Sermons

"Faces of Fear"

Delivered from the Pulpit of First Congregational Church by The Reverend Mark E. Long on March 1, 2009 

Lections:  Gn. 1.26-31; 3.1-7, 22-24

                  Eph. 4.17-24

                  Mk. 8.27-38

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent with the commitment of ashes for some and lives for others.  How Lent came to be, its historical evolution, is thought-provoking but generally leads to a dead-end.  We can piece together some of it, but in the end we really can only take educated guesses.  We know early on it had to do with fasting (which most of us are loath to do) and prayer (this we do somewhat better) as spiritual preparation for remembering the last days of Jesus.  This whole story can fascinate some and leave others less than enthralled.

I place myself in the latter camp.  What provokes me more is the story as an entry way into my own story.  If all of this liturgical time and the one to follow does not somehow become about me, well, let's just say the academic interest doesn't hold mine.

Last year, I suggested Lent is an appropriate time to notice your reflection in the pool of your inner experience.  What do you see?  I asked you to look deeply into it and listen for the inner voice that gets us about as close to knowing God as we can get from here.  That was last year; it still goes, is still an important part of the journey, and I still commend its path to you this year.

But as you know, in this month's newsletter "Mark-ings" asks something more as well.  I ask you to set out charitable targets at which to aim and let your listening give flight to more than contemplation.  Doing as a way of waiting for the story of one whose doing lies at the center of his tale.

How better to wait; what more needs to be said about this?  Do I do anymore than fill time with further words about this from the pulpit?  The call is to action, not listening to words about action.  The action plan for Lent is on the table, move on it or not.  It is your choice - just like the inner voice thing, listen or not, do or not.

But if the plan is on the table and I have called you to re-invest yourself to listening for your inner voice, what do I plan to do from this place for the next five weeks?  Hoist red flags!

Over the course of this time I hope to give you a look at Lent through a contemporary lens.  Lent has a penitential, sacrificial, dark and brooding side which not all of us care to embrace; some of us prefer our preparations for listening to Jesus' final chapter to be more uplifting in the possibilities which he lived and we dream of.  Life can be a whole lot richer for all of us, and if it is to be so it seems to have something to do with the way Jesus lived and recommended.

So what keeps us from realizing and at times even recognizing what there is for us in Jesus' story, so that we will hear our own voice and live a story that creates a better one for us and others?  I am not saying some of you, maybe many of you, do not already do this - if so, good for you, keep it up and encourage others.  As for the rest of us, I wonder aloud over the next five weeks what holds us back spiritually from living into our dreams?

What holds us back from living into most anything?  Fear - unvarnished, garden variety fear is the real Satan of our lives.  It is the true adversary to spiritual awakening or advancing.  A good definition for 'fear' is "the unpleasant often strong emotion of the anticipation or awareness of danger."

It is often all that stands between us and what we hope for; fear may lack a threat ahead until our imagination creates one.  FDR said in his Inaugural Address of 1933:  " . . . the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."  Yet it is quite enough, as fear's many "faces" confront us in similar fashion to often leave us either standing still or in full retreat.

Fear is no different in the parts of our story to do with our spirits.  Fear paralyzes us to either not look into our pool of inner experience afraid of what we might see, or it blocks seeing what our pool really reflects of our inner selves or it leaves us afraid to enact through our lives what we see.  Let me elaborate a bit on each.

Fear can lead us to live at the surface of our lives and what we can see from there.  The thought of a depth to us makes us uneasy because we can't touch it, drive it, or flick through it.  We appear to live in a tangible, touchy (not touchy feely) world of visible satisfaction.  We are used to it and it makes for a comfortably deceptive place, particularly if we are not awakened to a place, a path that offers more.  We are, in the words of "Pink Floyd," comfortably numb.  I see, I hold, I use.  Repeat with everything in my life.  There really is no fulfillment, but then we have trained ourselves to hold low expectations.

It is easy to see worldly progress; the progression of Spirit is a whole lot less apparent and even has us guessing where we are much of the time.  So what if my clinging to appearances makes my life anxious, and often insecure, so what if I grasp for things I can only fool myself into believing that I possess; I am comfortably numb.

For others, however, life at the surface is unsatisfying; they know that there is more, somewhere, someplace there must be more.  This, they think, can't be all there is.  So they try to go deeper but find that fear of what they believe about themselves keeps them from seeing the true reflection of their nature.  Things have happened, or are happening, at the surface of their lives which prevent them from looking into the pool and seeing their glorious image.  Its light shines back at them from their depths but their sense of inadequacy and damaged self-perception, a "face" of fear, does not allow the light to reach their darkness.

Then there are those who venture a little further.  Who look and see, but some of the things learned at the surface keep them from taking seriously enough, or at all, the lessons of their inner selves.  So they look, see, return with the lessons but nothing happens.  Some of these "faces" of fear, e.g. prejudice are grounded in community, even institutionalized - as the song says from "South Pacific," "you've got to be carefully taught."  Other "faces" of fear are more home grown, e.g. anger and pride.  But in any case, our fear tells us that our inner lessons will make us different in a way we don't want to be known to ourselves, or want others to know us.

These are just some of the "faces" of fear, but I believe some that most profoundly keep us from self-discovery that ours are the "faces" of God.

Fear is a part of the human condition when God's presence is somewhere else.  The creation story in the Bible tells us as much.  Adam, 'adama' meaning "earth," is created out of the breath and in the image of God.  How close is that?

But then a wrong turn is taken and fear appears upon realization of Adam that he is naked.  Knowledge or awareness, the end of innocence, brings the possibility of being discovered to be unfit for Eden.  Where are those fig leaves?  Wakefulness is a blissful state but only if we embrace the presence that calls us to awaken.  Otherwise to be awake is a curse that has us scurrying to cover the exposed parts of our selves to prevent discovery.

The questions come in the wake:  Will others see through me?  Will the unfamiliar move closer to me than I feel comfortable?  Can I tame my savage ways?  Can this animal, I readily understand myself to be, really rise to something like the at-man idea, the "greater self?"  These are the questions of fear; they are spoken out of many "faces."

The wrong turn ultimately lands us outside of Eden with choices - our lot rather than blissful innocence.  We are awake; we know too much to get back in.  Now says Paul in Ephesians, we must choose.

Our choices are Adam's old pattern of living in fear of the Lord (not the respectful kind either) or a new pattern of living in trust of the Lord, as taught and lived by Jesus.  Old Adam or New Adam - Paul says you must choose and to not choose is to choose and not wisely.  Paul goes on to say that for the "new self" to arise within you or for the presence of God to get out of your depths and into your surface life, you must make the right choices.  You must turn from choices that leave you naked and looking for fig leaves toward ones that "clothe [you] with the new self," and the recognition that you were "created in the [image] of God."

Fear in its forms - clinging to that which you do not possess, the inadequacy born of not knowing who you are, the social "face" of prejudice and the personal ones of pride and anger - all must be confronted for the new being to arise from your depths.  The extent to which fear dies within your choices will determine how far you can go in your spiritual progress.

What Jesus tells us to seek, basically what we should be trying to live, is our most effective life; the life well lived will be one that brings into it and then out to others the birthright of abundance due those who know and live as though they know who they are and in what image they were created.

Jesus cautions Peter:  "Get behind me, Satan!  For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."  So are a number of the rest of us.

Next week, we will begin to consider one by one some of the "faces" of fear that confuse us and leave us without an accurate image of life at the surface.

This is how I see it on the first Sunday of Lent through a contemporary lens.  Amen.