Why are we afraid?
The
early Christians adopted a simple drawing of a boat with a cross for a mast as
the symbol of the church. In an age of persecutions from the outside and
controversy and conflict on the inside, in their experience, the emerging
church must have seemed like a boat on a storm-tossed sea. Recalling the story
of Jesus' calming of the sea, like those first disciples in the boat, the early
Christians must have joined in their desperate prayer, "Teacher, do you
not care that we are perishing?"
Little
has changed in the intervening years. The winds of change and the waters of
chaos continue to beat hard on the worldwide church and the people of faith.
Christians are still being martyred in shocking numbers in tribal, ethnic, and
religious wars around the world. At home, the church is fiercely divided around
issues of authority, liturgy, sexuality, and cultural diversity, so that
members to each successive leadership body such as Synods and Assemblies must
arrive with feelings of foreboding as they look to the business before them
with suspicious eyes, preparing to build alliances of power to bolster their
respective sides. Today, the prayer of many in the church is: "Teacher, do
you not care that we are perishing?"
Our
private lives are not spared stress and storm as our individual little boats
are tossed about by the waves of economic uncertainty and change, war, divorce,
sickness, and death. Hardly a week goes by that we do not face the fearsome
realities of these events, either impacting us personally or our neighbours or
our friends in the church, and nightly the troublesome images of television
news intrude into our homes from the larger world. "Teacher, do you not
care that we are perishing?"
In Mark
4 the gospel reading for this week, Jesus calms the wind and the waves and says
to the tense disciples, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no
faith?" He surely intended the link between faith and fear. The opposite
of faith is not doubt or unbelief; those tend to be doctrinal differences. No,
the opposite of faith more often as not is fear.
We fear
the unknown. We fear the undiagnosed lump in the breast, or the persistent
cough. We fear Swine Flu, Ross River Fever or Dengue Fever. We fear losing
control of our bodies and our health because of aging. We worry about how
changes in politics, technology, or the economy will influence our jobs and the
income from our savings and retirement funds. Fear is like waves ever seeking
to knock us off our footing -- our faith footing.
When
facing fear, a priest once told people about how he could be so calm during
such times. He explained that in his childhood he had very little supervision
from his parents, so he spent many hours each day at the beach. Sometimes a
huge breaking wave would catch him by surprise and thrust him under the water,
rolling him in the sand. But he said that he learned just to relax and see the
thousands of air bubbles as the fingers of God catching him up and lifting him
to the surface. Now, whenever he found himself in trouble, he just relaxed and
waited for the fingers of God to reach under him and lift him up."
Faith
is a stance toward life. Back in the Cold War, when we were all living with the
possibility of nuclear holocaust, some researchers interviewed children to see
how worried they were. What they discovered was that the children with the
least fear were those whose parents were active in nuclear disarmament, or who
regularly attended church, or who were deeply involved in the social issues of
their communities.
These
parents did not feel hopeless in the face of tremendous challenges. They
invested themselves in actions to change the world around them and remained
optimistic that what they could contribute would make a difference. As a
result, the attitudes of the parents infected the emotional and intellectual
stance of their children. These children did not feel helpless as they saw
parents and others doing something toward resolving problems.
"Why
are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" In these rather impatient words
directed to his disciples, our God through Jesus brings into focus the
polarities of faith and fear. Faith is a stance of how we stand up to those
things that would threaten us and how we manage our fears, and this makes all
the difference. In the midst of troubles, try reaching up your hand to God and
saying, "Help!" And when you reach your hand out to others around you
and say, "Help!" the fingers of God will never fail to reach down and
lift you into new and reassuring experiences of God's grace.
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