Beyond the Country of Fear

Beyond the Country of Fear--July 4, 2017

"Then Moses went up to God; the LORD called to him from the mountain, saying, 'Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the Israelites: You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.'" [Exodus 19:3-6]

Go to a Passover Seder meal sometime, and notice the tense of the verbs.

As the great story of God's deliverance of the Hebrew slaves is retold, as the unleavened bread is broken and passed, as the bitter herbs and salt water recount the tears and bitterness of centuries of bondage, and as the announcement of the defeat of Pharaoh is recounted, notice that the storytelling in the Passover Haggadah is framed in the present tense. "This is the night..." the recitation goes, not "A long time ago, God used to do stuff like this..."  "God set US free..." the storytelling says, not simply, "A long time ago, God freed a long-since dead group of our ancestors."  The storytelling telescopes the flow of time, as if it is all happening now... as if humanity is in constant need of being set free.

And that is exactly the point. 

The story recounted in the Exodus--the great drama of being set free from Pharaoh and the ways of Pharaoh's Egypt--isn't just a one-time fluke, a solitary intrusion of God into one moment in history.  It is the way God is always at work in the universe--always setting people free, always drawing people who were told they were nobodies and calling them precious and treasured, always taking those on the margins and giving them a new home, always lifting up the lowly and deflating the puffed-up powerful pretenders like Pharaoh.  The God whose story is told around every Jewish household's Passover Seder plate is the God who keeps leading people from the dominion of fear... into the new wilderness territory of hope, courage, mercy, and love.  And the reason that the Passover storytelling is recounted in the present tense is that God keeps moving us beyond the country of fear.

The Passover story is all about breaking the power of fear.  Fear was how Pharaoh ruled. Do what Pharaoh says... or else his soldiers will silence you in this life, and the gods at his command will punish you in the life to come.  The whole national economy of Pharaoh's Egypt was run on fear--slaves were to be afraid of their masters, lowly peasants were afraid of being made into slaves, nobles were afraid of losing their status, and (although he dared not admit this out loud) Pharaoh was afraid of being overpowered by the slaves... and so he kept threatening, cajoling, and blustering to make them afraid.  It was a vicious cycle, and it fed on itself like an ouroboros, fear begetting fear begetting fear.  Fear is a clever demon, it turns out, and it was (and is) clever enough to hide behind the scenes and let everyone simply become petrified of one another, and of Pharaoh most of all.  So when the God of the Hebrew slaves strikes down the arrogance of Pharaoh and sets the Israelites free, it is a frontal assault on the grip of fear to keep people in that horrible circle.  The Exodus story is not simply the story of an ethnic group making a journey on a map--it is the story of God's victory over the power of fear that kept the Israelites enslaved.

The letterheads of the powers of the day may change--Pharaoh's Egypt, Babylon, Rome, and the rest of the litany of empires that rise and fall--but they are all really the same country of fear.  And we human beings keep selling ourselves into captivity to fear, to the point where we forget what it was like to ever not be afraid.  The labels of the fears change, too, but fear's demonic power still makes us all eye "them" with suspicion, just like fear made everyone in Pharaoh's Egypt afraid of everybody else.  Fear doesn't respect national boundaries or the century markers of history--it keeps setting up shop in every new era, across the globe, and fear keeps captivating human hearts to dwell in its dominion.

We like to celebrate our freedom, we Americans.  Especially on a day like today, when we recount the story of our own national independence.  We like to draw comparisons, too, envisioning ourselves as a sort of new exodus story, with the British cast in the role of Pharaoh's Egypt.  And then we imagine that with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or with the end of the Revolutionary War, or the drafting of the Constitution (pick a moment, if you like), we imagine that the captivity ended, and that we have ever since been free from the rule of a dominating power, simply because we were no longer subjects of King George. 

And in that sense, we sound an awful lot like the so-and-sos who debate with Jesus in John's Gospel and who say, "We are children of Abraham--and have never been slaves to anybody!" while forgetting that most of the story of those descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was lived either as slaves, as occupied people, or as exiles.  That is to say, we have forgotten that while the letterheads on the empires come and go--from Babylon to Britain, the power of fear keeps reaching its claws around us to capture us again.  We forget that even if there is no longer a crown involved, we keep offering ourselves up to become subjects once again of the dominion of fear.

Of course, fear knows no borders, no party lines, nor limits to its jurisdiction.  To be human is to be constantly susceptible to surrendering ourselves to fear.  And so we let ourselves, again and again, be made afraid.  Afraid of "them"--whoever we are persuaded to believe the dangerous "them" might be in any given era.  Afraid of losing our comfort.  Afraid of losing our security.  Afraid of losing our status.  Afraid of losing the golden-tinted time in our memories or imaginations when things were better.  Any and all of those fears grab hold of us and declare us to be their subjects, and without even realizing we have done it, we surrender to them, and allow ourselves to live in the country of fear again. And when that happens, we do just what the biggest scaredy-cat in the whole Exodus story, Pharaoh himself, did--we hate.

Pharaoh was afraid of having his power, his privilege, and his established system overturned by the growing numbers of the Hebrews... and so he lets the fear blossom into hate that seeks to oppress, enslave, and exterminate the ones he is afraid of.  Pharaoh justifies it in the name of preserving his comfortable, traditional way of life.  He says he is only protecting his society from the influence of those dangerous new faces who have settled in his territory. He forgets the way those same newcomers had saved Egypt once before in the days of Joseph and the famine, and instead he lets fear whitewash his memories to cast himself as the hero and these foreigners from Canaan as a dangerous threat.  Even though Pharaoh is, in a sense, the head villain of the Exodus story, we sometimes forget that he is the one most afraid in that whole saga, and that it is his fear that drives him to reckless violence and dangerous tyranny.  Fear makes him hate, fear makes him suspicious of "them," and fear makes him believe that any means are justifiable to keep his grip on "the way things are."  Pharaoh doesn't realize that he has made himself a willing subject under the rule of fear, too.

If we find ourselves doubting that we, too, live in the country of fear, just take a look in the bathroom mirror.  Have we allowed fear to make us hate people too?  Have we allowed fear to make us divide the world, or our country, or our community, into groups of "us" and "them"?  Have we gotten comfortable with the idea that "they" are expendable because I need to look out for me and my group first? Have I gotten comfortable with the thought that I would kill someone else without a second thought if it would keep my house safe and all my oh-so-valuable possessions from being lost?  Have I gotten numb to the ways I start to clutch my bag closer to me, or cross to the other side of the street when I see someone different--and have I convinced myself that's just a "normal" response to someone I deem suspicious?  See, the diabolical genius of fear is that convinces us that what it whispers in our ears is normal, is usual, is just the price of doing business, and that it is really a life of vulnerable love that is foolish and strange.  Pharaoah didn't see how he had become captive to fear's power, either.

See?  The need for deliverance from captivity wasn't just millennia ago under Pharaoh--the need for exodus from the country of fear is ever-present.  Just when we have convinced ourselves we are finally free of its grasp, we invent a new thing, a new group, a new reality to be afraid of, and we let it bend our hearts into hating again, into justifying any means for the end of making the new boogey-man go away.  The labels and letterheads change, but the fear keeps clawing its way back.

This, dear friends, is what the movement of God is all about in the world--freeing us from the dominion of fear, wherever and however it rears its ugly head.  God's movement--the movement of grace and liberation--is always a present-tense motion to gather us up, like the Hebrew children from under Pharaoh's boot, and to love us into freedom beyond the country of fear.  And you'll notice, it is a movement of mercy from beginning to end.  The children of Israel haven't earned a thing, followed any rules, or kept any commandments first--God just up and frees them, because God will not accept the rule of fear, whether it is going by the name of Pharaoh's Egypt, Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, Nazi Germany, the Jim Crow South, or anybody else's label.  God makes a point of saying to the Israelites, "Look here--see how I freed you, I took you out from under Pharaoh's grasp, and I brought you to myself... so that you would not have to become a new version of Pharaoh's Egypt every again."  The hope--God's own hope--is to set us free so that we will not keep selling ourselves back into indentured servitude to the latest version of fear's dominion.  And even though we do keep finding ways to let fear take hold of us, and then to let fear curdle into hatred and suspicion, the living God keeps pulling us outward, forward, and beyond the country of fear.  Freedom from the power of fear is not a reward for good behavior, it is a gift of grace.  It is the movement of mercy, because the living God did not make us to live under the grip of fear.

Nobody is meant to live in fear--not the Hebrew slaves, not the Egyptian citizenry, not even Pharaoh.  Nobody is meant to live in fear today, either--not refugees of an endless war in Syria, not you and me, anxious about terrorism or a mass shooting breaking out, and not the powers of the day, either.  And yet... we all are captive to the power of fear yet again.... even all these millennia after the great exodus story was first told.  And so, what we most deeply need on a day like today, is both the honest, open-eyed awareness of all the ways we have let ourselves, whatever our position, become ruled again by the power of fear... and the mercy of God that keeps finding people trapped in fear and bringing them out into the stark clarity of the wilderness beyond Pharaoh's grip, beyond the rule of the powers of the day, beyond the country of fear.

This is the movement to which we are called.  As you and I eat hot dogs and watch fireworks today, as we remember one moment of independence from an empire past, let us be honest as we also look at the ways we keep letting ourselves be ruled by fear in new disguises, and let us dare to hope, like the Passover storytelling teaches us, to say, "This is the day in which God sets us free once again."

Today, God is setting you... and me... and all people... free from the power of fear and of hate.  Let us dare to believe it is true.

Lord God, you who freed slaves in Memphis, Egypt and in Memphis, Tennessee, you who keep setting people free by bringing us beyond the country of fear, give us the courage to see ourselves truthfully, to recognize our own captivity to fear honestly, and to step forward beyond it as you lead us.