You Have Nothing To Fear

 

June 23, 2024 – The 5th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 7B

1 Samuel 17:1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

What are you afraid of? More than anything else in the world, what do you fear? Years ago, Jerry Seinfeld joked that the number one fear among Americans was speaking in public. Number two was death. As he put it, that means that at a funeral most people would rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy.

For several years, researchers at Chapman University have conducted a survey that identifies what people fear the most. In 2023, the most popular answer was government corruption (60.1%). In second place was the collapse of the economy (54.7%). In third place was Russia using nuclear weapons (52.5%), and right behind that was the United States getting involved in another world war (52.3%). Only after those four things, all of which involve geopolitical issues, did people name anything personal. “People I love becoming seriously ill” (50.6%) and “people I love dying” (50.4%) were fifth and sixth, respectively.[1]

What we fear as a nation changes significantly year after year. Just one year earlier, in 2022, when the pandemic was still big news, “People I love becoming seriously ill” (60.2%) was Americans’ second greatest fear, and economic collapse (53.7%) was way down in eighth place. [2] Throughout your lifetime, I bet the things you fear most have changed as you have gotten older and gained some wisdom and experience. As infants, we don’t even know how to be afraid of nuclear war or Covid-19. As we get older, fears like separation from our parents or loud noises give way to more abstract concerns—things like disappointing our parents or the monsters under our bed. Then, as we learn more about the world, those abstract fears become concrete again, and we become terrified of awkward social situations or the very real monsters we hear about in the news.

Although some children experience the death of a loved one early on, most of us only acquire a fear of our own death relatively late in our development. Maybe that’s why you need to be twenty-five years old to rent a car but only eighteen years old to vote. It’s only after we’ve pushed through all of our other fears in order to encounter our fragility and mortality that we realize death’s inevitable sting. As Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “A person always acquires courage in this way: when one fears a greater danger, a person always has courage to confront a lesser one—when a person infinitely fears one danger, it is as if the others did not exist.” [3] So what is it that really keeps you up at night? What would threaten the very security you depend upon to navigate all the other threats that come with this life? 

What if I told you that there is something far more dangerous for us to fear than our own deaths? What if I told you that, of all the terrible things that could happen to you or your loved ones or our nation or the economy, the only thing that you should be afraid of is being afraid? 

Although his was a political speech, designed to give hope to a nation that was stuck in the Great Depression, FDR’s first inaugural address might as well have been a sermon on today’s readings, if he had only based his hope upon God instead of the American ideal. Roosevelt said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” [4] Over and over—and chiefly in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—God has shown us that it is nameless, unreasoning, and unjustified terror that paralyzes our souls and that faith in Almighty God is the only thing that can set us free from the fear of fear itself.

When David, the young shepherd, arrived at the battlefield, the stench of Israel’s fear filled the air. Goliath, the champion of the Philistines, whose height was six cubits and a span—that’s nine and a half feet—and whose armor was intimidatingly more sophisticated than that of the Israelites, had taunted Saul and his army for days. “When [King] Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine,” the Bible tells us, “they were dismayed and greatly afraid.” But not David.

Foreshadowing the complete reversal of their relationship, which only would come years later, David said to the king, “Let no one’s heart fail because of him; your servant will go and fight with this Philistine.” Saul rejected the boy’s offer: “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are just a boy, and he has been a warrior from his youth.” But David’s courage did not sprout from recklessness or ignorance. He had been anointed by Samuel the prophet. The Holy Spirit had come mightily upon him. David belonged to God, and he knew it in his bones. 

The Philistine giant disdained the shepherd boy and cursed him by his own gods, promising to deliver his lifeless body to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. Unimpressed, David responded by invoking with confidence the name of the Lord: 

You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This very day the LORD will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth, so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the LORD does not save by sword and spear; for the battle is the LORD’s and he will give you into our hand.

We don’t teach the story of David and Goliath to our children so that they will learn that David was a mighty warrior. We teach it to them so that they will know that they, too, belong to the God who has the power to deliver them from anything that threatens them—so that they, like David, will have courage in the Lord.

The very same fear that filled the hearts and minds of Saul’s army filled the disciples in the sinking boat. “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” they asked Jesus, as they awoke him from his slumber. Just as the author of 1 Samuel contrasted the armor-free David with the Israelite soldiers, so, too, does Mark depict the peaceful Jesus in contrast with his frantic followers. “Do you not care that we are perishing?” they asked him, using a word that implies that they were worried that they might be lost forever—that they might be destroyed, annihilated, or devoured by the sea. But Jesus woke up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!”—literally, “Be silent, for you have been muzzled!” And the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.

Once the threat had passed, Jesus said to the disciples, “Why are you afraid?” He says those same words to us whenever we allow the storms of this life to fool us into thinking that we could ever be lost to God: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” These are not the words of a harsh rebuke but those of a tender and loving reminder that our fear is a merely sign that we have forgotten who is in charge of our lives—that we have lost sight of the one who has defeated death itself—that we have allowed the terror of the moment to obscure the everlasting promises of God. 

I do not mean to suggest that God will always protect you from pain, loss, grief, sickness, suffering, or death. If you live long enough, you will discover that every one of those is real and horrible and inescapable. But what I do mean—and I mean it with every fiber of my being—is that none of those things has the power to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. You belong to the one who has slain the giant and stilled the storm. You belong to the one who took on the threat of everlasting death so that you might be set free from its clutches. You belong to the one who has always loved you and will always love you, even from this life into the next. And nothing could ever change that.

The only thing you should be afraid of is losing touch with that truth. The only thing that should really scare you is the thought that you could ever forget how much God loves you. The only thing worth losing any sleep over is the fear that you could ever be afraid. So nourish your true identity as God’s beloved child each day. Read from scripture the stories of God’s saving deeds, and pray that God will remind you that you are precious in God’s sight. Ask God to deliver you from anything that threatens you and to remind you that there is nothing that can come between you and God’s love. When you remember that, you truly have nothing to fear.

__________________

1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-time-cure/202401/what-are-you-afraid-of.

2. https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2022/10/14/the-top-10-fears-in-america-2022/.

3. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness unto Death. Bruce H. Kirmmse, transl. Liveright Publishing; New York: 2023, 15.

4. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/franklin-roosevelt-inauguration.htm.

Tell It Slant

 

June 16, 2024 – The 4th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 6B

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; 2 Corinthians 5:6-17; Mark 4:26-34

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

The kingdom of God is like a preacher, who sets his alarm the night before Daylight Saving Time. He sleeps and wakes every hour or two, checking his phone to see if it has automatically sprung forward. Each time, he compares the display on his phone with the analog watch he put on his nightstand just to be sure. A little after 2:00 in the morning, he sees that his smart phone has done the same thing it has done every year for almost two decades, and he drifts off to sleep, still not sure how it works but grateful that Steve Jobs made it possible for him not to worry about oversleeping.

The reign of God is like a patron of the Fayetteville Public Library, who forgot about the book she checked out two weeks ago until she got a text message letting her know that it has automatically be renewed. She’s not sure why the library doesn’t go ahead and make it a four-week check-out period since she never returns her books until after the second two weeks are up, but she’s grateful that the library knows she wants to renew it even before she does.

The way God envisions the world to be is like an eight-year-old who puts a bag of popcorn into the microwave and presses the popcorn button. After two and a half minutes of watching the timer count down, she opens the door and pulls out a puffed-up bag of yummy, buttery goodness. She doesn’t know a thing about the vibrational frequencies of water molecules and the microwave radiation that excites them until they boil over, exploding each kernel like a miniature starch grenade, but she knows that, without fail, what started as a flat envelope of inedible seeds and salt will become a tasty snack.

There’s no such thing as a perfect parable because parables aren’t supposed to be perfect. They aren’t intended to convey the full, complete picture of what God’s reign looks like, but they do give us an important glimpse into what God sees among us. Parables can be simple comparisons—like the parable of the mustard seed—or they can be complex narratives—like the parable of the prodigal son. When we encounter a parable, we must resist the temptation to over-interpret it, forcing it to yield more than it was designed to convey. We must instead allow the parable to work on us, gradually and persistently, until a deeper knowledge of God and God’s kingdom has become clear, even if that insight isn’t as profound as we’d hoped. 

When Jesus tells a parable, he always has a goal in mind—a truth or an insight he wishes to convey—but to try to unlock a parable as if it were a mystery or a riddle to be solved is to miss the richness of this teaching technique. Parables may have a central goal or purpose, but there’s always more to them than a simple, straightforward interpretation. To mine one of these similitudes for its true value is to stretch it beyond the point of logic or reasonableness before allowing it to snap back into its more familiar shape. Sometimes we learn best what Jesus is teaching us by straying off into the realm of the absurd before returning back to what really makes sense. And sometimes Jesus’ parables teach us something that Jesus himself would not have recognized when he spoke these words so long ago.

“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how…With what can we compare the kingdom of God…? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs.” What is Jesus trying to teach us, and why does he need these parables to get his teaching across?

Jesus lived at a time when faithful people were eager for God to come and make all things right. They waited and watched and hoped for the day when God’s judgment would come and God’s vision for their lives would finally be fulfilled. Sound familiar? They had been taught all the same things about God that we have been taught—that God is powerful, that God is loving, that God is merciful, that God is just. They knew that God is faithful and that, because God is faithful, one day God would come and fulfill God’s promise to establish God’s perfect reign on the earth. And, as they waited and hoped and believed that that day would come, their prayers sounded a lot like ours: How long, O Lord? How long?

It’s hard to know where to look for God’s kingdom when so many people in the world experience so much pain. It’s hard to remember to watch for God’s reign every day when it feels like things are getting worse, not better. Surely that’s not what God envisions for our lives. We want to see signs that God is in charge and that all the things that stand in the way of God’s perfect, loving reign have been extricated from our lives. We want to look around and see clear evidence that God’s kingdom has come and that God’s will is being done here on the earth just as much as it is in heaven. And, when that evidence is hard to see—when God takes longer than we’d like—we’d just assume God step aside and let us take over. But do you know what God’s kingdom looks like? Do you know where we are supposed to look in order to see it? 

It is like a farmer who scatters seeds on the ground and who sleeps and rises, night and day, beholding the miracle of those seeds sprouting and growing one day at a time. Jesus probably didn’t mean to imply that the farmer sits around and does nothing. Someone has to water, fertilize, and weed the crops in order to coax them into their full potential. But it’s kind of fun and informative to contrast in hyperbolic ways Jesus’ portrayal of the man with that of the earth, which Jesus tells us “produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.” The word Jesus used to describe how the earth produces the grain is “automate,” from which we get the word “automatically.” In other words, we might be called to tend God’s garden, but no matter how eager we are to see it bear fruit, we aren’t the ones who make it happen. 

The sexton at St. John’s in Montgomery, Mike Jarrell, used to grow lots of tomatoes every summer. He would sell them to parishioners on Sunday mornings, using a scale in the church’s kitchen, and sometimes he would give the clergy a paper sack full for free. One spring, I asked Mike if he was growing any tomatoes, knowing that the answer would be yes, but he quickly snapped back, “I don’t grow tomatoes. I plant and water them. God is the one who grows them.” I guess he paid better attention to the parable than I did.

In these parables, Jesus teaches us that God has scattered the seeds of the kingdom all over the earth. As that kingdom grows among us, we may not understand any better than the farmer how God achieves that growth, but Jesus has taught us to trust that the seeds which have been scattered will grow and bear fruit for the harvest. And he teaches us to believe that, even though the growth comes more slowly than we’d like, God will bring all things to their perfection in God’s perfect time. 

We may want God’s reign to be as strong and tall and majestic as a cedar of Lebanon, but Jesus teaches us to look for that reign not in battlements and fortresses but wherever a mustard seed has been planted. That’s because God’s kingdom shows up whenever something small and insignificant grows big enough to provide shelter for anyone who seeks it. 

How else could we possibly understand the nature of God’s reign if it weren’t given to us in parables? How would we ever make sense of Jesus’ death if we hadn’t been taught to look for God’s triumph where the world fails to see? 

Everything Jesus taught the crowds, Mark tells us, was in parables. Maybe Jesus used parables because it’s easier to get from this world into the kingdom of God through story, analogy, comparison, and play than through explanation, definition, interpretation, and direct instruction. Maybe the only way we can receive the reign of God is backwards and strange and full of surprise.

As Emily Dickinson wrote, 

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind — [1]

_______________________________________

1. Dickinson, Emily, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Ralph W. Franklin, ed. Belknap Press; Harvard, MA: 1998. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56824/tell-all-the-truth-but-tell-it-slant-1263. 

Holy Practices Bring Life

June 2, 2024 – The 2nd Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 4B

1 Samuel 3:1-20; 2 Corinthians 4:5-12; Mark 2:23-3:6

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.

For a few years—from the time my family moved to Fairhope, Alabama, until the time his family moved away—Bryant Stringham was my best friend. We did everything together. We climbed in his tree fort. He taught me how to play chess. One day, at the end of P.E., in an expression of how silly we were, we tied each other’s shoelaces together. When our sadistic P.E. teacher saw what we had done, she decided to make the whole class run one last lap. Frantically, we tried to untie the knots we had made, but they were too tight. One row at a time, the teacher dismissed the students to run that extra lap, saving our adjacent rows for last. We managed to half-run-half-hobble around the field and back to the school building, falling face first into the dust every few strides. I would tell you that we learned our lesson, but I don’t think we did.

Bryant and I did everything together. I played at his house, and he played at mine. One Saturday, I was having so much fun in his backyard that I got a feeling that something this good shouldn’t have to end. “What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked him. “Would you like to come over and play at my house after church?” “I can’t,” he said, with a clarity and finality that surprised me. “Why not?” I asked. “Because Sunday is a day for family. We spend the whole day together,” he said. “Well, can I come over and play here?” I asked innocently. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t work like that.”

I didn’t understand it at the time, but Bryant was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As a Mormon, Bryant and his family approached Sunday as a Sabbath day. Instead of working, shopping, or even playing with friends, they believed that Sundays should be spent going to church, focusing on their family, and resting from their usual activities. For them, it was a beautiful opportunity to reconnect with the most important things in life. For me, it meant I wasn’t allowed to see my friend.

Thirty-five years later, I’m still not ready to say that spending time apart from our friends is a good thing, but I do find powerfully attractive the idea of setting aside a day each week to realign my life with what truly matters. What if all of us set apart a weekly Sabbath day, not merely as a day away from work but as a day to celebrate the best things in life? 

For the most part, our understanding of the Sabbath comes not from the Jewish tradition, in which Jesus lived and taught, but from the Western and, eventually, Protestant reinterpretations of that tradition. As a result, we tend to think of the Sabbath as a day off—a day when sabbath-observers rest from their labors in order to renew their strength for the next six days of work. But, according to Jewish teaching, that approach is backwards. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, “The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.”[1]

We see and hear what Jesus says and does in this gospel reading, and we think that our Lord and Savior came to set us free from Sabbath observance. But that approach ignores the beauty of a practice that Jesus surely would have treasured. And, more significantly, it misses the important and life-giving point that Jesus is making. Jesus doesn’t rebuke the Pharisees, get angry at them, or grieve their hardness of heart because they love the Sabbath. He is upset because of what they have allowed sabbath observance to become—a means for death instead of the means for life that God intends. But, to see that, we have lean into the importance of sabbath observance a little more fully.

Did you know that many modern appliances come with a Sabbath or Shabbat mode? When you put your oven in Sabbath mode, the interior light won’t come on when you open the door because turning on or off a light is prohibited on the Sabbath. Also, the oven won’t cycle on and off but will maintain a steady temperature to keep your food warm and ready to eat because neither cooking nor kindling a fire is permitted on the Sabbath. 

Preparing for Shabbat, which begins at sunset on Friday, takes time, effort, and intention. You must remember to leave a light on in the kitchen and the bathroom and to turn off the lights in the bedroom. You need to put the brisket in the slow cooker early in the day and make sure the challah is finished in time. You must even pre-tear sheets of toilet paper or else the Sabbath won’t be very pleasant.

Why do those things matter? Because time itself is a sacred gift of God that we all too easily pollute with things that distract us from the truly important parts of life. As Rabbi Heschel wrote, “The Sabbath is the most precious present mankind has received from the treasure house of God. All week we think: The spirit is too far away, and we succumb to spiritual absenteeism, or at best we pray: Send us a little of Thy spirit. On the Sabbath the spirit stands and pleads: Accept all excellence from me…”[2]  Only a strict observance of the Sabbath allows us to give our best to God. As soon as we bring even the smallest shred of work into the day of rest, we lose our ability to dwell undistracted in the presence of God.

Was Jesus taking issue with the sort of legalistic religiosity that leads to pre-torn toilet paper? It’s tempting for Gentile Christians to think that, but I don’t think that’s right. There are thirty-nine categories of work that are prohibited on the Sabbath, including spinning, weaving, sewing, and tearing; trapping, killing, skinning, and curing; writing, building, demolishing, and transferring; planting, ploughing, reaping, and threshing. When Jesus’ disciples plucked those heads of grain, they were violating Sabbath observance. When Jesus told the man to stretch out his hand in order to heal him, because the man’s life was not in danger, Jesus violated Sabbath observance. But the gospel text shows that Jesus wasn’t challenging the holiness of Sabbath observance as much as the way that the religious authorities were eager to use it to condemn others.

When the Pharisees pointed out the disciples’ unlawful act, Jesus replied by appealing to the story of David from 1 Samuel 21: “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food?” At first, Jesus’ choice of that biblical passage doesn’t make a lot of sense. Other than being hungry, which isn’t a valid excuse in either case, there isn’t an obvious connection between the two episodes, unless you focus on David himself. 

David was God’s anointed. He wasn’t perfect by any means, but he was the one whom God chose to be the King of Israel. The scriptures do not condemn David for giving the showbread to his companions, but the Pharisees were eager to condemn Jesus for allowing his disciples to pluck heads of grain on the Sabbath. But Jesus was the new and perfect David—God’s anointed one, the Christ. As the Son of Man, who came to the earth with the full authority of God, Jesus wanted the religious leaders to recognize what they were missing—him. 

All along, God’s will for God’s people has always been abundant life. Observing the Sabbath as fully as possible is one way to celebrate the life that God has given us and has promised us. But our failure to be as faithful as God asks us to be or as we hope to be is as sure and certain as the cycles of the sun and moon. How those failures affect our relationship with God is at the heart of this gospel passage. 

Jesus came to give life to the world, and he succeeded in giving us that life in a way that no effort or intention on our part could ever accomplish. “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” Jesus asks, calling into question not only the Pharisees’ agenda but our own approach to religiosity—the fiction we write of our own self-justification and the condemnation of others. When the result of Jesus’ healing act is the religious leaders’ decision to go out immediately and conspire with the political leaders about how they will destroy Jesus, the universal failure of humanity is on full display. 

Jesus didn’t come to set us free from something as beautiful as keeping the Sabbath. He came to set us free from our proclivity to make good and holy religious observances a channel through which we would condemn others or ourselves. Faithful practices are supposed to bring life, but, when we define ourselves by them and by our failure to live up to them, we make them an instrument of death. 

Because of Jesus, we are already good enough, holy enough, even perfect enough to inherit the full and abundant life that God has promised us. When we recognize who Jesus is and what he has given us, that life becomes ours here and now instead of a longed-for hope that is beyond even our fullest striving. As a people who belong to God in Christ, our religious observances are not a path to abundant life but a celebration of that life which God has already given us, and that is something worth celebrating any day of the week.

1. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Sabbath. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; New York: 1951, 14.

2. Ibid, 18.