LIVING WITH FAITH IN A FEARFUL WORLD

(Preached on Sunday, April 15, 2007)

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, APeace be with you.@                   -John 20:19

 

ALater on that day, the disciples had gathered together, but, fearful of the Jews, had locked all the door in the house.@

What a powerful way to begin a story!  A group of people gathered together in shared fear behind locked doors.

That is not an uncommon scenario or feeling for us, is it?

In a post-9/11 world, fear is nothing new.

We have lived for the past six years knowing that another terrorist attack was possible, and, we assumed, likely.

 

But it was not terrorism alone that created our culture of fear.  Our fearfulness is, to some extent, self-inflicted. 

Long before 2001 the construction and manipulation of fear was a staple of marketers, politicians, activists, even religious leaders.  It=s no secret that fear motivates people. Every time an advertiser urges us to buy a product or risk being uncool, unsafe, unwanted, unprepared, etc., our fears are being aggravated and manipulated. 

Every time a politician tells us that the other party is Arecklessly unilateral@ or Aweak on terror,@ we are tempted to vote from a place of fear. 

Every time religious leaders use threats of hell to make

 

others believe or obey, they are using fear to manipulate their listeners. 

Unfortunately, the news media has been at the forefront of fear-mongering C overemphasizing shocking and frightening stories to gain an audience and boost ratings.

 

There is something soul-crushing about fear, especially when it is unchecked and disordered.  One of the greatest dangers from excessive fear is that it can turn you into the very thing you wish to avoid.  As Bono of U2 sings, Ayou become a monster, so the monster will not break you.@

Another danger is that you become weighed down, depressed and despair for the future.  There is a thickness of anxiety hanging in the air these days, and many people feel exhausted as a result.  Talk to any group, and you will most likely hear about the heavy burdens they are carrying and their sense that things are getting worse, not better.

Whether it was rational or irrational, we understand full well what the disciples of Jesus were feeling and struggling with on that first Easter so long ago.  After the events of the previous week, after the betrayal, arrest, torture and execution of their beloved teacher and friend, it is no wonder they huddled together in a room with the doors locked to any intrusion from the outside.  The sad truth is, there was really no need for those locked doors. 

There were no soldiers looking for them.

 

There were no critics among their friends or family searching for them to ridicule and mock them for their lousy choice of someone to follow.

The only one trying to get to them was Jesus, the risen one.

Of course, he might have been the one they truly feared.

After all, they had all abandoned him in his hour of need; Peter had denied knowing him; Judas had betrayed him; none of them had stood by him.  Yes, in truth it might have been Jesus and God whom they feared most.  Feared his condemnation, feared his rejection, feared his judgment and punishment.

 

The good news today is that our securely locked doors are not a problem for Jesus.  That is the good news of Easter.

Just as death could not hold him in the tomb, so our various locks cannot keep him from getting to us.  He gets through the locked doors.

He shows his wounds and scars from the cross to them.

He says to those who may be fearful of the possibility of his retribution against them, Apeace be with you.@  Just as boundaries didn=t matter much to Jesus during his life and ministry, so the boundaries of sealed tombs and locked doors don=t matter much to the risen Christ.

He bursts through those boundaries and while the disciples are reeling in shock, tells them to be at peace, commissions them for ministry, and breathes God=s Spirit on them, telling them to forgive others.

This is the point of Easter: don=t hide in fear, go out into the world in Christ=s name, receive God=s Spirit, and proclaim God=s mercy/forgiveness.  Simple.  Straightforward.  Just do it.

 

I expect that all of our attempts to lock Jesus out and to secure ourselves against his incursions are unintended.  We didn=t know that we were locking him out when we stayed away from church, when we avoided signing up for the Bible study, when we found other things to do rather than pray.  But we were.  We didn=t know that we were locking him out when we kept our faith safely tucked away within ourselves, when our religion became something that we practice only in the safe confines behind the closed doors of the church, rather than out in the world where we work and spend so much of our lives.  But we did.

 

But the message this morning is not to feel bad about those things, nor to screw up your courage and open those doors.  That is not what the disciples did, in fact, the passage states that eight days later, when Thomas was with them this time, Jesus came to them and again, it was through locked doors!  It takes time for us to overcome our fears!

No, the message this morning is to offer you a promise.

Here is the good news.  Just as the risen Christ was not stumped by the locked doors behind which the disciples cowered, so I promise you that the risen Christ will not be deterred by any locks that you have put on your doors.  Our God is wonderfully resourceful, imaginative, persistent, and determined to have us.  Even in our lostness, even in our betrayal, the first thing God does at Easter is come out to get us.  I believe even now, even in this sermon, in this worship, here at this church, as you go forth in your daily life, God is coming out to get you.  There is no sure defense against the risen Christ.  There is no way to secure yourself against God=s intrusions.  God is coming.

 

Let me offer in closing two evidences of this good news.

The first is the witness of historical perspective.  Granted, racial hatred and sex discrimination are still with us, war and violence still poison our culture, we have a large underclass of poor, desperate people, and there is a hard core of the population content with the way things are, afraid of change.  But consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people=s consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place,, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness.  There has been real, gradual, but significant change in our world.  Radio shock-jock Don Imus has been doing his thing for 25 years.  The derogatory comment he made about the Rutgers University Women=s Basketball Players was not the first time he had ever made such racist, misogynist comments.  Something has changed in our cultural consciousness that led to public outrage and his firing as a result of those comments this time.  Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society.

That is evidence of the Risen Christ overcoming our fears.