Isaiah 41:10-13 Moving Out of Scare City: Overcoming Fear

         Last week, we began our sermon series entitled “Moving Out of Scare City.”  We talked about the dark, forbidding, and brooding shadows that characterize that part of town.  

         What part of what town, you might ask.  Well, Scare City is where we hang out when we live our lives wanting more, more, more because we are scared that someday we will not have enough, enough, enough.  Scare City is where we reside when we wonder if we have all we think we need clenched tightly in our fists – enough friends to turn to in our loneliness, enough money to cover our essential and discretionary expenses each month, enough guns to protect us, enough of all the toys and material things we are sure we must have to make us happy and, more than happy, secure. 

         Scare City is where we set down roots if we conclude that we will never have sufficient resources – finances, friends, faith.  Scarce City is where we skulk around in the darkness, hiding ourselves “in here” (whether that be the church, a job, or some other place of escape), hiding ourselves from the world “out there” in all its brokenness and all its need. 

Scare City is where we can not help but live our lives in fear – fear of others taking what we have, fear of ourselves giving away too much.

         Fear is as old as the world itself and takes many and varied forms.  There is agoraphobia (fear of being in situations where escape might be difficult or that help would not be available if things go wrong), arachnophobia (fear of spiders and scorpions), arachibutyrophobia (arachi-bu-tyro-phobia - Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth) – and that is just a few that begin with the letter A.

         And yet, just as fear has been around for eons, so God has been telling us this since the very beginning of time: “Do not be afraid”.  God has been tweeting out that message through myths and stories, through Christmas angels, through the ancient prophets. 

         As we just read, Isaiah – that man who was God’s mouth piece  so long ago - declared to the Israelite people over and over again:  “Be strong, do not fear.” “Do not fear, for I am with you.” “Fear not, for I have redeemed you.” “You will have nothing to fear.”

         And believe me, the Israelites had a lot about which to be fearful.  When Isaiah spoke his words of comfort and security, they lived on the edge of uncertainty.

After all, they had been shipped off in exile to the backwaters of the Babylonian Empire, left to sing their songs and hold on to the vestiges of their religion in a foreign land.  Once again, they were refugees – a people with no place to call home. 

         You see, the Babylonians, basing themselves in today’s southern Iraq had claimed the world stage under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar.  They had destroyed the southern kingdom of Judah.  They had laid waste to the Holy City of Jerusalem. 

         And perhaps the worst part was that the Temple, where the Israelites believed with all their hearts that their God permanently resided, was a pile of rubble, and in 586 B.C., God or no God, the most important people in the community were hauled off into exile, leaving only the likes of the widows and orphans to fend for themselves in a land that was no longer easily farmed and yielded next to nothing.

         And yet, to those in exile (and I like to think those left behind in Jerusalem might have heard the whispered words as well – if only as a distant echo), the old prophet Isaiah told the people time and time again:  “Do not be afraid.” In spite of all the terrible things that have happened and will likely happen, do not be afraid.”

Those are wise words, and I think the prophets and the angels are still whispering them to us – even us, even today. 

         And heaven knows we need the comfort those words can provide, perhaps as much as the ancient Israelites did.  For surely we too live in scary and uncertain times. 

         What will the stock market do, and how will that affect my retirement?  What will happen to my health insurance premiums whenPresident Trump eliminates the subsidies under the Affordable Care Act?  Will my family go without insurance once again? 

         Will I be safe at a concert, at school, or even walking down the street – or will someone fire a weapon and take me out? And will any of these concerns even matter if nuclear weapons are used to settle a bullying war of tweets? 

         It is overwhelming, to be sure, and certainly enough to turn us inward, to cause us in no uncertain terms to run back into Scare City and hide in the darkness and apparent safety we find in clutching the little we think we have.  Under the circumstances, why would we not retreat into fear-based living?

         But to do so is not living as God meant for us to live.  Living our lives in the perpetual fear of not having enough – enough money protection, hope - is not what God ever had in mind.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this disconnect between us and God, and he also understood fear.  Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran theologian who resisted Nazism in the years leading to World War II.  He was part of a failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and spent his final months in a concentration camp, only to be executed mere weeks before its liberation. 

         Bonhoeffer wrote this  in a sermon in the early 1930’s:  “Fear is, somehow or other, the archen­emy itself. It crouches in people’s hearts. It hollows out their insides, until their resistance and strength are spent and they suddenly break down. Fear secretly gnaws and eats away at all the ties that bind a person to God and to others, and when in a time of need that person reaches for those ties and clings to them, they break and the individual sinks back into himself or herself, helpless and despairing, while hell rejoices.”

         In the end, fear limits our ability to be truly human, as God intended us to be.  Fear limits our capacity to love, to serve, to share, and to live in harmony.  Non-denominational pastor Abri Brancken, in his blog, listed some of the mischief that fear can do:

         Fear causes you to see your problems as bigger than God’s ability to solve them.  It magnifies itself and diminishes the role that God will play if we will let her.

         Fear causes you to resist positive change and allows suspicion to breed within you.  It causes you to seek an easy way – perhaps rather than the right way - out of the uncertainty.

         Fear paralyzes you and causes you to want to control things and people – taking matters into your own hands rather than trusting in God.

         Because of 24-hour news and each broadcaster trying to outdo the others, we are surrounded by messages that inspire feelings of scarcity and fear. What "makes news" heaps images and stories of what might happen to us. Like walking down dark, winding, and narrow alleyways in Scare City, we are encouraged, I think, to move through our lives in fear of what might be lurking around every corner. 

         However, if we are to move out of Scare City, we need to come to grips with the fears that haunt us.  And most of all, we need to face the fear that what we have will not have enough for real happiness and security.  Likewise, we need to face the consequence of that fear – the consequence that we will not risk generously sharing what we do have in service to others.  We will turn inward, doing exactly the opposite of what Jesus taught.

         Of course, there are many ways of dealing with our fear.  Take the man who had been visiting a therapist because he had a fear of monsters living under his bed. The man had been seeing this therapist for quite some time. Every time he would come in the therapist would ask, “Have you made any progress?” Every time the man would say, “No”.

         After months of this same conversation, the man decided to go and see another practitioner. When he happened to run into his original therapist, the therapist asked out of curiosity, “Have you made any progress?”

         The man replied, “Yes, I am feeling all better now”

         The therapist was amazed and asked,  “What happened”.

         The man continued, “I went to another therapist, and he cured me in one session”.

         The first therapist asked, “What did he tell you?”

         The man answered triumphantly. “He just told me to cut the legs off of my bed”.

         I guess that is one way to conquer a phobia, but I like to think that we in the church embrace a more lasting solution.  Bonhoeffer put it simply:  “The overcoming of fear—that is what we are proclaiming here. The Bible, the gospel, Christ, the church, the faith—all are one great battle cry against fear in the lives of human beings.”

         We are the church, trusting in the presence of God in our lives and in the lives of those around us, trusting that we will never go it alone, especially in the midst of fear.  And because we are the church – and I do not mean coming here on Sunday to sing songs and listen to the preacher prattle on – but because we are the church beyond these four walls, we have the power to alleviate fear. 

         The ministries that we do here – the ones we can only do with your financial support - from teaching our children about service and caring to preparing Thanksgiving baskets to filling Heifer Project banks matched by Missions – these ministries say to the world that we in our small church with its big heart are here to proclaim that fear does not have the last word and that Scare City is a place where we will never lay down permanent stakes. 

     We are here to proclaim that life is for living abundantly and with open hands, not grabbing and clutching at what we think we need.  We are here to proclaim that by trusting in God and the God-given power we all possess, we have the potential to transform both ourselves and the world. 

         We are here to proclaim that we will not live in the fear of not having enough but rather will live with an abundance of faith that we have more than enough and so we can unclench our fists, open our hands, and share more of what we have. 

         We are here – not to do away with fear because that will never happen – but we are here to proclaim, as theologian Frederick Buechner once noted that “undergirding all we fear, are ‘the everlasting arms,’ spoken of in Deuteronomy, that are there to hold us up in the times when all we fear seems to break around us.” 

         We are here to proclaim that we are the church, and we trust in the abundance of God’s grace and the power of God within us to live generous lives.  We are here to proclaim that we are the church and have faith that God will strengthen, support, and sustain us always.  We are here to proclaim that we are the church and each one of us is called to contribute to the resources we needto strengthen, support, and sustain our ministries. We are here to proclaim that we are the church, and we know that fear freezes and faith frees.  We are here to proclaim that we are the church, and we are moving out of Scare City.