Be Not Afraid

A Sermon delivered by Reverend Marlin Lavanhar, Senior Minister
At All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, OK
Sunday, Dec. 3, 2006

I spent time with someone recently who told me he doesn’t see any reason to belong to a religious community.  This person has a demanding job, so on Sundays he likes to sit at home and take it easy.  It’s not that he’s anti-religious or anything.  I believe he’d agree with the renowned American theologian John Lennon, and be for “Whatever gets you through the night.”  In other words, he’d agree that most folks need something.  So, if some people want to get all gussied-up and come to church, and listen to some churchy music, and be reassured about the nature of God and life – and that helps them – great.  If other people want to do it with coffee and the newspaper, or a cigarette, or on the back of a motorcycle or whatever, that’s great too.  The underlying question is really whether religion is culturally relevant or just a nice, kind of old-fashioned thing to do.

Of course, if you’re sitting in the congregation this morning, you probably know something about how being a part of a church adds value to your individual life.  We could talk about intellectual stimulation, a sense of community, religious education for our children, help in times of crisis, opportunities to offer service to others, rituals of birth, marriage and death, spiritual practices, support groups, a chance to hear innovative rap music, and many other personal benefits of being part of a church.  But can we make a serious argument about cultural relevance?  I mean, who are we, to shape the values of our culture?

Then again, think about Mary, the mother of Jesus.  She was a poor, simple woman, living in a remote town in some backwater of the Roman Empire.  She had no title, no status, no formal education.  When she found out she was to bear a son who was destined to change the world she must have wondered, “Who am I to be the mother of a new creation?”

We too, have to ask ourselves, who are we – to be bearers of a new creation?  Sure, we’re part of a very historic American church.  We trace our heritage back to the pilgrims and founding mothers and fathers of this nation.  And our churches include some of America’s landmark churches in Plymouth and Salem and Boston and Quincy and Concord.  But we’re a relatively small band of religious people.  I certainly don’t want tourists just driving past our churches taking pictures and saying that is the church of President John Adams and Susan B. Anthony, and Horace Mann, and Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott and others.  I don’t want to be seen as some quaint little historic religious community in America.

So today I’m going to talk about fear.  It could be argued that the origins of religion are in fear.  Hundreds of thousands of years ago, as people experienced seemingly random earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, lightning, and attacks by wild animals, they sought explanations and they looked for ways to ward-off such foreboding forces.  The explanations for how and why these events occurred, and the rituals that developed, became the origins of religion.

There were tales of competing gods and spirits.  And superstitions evolved around how to appease these spirits and evil forces.  One of the sad truths about religion today, is that even though humanity has advanced in our understanding of natural events, many faiths are still founded on fear-based ideas.  Ideas of devils and demons are prevalent, and people are actually scared of burning in hell if they do not follow the dictates of a particular faith.  With the exception of politics (which I’ll get to a little later) religion is the only field left where the propagation of fear is still commonplace and accepted.  Here in Oklahoma we don’t have to look too far to find religions that promote fear in people and then offer solutions as irrational as the fears themselves.

Let’s keep in mind that if love for God comes from fear, then it is not love.  Because fear coerces love.  Imagine if we were to translate certain popular theologies into human terms.  They would be called abuse.  If a person said to another person, “You must love me and do what I say or I’ll strike you down and punish you,” that’s the very definition of an abusive relationship.  It’s also the definition of a fascist or coercive political regime – using fear as a form of behavior control. 

Making a decision based in fear is not the same as making a moral decision.  You yourself may have grown up in a religion that filled you with fear as a child.  One of my colleagues tells of a woman in his congregation whose father used to warn her “if you are not a good girl, the Unitarians will get you.”  Of course, she always adds that the Unitarians eventually did get her, and it has been one of the great blessings of her life.

Even though I have a lot to say about the negative effects of fear, I also want to argue against another common belief in our culture regarding fear.  That is, there are people who want to cast out fear and who think that fear is all bad.  We sometimes hear people say that they never want to act out of fear.  Or they might say, “I feel like I’m allowing my fear to lead me and I know it’s wrong.”  But, as much as I want to denounce the use of fear for coercion, I also want to defend fear as an important emotion.  I want to make the case that by trying to neglect fear, we have ended up living in terror.  We’ve lost our understanding of fear.

On the most basic level, fear is responsible for the survival of our species, right?  If people didn’t feel and act out of fear upon being confronted by a tiger, or any number of other dangerous situations, we would have most likely died out as a species long ago.  Fear under certain circumstances is an appropriate response to danger.

Courage is not the absence of fear, as the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz misunderstood.  Courage is the ability to act in the presence of fear.  Certainly today, most of us don’t live in fear of lightning or attacks by wild animals.  But we do fear such things as terrorism, the effects of global warming, the loss of a job, the collapse of social security, the encroachment of religion on schools and government and other concerns of our time that urge us to act.  It’s important that we acknowledge and pay attention to these fears and then act to try and achieve the best possible outcomes.

In other words, fear has the ability to move us to positive action.  As one of my teachers explained, “The word emotion has the word motion in it.”  Every emotion has a motion that it is directing us to make.  When we ignore an emotion, or try and bury it, or put it off, eventually we are forced to deal with it.  And by the time the suppressed emotion comes back, it’s usually developed into a distorted form.  The distorted emotion can end up causing harm or confusion rather than the original motion it was intended to create.

We see it all the time with grief, when a person covers over their grief after a death, or a divorce, or the loss of a job, the grief eventually rears its head.  It can’t be kept at bay forever.  And since it wasn’t dealt with constructively the first time, it usually emerges in surprising, embarrassing and often complicating ways.  The same is true of fear and pain and other so-called “negative emotions.”  They may not feel good, but they are calling us to act.

Author Michael Meade reminds us that our country’s leaders knew for a long time about the serious threat of what we now call global terrorism.  But since they, and we the public, mostly denied and ignored the threat and the fear of it for so long, we find ourselves in the situation in which we’re now living – with an excess of fear – global terrorism.  Do you see how the thing we ignored as a culture, we now have in abundance?  That’s why we need to find ways to deepen our understanding and appreciation of fear.

Fear is usually instructing us to either “Get out of here!” or telling us, “That is exactly where you need to go.”  The complicating thing is that it can be hard to tell which kind of fear it is.  We need to work to recalibrate our intuition regarding the messages of fear.  It’s similar to the way we, as a culture, have lost touch with what we truly long for.  We have deep longings, but our media and advertising often work to confuse us about what it is that will really fulfill us.  In the same way, we as a culture have lost our connection to what fear means for us. 

Ours is a religion that long ago rejected fear of hell in the afterlife and fear of the wrath of God.  It is also a religion that has rejected fear as a motive for taking moral action.  We do not say, “Do the right thing or you will be punished.”  We say, “Do the right thing because it is the loving and ethical thing to do.”  But let us not be a religion that is naïve about the role of fear in our lives.  If we try to create a life without fear, we’re probably not very alive.  We may have created a safety net so tight that we’re trapped by it.  I’m not suggesting we allow our lives to be dominated by fear, but I am suggesting we come to experience it and creatively live in it. 

To love is to risk losing some one you love.  To trust is to risk having your trust betrayed.

To try something new is to risk failure.  Some people work so hard to avoid the fear of loss or rejection or failure that they do not take risks.  They keep the scope of their lives incredibly narrow and familiar.  They choose sameness and safety so as to avoid being afraid at any cost.  They have developed such a fear of failure, or criticism or intimacy, that they rarely test the limits of their abilities. Some people fear fear itself so much that they miss living.

What I’m suggesting is, that we challenge ourselves to be willing to confront new situations, and take considered risks so that we can step more fully into our lives.  If you fear fear, you must ask yourself what has been the cost in terms of your relationships, your opportunities?  Keep in mind that in the Bible we find the word fear, but we don’t find the word risk.  The reason is that risk implies that there’s a degree of chance involved.  But in biblical times, people didn’t believe in chance, their understanding was that everything that happens is God’s will.  If you got hit by lightning it was God’s will, rather than your bad decision to stay on the golf course in a thunderstorm.

I contend that ours is a religion that does not promote the idea of a God that strikes people down.  Nor does it teach that everything that happens is God’s will.  Therefore, the meaning of faith is not a cosmic agreement in which if you do all the things you are supposed to do then you have nothing to fear.  Rather, ours is a faith that teaches us that we can handle and even appreciate life despite whatever happens.  It is a faith that teaches us that we can act to change the world.  That our lives matter.  It’s a faith that is not afraid of fear, or based in fear, but one that is not naïve about fear either.  And, in a culture that teaches us to reject fear, this is an important faith we offer.

In a world where preachers and politicians would still have us live in fear as a means to an end, this is an important gospel.  In a world that seems constricted by terrorism and divided by fundamentalism, such a faith is not only culturally relevant, it offers the hope of a new creation.  Oh but wait, who are you and I, to be the bearers of a new creation?