Keeping the Light On

Facing Our Fears 

Psalm 27:1-3, 13-14; John 14:27 

A sermon delivered electronically by Rev. Dr. Randy K. Hammer, Jan. 31, 2021

An ordinary, late-afternoon, family car ride to the store proved to be anything but ordinary.  It was in the early 1960s.  I was seven or eight years old.  Late one afternoon, my parents loaded us kids up in the car for a quick trip to the local store for the essentials – bread, milk, and such.  About halfway there, a woman came running out of her house, waving her arms wildly, and calling for us to stop.  We knew her; it was Fay.  In a rural neighborhood, everybody knows everybody and everybody’s business.  My dad stopped the car, and Fay ran up and shouted, “Help us!  He’s dying!”  Fay’s husband, Clifton, and the father of one of my school classmates, had terminal cancer, and he had been suffering terribly of late, and everyone in the neighborhood knew it.  

My dad parked and jumped out of the car and ran into the house with Fay.  In a moment, my dad ran back out and started the car, and we headed down the road to get Kenneth, one of the elders of our church, as my dad felt, I guess, that some official from the church needed to be there too.  We drove back and my dad and Kenneth went into the house.  After a few minutes, my dad came back to the car with a solemn look on his face.  Clifton had died.

Well, this was one of my first encounters with death.  It was an unsettling experience for all of us.  But you can imagine how unsettling and frightening it was for an eight-year-old boy. 

Later that day, I had to go to the barn to perform my evening chores.  It may have been feeding the pigs or giving hay and ground feed to the three or four cows we had at the time.  But the thing that sticks out in my mind was the fact that as I was finishing my chores, it was dusk; it was starting to get dark outside.  I still recall how unsettled and anxious I was, and how fearful I was walking – I think I actually took off running – from the barn back to the house in the approaching darkness.  My whole being was gripped with fear.

Fear.  Fear is one of the most common, most powerful, and can be one of the most dangerous emotions and experiences of humankind. As preacher John Killinger notes, “Most of us go through our years afraid of more things than we can count . . .”¹

These past ten months have brought with them universal unsettling and a tsunami of fear upon the whole world.  Many of us have found ourselves living with constant fear brought on by the coronavirus.  I read an article in the newspaper last weekend where one person was quoted as having said, “I didn’t use to be afraid of death.  But now, with COVID-19, I’m terrified.”  The current pandemic has made most of us fearful – afraid to visit loved ones, afraid to go to the grocery store, afraid that we may come down with the virus and end up in the ICU on a ventilator, afraid that we might lose to the virus our spouse, a parent, child, or grandchild who has a weak immune system. The fear I experienced as a boy when confronted with the death of a neighbor has been multiplied in hundreds of thousands of lives these past ten months.

I have a dear minister friend in New York who, within the past month, has lost both of her parents.  They had been happily married for 70 years.  First her beloved dad died of COVID-19 about a month ago, and then we learned last Saturday that her mother had died.  So she has had to make two trips from New York to Iowa to bury her parents.  And yet, some people still contend the virus isn’t real.  But for most of us, we live each day – or each restless night – with a degree of fear.

It should not be surprising that the words “fear” and “afraid” are two of the most prevalent words in the Bible.  There are literally hundreds of biblical references to fear, afraid, fear not, be not afraid, and so on.  In fact, I have read that “’do not be afraid’ is the most often repeated command in the Bible” and “365 scriptures command us to not fear or be afraid.”²  But it’s easier said than done, isn’t it?

I think it is important that we acknowledge our fears.  I don’t mind telling you that I have dealt with fear these past months – fear of COVID-19 and the dangers it poses to our family and to this United Church family; and fear for our nation, as for a time democracy hung in the balance. There have been many instances these past months when I have awakened in the middle of the night, fearful and finding it difficult to go back to sleep.

But acknowledging our fear is not enough; we also need to address it.  It does no good to pretend to be strong or that all is fine and dandy when it is not. We should not try to sweep our fear under the rug as if it doesn’t exist. 

Through our faith resources and relationships, we can seek to alleviate at least some of our fear.  Prayer, meditation, reading or reciting scripture (such as the verses chosen for today from Psalm 27 and John 14 – “The Lord is my light and my salvation – whom shall I fear?”) often can provide comfort and support.  There have been nights when I have recited over and over as a mantra a few favorite, comforting words from one of the psalms as an aid to falling back asleep.  Or maybe there is a comforting poem that one could recite, or some may choose to focus the mind on a piece of music or the words of a comforting hymn.  Or maybe a relaxing memory from the past, such as being at the ocean or by a mountain stream.

When possible, it may help to talk with someone else about our fears; if not a friend, then maybe our doctor or a professional therapist or counselor. 

Writer Jim Wallis, in commenting on “The Fear Question,” says, “Jesus’s words ‘Be not afraid’ . . . do not mean to be fearless. . . Rather we can learn to respond to genuine valleys of evil with real dangers by being less fearful, having more courage, and having more faith.  Fear may always be with us and around us, but fear does not have to consume or control us.”³ 

That’s the point, isn’t it?  As long as we are alive and conscious, I guess, there will always be something to make us fearful and we will always have a certain amount of fear.  And to be honest, a certain amount of healthy fear is necessary.  I have a healthy fear of deep, rushing water, and copperhead snakes, and climbing too high on a tall, extension ladder, to name a few. 

But the goal, the hope is that we will not let our fear of things – we will not let fear of COVID-19 – consume or destroy us.  The writer of the 2 Letter of Timothy puts it this way: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7 NKJV).  May it be so.  May it be so.  Amen.

¹John Killinger, Preaching the New Millennium.

²Jim Wallis, Christ in Crisis?  Reclaiming Jesus, p. 135.

³Wallis, p. 145.