Wadhams United Church of Christ
2569 County Route 10, Wadhams, NY 12993
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Sermon by Steve Smith
October 26, 2008

           Be Afraid (Not)                           

Earlier this week, I was sitting in front of the television while I ate my breakfast. CNN’s Headline News was doing a piece on how people were reacting to the bad news about our economy, when I had to stop shoveling food into my mouth and pay serious attention to what they were saying. They quoted a statistic that took my breath away, and it should have taken my appetite away, but after working with nurses who love to regale the rest of us at lunchtime with gross stories of horribly disgusting things they have seen, smelled, or done, it takes quite a bit for me to lose my appetite. Here’s what they said on CNN: three out of four Americans are frightened and anxious by what is happening in and to our country.
I was completely at a loss as to how to respond to this news. Betty and I are both avid worriers, and neither one of us had even picked up a whiff of how serious things have become. Needless to say, I went right to work and spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what I was supposed to be frightened and anxious about. Since you may be hearing this terrifying news for the first time, I wanted to be able to spare you some of that dreadful apprehension of not knowing what you are supposed to be afraid of. As a public service, I’ve compiled a list of ten reasons to be afraid and anxious about what is happening in our country.
10.         If you see your bank president on an episode of America’s Most Wanted, you should be afraid.
9.         If you try to reach your financial advisor and are informed that they have been relocated under the federal witness protection program, you should be afraid.
8.          If you go to your stock broker’s office only to find that it has been torn down to make way for a dollar store, you should be afraid.
7.         If your bank has to hold a bake sale or a raffle every time you try to make a withdrawal, you should be afraid.
6.         If your monthly pension check is replaced with the worthless currency of a foreign nation that has descended into financial chaos, you should be afraid.
5.         If you get a phone call from your heating fuel provider every time your furnace kicks in, warning you that excessive fuel usage can result in serious financial consequences, you should be afraid.
4.         If you recognize the greeter at Walmart as the person who managed your retirement portfolio, you should be afraid.
3.          If your quarterly account summary of your investments spontaneously ignites into flames when you open it, you should be afraid.
2.         If the collection agency you have been working with begins to send you pictures of your family with vaguely ominous remarks written on the back of the photos, you should be afraid.
1.         If your favorite politician promises that they can fix this mess without raising taxes on anyone, then you should be very, very afraid.

Even as I joke about these things, I realize that there are hundreds of thousands of people here in America who are suffering because of what has happened and continues to happen to our economy. I realize that it’s no laughing matter: to people who have lost jobs; to those whose homes have been or are about to be foreclosed; to people on a fixed income, and who are going to have to make terrible decisions between buying their prescriptions, or paying for a doctor’s visit because Medicare won’t cover it, or buying enough food to keep them from going hungry, or putting enough fuel in the tank to keep them warm this winter.
I realize that it’s no laughing matter: to people living in the so-called developing countries of the world, when a single storm can wipe out their crops, their livelihood, their families, and the fledgling infrastructure that their governments can’t afford to maintain or repair; to the millions of people who have been uprooted from the land of their ancestors and forced to flee the marauding bands of militias who strike terror into the hearts and minds of the average civilian who has no defense against their weapons; when those same governments go to the International Monetary Fund for loans to hold their countries together, but come away with empty hands because the money has already gone to bail out the bigger governments and bigger banks trying to cover their losses for their predatory lending practices.
I know that it’s no laughing matter for the seniors in our community or in dozens of cities across our country who are too proud to ask for help, so they won’t, and because some of them don’t have family close by, will end up malnourished, or hospitalized with hypothermia, or in some cases found dead by a neighbor. It’s no laughing matter for people who will be forced to sleep in their cars, or move from relative to relative while they look for work and for some way to break the downward spiral they’re in. It’s no laughing matter when local food pantries are reporting double and triple the number of requests for help, while only seeing a fractional increase in the donations.
It’s no laughing matter for people who have been looking forward to retirement only to find that the value of their nest egg has dwindled to a fraction of what it was a year ago. In fact, it’s all downright scary. Just last Sunday, someone asked the Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman what he thought about what was happening. His answer? “It’s terrifying.” Just talking about it or thinking about it puts a knot in my stomach. We try to unravel those knots and tackle our anxieties in a variety of different ways. Some of us face our fears with force, or we stockpile wealth, or we seek security in the things we own, or we try to answer the insecurity by cultivating fame and status.
But do these approaches work? Can power, possessions, or popularity really deliver us from our fears? Max Lucado, writing in his UpWords Ministry webpage, answers the question. If power could do it, then Joseph Stalin should have been fearless. Instead, this infamous Russian premier was afraid to go to bed at night. He had seven different bedrooms, each of which could be locked up as tightly as a safe. In order to foil any would-be assassins, he slept in a different bedroom each night. Five different chauffeur-driven limousines accompanied him everywhere he went, each with curtains closed so no one would know which one contained Stalin. So deep-seated were his apprehensions that he employed a servant whose sole task was to monitor and protect his tea bags.
If the security of our possessions or our wealth could conquer fear, then the late billionaire Howard Hughes would have been bold and unafraid. But you probably know his story. His distrust of people and his paranoia of germs drove this billionaire to the deserts of Mexico, where he died a lonely death as a cadaverous hermit with a belly-length beard and long, corkscrew fingernails. What about popularity? This one really surprised me. Some of us grew up with John Lennon of the Beatles. His fame as a singer, songwriter, and pop icon made him a household word, but his fears brought him misery. His biographers describe him as a frightened man, unwilling to sleep with the lights off and afraid to touch anything because of its filth.
Though Stalin, Hughes, and Lennon are extreme cases, they are indicative ones. Power can’t bring us peace. Money can’t buy us love or happiness. Fame can’t tame our fears. In fact, if left to its own devices, fear can take away our courage as easily as it takes away our breath. Fear manipulates us with the mysterious, it taunts us with the unknowns of life: fear of death, fear of failure, fear of God, fear of tomorrow, the list goes on. The result is that we take our eyes off our ultimate goal, we drop our gaze from the lofty peaks of a life lived in God’s love, and settle for a dull and dreary existence in the flatlands.
So we turn to our faith, hoping to find some encouragement and enough inspiration to somehow answer the fears that grip our hearts and grind our minds to a paralyzed stop. It’s obviously an enormous issue, because the scriptures are filled with admonitions to “fear not,” or “be not afraid.” Hundreds of times the message is repeated, as God tries to gain our distracted and distractible attention from everything which robs us of divine peace. I’m so glad that the message is there, but I also have to admit that I’ve often gone complaining to God, “Where’s the switch? I’d love to be able to shut it down and never have to worry again! Don’t be afraid? How do I do that?”
I’ve been reluctant to receive the message coming back to me, because I prefer quick and easy solutions that bring immediate results. But just like an economy that’s going to resist quick and easy solutions for complicated issues that were a long time in developing, the answer to my questions requires patience and trust. When the prophet Isaiah was addressing the fears of his people, who had been forcibly relocated to foreign soil, he began by reminding them of their ancestral origins and reassuring them that God had not forsaken or abandoned them: I’m the one who made you, says the Lord. I’m the one who brought you out of slavery in Egypt! I have summoned you by name, you belong to me!
When Jesus is talking with his apprehensive and unsettled group of fledgling followers, he has to remind them that he has no intention of leaving them all alone to face the uncertainties of an unfair world that can sometimes seem hostile to people of faith: I will not leave you as orphans, but I will come to you… So when fear begins its gripping and grinding routine, we have to remind ourselves of our spiritual ancestry and reassure ourselves that God has not forsaken us or left us all alone to figure it out all by ourselves. In fact, if we were to let Isaiah’s prophetic words speak to our anxious and frightened minds, we might be startled by the message.
What if the fear itself is a divine summons to lift our gaze from our bondage to our worrisome anxiety to envision a different kind of today and tomorrow for ourselves and for those who come after us? What if the fear itself is a divine initiative from a God who is constantly looking for a way to gain the attention of our distracted and distractible hearts and minds? I’m not suggesting that the morbid fears of someone in a psychiatric crisis are divinely inspired. What I am suggesting is that God can use even our fears and anxieties to get our attention and turn our gaze toward the one who walks with us through life.
This was the core of Isaiah’s prophetic message: When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. This is part of my resistance to God’s answer to my questions. I would rather avoid tough times and difficult circumstances. I want God to solve my problems and make them go away, so I can be happy all the time. I don’t want to have to worry about being in over my head financially, or being caught up in the raging current of an economy in flood stage, or having my life savings go up in smoke and flames, or seeing my life being torched by the tragic or traumatic events of life.

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