An Advent Teaching on Fear
Psalm 27:1-6, 11-12 and I
John 4:16b-18
First Sunday in Advent +
November 28, 2004
Douglas K. Huneke
Life has the illusive
feeling of being easier when people do not deviate from their path. On the one hand humans prefer
predictability, familiarity, and reliable directions; on the other hand we
would not enjoy the positive benefits of modern life if we did not look beyond
horizons, take paths less traveled, and ask forbidden or impossible questions.
Whether we speak of science, law, technology,
medicine, or spirituality there is a certain trust that instills confidence
that in turn enables a person to step out, follow a hope or a dream, or journey
without maps or even a discernible destination. Fear, that powerful human leveler, is the adversary of trust and
the enemy of confidence. Fear prevents
people from looking around the corner, from asking ‘why,’ or ‘why not,’ or
‘what if,’ and from living life abundantly.
The opposite of love is not
hate, as we might assume. Fear is the
opposite of love. In his first letter,
John hit the nail on the head: “There is no fear in love, perfect love drives
out all fear.” Christ’s love fills our
spiritual center with trust and confidence.
Love silences fear, trust inspires courage, and we are free to discern
where the Spirit wants to lead us.
This first Sunday in Advent,
two central characters in the Christmas drama teach us about fear and perfect
love, trust and confidence. The angel
Gabriel showed up unbidden one lovely day in Nazareth to speak with a fine
young woman. He meant well but his
words troubled her soul – no big surprise there! Thinking he made her afraid, Gabriel told not to fear. It was not the angel’s words that calmed her
soul. Mary was at peace because she
trusted her experience of God’s perfect love and her own perfect love. Mary was fearless because she had a healthy
sense of self that was integrated with her faith. “Perfect love drives out all
fear.”
What would have happened if Mary
allowed fear rather than love to rule her life and guide her choices? One of the most insidious forms of fear is
self-doubt. It is a vicious cycle:
self-doubt diminishes trust and without trust it is impossible to embrace and
to become perfect love. Because Mary
paid attention to and practiced her faith, she was openhearted to discern and
affirm the Divine call to embody perfect love.
Mary teaches us the
practical lesson that when our faith and being are integrated our souls open to
embody perfect love, and fear and self-doubt give way to a life rich with
horizons, creative energy, surprises, and adventures. She teaches us that when we struggle with a decision or face a
crisis there is a life-changing truth in the words of Scripture, “There is no
fear in love, perfect love drives out fear.”
Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on Christmas morning one month after the
Nazis imprisoned him for his part in the General’s Plot to assassinate Hitler,
struggled with fear and love, loneliness and presence, trust and
self-doubt. He prayed, “I do not
understand thy ways [O God], but thou knowest the way for me…. Give me the hope
that will deliver me from fear and faintheartedness…. ‘If God had not been with
me and led me by the light of his countenance, my fear would have prevailed
over me. Everything has its day, but
God’s love is eternal.’”[i]
The second set of characters
is the shepherd crew standing watch in the fields on Christmas night. They were responsible for guarding the
unblemished sheep for Temple sacrifice.
Winter nights in Israel are very cold.
Stealthy predators move swiftly and silently between streambeds and
stone outcroppings searching for prey.
Bundled against the cold, the shepherd’s acute heading had to pick-up
the nearly inaudible sound of a pebble turn under a paw, the touch of two
leaves on a dry branch as fur breezes past, and sense the subtle tensing of
muscles in a defenseless lamb, whose shape they could barely see in the
starlight, as it caught the predator’s scent.
Without warning, out of nowhere, an ethereal light filled the
sky over the field, voices whispered, “Don’t be afraid…good news…great joy…a
baby in a manger.” Now imagine, 12
a.m., you are warm and sleeping soundly as 100 souped-up Chevy’s, each with a
trunk full of triple amp Quadra super bass amplifiers, driven by 16 year olds,
all the windows rolled down, park in front of your house and as “one Chevy
voice,” at the highest mega augmented volume, play a rap rendition of the
“Hallelujah Chorus.” Imagine that, and
you have a sense of what happened next in the Shepherd’s Field as, so Scripture
describes it, “A great army of heavenly angels sang praises: ‘Glory to God in
the highest heaven, and peace on earth….” Now that’ll get your juices flowing!
And it did for the shepherds!
The angelic message to the
shepherds was almost the same as Gabriel’s to Mary: Don’t fear, good news: Love
is here at last…great joy…the savior is born…a manger behind the tavern! Friends, what we have here is God’s eternal,
timeless, trans-historic message in human form, Love has cast out fear!
Read the newspaper, listen
to Fox or CNN or Michael Moore or Bill O’Reilly, picture the world’s predatory
forces that you most fear, surface the sub-conscious dread that has hung over
our souls since 9/11. And now you have
a sense of the troubled and profoundly compassionate mind of Christ when he
looked out over “a great throng of people, and he had compassion on them
because they were like sheep without a shepherd….”[ii]
The economy, terrorists, cancers, global provocations, the curtailing of civil
rights, vocational upheaval, and the amorphous and pervasive societal
insecurity – those are some of the stealthy wolves barring their teeth against
us. It is Jesus Christ who knows the
fears in our hearts and has compassion for us because the world and life have
the power to render us like defenseless sheep without a shepherd.
The Christmas shepherds
remind us, against all odds and every dread, that we must not ally ourselves
with false hope or surrender our souls to anything less than perfect love that
will be born in us again! Love was born
in the manger, fear was vanquished!
Advent is a season of
waiting and preparing. This Advent, as
Mary, we will get pregnant with Perfect Love, and prepare to embody perfect
love that drives out fear and self-doubt, and say “Yes!” to Christ so that his
love is our love and lives in us day-by-day!
This first week of Advent,
squarely face your fears – personal and global, conscious and shadowed – look
at how each robs you of love and self-confidence, limits your trust, and keeps
you from living fully and freely. As
you look at each fear, lay each one in the manger of your mind, and pray Pastor
Bonhoeffer prayer, “I do not understand thy ways [O God], but thou knowest the
way for me…. Give me the hope that will deliver me from fear and
faintheartedness….” And then we will know as our brother Dietrich knew, “If God
had not been with me and led me by the light of his countenance, my fear would
have prevailed over me. Everything has
its day, but God’s love is eternal.”
It is true, we have tasted
it, and we want to live it: “There is no fear in love; perfect love drives out
all fear!” Live the truth of those
words; it is your best Christmas present ever.