Unlearning Fear

A Homily for Advent 1

December 1, 2013

From the words of the Gospel: 

“Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

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Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t?

   

That’s one of our “one-question-I-want-to-ask-God” questions from last spring.  

   

The answer might seem obvious to us if we answer it with our heads.  We might say, “Well, of course, we should follow the Lord because we love him.” But our hearts have had years of conditioning that keeps this question alive and burning inside of us.  

   

I remember vividly an early experience in my childhood that revealed just how much I had been conditioned to follow God out of fear. 

   

It a middle-of-the-night experience that woke me up from a deep sleep. 

I was already dreaming about it when I woke up to a light, and a deep rumbling, 

and a tremble. In two seconds my eyes were wide open, as my whole room grew lighter and lighter, and trembled more and more, and the rumbling became louder and louder. 

   

It wasn’t a long time, but it seemed like forever.  The whole experience became more and more intense, and I became more and more overcome by fear that this was the end of the world, and I wasn’t prepared! 

   

Until finally I woke up enough to recognize that, on my residential street, a large eighteen-wheeler truck was pulling up next door - engine rumbling, lights coming in through the window, shaking the whole house as it approached in the dark.  

Scared me to death.  And revealed just how much my relationship with God had been conditioned by fear. 

   

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It’s an old dance, the dance between love and fear.  And it goes all the way back to the early Jesus movement. 

   

By the time the Gospel of Matthew was written in about a few decades and generations after Jesus, the idea of Jesus coming back in the clouds to judge the world, sending some people to eternal reward and some to eternal punishment, had been fully developed. In fact, leaders like Matthew were trying hard to defend it. 

   

The reality was that the early followers expected Jesus to come back, as many of the Scriptures put it, “in their own generation,” but he didn’t come back, and in the next generation he didn’t come back, and in the next generation he still hadn’t come back. 

   

So leaders of the Jesus movement were trying hard to encourage the early Christians to hang in there, to trust that the time was at hand, and that Jesus would indeed return like a thief in the night to separate the sheep and the goats, and to assign them their eternal destinies. 

   

Other leaders of the Christianity over the next few centuries, went back and forth between teaching about a God of love, and a God of retribution - a God to be loved and a God to be feared. 

   

So it’s an old dance, and even if we know better, we come by our fears honestly.   

   

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The origins of the idea so vividly expressed in our Gospel storyteller today were a combination of two or three different ideas that were typical of troubled times. 

   

One was the idea among the Jews, who were more and more marginalized,

and vulnerable to more and more oppression by their world, that the day was coming, 

hopefully sooner than later, when God would intervene in history 

in some ultimate and cataclysmic way, and make things right - judge their enemies and vindicate all of Israel, whether in this world or another. 

   

For them, it was a day to look forward to. Until prophets like John the Baptist taught that God had a bone to pick with his own people, and that the coming judgment of their enemies would apply to them too.  

   

At the same time, there was a growing idea of a resurrection of humanity into some after life, or into some larger life. This idea came more from Egyptian and Persian religions, but it was easily adapted by the Jews of Jesus time, and by the Jesus movement itself. 

   

And, unlike the way we often imagine resurrection, this idea of the resurrection of humanity included all of humanity at the same time. Not individually, but collectively humanity would be raised up together again after death into some new kind of life. 

   

When the early Jesus movement incorporated these ideas with their experience of a resurrected Jesus, and their teaching of Jesus’ resurrection, often in literal terms, and their conviction that Jesus was coming back soon as the finale to the whole movement of decent from heaven, death, rising, ascending, and coming back again to establish an eternal Kingdom - when the early Jesus movement incorporated all of these things together, it created a scenario of the Last Day, of the Judgement Day, with which we are all familiar. 

   

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If we turn back the clock several decades, digging through the layers of teaching built up by the early Jesus movement, to the time of the historical Jesus himself, what do we hear  What was the teaching of Jesus himself? 

   

And by now, as much as we have talked about it, you already know the answer to this. The one thing that Jesus always taught and talked about was … (the Kingdom of God). 

   

Not a Kingdom off in the distant future, not a Kingdom some people can earn their way into, but a Kingdom that is radically inclusive of all people, a Kingdom that we can all wake up to, a Kingdom that we can all “realize” (that we can all “make real”) in our own life and times. 

   

A Kingdom that is “at hand.” A Kingdom that is already “within us.” And yet a Kingdom that is always coming toward us (“thy Kingdom come”). 

  

Jesus’ experience of this profound, mysterious Kingdom, this Commonwealth, this Domain, this graceful subjection of all things to the will of God, this spiritual reality, was the one thing that he tried in hundreds of ways to describe and teach to his apprentices. 

   

Yes, it comes on ordinary days, to ordinary people, eating, drinking, marrying, grinding grain, working in the fields, living ordinary lives. 

   

And it comes like a thief in the night, when we least expect it. 

   

It comes, exposing our deepest fears and most darkest secrets, but it comes, opening us up not to blame, but to pity (as a favorite saint, Julian of Norwich put it) for the destructive ways we act our own wounds and inflict our own pain on ourselves and others. 

   

And yes, Jesus does come again, and again, and again, at every Eucharist, in the bread and the wine, the gifts of God for the people of God, and around every corner, like a hungry person, or a neighbor ill-clothed, or someone sick or in prison. 

   

So in the words of the Gospel Reading for this morning that best reflect the words of Jesus himself, “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

   

The question of the day, one more time, is “Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t?”  

   

Let’s take a minute to discuss what’s on your mind or your heart at this point.  What do you notice?  What touches you personally? 

   

[DISCUSS] 

   

A good way to close, perhaps, is to recognize that Christianity isn’t the only religion to struggle with loving God out of fear  or loving God out of love.  

   

One of my all time favorite saints is actually a Muslim Sufi, Rabia Basri, born in the late eighth century, whose conviction earned her a legend that says, One day, Rabia was seen running through the streets of Basra carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other.  When asked what she was doing, she said, "I want to put out the fires of Hell, and burn down the rewards of Paradise. They block the way to God. I do not want to worship from fear of punishment or for the promise of reward, but simply for the love of God."

   

This story is probably a legend, but one of Rabia’s actual prayers was: 

"O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.”

So Christianity is not the only religion to struggle with this question. 

   

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For myself, I can tell you that some twenty years after being scared out of my mind by an eighteen wheeler pulling up next door to my house, I had a near death experience when my car nearly went over an icy bridge. 

   

But this time, as I saw my life flash before my eyes, and imagined my car and me falling and crashing into the ravine below, I was at peace. 

   

I won’t tell you about the cat in the back seat who I had to clean up after that incident.  But I was at peace.  

   

I am grateful for that experience, which tells me that my answer to the question about following God out of fear or out of love, is moving from my head to my heart.  

   

Unto him be worship and praise, dominion and splendor, forever and ever.   Amen.