Less Fear

Isaiah 35:1-10

Luke 1:46b-55

How are you feeling?  Go ahead, it’s a real question.  I’d like to hear what you have to say.  How are you feeling?

When I asked, “How are you feeling?” - some of you experienced a dizzying rush of all the different things you’re feeling right now.  And so your problem was how to pick out just one of those things to share.

 

Others of you had an answer about what you’re feeling, you just weren’t going to share it.  You know what you’re feeling.  You can identify it and label it.  But the idea of saying it out loud is ridiculous to you.  You’d rather take off all your clothes and run a few laps around the sanctuary than tell the rest of us what you’re feeling.  And you kind of resent me for even asking.  Because to say out loud how you’re feeling would make you feel vulnerable and uncomfortable.

But there’s still another group of you.  And you’re the people who are just now beginning to dial in and figure out what it is we’re even talking about.  When I asked, “How do you feel?”, you felt . . . nothin’.  You went blank.  You went numb.  Had I put a mic up to your face you would have said, “Uhhhhhhhhhh.”  You weren’t hiding anything.  You weren’t holding anything back.  You just literally don’t know what you feel.  And I feel ok making fun of this group because this is my group.

Now that everyone is uncomfortable, let me ask you another question. How do you feel about the fact that it’s Sunday morning, you came to church, to a Presbyterian church – where things are pretty orderly.  And we started on time and we’ve marched through our liturgy, we read our prayers, and everything so far has been nicely mapped out.  And then all of a sudden, your Presbyterian pastor, wearing a liturgical robe and the right color for Advent, messed up the script by asking you how you feel.  Now how do you feel about that?

In our readings for the third week of Advent, the poem from Isaiah calls us to “Strengthen the feeble hands and steady the knees that give way; say to those with fearful hearts, ‘Be strong, do not fear’.”  And Mary the mother of Jesus sings, “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

The poem and the song call us to less fear and more courage.  They ask us to tune in to what we’re feeling.  And they invite us to welcome the story of the birth of Jesus as the birth of a different way of seeing and feeling the world, the birth of a different way of moving around within it.

So I want us to explore this morning what our lives would look like with less fear.  I want us to at least toy with the idea that the good news of the Christmas story should make us less fearful and timid, and more playful and courageous.  I’m not asking you to believe anything, or even to do anything.  I just want you to feel God pulling you forward into a more joyful, more satisfying, more confident life.

Isaiah 35 is a beautiful poem about the transformation that happens when God arrives.  It’s a poem that dares to dream that the world can change even when everything seems stuck.  It’s a poem to dares to dream of reversals of difficult situations that seem fixed in cement.  Historically speaking, these dreams involved Israel’s difficult period of exile and slavery in Babylon.  They had been conquered and removed from their homeland, forced to live as refugees in a hopeless and life-crushing situation.  Their temple back in Jerusalem on Mount Zion had been reduced to rubble.  And in the dead winter of this bitter time, the poet announces that God will make a highway, and that God’s people will rejoice and sing on their way back towards home.

But notice that the poem is interested primarily in how we feel.  All the cues direct us to the emotional dimensions of our lives.  The barren desert finds gladness and begins to rejoice and sing.  Plants withered and beaten down will suddenly burst into colorful bloom.  These are descriptions of the landscape but also of the landscape of our hearts. 

So too with the central image of the poem, “Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; say to those with fearful hearts, ‘Be strong, do not fear; your God will come’.”  Apart from the good news that God arrives to save us, we are shaking, worried, anxious, wilting, tired, totally unable to stand up strong and join in the crowds walking a new path back towards home.

When I was in New York, our church staff would go on planning retreats.  There was a member of the congregation who let us use a house on the Jersey shore.  There was a ping-pong table that was the site of many epic battles.  And there was a grill on an outdoor patio.  So we would get groceries on the drive down.  On one retreat, we arrived after dark and hungry.  The lights on the patio weren’t working, but we fired up the grill anyway.  Before long we were sitting around a patio table, talking and laughing and ready to enjoy the sausages that had just come off the grill.  One of my colleagues said, “Um, these sausages are good.  Is there cheese in the middle?”  I’m the one who picked out the sausages, and I said, “There’s no cheese.”  He said, “I think there is.”  Keep in mind, we’re eating in the dark.  Someone turned their phone flashlight on to look at the sausage, and it turns out you should never cook sausages in the dark.  They were cooked on the surface but completely raw in the middle.  Luckily, none of the rest of us had eaten ours yet, so we threw them back on the grill. (And my friend suffered no discernable gastro-intestinal trouble.)

This is an image for faith that remains on the surface of our lives, for faith without growth and deepening – where the good news of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ never sinks down into the center of who we are and never begins to rearrange the furniture of our lives, never alters us at the level of shame and secrets and dreams and fantasies and desires and all the other powerful feelings that form the undercurrent of our lives.  And the sad truth is: many of us go through life making mostly cosmetic changes, altering only the visible parts of our lives, never welcoming the good news of God’s grace down into the messy basements of where we keep the parts of ourselves we don’t like, the parts of ourselves we’re afraid of, the parts of ourselves we’ve edited out or left behind.

Luke 1:46b-55 

For a positive model of what living with less fear and more courage looks like, we can look to Mary the mother of Jesus.  The Mary who sings is an unknown, poor, Jewish teenager, bewildered by her own pregnancy and unaware of what the future will bring.  She’s barely old enough to bear a child, but she’s plenty old enough to know how the world works.  She knows that the world is out of joint.  She knows that the cards are stacked against the poor and powerless, against women and children and anyone who is sick. 

If anyone’s hands were feeble, if anyone’s knees were knocking, it was young Mary.  And yet God’s good news coming to birth in her caused her to bloom into courageous song.  And when she sings, “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior . . . for the Mighty One has done great things for me,” she is not singing only for herself.  She sings for all of us who have been paralyzed by fear; she sings for all of us who are unsure about the future; she sings for everyone worn out by worry; she sings for all the anxious parts of us when our hands tremble and our knees knock together.

In the 1976 movie, Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman stars alongside Laurence Olivier.  Hoffman was devoted to method acting, a strategy that involves trying to create the experience your character is having.  So when Hoffman’s character had a scene in which he had not slept for three days, Hoffman kept himself awake for three days before shooting the scene.  He thought that this was the best way to make the scene realistic.  News of Hoffman’s stunt reached his co-star Laurence Olivier.  “My dear boy,” replied the older Olivier smoothly, “why don’t you just try acting?”

According to Olivier, to be a good actor, you don’t have to literally experience everything in the script.  You can simply use your imagination.  You can playfully entertain different kinds of lives, alternate worlds.  Maybe that’s what we need to do to find Mary’s courage for ourselves.  We may not see rulers cast down from their thrones and the poor exalted.  We may not see the hungry filled with good things and the rich sent away empty handed.  But we can imagine that in the small reversals around us are the seeds of a grand reversal that begins with Jesus.

Every year during Advent we cycle back around to the good news of God’s visitation in Jesus and what it means for us.  We take yet another look at the astounding promises for transformation that these stories tell, and we ask ourselves whether we are still up for believing them.  Better yet, we ask ourselves whether we are up for feeling them to be true.  We ask ourselves whether we want the despair and worry and fear to continue to be the music of our lives, or whether we are open to a new kind of music – to the sound of hope and courage and expectation.

While I am grateful for Isaiah’s poem and Mary’s song, I need only glance around here to find examples of courage in the face of fear, courage that is fueled by trust in God’s goodness.  I see young people fighting against all kinds of unhealthy cultural expectations to forge a path that makes sense for them.  I see people dealing with unforeseen challenges with grace.  I see people doing the hard and long work of forgiveness, because they don’t want to live with the poison that can ruin life.  I see spouses building a new life after loss.  I see people moving forward through cancer treatments with resilience and determination.  I see people pouring themselves into care for others in an economy that leaves too many behind.  I see people refusing to give in to despair, stepping up and leading in a variety of community projects.  Whether you realize it or not, you are already singing Mary’s song.

God can surprise us once in awhile.  It can even happen in church.  I was once in a Pentecostal worship service at a homeless shelter.  And when the song leader didn’t choose the hymn proposed by the man sitting in front of me, he shouted “F*%# that, I want to sing page 382!” 

I visited a worship service in Lawrence, Kansas once, not expecting much.  But that was the most fun I’ve ever had in church.  The young boy who sat next to me in the pew had his shoes on backwards, and kept crossing and uncrossing his legs.  And I laughed for the whole hour and missed everything but somehow got what I needed. 

When Cedrik Martin and Andrew Lyon were younger, I jokingly appointed them to a security detail.  I assumed, of course, that there was no need for their detective work.  But lo and behold, the very next Sunday during my sermon they were roaming the building and came across two teenagers making out in a corner of Zimmerman Hall!

If deserts can bloom in Isaiah’s poem.  And if teenage Mary can sing and see the old world dissolving so that something new can be born.  Then surely God can meet us – ordinary us, sitting here is this small congregation in this little overlooked corner of the world.  Surely God can surprise us by strengthening our hands and stilling our shaking knees.  O lord, let me not be like a sausage, seared on the outside but still raw in the middle.  Let the good news radiate down into even the deepest parts of who I am.  Fill our hearts with singing and make our faces determined and strong to face our future with courage.  Amen.