No Fear
A sermon delivered at Heritage Baptist Church, Wake Forest, NC on July 31, 2016
About
twenty years ago, I heard a sermon on the passage I am preaching about today. I
knew this passage because verse 7 was one of the first lines I’d ever
memorized: Let us love one another, because love is from God. It was in
needlepoint and hanging on my mom and dad’s bedroom wall—it still is, too. But that sermon I heard one day when I was
driving from Raleigh to Forest City or vice versa was the first I’d ever
encountered the phrase “Perfect love casts out fear.” It seems to be an odd
thing here in the midst of talking about love, God’s love, that fear should
enter the picture at all.
Fear
is something that is common to each of us. In fact, some fears are so great
that we have to dig into the Greek and call them phobias. If you go to the
website, phobialist.com, you can see hundreds of phobias—real fears.
Barophobia- Fear of gravity
Cathisophobia- Fear of sitting
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia- Fear of long words
Homilophobia- Fear of sermons
These aren’t small terrors—they are fears that debilitate. I
thought I had a fear of heights, but it isn’t a phobia. When I was in Petra in
Jordan in 2001, I was walking with a couple of friends to a place called the
monastery. To get there you have to walk along a ledge that is probably 15 feet
wide, but has a hundred foot drop off on the left. And in Jordan, they aren’t
worried about putting up rails like in the US. My friend Heather could not get
close to that pathway. She folded up and would not move. We had to leave her to
wait. And I’d always thought I was scared of heights.
Phobias are psychological. But there are many more fears that we
each have at some point in our lives. As babies we are afraid when we can’t
find our parents—who are probably in the next room. As children we fear the
dark or thunderstorms or monsters under the bed. Will we make friends at the
new school? Will I be able to find all my classes? Will I get teased? Will I
say the right thing? What was that scary sound outside my window? I’d better
work on this paper or I’ll get a bad grade. Will my roommate be normal? Do I
have enough money this month? Those are all pretty personal.
There is another list that reads: ISIS, the economy, terrorism,
Zika Virus, failing
schools, global warming, and shark attacks. These fears get the news coverage
and if we weren’t afraid before, then we are now. Fears in the media can create
panic, hysteria. Those fears can make us feel hopeless and defeated and scared
to step outside our door into the world. The media doesn’t help. According to
psychologists:
“Watching
the news can be a psychologically risky pursuit, which could undermine your
mental and physical health. Fear-based news stories prey on the anxieties we
all have and then hold us hostage. Being glued to the television, reading the
paper or surfing the Internet increases ratings and market shares - but it
also raises the probability of depression relapse.”[1]
“There
is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with
punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”
Fear
and punishment. Not a deserved punishment necessarily, but something that is
going to be bad if the fear isn’t overcome. You see the Syrians escaping from
the cities they know and fleeing into refugee camps. I mean, look at the
pictures of those cities like Homs. Those were modern, cosmopolitan cities.
They worked in offices, had their coffee every morning. Their kids went to
school, took dance lessons, played video games. The streets were safe, until
war came. And fear drove them out. Stay and be killed or live in a tent in a
land far away.
In
our own country, a policeman pulls over a woman. Asks her if she knows why he
stopped her. The look of fear on her face even though it is only to offer her
an ice cream cone. She didn’t know that though. The fear and terror that I see
is a look that suspects the worst and never dreams that it is going to turn out
the way it does.
A
girl locks herself away for years so that she won’t harm her sister with her
power to freeze things. After the secret is out, the younger one is confident
that they don’t have to live in fear, that love can be the answer. And it is in
the end—the love between the sisters can break the spell and save the town.
Yeah, that was from Frozen, but we
like our movies to have that element of love—a love that is going to save us
all. It must have been on the mind of our letter writer in our Scripture
passage as well. “Perfect love casts out fear.”
One
more story though: A boy is 8 years old when he and his sister are brought to
the United States by their mother and father. They overstay their visas and
live under the radar. The parents work. The boy keeps his sister quiet after
school and out of sight of the neighbors. Even as he grows into his teenage
years, there is a signal that his parents work out to warn him that they have
been taken by immigration officials. He lives in fear, every day, that their
lives in this country will be turned upside down. Yet to go back to his
country, a place where he does not even understand the language, where martial
law is in place, is an unthinkable fear far greater than the daily one he
faces. When the boy is grown, he falls in love and at some point has to tell
his girlfriend that he is undocumented, illegal. But that girl knows that their
true citizenship is in heaven and it doesn’t matter to her either—cause she is
in love with him, too. In their first year of marriage, she applies to get him
permanent resident status. She also hears a sermon on the radio that is the
first time she has ever encountered “perfect love casts out fear.” She takes
his wedding band and has the words engraved because it is true.
Now
the words actually say, “Love casts out all fear” because that girl was
theologically smart enough to know that perfect
is something only God can do.
That’s
the key, isn’t it? We can’t ever create a perfect love ourselves. In our
relationships, there is always some hurt, some disappointment, some betrayals
that keep love from being perfect. Perfect love isn’t something that we as
humans can do ourselves. Only one human ever had perfect love, and he was
divine as well as human—which is the only way that Jesus could ever have
perfect love: a perfect love for those children, those misguided disciples,
that woman who was an outcast, the Pharisees that wanted to entrap, the Roman
soldier who came to arrest, his own murderers shouting “Crucify Him!” And
through it all, perfect love was all that Jesus ever showed us. Jesus is our
perfect picture of love.
When
this letter of First John was written, Christians had not yet been under
persecution. It was coming in the next decade or so, but the tiny little sect
of Christians were still under the radar of the powers that be. The writer of
this epistle really wants to have those early Christians understand the nature
of God’s love. And it was a foreign concept to the early converts around
Ephesus—the place that most scholars believe this letter was intended to be
read. Ephesus has a Greek culture—as most places in the “known” world of that
time. The religion was based on the Greek gods and later the Roman variations
of those gods. Greek mythology was lacking an understanding of a deity that
loved humanity. Sure the Greek gods interacted with humans in the stories, but it
was for short-lived affairs and nearly always went on to explain how something
in the world worked—which is the point of a mythology.
The
culture in the first century was new to the concept of one Supreme Being who
loved humanity. Even the hints that are in the monotheistic Jewish religion
still were developing a God who loves. Christianity pushed that idea into the
forefront primarily with those stories of Jesus—both divine and human—who loved
everyone he met. Jesus is the model for those early Christians in how to act
toward their neighbors. Jesus is the model in dealing with enemies and friends.
Jesus is the model for when we are content and agitated, happy and sad, calm
and fearful. The stories of how Jesus was calm in the Garden of Gethsemene at
his arrest. How Jesus was silent before Pilate. How Jesus went to his death at
Golgotha. The divinity of Jesus lets us know that sure he must have known the
outcome. But Jesus was human as well. And we know Jesus felt the range of
emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear. Yet Jesus’ death was one where we
can see perfect love in action.
Jesus
has been our model throughout the years. As the persecutions of Christians
began in the decades after our text was written, there are stories after
stories about Christians going to their deaths yet they are elevated to
sainthood because they didn’t show fear. Later, during reformation, the
Anabaptists were tortured and burned in much the same ways. Yet they all seem
to go to their martyrdom willingly.
We
are not being called to lay down our lives here in this country where we have
free worship of God. But we are still called to be like Jesus. To create
relationships with others. To love our neighbors—indeed everyone—and offer them
respect and understanding and compassion and justice and mercy—just as we have
been offered by God. It sometimes takes a lot of work to see past our
prejudices and the stigmas we attach to certain situations. We cannot
automatically think terrorists when we see a woman in a hijab. We cannot automatically
think thug when we see an African-American boy walking down the street. We
cannot automatically think loser when we see the homeless man with a sign at
the intersection. We cannot automatically think pervert when we see two people
of the same gender holding hands in public. Terrorist, thug, loser, pervert are
not in Jesus’ vocabulary; and Jesus is not fearful of the people he encounters
on our streets today. Our call is to get to know our neighbor: to see their
humanity, to understand their situations, to have relationship with one
another. That is the job of love.
Perfect
love is what connects us to God. Our imperfect love is what connects us to one
another.
In
the 1960s, there was a song, most popularly sung by Dionne Warwick, that says:
What the world needs now is love sweet love,
It's the only thing that there's just too little of.
What the world needs now is love sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone.
It's the only thing that there's just too little of.
What the world needs now is love sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone.
I
happen to be a big fan of music from the 1960s. And it seems like this world is
in the same kind of chaos that it was in those 50 years ago. No matter how this
decade, or even this year, is going to end; we still need love to overcome
fear. Love to cast out all fear. For Perfect love to cast out fear. We here in
this place know the secret is holding fast to the love of God and following the
example of Jesus’ life. It is our call to live out loud in full knowledge of
that Love.
There
is no fear in God. Fear and the realm of God are complete opposites. Our hard work
is to stay hopeful. To keep setting aside the unnecessary fear, taking a
deep breath, and returning ourselves to peace, patience, and an open mind.
This day, may grace keep opening our ears to each other, and making us deaf to stirred up fear. May hope keep our hearts alive, to God and each other. May love keep us attentive to the realm of God among us.
Let
us pray:
God, builder of new connections and unseen gifts,
teach our hearts to respond more deeply
to your purposes, we pray.
Make us calm before the voices of anxiety, panic and rage.
Settle your Spirit to brood within us and among us,
forming us in wisdom and compassion,
immune to false fears and alert to grace. Amen.[2]
God, builder of new connections and unseen gifts,
teach our hearts to respond more deeply
to your purposes, we pray.
Make us calm before the voices of anxiety, panic and rage.
Settle your Spirit to brood within us and among us,
forming us in wisdom and compassion,
immune to false fears and alert to grace. Amen.[2]
posted by A. Lin @ 7:37 PM
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