The Readings:

Psalm 46
Matthew 8: 23-27

One of the complications of planning worship is that sometimes the really good idea hits after the bulletin is already printed. Today’s sermon title, for instance, that I didn’t think of in time so I’ll tell you now could be “The Four Letter F Word.” If you’ve been here other recent weeks you know I’ve been on a kick with four letter words. So I thought I’d worked up to the ultimate four letter word . . the F word even. The F word that appears excessively in both the old and new testaments and that may be the oldest and strongest human emotion. . . Fear.

Fear in real excess is known as ‘phobia’ and I was fascinated to learn this week that there are 530 phobias with listings in reference books or medical papers. Many phobias are the familiar ones to human experience: snakes, spiders, social situations and multiple variations on fear of illness and of sex and of body parts related to sex and to the opposite sex. . ..

But did you know that there is such a thing as Aulophobia- Fear of flutes ?
Porphyrophobia- Fear of the color purple (why particularly the color purple?)
Octophobia - Fear of the figure 8 (why particularly the number 8?)
There are also documented phobias for fear of garlic, fear of belly buttons, fear of clowns, fear of looking up, and fear of being infested by worms. Well ‘duh’ on that last one.
And here’s a good one: Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia: Fear of long words.
The fact that today’s service is featuring leadership by our youth may be problematic for any of you with Ephebiphobia- Fear of teenagers. And if you also have Homilophobia- fear of sermons, you are particularly uncomfortable right now . . though on second thought, those folks probably wouldn’t be in church to begin with. Finally there is: Phobophobia- Fear of phobias. Or the generous catch-all: Pantophobia- Fear of everything.

I like how Dave Barry captures the common human condition of fear:
"All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears--of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, or speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words "Some Assembly Required."

Phobias . . are debilitating levels of fear . .. I do not mean to discount them. They are completely and paralyzingly real. . . .but this sermon is not a journey into the psychology of dealing with the extreme anxiety produced by fear which thankfully is well advanced. No, I’m interested today in the fear that is so pervasive and unexamined in all of us that we don’t even recognize its very power in out lives.

The most pervasive fear we all share, according to Ernest Becker is our fear of death. In 1974 Becker’s book, The Denial of Death earned a Pulitzer Prize. The basic premise of his work in is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality. We spend our lives trying to create something that will outlast us. Most of us would readily admit to a fear of death. Its close cousins are fear of illness and fear of aging. (As an aside on this Sunday with leadership from our youth, I do find it ironic that while we are a youth-worshipping culture, it is only in a physical sense and we do too little to actually listen to, include, and empower our youth.)

Fear is not limited to our ultimate outcome. Fear shapes the very way we live. Fear determines our social systems. It is usually in our families or early social groups we learn to fear those different from us. . . different skin color, different religion, different sexual orientation, different politics . .. and these fears are reinforced by the separateness of our living. As globalization races forward and our abilities to stay cocooned with our own kind is threatened, our fears are heightened and they feed the growing swells of fundamentalism and terrorism.

Our national politics are driven by fear. Walked through an airport lately? It is an assault of fear: color-coded charts tell you the current level of threat while broadcast messages tell you to watch your bags! and report suspicious behavior. And of course there’s the rigamarole of taking your shoes off and on and measuring your level of bottled liquids. The national policy of fear was not created by 9/11. .. some of us are old enough to remember practicing air-raid procedures at school and when putting a fall-out shelter in the family home was the thing to do. General Douglas MacArthur said, “The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear; keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded.”

As a good Baptist girl raised in the south my greatest teacher of fear was my religion. Fear of my own sinful self and of going to hell kept me pretty busy as a child. Of course there was also the fear of the ultimate destiny for those idol-worshipping non-Christians of the world who it was my duty to ‘save.’ In such a religious system as this, the very being of God is to be feared. Get that kind of religious fear combined with fear-based politics, and what a mess. The Master called Fear has led us into needless wars and multiplied our enemies.

Our culture is driven by fear. . . fear of not fitting in, fear of being left out or left behind. ‘Left behind’ is what will happen to the non-believers according to certain evangelists, and we’ve even taken that phrase into our social services with ‘No child left behind.”

The Bible has a LOT to say about Fear. I have always been a bit amused by how often the word appears in the Bible. I love the multiple scenes of angels appearing and proclaiming ‘Fear not!’ Jesus says it over and over. Apparently those folks of two thousand years ago were just as fearful as we are . . . and perhaps the sudden appearance of an angel or some of the antics of Jesus were enough out of the ordinary to strike some justifiable fear. And anyway we’d much rather live with our known fears than have them interrupted by the appearance of new ways of thinking, even if they might show us the way out of our dark corners. And that, I would argue, was what Jesus was about. . . . teaching us new ways of thinking, the path to live without fear. I’m not speaking of an irrational denial of true danger; you won’t find me arguing for snake-handling as a way to deny fear or prove my faith. The fears that Jesus invites us to give up are far more difficult to face than a pile of copperheads.

The fear that Jesus most often addressed is, I believe, also the fear that goes most unexamined in our lives and the fear that paralyzes our very living. Teenagers are usually the ones most in touch with this fear. The problem is that rather than help them face this stage of life face and deal with the fear . .. . we help them drive it under the surface and becomes our back-seat driver for most of us for the rest of our lives.

The fear I’m talking about is the fear of our own potential.

There are two New Testament scenes in the book of Matthew where the disciples of Jesus are in stormy situations and fear is the theme. Both stories have them in boats at sea. One of these you already heard read this morning. The disciples are at sea when a big storm comes up and they are all frantically on deck fearing for their lives. And where is Jesus? Sound asleep down below. This storm, be it literal or figurative, it struck true fear in the hearts of the disciples, but not Jesus. . and after they prod him awake, a bit indignant that he would be so calm as to sleep, for heavens’ sake, through such an event. .. Jesus calms the storm.

The second story again has the disciples in a boat when again a vicious storm arises and again they are huddled and fearing for their lives. This time Jesus is not on board, and this time they do not have to go find him, but he comes to them . . and he is walking across the waves walking on the very object of their fears. Peter, amazed and inspired, climbs over the side of the boat and steps out on the waves with Jesus. . .and it works for him. For a brief bit of time, he ventures out in denial of his fear and he too walks across the storm. But then, he looks down, he takes his eyes off the horizon, he loses his eye-contact with Jesus, and looks instead at the object of his fears, and he loses it altogether . . . .and down he goes.

We can get all distracted by the questions of Jesus’ power over nature in each of these scenes, but I would argue that the point of the stories, and perhaps the bigger storm to subdue in each story was not the external storm but the internal storms, the fear, inside the disciples. I would argue that these are stories about Jesus trying to teach his boys about moving beyond their fears, about living their potential.
Where is your faith? Jesus asks them.
Fear stifles faith and faith that is alive is action.

What we fear most is our own power, for to claim it is to take responsibility for our own lives. To step out onto the waves is to go to unknown places and so we choose to huddle in the corners of our known fears.

Our personal fears become our public fears. We collect and institutionalize and hide behind them. We make excuses and look down at the waves and see the difficulties and we go under. ‘We can’t really fix the health care crisis.’ ‘We can’t risk peace’ and so we rage war. We are overwhelmed and we become our fears.
We fear war, we become warmongers.
We fear there is not enough and we become self-centered.
We fear our potential and so we create personal dramas and petty distractions to keep us from living boldly.

Marianne Williamson says it best:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Martin Luther King certainly felt the fear. In the dark night in his kitchen he writes about, he saw the potential of danger in what he was undertaking. It was reminiscent of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemene. But as he was liberated from his fear, his presence liberated others. Where would we be now had he chosen to give into his fear? Yes, his fears were real and yes, he did ultimately die but more importantly, he dared to live. Which do we choose. . .to do as my friend Mark says, die by the Jim Jones kool-aid we passively accept from others who keep us in fear, or die like Socrates by the hemlock, in defiance of having others determine our direction.

What are we going to do, with all our power? Playing small does not serve the world.

The title to this sermon that did make it into the bulletin is “Finding Sanctuary.” It was inspired by spending time with our youth in planning today’s service and the song they selected for our call to worship. It is called Sanctuary. Sanctuary is one of those religious words we have heard so many times that we have become numb to it and rarely stop to think what it really means. We generally use it to name the spaces in our churches or temples where we gather for worship. In the 1980s the word took on a powerful new meaning when The Sanctuary Movement was the name given to a religious and political movement of created to offer sanctuary, or faith-based protection, from the political violence that was taking place in El Salvador and Guatemala. The roots of the movement were from the right of sanctuary in medieval law. Sanctuary was the right to be safe from arrest in the sanctuary of a church or temple.

What struck me in hearing the song that we have sung today, is that it is about internalizing this idea of an external safe place. . . of cultivating peace spaces within our souls, shaping our spirits as places where fear is not allowed. Fear has no passport into Sanctuary. When we create sanctuary in our own souls, when we dare to cast our fear, we not only live more fully but our potential to create change in these systems in which we live is immeasurable.

There is a Cherokee Legend, already familiar to many of you, which tells this truth so very well:

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside each of us," he said to the boy.

"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

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My thanks and acknowledgement to my friend Marc Mullinax for spirited discussion over coffee which helped crystallize this sermon. Also for resources shared by Marc from his own preaching & teaching, Mark is s a professor of religion at Mars Hill. Thanks also to the youth of UPUCC and to Joi Williams for their time in reflection with me on the subject of ‘fear.’ Thanks especially to Anna MeKeown for her writings which led our prayers and which so enriched our worship service.