Defusing the Fear--April 20, 2020

Defusing the Fear--April 20, 2020

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials..." [1 Peter 1:3-6]

It's our fears about the future that make us no use to anybody in the present.

Have you noticed that in yourself before?  I see it in me, for sure.  When we are anxious about something coming up on the horizon, it has a way of taking up all of our attention, all of our field of vision, right now in the present, so that we can't deal with the needs and opportunities of the moment.  Folks who are worried about their finances or whether they will be laid off next week are going to be extra guarded about giving away money to someone else--and understandably so.  People who are worried about where their next meal will come from learn the coping mechanism of taking (or stealing or hoarding) extra food and hiding it away, because it gives them some small feeling of control when they have so little over anything else (ask kids who have spent time in foster or group homes about that).  And others who are uneasy about change--in their way of life, in their community, in their country, or in their culture--have a way of becoming afraid of anybody or anything different in the present, and we start seeing "enemies" or "threats" or "those people" instead of seeing "neighbors."  

The common thread is how our fears about an uncertain future make us antsy (or worse) in the present.  All too often, our worry about "what will happen to me," even if there are fair reasons for the worry, ends up poisoning our view of the world and of life right now, so that we value other people and their well-being less and value our own interests more--even if we have to sacrifice the well-being of others for our own sense of security in the present.  So... what if there were a way to neutralize our big picture fears about the future?  What might happen then... and what might it mean for the way we live in the present?

I want to suggest that's just what the opening lines of the book we call First Peter are intended to do: in the midst of uncertainty and anxiety, here is a voice that says, "You don't have to worry about your future in the end--your needs are covered, your destination is secure, and your life is in the hands of a love that will not let you go."  And because of that, the writer says, we don't have to get all fussy about with worries on the future horizon that it becomes a fog over our present, too.  Because we know our lives are forever in God's hands--the same Father who raised Jesus from the dead--we don't have to live hobbled up with fear in the present moment.  We don't have to run away from the things that scare us and then bury our heads in the sand, but rather, we can face them with eyes wide open to deal with them.  I don't have to become consumed with fear that my needs won't be met, and therefore I don't have to view everyone else around me as competition for resources or a threat to my existence.  You and I don't have to start treating each other as expendable dead weight, or obstacles to each other's success--we can see each other as gifts from God for one another.  All of that is possible when my worry about an uncertain future is defused with the assurance that God really does have me held by the scruff of my neck like a mama cat carrying her kittens to safety.

You know how I saw that play out recently for me?  Toilet paper.  My goodness, I know we're all sick to death now of jokes about people hoarding toilet paper in these days.  But there was a point a few weeks back when we were near the end of our supply in the house, and I started getting short with the rest of the people in my house as I stewed in anxiety about it... and when I saw someone else post on social media that they were running low themselves and that they had seen bare shelves at their local grocery store, for a split second, I had this gut reaction in my head where I thought to myself, "I hope they don't ask me for any, because I'm not sharing."  Man--where did that come from?!  It was such an ugly sentiment from the reptilian part of my brain that is only concerned with my self-preservation, and wow, did I do a LOT of jumping to conclusions in a split second!  Of course, it wasn't long at all that another grown-up in the house assured me that we did have more toilet paper, and that, after all, we had some in the back bathroom I had not even thought about... and that if someone else really were down to the end of their last roll, we could help out.  An awful lot of mental drama from me for just a bit, but it is now unnerving to me to see how quickly I could revert to an almost animalistic mix of fear and territoriality.  And on the other hand, it has stayed with me how that malice and negativity dissipated like the morning fog as soon as a reliable voice told me that our needs were already covered, and that there was no need to be so obsessed.

That was a two-minute conversation about toilet paper--but imagine what it is like to live your whole life constantly in the fear that there won't be enough for you... or that you're on your own in this life... or that everybody else around you is a threat to your well-being!  My goodness, that would quickly lead me to think it was OK to do some terrible stuff, all in the name of me getting to preserve my comfortable way of life.  And on the other hand, what would it be like to live all of the time seeing the world clearly, rather than with a vision clouded by suspicion of everybody else and anxiety that we're alone and defenseless?

For both the very vulnerable first readers of First Peter and us today two millennia later, the promise and the invitation is the same: we really can live and move in this day unencumbered of the anxiety that no one has our back.  God does.  God always has.  The resurrection of Jesus gives us a hope that means we don't have to be constantly obsessing about the uncertainty of the future.  For people in the first century who were peasants, slaves, or scattered refugees (the sort of folk First Peter was written to), there was the promise that we have an inheritance nobody else can take away... that isn't susceptible to the fickle whims of the market or the possibility of spoiling.  And for us today, who live in times when people hoard toilet paper out of fear and folks start calculating the cash value of letting others die, all stirred up because of anxiety about the future, we need the same message, too.  

So here it is: In the big picture, God's got us.  

In the final analysis, your future is secure, and nobody can take you out of God's hands.

Not Caesar in all of his boastful, incompetent crookedness, fiddling while Rome burns.

Not the specter of sickness in the ancient or modern world.

Not thieves in the night or con artists in the daytime.

And not, as another biblical writer would put it, "anything else in all creation."

When we dare to trust that our future is the hands of a God whose grip will not let us go, we live this day with a peace that makes us so much more... useful in this day.  We can stop being agitated like a cornered animal, and we can instead live with open hands, ready to help the neighbor, ready to receive our daily bread, and ready to accept the nail-scarred embrace of the one who has already been to death and back for us.

Go ahead, breathe out.

Go ahead, trust that there will be another breath to take in.

The resurrection of Jesus gives us a hope for the future that makes us ready to face the present.

Go to it.

Lord Jesus, keep speaking your assurance to us that you hold us... so that we can let go of our unnecessary anxieties and be freed up for doing good in this day.