Sunday, August 11, 2019 | 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 4:00 p.m.

Discipleship in a Time of Fear

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 33:13–22
Luke 12:32–40

What Jesus is commending is faith—faith that frees one to be generous; faith that enables one to leave anxiety behind; faith that creates in one confidence about a future secured not by human endeavor or achievement but by God alone.

David Lose

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus says. “Fear not!”

“Be not afraid.” It is a refrain that we hear not only from Jesus but also from angels in the biblical text. If Jesus and the angels are saying it, it means that people around them are afraid. In today’s scripture, people are afraid of not having enough to eat, of not having a place to live, or not having things to wear. Our text today comes right after Jesus has said, “Consider the ravens,” how God has fed them; “consider the lilies,” how God has clothed them. God will give you the kingdom, Jesus says, but don’t cling to things that cannot save you. Cling to God. Cling to the Good. Make purses for yourselves that will not be destroyed by thievery or decayed by anxiety that eats at the soul.

The angels announcing Jesus’ birth and his resurrection all said, “Fear not!” They were inviting the witnesses to see God’s beauty and glory and power and not run from that.

Angels in so many biblical stories looked frightful to people, because they showed up in unexpected places like closed tombs and rural skylines. They had faces like lightning, and their voices filled the heavens with unending song.

Fear not, they said. Don’t be afraid of God’s glory and power. Don’t be afraid of the impossible becoming possible. Don’t be afraid of transformation and healing and new life. Don’t let fear separate you from all these wonderful things.

Sometimes our fear causes us to hurt other people, to lash out at them, creating more pain. Sometimes our fear causes us to be silent when we should speak, and we become collaborators with injustice, thinking that our silence will protect us.

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus says, because people are afraid. When Jesus was walking the earth in Jerusalem, people were afraid of the Roman imperial powers. They were afraid in the face of soldiers dominating them and forcing them to walk a mile carrying the soldiers’ bags. They were afraid for their survival in the midst of their deep poverty. They were afraid they would not have daily bread.

And we are afraid, too. We’re frightened by things that are happening in our world and in our country. We are frightened by some of us who feel they are superior to others of us. We are frightened in particular by white supremacists who feel they are right to bring a gun into a supermarket and begin to kill. We wonder where the next assault will be.

With every additional attack it gets harder and harder to keep paying attention and trying to figure out how to respond. Part of us wants to turn away, to get relief from the violence and the fear.

Maya Angelou, in a conversation with Bill Moyers about facing evil, once said that,

Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed pyramidic towers of evil, ofttimes in the name of good. . . .

The lists of our subversions of the good stretch from before recorded history to this moment. We drop our eyes at the mention of the bloody, torturous Inquisition. Our shoulders sag at the thoughts of African slaves lying spoon-fashion in the filthy hatches of slave-ships, and the subsequent auction blocks upon which were built great fortunes in our country.

We turn our heads in bitter shame at the remembrance of Dachau and the other gas ovens, where millions of ourselves were murdered by millions of ourselves.

That line was so striking to me. Millions of ourselves murdered by millions of ourselves. It breaks down the us–them paradigm and acknowledges our shared human identity. Angelou went on to say,

As soon as we are reminded of our actions, more often than not we spend incredible energy trying to forget what we’ve just been reminded of. (Facing Evil with Maya Angelou, BillMoyers.com; select transcriptions at www.brainpickings.org)

It’s hard to pay attention, because the violence doesn’t seem to end. John Steinbeck once said that “all the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins—it never will—but that it doesn’t die” (John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters).

It can seem overwhelming; it can seem pointless to keep hoping and working for peace and justice and love and inclusion. But on the other hand, maybe the evil thing doesn’t win because we don’t give up. Maybe we are the bearers of goodness and we are performing the heroisms that keep rising up again and again.

This week we lost the brilliant thinker, author, and artist Toni Morrison. In reflecting on the role of the artist in times of despair she once said, “I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom” (“No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” included in the 150th anniversary issue of the Nation).

What is the information in our current chaos that can lead us toward knowledge and wisdom that heals? One thing that we see very clearly is that stories of us vs. them are tearing us apart. These are reinforced by narratives of fear that cause us to become more and more isolated into separate camps of people—whether this is our separation into this political party or that political party; this racial identity or that racial identity; this gender identity or that gender identity; this religion or that religion; and so on.

If we see the segregation, the separation into us and them, can we address it?

Hannah Arendt was a Jewish German philosopher who was briefly arrested by the Nazi Gestapo in 1933 but was able to flee Germany shortly after that. She eventually settled in New York and became a well-known and respected author and philosopher.

One of the things Arendt wrote about was how isolation provides a fertile ground for terror. When we allow ourselves to be shaped by a narrative of us vs. them, we separate from each other and we become isolated from each other. We stop knowing the truth of each of our complicated, rich and beautiful identities.

In our isolation we become afraid of each other and we can be manipulated by ideologues who seek power. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are to being controlled (Hannah Arendt referencing The Origins of Totalitarianism). The more afraid we are, the greater the possibility that we will come to violence.

Perhaps this is another reason why Jesus and the angels tell us to be not afraid. They tell us to remain open, connected, to trust in God, and, importantly, to love one another.

On the night of his betrayal and arrest, Jesus gave his new commandment that we love one another. And on that night he also told his disciples, don’t be afraid.

Hannah Arendt also became known for the phrase “the banality of evil.” She wrote this as she reported on and reflected on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a war criminal of World War II. Although he played a significant role in unspeakable evil, throughout his trial he continued to insist that he was just following orders.

She reflected on how ordinary people get caught up in evil, and this led her to change how she thought about and talked about evil. Earlier she had referred to radical evil, radical in the sense of being deeply rooted evil.

But in a letter to a friend in 1964 she wrote, “It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ‘thought-defying,’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality.’ Only the good has depth that can be radical.”

I found this compelling in thinking about how evil can spread through a society of good people who aren’t paying attention or who aren’t remaining active. Like a fungus it only has to skim the surface, and it doesn’t make any sense.

It is “thought-defying,” as Arendt said. It is baffling and frustrating, and we can waste a lot of time trying to “understand” it and answer the question “How can this be happening?”

If we get stuck spinning in this question, or if we get stuck in the pattern of averting our eyes, as Maya Angelou described, then we fall into inaction and unresponsiveness.

In our scripture today Jesus speaks of readiness for the return of the master to the house. Discipleship calls for active and proactive responsiveness to a situation. It calls for preparation.

Jesus told his disciples, sell your possessions and give alms. Make yourself ready to receive God. “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.” In other words, stay awake. If you do this, when the master of the house returns, the master will serve the servants.

This flipping of roles, turning things upside down, is quintessential Jesus. The almsgiving Jesus describes doesn’t just provide some daily bread to those who were poorer than those giving the alms. This almsgiving led to changing social roles, mutuality, and shared power—a master who served the servants.
In addition to readiness and preparation, discipleship also has an element of fear in it, because we are called to confront fearful things and to be strong in the face of despair. We are called to not give in to malevolence, to not become that which we fear, and to persevere in the face of evil that does not die but does get pushed back.

Discipleship also gives us treasure that cannot be taken from us. We have the treasure of Jesus Christ and a God who does not die either. We have the treasure of God’s steadfast love that has endured from generation to generation.

With proactive preparation, pushing through our fears, and receiving the treasure that is God’s love through Christ, we are disciples of Jesus in our context. With the news reports that we get, with the people in our families, with the events unfolding in our city, our country, our time, we keep resisting the malevolence, we keep reshaping the narrative to challenge isolation and to shore up our human connection. We do it while leaning on the grace of God.

In the same essay I quoted earlier Toni Morrison also said, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

Toni Morrison was an artist, but she also invited everyone to find the creative parts of themselves as well. Fifteen years ago, in 2004, Morrison gave the commencement speech at Wellesley College.

She spoke about how each person has the power to make a difference in the world. It is in alignment with Jesus telling his disciples to sell their possessions, give alms, rely on God’s grace, and be ready and proactive in the world. But she spoke of the artistry of it. She said,

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth. What it feels like to be human without domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of others unlike you, without rotating, rehearsing, and reinventing the hatreds you learned [as a child] in the sandbox. . . .

Being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who you are and what you mean. But then, I am a teller of stories and therefore an optimist, a believer in the ethical bend of the human heart, a believer in the mind’s disgust with fraud and its appetite for truth, a believer in the ferocity of beauty. So, from my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art. (Toni Morrison, 2004 Wellesley Commencement)

This week I have been taking a deep dive into the work of artists, especially authors and poets, because they do help us to direct our thoughts, imagine, and visualize, shape, and reshape our world. Audre Lorde is another great inspiration, who said famously, “Your silence will not protect you.”

And so, speak. Tell your story. Make it art.

I will close with the inspiring words of another poet, Dawna Markova, who wrote:

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom
goes on as fruit.

(Dawna Markova, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life: Reclaiming Purpose and Passion)

May we each receive the seed of God’s grace, may it blossom in us, and may we share the fruits of it with all the world. Amen.