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Peter JB Carman
A sermon offered March 11, 2018 at
Emmanuel Friedens Church
in Schenectady, New York
Numbers 21:4-9
John 3:14-17
I. Fear
Fear! I remember taking two thirteen-year-old boys backpacking in the mountains of New Hampshire, as a wilderness leader, back in 1978. Children who had grown up in a housing project in the Boston area, they had never been for a walk in the woods. And they were both great—hiked for hours carrying their packs, rolled out their sleeping bags without complaint. Just one little thing. As we sat in our little tent on a high mountain, the wind howling, they both confessed they were terrified of snakes.
I started to laugh—then I shut up. If there is one thing that isn’t cool, it is scoffing at someone else’s fear.
I tried to explain that there were no poisonous snakes in the higher mountains of chilly New Hampshire. I could have explained that we were in more danger from people or weather! But no amount of explaining or comforting would unlock their fear. They were sore afraid! Some one had taught them fear of snakes.
Just when we think we know everything we could possibly be afraid of, something new shows up. Just when we have plumbed the depth of our own fear, we discover that our friend is afraid of something totally other! I have even discovered once that someone I cared deeply for was afraid of…me.
In the days when Jesus walked the paths of Galilee and Samaria and the towns around Jerusalem, toxic fear was thick in the air. People feared the Romans—rightly so. They feared the people who had taken their land and could force them to work for almost nothing, the soldiers who could force them to carry armor—or crosses. Servants feared their masters! Women feared men—and rightly so. Children feared their elders—if they were smart! They all feared nature, much as they loved it, for it could rise in a wind whipping over a lake, and overturn their boats, take their loved ones. It could belch fire from the earth; it could flood them, or it could slowly parch them dry. They feared disease and they feared the spirits that seemed to possess folk’s minds. Why, they even feared one another.
It’s been over half a century, since the anti-racist preacher Clarence Jordan suggested that one of Jesus’ greatest miracles was his ability to draw together disciples from rival groups that so hated and feared each other that normally they would not have dared to sleep close to the others—for fear of being stabbed in the night. Zealots and tax-collectors found him—and Jesus brought them together.
Clarence Jordan knew what he was talking about: he had lived through death-threats and cross-burnings, and just plain dismissal by most of his pious Christian neighbors, as he tried to create an interracial community called Koinonia Partners in rural Georgia, in the 1950s.
Some years ago, when I was preparing to preach a sermon addressing the problem of fear, I asked my wife Lynn about moments when she had experienced fear. “Are you ever afraid?” I asked her. “Sure,” she said. “When?” I hadn’t said so, but she intuited what I was up to, looking for a sermon example. Ever the educator and preacher, she asked back, looking up from the morning paper… “What passage are you preaching on?” I told her—it was from The First Letter of John, about perfect love casting out fear. “Why don’t you preach about that look of total fear that was on your face as your parents marched you down the aisle in the wedding photo we have. You know, the one where they each have you by an elbow.”
II. Signposts
It is a sign of the power of God’s total and complete love that it can cast out fear. But nowhere do we read that it is an easy thing. Human faith, as it receives that divine love, must look fear right in the eye, embrace it, claim it, move through it, not deny it.
We, being mortals, have to face the sources of our well-founded fear—be that through looking at the symbol of a bronze snake on a pole, or looking up to recall one poor person unjustly tortured and killed simply for speaking the truth to power. That would be the Crucified One in whose name we gather. That’s what it takes to let us march down the aisle of prayer and service and action to which each of us is called, even if we are…sore afraid. Got to look it in the eye if we are to be able to move through it.
Like the people of Jesus’ time, we too live in a time when there is not only a lot of fear but also a good bit of debate about the character of God. Should we or should we not be afraid before God? There is a rising movement in this land that has cast God in the character of an authoritarian judge, a King on a throne, a ruthless ruler. For those who would be kingly in their power, this may be a convenient image of God! It’s the image that was used in the middle ages to inspire fear and justify the divine rights of kings. God on a throne, a Christianized Zeus or Poseidon, tends to inspire fear. Such an image of God inspires and excuses systemic and personal violence, allows folk to justify feeding the ravenous desires of powerful men.
It is hard to shake the fearsome images of this ruthless authority! But we must, for the sake of Love. For the sake of truth.
Jesus, throughout John’s gospel, weighs in strongly on the side of Love! Jesus talks about the love of God transforming our relationships not only with God, but also with each other. “This is my commandment,” he tells them, “that you love one another, as I have loved you.” Through the power of God’s love, we go from being servants of Christ to friends! Through the power of divine love, we can find the human love to befriend each other, and the rest of humankind. And the image that John raises up is not of Jesus the judge on a throne, but rather Jesus on the cross, suffering at the hands of a world he loves, for the sake of his friends.
The priest Henri Nouwen once said: “Keep your eyes on the Prince of Peace, the one who doesn’t cling to his divine power; the one who refuses to turn stones into bread, jump from great heights, and rule with great power; the one who says, ‘blessed are the poor, the gentle, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for justice, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted for justice.’ See the one who touches the lame, the crippled, and the blind; the one who speaks words of forgiveness and encouragement; the one who dies alone, rejected, and despised. Keep your eyes on him who becomes poor with the poor, weak with the weak, and who is rejected with the rejected. That one, Jesus, is the source of all peace.” (Quoted by Father John Dear, from Finding my Way Home, pp 80-81)
III. The Road of Love
What is this road of love we learn from Jesus? It is the power of friendship, to set the heart on the path of that which we know to be true or right, without coercion. It is the power of a mother’s love to still a baby’s anguish and abandonment. It is the readiness of a religious teacher from a small town long ago, to lay down his life for the friends he cares about. Yes, and more. It is the love you and I find and share, that gives us the strength to face into our fear and raise our voices, raise our hands, raise our lives up….and our neighbors’….
Forty-four years ago, I sat alone in our family living room, a teenager in high school. It was on the second floor of a duplex in Belmont, Massachusetts. This actually happened: the carpet was mustard yellow and the couch well-worn. In the quiet I found my mind turning to matters spiritual, wondering what it would be like to meet God. I wondered sometimes if there really was a God, because I hadn’t been able to touch or feel or smell God, let alone SEE God.
As I sat, my reflections were interrupted. No longer surrounded by mustard colored carpet… I was immersed in what I can only describe as a burning ocean of light and love. It was so vast, and I felt like I was swimming in it, melting into it, being consumed with its incredible strength, and yet carried in it. I was so little, and it was so vast. I began to tremble and tremble, overcome, unable to bear its beauty and strength and compassion. It was too much for me; more than a body could bear.
It was an experience over as quickly as it began, and since then, well, since then I have never seriously questioned the existence of God again. The God I met there that day was an ocean of Love, NOT a dude on a throne.
There can be moments, when we most need them, in the presence of God, no two quite the same, but tremendous awe, and wonder, even trembling and shaking in the presence of a power so majestic, so inescapable, so overwhelming…. The feeling may be so powerful that we might confuse it with fear. Surely this is what the biblical writers meant by “The fear of God.” But this kind of awe is not fear in the usual sense. Instead this is what starts us down the road of courage and life, not death!
Once we have discovered the power of this very different God, the one whom we recognize in the healing and teachings and love of Jesus, no human power will hold the same kind of sway. Once we look to the sign of the cross and the sign of the dove, the sign of the suffering messiah instead of the symbol of an old angry man on a throne, love can be born in us, and we can become children of love. Does this mean that we will be unafraid to risk it all, for our friend? Unlikely, for even Jesus had to face his own fear in the garden of Gethsemane. And yet once love is born in us, even death may, with God’s help, lose its fearfulness, in the end.
For the glory of the living God is not far away. It is here, here right in the midst of us. It is here, in and through and around us, beneath us and above us, everywhere. And that glory is nothing but love. A burning, comforting, fiery, healing ocean of Love.