Lenten Reflection on Fear - Matthew 8:23-27; 10:28-31
For many years I
let it control my life. It kept me from
fully participating in some activities, or if I did, my heart would be racing
faster than a stock car around Talladega.
One time it left me stranded on a roof.
The drains in our house were not quite draining the way they were
supposed to. Plumbers in Northampton
County, at least the part of Northampton County we found ourselves living, were
far and few in between. In fact there
was only one plumber that anyone in the western half of the county, where I
lived, that anyone called. He had a
waiting list a mile long of calls he needed to respond to, and he prioritized,
not by the date you called, but by critical nature of your plumbing problem…and
slow drains did not rank way up on the waiting list. If I remember correctly, it was about a six
week wait for him to respond to the call.
One time before, in a previous parsonage where the same problem
occurred, the plumber had said that the issue was a buildup of stuff in the
vent and it just needed flushing out, they ran a water hose up, turned on the
water, and let it flush out the drains.
I decided one day that if that was all the problem was and all that had
to be done, I wasn’t going to wait for the plumber, I was going to handle
it—despite my fear of heights. I hooked
up the water hose, set the ladder against the side of the house, and slowly and
carefully climbed the ladder—determined to do this and determined to impress
Anita when she came home that I had actually done it. I got up there thinking about all the folks I
had seen climbing a ladder to the roof, hopping up there and walking
around. I got up there and…and…well I
never got off my arms and knees as I drug the hose across the roof, with my
torso never being more than an inch off the roof either. I did succeed in flushing out the vent, and
slowly worked my way back to the ladder.
I turned around to back down the ladder, and my foot wouldn’t
connect. I tried again, still no
success. Can any of you guess where
Anita found me frozen when she and the kids finally came home some time later?
How often do we
let fear freeze us in place or cause us an overabundance of trouble or worry or
cause us to miss out on what others seem to enjoy? My fear of heights has kept me from enjoying
everything from climbing trees as a kid to mountain trips. I know others whose fear of the water keeps
them from enjoying the beach, the lake, or even a swim in the pool. Maybe a fear of speaking in public has kept
us from sharing some good news in a crowd or the Good News with someone we do
not know. Maybe a fear of needles, a
fear of dentists, or even a fear of closed spaces keep us from getting medical
treatments we need. Maybe it is not fear
of any specific thing that causes us to freeze in place or avoid certain
situations, maybe it is a generalized fear of uncertainty—maybe we’re those
“worst case scenario” kind of folks, we worry about what might happen. We are
don’t travel because the bus might crash, the boat might sink, or terrorists
might take over the plane. We hesitate
to visit someone who is sick or in the hospital because we might catch what
they have. We hold back on our giving
because we might have an unexpected expense come up. We aren’t willing to go on mission trip –
whether it be downtown or overseas, because we could be hurt by the people we
are trying to help.
However, my
brothers and sisters, living in fear needs to be one of those things that we
nail to the cross and give up, not just for forty days, but for good. The problem with fear is that it is sin. It is failing to trust God. We need to learn how to live fearlessly.
Remember this
scene with Jesus and those closest to him:
“And when he got into the boat, his disciples
followed him. A windstorm arose on the
sea, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he [Jesus] was
[at peace and] asleep. And [terrified]
they went and woke him up, saying, “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” and he said to them, “Why are you afraid, you
of little faith?” Then he got up and
rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm. They were amazed saying, “what sort of man is
this, that even the winds and the sea obey him.”
Later, Jesus says
to those around him and to us:
“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot
kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground
apart from your Father. And even the
hairs on your head are all counted. So
do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
But it is not
just in the words of Jesus, as if we really needed anything else, but through
the entirety of God’s Word.
Consider the
words of God through the prophet Jeremiah: “For surely I know the plans I have
for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a
future with hope.”[i]
Or the words of
Paul: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor
anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God
in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Or the words of
God through the Revelation to John: “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” In other
words God is saying, “I am your beginning and your end, nothing else will have
the final word in your life, that belongs to Me and Me alone.”
What does all of
this mean? It means that God’s got our
back. It means that there is nothing
that can truly and ultimately bring us to a complete end. It means that God holds our future, both our
earthly future and our eternal future.
It means that we do not have to live in fear because we are trusting
that God has us, loves us, cares for us, and will always be with us. This Lent, nail fear to the cross and leave
it there.
In the Name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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