Fear and Trust

Haggai 1:15b-2:9

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

Luke 20:27-38

               All of today’s lectionary passages speak to us about fear, and remind us that God is a God of life who tells us “be not afraid”. 

In the first passage, Haggai is speaking to the Israelites at a time following their return to Jerusalem after their exile.  The returning Israelites believed their well-being was intimately connected with the well-being of the temple, which their tradition told them was literally the house of God.  During the time of the exile, the temple had been destroyed, but now the Israelites have returned to Jerusalem, and the temple has been rebuilt.   For outsiders this would appear to be a time of great celebration and renewal.  But for the Israelites who knew the original temple, who remembered its former glory and believed that it and it alone was worthy of housing their God, this new temple in no way matched up with their images of what was due, it in no way matched up with the old temple.  For them, what should be a time of great joy and new beginnings had instead become a time of despair, and more, of fear of what this portended for their future.  What does it mean that the temple, the house of God is not what it should be?  Will God be angry?  Will their future be half what their past was, as the temple is half what the old one was?  It is within this context that Haggai is speaking to the Israelites and reminding them that they do not need to live in this new existence with this new temple in a state of anxiety.  He tells them that poor beginnings do not mean poor endings if you go forward holding onto and trusting in God.  God is a God of life.  God is all about bringing new life out of any death.  They can, therefore, go forward without fear because God is with them still.

               The passage from 2 Thessalonians gives a similar message.  The people in Thessalonica are also living in fear and anxiety about their future.  They are afraid that the day of the Lord has already come and that they have missed the boat, they have missed the second coming, they have missed out on ultimate life.  Paul, too, is telling them to not be anxious about what is to come, that God is the God of life and that their faith will keep them tightly in the loving arms of God.

               And finally the third passage from the book of Luke also shows a group of people in the midst of fear.  In this passage it is the Sadducees who are afraid.  They are afraid of Jesus, fearing the influence he is having on the people, fearing how Jesus’ radical messages of love might influence the people, their faith, and as a result, their actions.  Jesus is in no way a legalist.  And the Sadducees (and Pharisees) retain control of their world through the Jewish laws.  With Jesus teaching something broader but less containable, less structured, the Sadducees are terrified.  Their reaction is to try to trick Jesus, to trip him up, to catch him in an unacceptable position that will discredit and harm him  by asking him questions that it appears he cannot answer without alienating part of the crowd, part of his following.  Among and within the Jewish people were different groups with different beliefs about the resurrection, among other things.  If Jesus agreed with the Sadducees and said there is no resurrection, he would have alienated those Jews who did believe in the resurrection and visa versa.  So they confront him with a question designed to destroy the unity and size of Jesus’ following that they fear.  This question they pose to him is the third in a set of questions intended to trick Jesus, intended to get him into trouble either with the law or with his followers so that Jesus will be discredited, rejected, or worse, brought to trial.  All of their questions have been motivated by fear, and all three are intended to help them regain their power and control.

               To Jesus’ credit, and what gives us huge insight, once again, into the nature of God, is that Jesus  did not flee from or avoid any of these questions.  He also didn’t seek revenge or retribution.  Instead, Jesus chose to respond to these fearful people.  He engaged even those who were attacking him with their fear and trickery.  In answer to the trickery that we read about today, he basically stated that those who asked the questions didn’t understand what they are asking.  He backed this up by stating that they needed to look at their own scriptures to see where they were wrong in their own beliefs.  And while his answers, his lack of “falling into the trap” may have inspired even more fear in those who tried to trick him, still Jesus’ message, too, was one of letting go of fear, of trusting in God, of seeing that God is “the God of the living”, the “God of life” and not a God of death and destruction.

               We live in a fear based society, and I believe this is becoming more and more true.  We see this in every aspect of our lives.  The news is not just telling us bad things, but filling us with fear about what is to come.  They know that fear sells and they capitalize on that.  No matter what side of any issue you are on  you are told to be afraid, very afraid.  Each side fears different things, but still we are each told to vote out of our fear, rather than out of our hope.  Our fear culture includes more than this, though.  People are afraid to trust each other so we set up fences, walls, security cameras, alarm systems.  We have background checks for everything and we put into place outrageous airport security checks.  We surround ourselves with police and emergency call systems and the many, many other “things” and systems in our lives that are supposed to protect us and keep us safe.  Our business choices, who we give to, IF we give at all, how much we feel we can spare to share and care for the world – these too are usually reactive and fear-based responses.  We know the result of acting out this fear.  We no longer have any privacy in this country, for one thing.  We alienate and separate ourselves out from our brothers and sisters who are at all different from ourselves because we are afraid of them, afraid “they” will take what is “ours”.  In the extremes, we have all heard of people who won’t even leave their homes out of fear, or who are so germ-aphobic that they can’t engage life normally.  But even for those of us without that kind of extreme fear, we are governed in so many ways by our fears.

At some point we have to decide if we are going to live in the world or live of the world.  If we choose the values of this world, if we choose to trust our methods of security and if we choose to trust those things that we set up to protect ourselves in a scary world, we are not trusting God.  And what’s more, we are not really living.

How many of you have seen the movie “French Kiss?”  The movie begins with Meg Ryan’s character, Kate, acting as a typical middle class person, saving money, planning for the future, working hard to make the dreams of many a typical middle class person come true.  She is engaged to a Doctor, and living in a home away from home, which for her is Canada, hoping to become a Canadian citizen.  She has saved enough money to buy a wonderful house and she is dreaming and planning for the family and kids she hopes to have.  She seems happy and excited about her life and the only clue we are given that things are not all that they seem is that she is terrified of flying.  So when her fiancé invites her to go with him to France, she declines, despite all his urgings.  The crisis in the movie comes just a few minutes later when her fiancé calls from France to tell her that he has met another woman in France and that he will not be returning to her.  She feels the secure walls of her life begin to crumble and she pushes herself to fly to France, despite her terror, in a desperate attempt to “get him back!”   When she arrives in France, it seems she is met by a number of people who block her attempts to connect with her fiancé and finally, everything she has with her in France is stolen from her.  So now she is across the world from her home, without fiancé, without possessions, without security, without her passport or any other form of id, and on top of that because she left Canada to fly to France before her resident visa to live in Canada was approved, neither Canada nor the United States will give her a new visa.  She has, in the span of a day, gone from being a complete “has” to being a total “has not.” 

At first, she is devastated.  But as she later explains, “I thought, there is no way that everything I was building for could be destroyed (by some stranger... and so I bought a plane ticket, got on the plane, somehow made it over the big blue ocean,... and then the most extraordinary thing happened.  Everything went wrong.  I was wandering the streets of Paris, penniless, without a hope in the world.  And let me tell you, you can do a lot of soul searching in a time like that and I realized that I spent most of my adult life trying to protect myself from exactly this situation.  And you can’t do it.  There is no home safe enough, there is no country nice enough, there’s no relationship secure enough.  You’re just setting yourself up for an even bigger fall and having an incredibly boring time in the process.”

While it makes sense to be cautious and to not be stupid or fail to do what needs to be done in this life to take care of things, the reality is that choosing to live in fear prevents us from living at all.  God’s message again and again is “be not afraid for I am with you.”   Another consistent message is that we are freed by our faith in Christ.  And yet when we continue to live in fear, and when we continue to live in slavery to our fear of losing all the things we have, when we spend all our time working for things that will “protect” us from whatever it is that we fear so much, we fail to really live.  The very things that we set up to protect ourselves, keep us from living.  I think about this when I look at the way that we now protect our children.  I remember hearing one of our favorite comedians say that my generation was the last generation of children allowed to be children.  In my own childhood I wandered in the foothills of Mt. Diablo on my own.  At very young ages we were allowed to go out from homes to play with neighborhood children and we would be out and about most of the day before coming home.  We had play equipment at parks like those spinning merry-go-rounds and monkey bars.  This is no more.  All of this play equipment as been deemed “unsafe” but the reality is that most parks and cities are just now afraid of being sued.  We no longer let our children run around and explore and get scraped and banged up and hurt because we fear it.  But those bumps and scrapes and even breaks are what gave us the greatest lessons and frankly, the greatest experiences too.  More than that, they strengthened us for what life really is, the prepared us for adulthood in so many ways.  I am sad that my kids never got to try to build a fort out of wood they found laying around as I did, or face wildlife in the same way I did as a kid, running into huge spiders and even snakes on the hill and needing to make decisions about how to handle it.  Yes, our kids are protected.  But the result of this “protection” is that often when they are faced with the real problems of the world, they no longer know how to handle them, they no longer have the strength of having faced hardships as children to know how to handle hardships as young adults.

We can think of so many other examples of the damage that our fear has done in the world.  When we become afraid of our money being lost in the bank, a “run” on the bank is disastrous, as we know.  When we fail to take the risk of trusting in our relationships, our relationships can’t deepen.  When, out of fear, we set up protections against others, defining them as “enemies,” treating them as enemies, we make them into the very enemies we fear them to be.     

               The movie French Kiss ends when Meg Ryan’s character, Kate, learns to let go of her fear.  At the end she is still without country, she is still without her fiancé.  But even in this place, she makes the decision to help an outcast whom she has befriended.  She gives to a man who has also isolated himself from his family and friends, who has been acting out his own fear, who seems to be beyond hope and redemption – she makes the decision to give to him her “nest egg” of $45,000.  She does so in an anonymous way that he will never know she has given him this money, and she does it believing that she will never see him again.  She gives away all of her “security” and “protection”- out of love - just because. 

In freeing herself from her fear, Kate frees herself to really live.  And while at first there is some sorrow and grieving for her, in the end, letting go of her security and choosing to live in a sense of openness and trust allows her finally to really live the life she wants.

Fear leaves no room for anything else.  Like Truth.  Like Beauty.  Like Love.  It leaves no room for trying new things, making new friends, living with fullness.  It creates no space for seeing God or for hearing the words of the angels.  We have a choice to make.  Do we choose to live in fear?  Or do we instead trust in the God who loves us beyond anything, the God who came to be with us, who died because of us, who rose out of death into life: do we trust instead the God who says through the voices of the angels, “Do not be afraid.”