Sermon: Fear Not

A sermon based on Luke 12:32-40

More than 4,000 years ago, a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Sixth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom in Egypt named Nefer-seshem-Ptah, perhaps his friends called him Nef, was dying.  He was worried about what people would think about him after he died, so he had the following inscription written on the wall of his tomb:

I gave bread to the hungry, clothes to the naked,

I landed one who was stranded,

I buried him who lacked a son,

I made a boat for the boatless,

And supported the orphan.

I never spoke evil against anyone to a potentate.

Remember, now, this was more than 2,000 years before Jesus, and yet this tomb inscription may sound familiar to those who have read the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.  Feeding the hungry and clothing the naked are two of the six ways of getting into heaven (giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick, and visiting the prisoner are the other four).  Nefer-seshem-Ptah added his own additional examples of vulnerability that might not make sense to those of us who do not live in a land prone to flooding as the Nile delta has always been.  But we have seen enough video of massive floods in recent years to know how important it is to rescue those who are stranded by high water.  And it does not take much imagination to figure out how scary the prospect of dying with no one to care for your body could be or how frightening it could be to live as an orphan with no family to support you.  Nef wanted to make sure after he died that these were the ways he would be remembered.  Imagine that, a political leader who thought the best way establish a legacy is to care for the most vulnerable in society.

Having titled this sermon “Fear Not” I want to start with a bit of a bait and switch and consider the things that make perfect sense to fear.  Being fearful of not being able to pay for your basic needs such as food, housing, and health care makes complete sense.  Being fearful of not being able to care for those most important to you makes complete sense.  But now remember that even 4,000 years ago, political leaders thought that their lives should be defined by trying to decrease these fears.  One very straightforward way to think about what justice looks like is eliminating the reality of these fears in our country and communities.  These fearful realities represent places where our communities have experienced disruptions that break an order that otherwise should exist; an order that would allow everyone to live without these fears.  Thus, a first meaning of “fear not” becomes a political demand.  Rather than leaving these problems to high-ranking bureaucrats and potentates, we the people of God are called to make them our problems.  Creating a world where people do not have very good reason to be fearful becomes our way of making the world that God wants a reality here on earth.

Now let’s look at today’s scripture.  There are two important injunctions.  First, do not be afraid.  Second, be ready, because the Son of Man will be coming at an unexpected hour.  We need to dispatch with this second one first.  Jesus, along with Paul, was almost certainly an apocalyptic preacher.  His understanding of God and the world was defined by a belief that God’s intervention in the world, an intervention that would turn everything upside down such that the first would be last and the last would be first, was coming very soon.  We know that Paul shared this conviction because the earliest problem that he is forced to confront in the congregation he founded in Thessalonica was that members of the congregation were dying and Jesus had not yet returned.  Clearly, this could only be a problem if someone had told them that Jesus would be coming back VERY soon, like before anyone died soon.  Who told them this?  Paul did.  So, both Jesus and Paul define the course of action that people should take in their lives within the context of a central conviction that God would be changing everything very soon.  In such a context, it makes perfect sense to sell everything you own, to not get married, and to forget about worldly concerns.  But those of use reading these words attributed to Jesus and written by Paul are left to confront a big problem: the Son of Man never came (at least not the one Jesus was talking about), and Jesus never returned.  How, if at all, should this basic fact change how we think about Jesus or Paul?  How should the instructions for life change when we move from an apocalyptic worldview to a non-apocalyptic one?  The churches have been struggling with this for 2,000 years.  I have no intention of trying to resolve this problem today.

However, the first injunction – “Do not be afraid” – even though it is spoken within the context of the immanent arrival of God’s kingdom, is one that might still reveal important dimensions for a life of faith even it we have no apocalyptic expectations.  In an effort to explore these dimensions of faith, I want to consider three fears that I suggest we should NOT have: 1) fear of missing out, known by younger folk as FOMO; 2) fear of our insignificance; and 3) fear of death.  What insights does our faith reveal that can help us avoid these fears?  Here’s the short version: the first two fears, FOMO and a fear of insignificance come from failing to appreciate that being loved by God and being able to love our neighbor is literally ALL we need.  Everything else is just icing on the cake.  Chasing worldly goods as if their possession is essential to our significance or doubting that we already have great significance simply because of who we are represent failures to truly live a life of faith in God.  The third fear, fear of death, reflects an overestimation of our significance.  We are not owed eternal life and God’s creation will endure without us.  Our task is to live in gratitude for the life we have now and to help others do the same.

So, first, let’s consider the fear of missing out.  I have become aware in recent weeks of a new “must have” item: the Labubu. At least for a certain segment of the population, having one of these small stuffed critters clipped to your backpack, purse, or whatever, is a clear sign that you are among those who are in the know, those who are with it.  Don’t ask me how possessing a Labubu does this, I find the whole thing baffling, but a quick look inside numerous stores at the mall makes clear that Labubus are the latest must have item.

Any time an item or an experience becomes “must have” we are clearly in the FOMO zone.  We must have some thing or some experience or our life will somehow, someway mysteriously determined by who knows who, become less important than it could be.  FOMO allows the fear mongers of culture to decide what we must pursue if we are going to be important.  FOMO is one of the many fears that follow directly from the second fear I want to discuss: fear of our insignificance.  We only fear missing out on something because we think that if we succeed in obtaining that thing or experience then we will, however briefly, become an important person.  Yet, if we can somehow overcome the fear that we are currently insignificant, that we are currently somehow not good enough, FOMO loses much of its grip on us.  When we refuse to let the wider culture set the terms by which our importance is measured, Labubus become enjoyable novelties, but not must have items.  We no longer fear missing out on them or anything else.

One of the most difficult lessons to learn in life is that we each get to decide what makes us happy.  There is a very good reason why this lesson is difficult to learn.  Basically, since the day we are born, people tell us how to live.  Our parents, our friends, our churches, our culture all decide what we should be doing with ourselves.  As a result, it becomes next to impossible NOT to look at ourselves through these lenses.  With all of these claims about how we should live, too often, we decide that we do not measure up.  At the very least, we notice that many other people seem to be measuring up better than we are.  We find ourselves feeling “less than” and just not good enough.  Soon we might start getting angry.  Soon we might even start hating ourselves or others.

If ever there was an original sin, it was the creation of social hierarchies.  A social hierarchy judges the importance of a person by where they fall on the hierarchy.  We know some of the classic expressions of such hierarchies: men are superior to women, people with one skin color are superior to people with all other skin colors, people with certain characteristics such as education, wealth, occupation, or sexual orientation are somehow higher up the hierarchical ladder than those who lack these things.  Religions have played essential roles in the creation and defense of these hierarchies.  Religious leaders insist that these hierarchies reflect God’s will.  Don’t get mad at us, the men say to the women.  God just decided that we are the ones who are supposed to be in charge.  Belief in these hierarchies is surprisingly persistent.  Only two days ago, the Secretary of Defense reposted videos from Christian Nationalist pastors who are trying to bring back the submission of women to men, asserting among other things that women should no longer be allowed to vote!

Well, I have some good news for you.  In the words of Colonel Potter from the TV show M*A*S*H, all these hierarchies, and I mean all of them, are horse hockey, mule muffins, or buffalo chips.  You get the idea.  They are all BS, every last one of them.  I want you to know that one of two things is true.  Either life is meaningless and we are cast upon a void empty of all goodness or badness, or, and I think this is far more likely, we are held every moment in our lives in the arms of a God who loves us unconditionally.  Either way, all of those hierarchies are exposed for what they are: absolutely made-up ways for one group to dominate other groups.

Don’t worry though.  I am pretty sure that the world is NOT pointless.  Certainly, Christians have insisted that it is not pointless.  However, Christians also have historically been and remain to this day some of the worst perpetrators of social hierarchical thinking.  Whether the issue is gender, sexuality, race, or even mere belief, Christians not only clearly affirm that some humans are more important than others, but they also insist that God is the true architect behind these hierarchies.  So how do we as Christians deny the pointlessness of existence without falling into all the hierarchical traps that our religious forebears and religious contemporaries have left for us?

We can start by looking at what the scriptures tell us about Jesus.  Jesus made it a habit of hanging out with people who were very low, and sometimes at the very bottom, of the religious and social hierarchies of his day.  He hung out with the sick, and not just cold or flu sick, but leprosy sick.  He hung out with those who were sick in such a way that they had been ostracized from the community.  He hung out with sinners, people who had been defined by their perceived failures.  Perhaps most shockingly of all, he hung out with women…yes, women.  In defiance of both religious and social convention, it seems that women were welcome in the circle of Jesus’s followers.  To be sure, they did not make into the 12 apostles, if the 12 ever really existed, but it is clear that there was an assumption that women were an important part of the original Jesus movement, so much so that later Christian leaders had to explicitly reject this assumption in order to make Christianity more appealing to those who lived by the accepted social hierarchy that affirmed the subordination of women.  The rejection of women in Christian leadership was only one of the first of what would prove to many of the ways that Christianity would sell out to the wider culture in exchange for cultural acceptance.  Christianity has repeatedly decided to try to climb social hierarchies to achieve importance.

In addition to the repeated focus by Jesus on those at the bottom of the hierarchy, we find scripture repeating over and over that God has a special concern for the poor and vulnerable in society.  It’s not that God does not care for those who are not poor and vulnerable.  I do not think God hates the rich and famous per se.  However, as I have mentioned many times before, God gets downright apoplectic when the rich and famous, the “elders and princes of the people,” use their status to become even more rich and famous at the expense of the poor.  When people use their high place on the social hierarchy to exploit those on lower rungs, perhaps by funding tax cuts for the wealthy by taking healthcare away from the poor, God loses God’s mind.  As the prophet Isaiah declares, “The LORD enters into judgement with elders and princes of his people.  It is you who have devoured the vineyard.  The spoil of the poor is in your houses” (3:14).  What should belong to the poor, the rich have taken for themselves.

Jesus and the prophets directly challenged social hierarchies, and we should, too.  Why should we?  Because we believe and proclaim that God does not play favorites.  More than anything else, we believe and proclaim that the greatest gift possible that God has given to us is our own lives.  Not a life that must be lived this way or that way.  Not a life that must just suck it up and get used to being lower on God’s hierarchy than others.  No such divinely ordained hierarchy exists.  God has given us life to live and the best way to live that life is to decide for ourselves how we want to live it.  Otherwise, we are living someone else’s version of our life rather than our own.  No one can tell you that you are living your life the wrong way, at least so long as you are not harming others in the process.  The best way to say thank you to God for the gift of life is truly to make your life your own.

Now, let me be clear.  Believing that we each get to decide how we want to live our lives is not a recipe for automatic happiness.  Most of us will still need to work, and that means we need to do what our bosses expect of us.  Many of us will pursue goals that are difficult, and we will often fail in those pursuits.  But while bosses can fire us and we can fail in the pursuit of our goals, we remain the measure of our own lives.  We can find new jobs and new goals.  We can enjoy that many wonders that are around us every day.  We can come to Christian Temple and meet wonderful people and hear beautiful music.

So, fear not.  You are not insignificant.  You are a child of God who has been given a wonderful gift, a life to lead as you think best.  Do not let the false measures of culture and society bring you down.  Do not let those around you bring you down.  Do not let your family bring you down.  Do not let your church bring you down.  You are so beautiful and wonderful already that I sometimes go bananas just thinking about it and find it hard to contain myself.

So let’s conclude, appropriately I suppose, with the last of the three fears: the fear of death.  Here, again, we could begin by interrogating our own religious tradition.  Christian churches have for two thousand years bribed their followers by dangling the promise of eternal life before them and they have threatened their followers with the possibility of eternal damnation, as well.  In the process, Christianity has become more about gate-keeping the afterlife than about transforming lives in this world.  What we might call a Christianity of fear rather than of love has come to dominate many minds, many homes, and many communities.  Christians have become much better at scaring than at caring.

Just like the many social hierarchies that try to judge us, this fear of the afterlife is completely bogus.  Hell does not even exist in the Bible.  If you don’t believe me, read Bart Ehrman’s book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, or the chapter on Hell in Dan McClellan’s book The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) about Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. Heaven might exist, but whether or not it does, I know two things.  First, I am already cradled in God’s arms every moment of my life.  I do not need to die in order for that to happen.  Second, a gift that does not last forever is no less of a gift.  Let me repeat those.  You and I are already with God.  We live sinfully and stupidly when we fail to understand this.  It is not the case that God is “up there” and we are “down here.”  God is here right now.  If heaven is a place where we are with God, then we are there already.  Second, I am not owed eternal life.  I am grateful for the gift of life that I have already.  When was the last time you gave someone a gift that lasted forever?  Was it any less of a gift simply because it was not everlasting?

But, Joe, you might object, I don’t think you are fully grasping the dread that people feel when considering the prospect of dying, and I certainly don’t think you are grasping the fear that some have when they are close to death.  Let me be honest.  You are probably right to bring such objections.  I do not grasp the fear of death, but I have recently been with a colleague who would die about two hours after I last saw him.  I walked away from that experience struck by the Buddhist, and especially Tibetan, conviction that we should practice dying so that we are less fearful and panicked when our own death is near.

How, you might rightly wonder, does one practice dying?  Well, among the Buddhist techniques is visualizing your own corpse on top of a pile of rotting corpses, but that seems rather extreme for spiritual beginners such as you and me.  So, I will close with two suggestions for how we might practice dying to reduce our own fear of death.

First, try to notice as often as possible how true it is that we do not need tomorrow to enjoy today.  Although it is certainly by now cliché, the present moment is really all that we need.  The more that we come to realize this, the less we should be inclined to panic at the prospect of having few tomorrows left to live.  Notice the irony here.  The best way to practice dying is to learn how to live well.

Second, understand that our life only exists in relation to God’s creation and especially in relation to our fellow human beings.  We are nothing without these relations.  What can we learn from this?  Although each one of us is loved by God, we are not the point of all of this.  The story of God’s creation is not about us and God’s creation will endure without us.  As far as God is concerned, we are both everything and nothing at the same time.  This empowers us to do two things.  First, we can let go of the need to be important, the need to believe that somehow it is necessary for us to continue.  Second, we can recognize that there is nothing better for us to do than to use the time we have left to immerse ourselves in God’s creation and to care for each other.  Once again, then, we practice dying by getting better at living.

So, fear not.  The fearmongers within our culture and our churches have no idea what they are talking about.  They are idiots.  As for your own importance, you, along with the rest of us are either pointless meat, or you are children of God.  I am confident that you are the latter.  Either way, your importance is out of your hands.  You have nothing to do with it.  Relax.  And as for death, we can either face that final fear having never figured out how to live and suddenly panic at the prospect of no longer living, or we can learn to live well and be at peace when the gift of our life comes to an end.  Again, fear not.  Commit to living well and leave this church today at peace.