Dealing with Bulletproof Fear

Dealing with Bulletproof Fear--August 23, 2016

"In days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountain, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.' For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." [Isaiah 2:4]

Of course something will have to change our hearts! We will never get to this promised day with the same old fear-bent mindset that is the order of the day right now!  Of course grace will have to change our hearts if there is ever to be a beating of swords into plowshares--we are all still captive to fear, which makes us bound to suspicion of the person or group or nation next to me (you know, they might take what I have), which makes us tangled in hate and deeply insecure about ourselves at the same time. 

And here is the dirty little secret that the fear will never admit to you: the fear is bulletproof.

That is to say, no amount of having more or better weapons will give you real freedom from the fears that have taken hold of us. (And by the same token, Cain killed his brother out of the same insecurity and fear of being un-acceptable, and he did it without the invention of guns or bombs.) The problem starts in our hearts, before we ever get to any talk about the weapons we put in our hands or can detonate with the push of a button. The problem is my heart first--and then, of course, that problem can be made a whole lot worse (with consequences that are a whole lot bigger) if my fear-dominated, insecure heart can get a deadly weapon into my hands.  But if the vision given in Isaiah 2 is to be anything more than a cruelly naïve pipe dream, then the root problem needs to be dealt with: our hearts are afraid.

And pretty much, when we are consumed with fear--of whatever, or of whomever--we have two default responses wired into our hearts: we run, or we lash out. And either way, the fear has won.  Either way lets the fear set the terms, and the game is up before it's begun.  Whether we run from what we are afraid of or attack it, we have let the fear itself steep in our souls like hot tea, and we are captive to it. 

Now, we like to imagine that we are not so ruled by fear, because, "After all, this is the land of freedom! We are the Don't-tread-on-me! nation, right?" So we imagine that we are not afraid--afraid of losing the way of life we imagine in our memory, afraid of the next economic downturn or how we'll pay for the next rate increase at tax time or insurance time, afraid of losing importance, afraid of scary things or people out there, afraid there will not be "enough," afraid of "bad guys" both real and imagined, afraid of having to face it all alone. And we do all sorts of things--and buy all sorts of things--meant to keep the fear at bay. Turn the television up and keep your head buried in a smartphone so you don't have to think about the fear. (You still will think about it.) Stockpile guns and ammo so you can tell yourself it will quiet the fear. (They will not.)  Let the fear crystallize into hate and anger so you can direct it outward and whomever you want to scapegoat as "the real problem," so you don't have to take a look at the heart inside you but just blame everything on something easier to be mad at. (That doesn't work either, by the way.)

The deepest problem is our fear--and certainly there are things to be afraid of, reasons to feel insecure, reasons to feel indignant, reasons that our hearts are troubled.  And fear is bulletproof--you can't make it go away by shooting it.  Bullets, swords, spears, what-have-you--they are all simply not powerful enough to really make us safe or secure.  And if our hearts are still bent by fear, then you can take away the guns and swords and we will still kill each other with rocks and sticks (although, it cannot be denied that it is easier to stop someone who only has a single rock in one hand from killing lots and lots of people, as opposed to more lethal weaponry).  The problem is the bent-ness of our hearts, and the way fear makes us more and more self-absorbed and concerned only with "me" and my self-preservation in the face of my fear, which makes it harder and harder for anybody else to resist giving into fear and suspicion and hate, too, from their side.

If I am still ruled by fear, then putting a gun or a sword in my hand to wave at possible enemies will not make me less afraid or more safe--it will simply make me a still-afraid person who now has greater power to cause damage... which makes everybody else around more trapped in fear of what I might do. And see? Fear has won the game already if we play it that way.

What Isaiah envisions is nothing less than a radical transformation, both of human society as a whole, and of our own hearts.  It will take nothing less than a change within our hearts, otherwise we will always reach for whatever hard or sharp objects are around to throw at each other. (I am reminded of that darkly funny scene from Dr. Strangelove, when the military planners are envisioning that after a nuclear war breaks out and any remaining survivors go and hide underground in mines, then we'll have to outdo the commies in having more and better mines to hide in. The weapons and tactics change, but the underlying fear just keeps feeding and growing, whether it's ICBMs, semi-automatic guns, or sticks and stones.)

And this is the other place that we church folk sometimes miss the point (the first place being the way have often foolishly thought that having more and better weapons than "the bad guys" will solve the problem, while leaving the root fear unchecked). We have a way, we religious folk, of reciting these words from Isaiah (or the parallel places it shows up in the Bible, like Micah, or like the other prophets, or even in spirit in Jesus' teaching), but imagining that they are simply a prediction of some far-off day when we get to heaven, and that in the mean time, there's nothing to be done to anticipate that future beat-your-swords-into-plowshares day.  Sometimes we church folk just say, "Well, one day it will be great and God will make us all nice to each other, but in the mean time, our hearts are still all selfish and afraid, so there's nothing to be done but play by the world's rules and have more and better weapons to kill each other with."  We act, in other words, as if the change in our hearts is only something that happens post-mortem--in the afterlife.

Isaiah certainly didn't think so. He doesn't imagine that his words and his vision were restricted to an otherworldly floating soul cloud.  He envisioned real people in flesh and blood lives, who were able to let go of their swords and turn them into farm equipment--because they were not afraid anymore.  Isaiah envisions a change of heart, which makes it possible for us to no longer fear each other, and thus to always be aiming at each other.  Isaiah envisions that there is a third way to deal with our very real fear: instead of running from our fears or lashing out in anger and hate, we can be people so confident in the God of life that we can break the cycle of fear. We stand up, not to attack the "bad guys" before they attack us, but in order to say that we will not be ruled by fear anymore. We stand up, not to shoot first and ask questions later, but because we are confident that God has got our back and can even raise up the dead, so we do not have to fear what anybody else can "do" to us.  We stand up, because we are so grounded in the grace of God that we can start to live now as one day all creation will live when, as the prayer says, God's will is done on earth as it is already in heaven.  We are part of that "your will be done on earth"--it is not a "one day after we all die" thing, but a right now thing.  Isaiah has sparked the possibility for us that we don't have to give up on the idea of a world where swords are beaten into plowshares and weapons are at last laid down, and we don't have to put it off as a "heaven only" thing--we are the beginning of the change.  The change is in our hearts--these hearts, ours right now--and God is beginning to work that change in us already. Dare we let God continue that change in us? Dare we let go of the fear, and the stranglehold it has on us?

It's funny, kind of--how often we hear religious folk these days pining for a time when they thing things were better, more moral, more righteous, what-have-you... and yet, the Bible itself doesn't merely look backward. The prophets like Isaiah point us forward to a home we haven't been to yet, to a reality that is awaiting us on the edge of the horizon, to a new way of life that is not just a wistful rehash of "how it used to be." Maybe, if we think the Bible is important after all, we should take a cue from the voices in its pages, and look forward to a new kind life, in which our hearts are no longer ruled by fear, and when at last, we will be so grounded in the goodness of God that we can see it in the faces of those we used to be afraid of.  Maybe we should consider, as Isaiah and Micah and Jesus all tell us, there is an alternative to running and to lashing out.

There is a third way.  There is courageous love.

Lord God, break open our hearts where we are ruled by fear and insecurity, so that we can beat our weapons into tools for work, and so that our lives can be transformed by your power for good.