed her home,” the pastor joyfully told the congregation, “thanks be to God.”  I, too, wanted to thank God, for the daughter’s safe return,  but I wondered if there were parents in that congregation whose prayers for their child’s safety had not been met, but instead misfortune had befallen their child; and I wondered what if something terrible had happened to the pastor’s daughter, would he have blamed God for not protecting her; would he think God has broken his promise to keep us safe; would he have been disappointed in God, or disillusioned; would he begin to distrust God, wondering if God is good, or if God is weak, or if God doesn’t even exist.  Would he begin to fear that he was losing his faith or that something had broken in his once strong faith?   And what of us?  Do we sometimes have these fearful thoughts?
Sisters and brothers in Christ, into our fearfulness, come the words of Jesus Christ, “Do not fear, only believe.”   And what is it Jesus asks us to believe?  Certain doctrines, propositional statements, ideas?  I’m the last person to underestimate the importance of ideas; they are important but not primary.  And that is not simply because we are always reconstructing our ideas, but because Christ is not so much present to us as an object of belief, as present to us as a person, present to us as a spiritual person, so that belief in Christ, trust in Christ, is loyalty to the person, to the living spirit of Christ, a spirit that goes out to others in care and respect, a spirit that has a cause: to heal and to reconcile.   To be faithful, then, to the person of Christ is to make his cause our cause, to live his cause.   Of course in the history of the church, in our own lives, we find repeated acts of faithlessness, but, also, in the history of the church, there has always been the presence of individuals manifesting Christ’s spirit, Christ’s person, carrying out the work of healing, forgiveness, reconciliation.   And if we say to ourselves, “Where is Christ’s person, I want to meet him,” the answer is that we meet Christ in the company of our very own brothers and sisters in Christ, in those moments when they, when we, live out trust in Christ, loyalty to Christ; in those moments when they, when we, hear Christ say to us in our inner ear such things as “love thy neighbor as you love yourself”  or “as you fed even the least of these hungry ones, you fed me.”  So where is Christ?  He is here, now, in this sanctuary, in our midst, amongst us, in us; he is our merciful, forgiving companion who understands our fears, our needs, the reasons for our faithlessness.  So what is it, then, that we are not to fear?  Well, Christ tells us that, in the final words of Matthew’s gospel.  “Do not fear,” Christ says to us, “(Do not fear) because I am with you always.”   Always, with you.
Praise Christ for this great mercy.  Praise God.  Amen.