sermon by Carrie Eikler
Psalm 34:9-14
What are you afraid of? I asked the “new friends” on our “new Facebook page” what they were fear-full of, and Trent Milam all the way from California made me promise to quote him on Sunday that his fear is “Banana Spiders. Worse. Thing. Ever” he says. I personally have never come across one, so I don’t know how I’d feel about them. Another friend of mine in my book group responded that her fear was “vomit.” OK, I have experienced that one. My fear, being the Midwestern girl I am is tornadoes. My mother: snakes. Torin’s fear, I’d venture to say: baboons. Just ask him why. So what is your fear?
Psalm 34:9-14
What are you afraid of? I asked the “new friends” on our “new Facebook page” what they were fear-full of, and Trent Milam all the way from California made me promise to quote him on Sunday that his fear is “Banana Spiders. Worse. Thing. Ever” he says. I personally have never come across one, so I don’t know how I’d feel about them. Another friend of mine in my book group responded that her fear was “vomit.” OK, I have experienced that one. My fear, being the Midwestern girl I am is tornadoes. My mother: snakes. Torin’s fear, I’d venture to say: baboons. Just ask him why. So what is your fear?
Those fears, they are
somewhat situational aren’t they. They
come about when you happen upon a scary beast, or inclement weather. But I’d venture to say that most of us here
are living in some type of fear that is bigger that these things. Fear about your job. Or your retirement security. Fear about the well being of someone you
love, or losing your house, or your health.
Fear about what comes next? Fear
about the environment, and what kind of world your children and grandchildren
will be left.
These fears aren’t so
easy to post about on social media, or to share with one another in a faith
community, or even tell your pastor about so she can hold you in prayer.
And do know, I have my
own. I stand before you with my fears,
unique, but maybe not so different from your own, at least, not so different in
how our spirits and bodies and minds react to those deep fears. Maybe we’ve both been looking at the clock at
1:37am, you and I in our separate houses, praying our minds will just settle
down, our fears dissolve momentarily, so we could each find sleep.
Now here’s a harder
question. How many of you fear God? How
many of you fear God? That’s a tricky question. After all we are
constantly being told “do not fear”: Genesis 15:1, Luke 1:30, even in the
terrifying book of Revelation, chapter 1 verse 17 we are told “do not be
afraid.” It’s almost as if it is one of
God’s most favorite phrase: do not be afraid.
So why then, are we told
in the Psalm for today…to fear? Probably
as much as we are told to “not be afraid” we are told to “fear the Lord”, to
learn the “fear of the Lord,” that those who “fear the Lord” will be blessed.
There is a not-very-healthy
strain of Christianity that “grows by highlighting a negative fear of the Lord”[i] It is a fear that emphasizes judgment and
terror. You probably know what I’m talking about It is a fear that “sets a deep
guilt into our souls, and it feeds on itself…”
It’s turns that fear within us and projects it outwards, looking at the
world and everything not like ourselves, or our image of what is “right” and
encourages self-protection, and a zealous purity whose ramifications can be
disastrous. While some may flock to the
churches emphasizing this, many feel repelled by it, and find it contradictory
to the loving message of Jesus. And yet,
we are still left with question “what is this fear we are supposed to have for
the Lord?”
Well, as often happens
in scripture, there is a lot lost in translation. What is translated in English as “fear” is
perhaps an unsatisfactory translation of the Hebrew. The word that is used is “yare” which can
mean to “be afraid of” but when used towards a diety, such as God, the
scripture would better be read as “revere YHWH”: this is probably better
translated as “revere YHWH alone by honoring and obeying only YHWH.” I like how Eugene Peterson translates this in
The Message:
Worship God if you want the best; worship opens doors to all his
goodness. Young lions on the prowl get
hungry, but God-seekers are full of God.
Come, children, listen closely, I’ll give you a lesson in God
worship. Who out there has a lust for
life? Can’t wait each day to come upon
beauty? Guard your tongue from
profanity, and no more lying through your teeth. Turn your back on sin; do something
good. Embrace peace—don’t let it get
away!
This is yare, the worship of God that frees us,
not the fear of God that freezes us.
When we were on our way
to Maine for our vacation, we stopped for breakfast at a Roy Rogers in
Cumberland, Maryland. There was a TV on,
and they were reporting on the shooting in Colorado, which happened just the
night before. I situated the boys in a
booth so they couldn’t see the TV while they noshed on their breakfast
sandwich. I didn’t want them to see or
hear about what was going on. Shortly after we arrived home, it felt like for a
few days my breakfasts were punctuated with scrambling to turn down NPR when
reports of the killings at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin came on: they boys are
old enough now to ignore the mundane chatter, but they sure do pick up words
like “kill” and “shoot” and “dead.”
Fear is a word to
describe the experiences of many in this past month. On my part, fear of the boys feeling scared
and unsafe, fear of my own incompetence to talk to them about the hard reality
of life. Witnessing fear and xenophobia
of a country whose ethnic and religious tension grows everyday. Fear of living in a country like that. Fear of my own fear.
I don’t want that fear
any more. I don’t want any of God’s
children to live out of that fear—fear which leads to such violence. I want the
fear of the Lord. The reverence. The awe.
The joy in a God that moves me from negative fear to a life seeking
peace and pursuing it, even when it seems the world around me is falling apart.
The Reverend Janet Hunt,
a Lutheran pastor, was serving a congregation in DeKalb Illinois in 2008 when a
gunman opened fire at Northern Illinois University, injuring 25 and killing
six, including himself.
Hunt recounts snippets of that first
day[ii]:
The call that came saying there had been a shooting Standing
in candlelight vigil with students on a cold February night. Dwelling with one
family huddled together as they received the unimaginable news that their
daughter who had survived a tour in Iraq had been murdered in a college
classroom in DeKalb, Illinois. These
images flood back to her whenever the headline of another senseless shooting
reaches her
But the story that still touches my heart is this one, she says: A friend, a member of the congregation I was then serving, is the Director of Emergency Services at our community hospital. While dozens and dozens of courageous people were about saving lives that day, her staff walked into some of the worst of it. It was the end of the day --- The wounded had been tended and had gone home with families or sent on for surgery or other needed interventions. But there were still six dead young people: five students and the gunman…who had turned his ammunition on himself. There were families waiting to see them, to make final identifications, to go deeper into the grief that was already gripping them. [She knew] that someone would need to clean up their bodies so as to at least ease in some small way the horror that was waiting their families. And so she did. [It wasn’t her job to do, but she] said she didn't want her staff to carry those memories and so one by one she went into room after room after room and wiped away the blood from their wounds. She did so for the shooter, too. Later she said he looked like the boy next door...not some monster capable of inflicting such senseless suffering.
For I say this in all truth. I hear news of the
kinds of shootings we hear of again in these last days ---- at a midnight
showing of a movie in Colorado --- in a Sikh Temple outside of Milwaukee ---
and a great sense of helplessness overcomes me. As I have stood with those who
grieve such senseless losses before, I find myself aching as I imagine the pain
being felt by so many today. And yet it
seems to me there must be more than empathy for us to offer. Yes, even more
than walking in and picking up the pieces and wiping up the blood to ease the
suffering of those left behind in some small way. ..[M]ustn't our faith, our
following Jesus, still make some difference in all of this?
“And maybe that
difference is simply this.” she proposes, and where
I see her almost become the psalmist who wrote our words we read today: Every
one of those who grew up into those who would pack up an armory of weapons and
ammunition and inflict such violence --- every one of them was someone's child,
confirmation student, team member, student, next door neighbor. So perhaps it
simply comes down to this: maybe I need to begin to take a second look at the
boy, the girl next door. Maybe I need to begin to see all those I encounter --- in my office, at worship, at coffee hour,
in the grocery line, at a high school football game, on the bike path, in the
car next to mine at the stoplight ---maybe I need to see all those I encounter
as those who hold all the potential in the world. To SEE them, not with a heart made dull by indifference or quickened by
fear but [to see them] rather with a heart full of wonder, and curiosity and
hope. To see us all as bearing the very face of Jesus, for in fact we do.
And then to begin to act like this is so.
What Hunt is talking
about, that is the fear of the Lord: hearts full of wonder, and
curiosity, and hope: “To see us all as bearing the very face of Jesus, for in
fact we do. And then to begin to act
like this is so.”
Worship God if you want the best; worship opens doors to all his
goodness. Young lions on the prowl get
hungry, but God-seekers are full of God.
Come, children, listen closely, I’ll give you a lesson in God worship. Who out there has a lust for life? Can’t wait each day to come upon beauty? Guard your tongue from profanity, and no more
lying through your teeth. Turn your back
on sin; do something good. Embrace
peace—don’t let it get away!
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