© 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.
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