"Living Without Fear"

As you remember, two weeks ago I began what I said would be a two-part sermon series. Two weeks ago we read the parable of the rich farmer and his bigger barns and his fate. We observed that, though he had more than he could have imagined, more than he could have hoped for, in the end he was a poor man because he had nothing to give. I recounted to you the words of Reuben Zamora, who was hosting a group from the United States in El Salvador. When they remarked how impressed they were with his hospitality, he said, "Being rich is having something to give. Many of us are still rich."

The man with the bigger barns was poor because he couldn't give. He wasn't a bad man; he wasn't an unjust man at first glance. He simply didn't think about God, or about other people, when figuring out what to do with all of his surplus.

Today I am exploring more of the themes from the twelfth chapter of Luke. As we read further in Jesus' words about birds and about flower and about not worrying, about not being anxious and not being afraid, his words get at something deeper than whether or not, or to what degree, we are possessed by our possessions. Jesus' words get at the root of it all. Jesus' words address the question of fear -- the feeling more basic than any other that forms our attitude and directs our stance toward the world: whether or not we are anxious, and how much we are anxious. Jesus opens the question of what our fears and anxieties lead us to do as we deal or choose not to deal with the rest of the world.

Jesus' words speak to the basic human anxiety of survival in the world, and the way that we perceive threats to our survival. And I think Jesus spent so much time developing this point because he knows that it is anxiety, he knows that it is fear which drives people apart. It is fear which is the greatest obstacle to the Kingdom of God. It is fear which destroys the unity for which Jesus prayed for us. It is fear which breaks apart the beloved community that we look forward to in the Kingdom of God, the beloved community about which people like Dr. King told us, and spoke about, and dreamed about, and hoped for and worked for. Not greed. Not idolatry. Not hatred -- but fear. Those other things are obstacles to unity certainly and to the Kingdom. But it is fear that is at the root of them all.

When you think about it, you know in your heart that it is love and fear, not love and hate, which are opposites. Because if you are afraid of someone, you can't love them. The scriptures tell us that perfect love casts out all fear. And if you are afraid, you do all sorts of things to try to keep yourself safe from the things that you perceive as threats that could hurt you, or take things away from you, or damage your security. If you are afraid, you will do all sorts of things to hurt other people, or the earth that God has put into our care. Hatred and idolatry and selfishness and all the rest - are simply the acting out of our fears. People who plant bombs in market places and at embassy buildings must have a tremendous amount of fear in them, that they cannot be moved by sympathy for people they would injure, when they decide to destroy in order to call attention to their concern or their cause, or to try to get their way in the world.

Henri Nouwen, in his book, Aging, has said this: "Much violence in our society is based on the illusion of immortality." What he means by that is "the illusion that life is a property to be protected or defended, and not a gift to be shared." Because if we think of life as something to be protected and defended, we will resort to all sorts of extreme measures that result from our fear that somebody might take it away from us. But if we see that this is a gift from God, given to us for the use of our community, for the building up of life, the building up of relationships, the building up ultimately of the Kingdom of God. Then we can hold our things much more loosely and be much more generous.

Because we forget that our ownership of what we think we possess is temporary. It is easy to be afraid. It is logical to be afraid. Examples and reasons to be afraid are all around us: fears that we or someone we love will be injured by a predator, that we will die in an accident or be struck down by disease or that our economic security and our future welfare will be destroyed by the vagaries of the markets or investments. And so we have the tendency to lock ourselves away, either behind physical barriers, or emotional barriers, or economic barriers that we erect between us and other people. But Jesus calls us away from the logic of fear to the logic of faith when He says, "Don't be afraid little flock. It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the Kingdom." It is yours. All these things you hold so tightly to, will one day be gone. Strive for that which endures, because God knows you need things to live, and God will provide, but seek first His Kingdom. And no matter what happens, don't be afraid.

Last Sunday evening, the last in our series of movies that address racism in our society was a movie called "The Long Walk Home." The movie is a depiction of the events of the Montgomery bus boycott, which began after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man who commanded her to stand on the bus as she was being driven across town to the house where she served as a maid. And so the organizers in the black churches asked the people just simply to stop riding the buses. "The Long Walk Home" tells the story through a look at the life of one family and their maid, whose name was Odessa, and it shows what can happen when people are afraid. It shows how threatening even this vision of a beloved community can be to people who think that they have something they need to protect. There is a scene that occurs early on in the movie that is at a Christmas dinner. The boycott has begun about two or three weeks before Christmas. The scene shows the family with a brother-in-law and grandparents all at the table and the two black maids serving the table. And the topic of the bus boycott comes up. And they talk about what it means and what it might mean to give in, and let the blacks ride anywhere they want and sit down on the bus. They don't use the words "blacks" of course, but one of the grandmothers, a very proper Southern woman but for her language to describe her dark-skinned neighbors, says, "Now you know what will happen if we give in to them; those coloreds aren't going to stop there. They are just going to want everything else too. If you give in to them, you're not even going to be able to have a dinner like this, because you'll have to have your maid sitting right here at the table with you."

"They will come from east and west, and north and south, and sit at Table in the Kingdom of God."

"Maybe in the Kingdom of God," some people might say, "but not a my table. Not in my house."

That's the fear that drove so many people who couldn't understand and couldn't accept what the struggles of the 60's in the Civil Rights days were all about. And to know how much fear still affects us, to know how far we still have to go convicts us of how much we still can and do live in fear.

African American friends of mine in Lexington tell me that in this community still they wait at counters while white people are waited on first. They are followed around by security people in department stores, as if they are more likely to steal than anybody else. We are still a long way from sitting at that table together. We are still a long way from that beloved community for which we pray, for which we hope, which we anticipate, when the Kingdom comes. It is not something we can do because it depends on God's grace and God will give it. But Jesus invites us to decide whether we want to live in that Kingdom or whether we are too afraid to want to live in that Kingdom. Jesus invites us to make decisions which are not controlled by anxiety and by fear, which do not project our fears on those who are different from us. Remember Dr. Seuss's story about the "pale green pants," who only wanted somebody to talk to and to play with.

When we listen to these words of Jesus, we should be aware that they apply especially to most of us in this room, because Jesus wasn't talking to people who were in need, who were suffering great want. He was talking to people who had plenty and who wanted more. People who were full and who were looking for more ways to accumulate the goods of the earth. And when he invites them to sell their possessions and to give alms, "Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out..." he is inviting us away from the logic of fear and into the logic of faith. He reminds us that having more things will not make us more secure, will not free us from anxiety. In fact it may be the opposite -- that having more can even cause us more anxiety because we feel a need to protect the more that we have.

Jesus calls us to a new attitude, to the attitude of faith. He invites us to hold loosely to what is temporal, so that we can cling tightly to what is eternal, to the things that do not wear out, the things that will not flee from us. He asks us to cling to the Kingdom.

And the Kingdom of Heaven is like so many things, isn't it? The scriptures tell us it is like a seed sown in a field, like yeast mixed in with flour, like a mustard seed that is tiny and grows to be a bush that can provide nests for the birds of the air. It is like an impossible debt forgiven, like a treasure hidden in a field, like a pearl of great price. It belongs to children and the child-like. It is hard for the rich to enter.

But the dominant image of the Kingdom of God that stands out for me is that of the banquet table, to which people are invited and drawn from the hedges and the highways to come and sit down and enjoy the goodness of God. It is a place where people will come from east and west and north and south as we say, when we join at the Lord's Table, when we share the sacrament of our Lord's life. The Kingdom of Heaven is a place of such abundance that no one will go hungry, that no one will be in want, no one will have to live in fear. The Kingdom of Heaven is a place of abundance, where we all receive our daily bread. The Kingdom of Heaven is where God's abundance is shared and no one is left out, where the weak and the strangers and the widow and the orphan are welcomed and cared for and their needs provided for.

You see, the logic of fear lives out of a mind set which thinks there isn't enough to go around, which believes what we have has to be carefully kept and carefully guarded. But the logic of faith acts out of a mind set which believes that in God's Kingdom there is enough for all and that what we have God has given to be shared with any and all who are in need. And Jesus invites us as citizens of this Kingdom to adopt this mind set, this mind set of abundance, to replace our mind set of scarcity. Jesus invites us to cling loosely to the things that are temporal so that we can cling tightly to things that will not be consumed or stolen.

In the Kingdom what is of ultimate value enriches the soul. And what enriches the soul is our living out of a mind set of trust in God's abundance, where no one is left out and all are included. "Within our family," said Shirley Abbott in her book, Womenfolks Growing Up Down South, "there was no such thing as a person who didn't matter. Even those shirt-tail cousins. Even second cousins thrice removed; we knew who everybody was, and even if they were black sheep, they mattered. We knew who they were. We knew where they were buried. They all mattered."

In the Kingdom it is not just family, and certainly not just the dead who matter. It is all God's children. Red and yellow, black and white, who are precious in his sight. And we are beginning to learn from some of our brothers and sisters in other nations and from other races, what it means to trust God radically and live in the hope of the Kingdom when you have nothing else to depend on. A Mayan theologian from Central America, Petal Cut Chab, was quoted in the National Catholic Reporter a few years ago. He said, "We indigenous people have a lot to offer to a world that appears to be set on its own self destruction. From the rich values of our poverty, we can offer elements of salvation to our brothers and sisters. Our experience of God strengthens our communities, but our communal experience also enriches our vision of God."

The rich values of our poverty. I think he is getting at what Jesus is expressing in his words to us. What Jesus wants us to understand, is that what really makes us rich is not the things we have, but what really makes us rich is life in the Kingdom -- sharing the values of generosity and hope and faith and love and mutual support, and of building up one another.

Alexis de Toqueville writing early in the history of our nation, said that: "Individualism is that calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; and with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself." The mind set of the Kingdom leads us away from the illusion of safety of individualism and leads us to the true safety of a life which trusts in the abundant love of God, which will provide for all our needs and join us to the lives of others.

An example of the kinds of things that we may be led to do when the values of the Kingdom begin to take root in us, is told by a man named Bill Kane in a book entitled Circles of Hope. He says, "When my wife Pat, and her friend Alice, go to Central America to work with poor women's groups there, they usually carry large bags full of donated items like school supplies, and cloth and medical supplies and other items that have been donated for them to take for their work and to share with the people that they work with. As they were leaving for one trip, the porter at the airport, who met them at the curb, looked at their bags and shook his head and he said, 'Where is all this stuff going? It's way over-weight.' But when they explained what it was for, he said, 'Come here. Come with me.' He took them to the ticket counter and spoke to a friend of his who got them through without any extra charges for over-weight bags. And when they offered him a large tip, he refused and said, 'No. I've been down there. I know what it is like. Give the money to the people there.' This airport porter may have had little education and not a glamorous job in life, but he did have a very highly developed sense of global economics. He knew that we are all part of one world family and that we have some terribly impoverished relatives."

So, says Jesus, if you are pursuing the Kingdom you won't be anxious about the rest. Well, that is easy for Jesus to say. And I don't know about you, but there is still plenty in this world about which I am anxious. My driveway, for instance. We bought a house with a crumbling driveway. And more than moss and rust are doing their work on our driveway. There is grass growing in the cracks, and pieces of asphalt wiggling around, and early this summer the whole thing took on sort of a greenish cast. It brought to mind a picture I saw long ago of an old house in the mountains somewhere, just the foundation and the chimney still standing, the rest of the house long ago fallen and rotted around it. And the caption read, "The weed will win in the end."

So I try to keep it all in perspective. Logic says that we will never be free from anxiety without something, no matter how loosely we try to hold our possessions. But the logic of faith invites us to keep things in perspective. Keep in perspective the things which one day will all slip from our grasp, which we will all leave behind, when our lives are over. To let those things take a back seat and to store up treasure in heaven. Where thieves won't steal, where moss and rust can't consume, to dream of a world without fear and loosen our grip on the things we lean on in place of God, to attend to living as citizens of that realm which Jesus tells us is coming, even now among us, that realm of which people like Dr. King told us, where little black children, and little white children will live in peace and be able to play with each other without fear, where we will live together as brothers and sisters will no longer live on opposite sides of town, separated by mistrust and anxiety, to live as citizens of that realm which is already, even now, coming into being among us, so that when that day comes, we will know how to act at the Banquet Table which is already, even now, being set and prepared for us.

Jesus' words invite us to live in the hope and preparation for that great day. I want to close with a prayer that I have heard when I have been in African American churches and at Black Church Coalition meetings here in Lexington, where people who don't have very much of the means of the earth pray this prayer, or something like it.

Let us pray.

Lord, when my life is over, don't let it be said about me that I live just for myself. But that I made this world a better place, that I helped somebody else along the way. Lord, watch over our souls this day, help us to store up treasure in heaven. And help us to live Your Word tomorrow. AMEN.