Fear Not.

Isaiah 43:1-7

Acts 8:14-17

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

January 10, 2016

I.

“Do not fear,” says God to the people in exile, the defeated, broken, shattered, bereft and grieving, hopeless and despairing people.  Even though you have horrible memories and deep resentments; even though your rage be overwhelming and your pain seem infinite; even though by any measure you have much to fear.  Your conquerors are strong to the point of seeming invincible.  Many of your sisters and brothers and friends have abandoned the faith and given up the old ways, even rejecting their own people, for the temptations of wealth, success, status, and privilege, dangled in front of them by the leaders.  It just seems so much easier and more profitable to simply go along with the crowd, fit in to the system, buy in to the way things seem to be.  That is certainly more convenient and popular; that makes more sense.

“Do not fear,” says God, because fear is always the problem.  We fear because of our own limited perceptions which means that we simply don’t know what is going on around us.  So we develop “defense mechanisms” and “personality structures” and other ways of coping.  And we spin out elaborate stories and mythologies and filters and habits of self-protection.  We try to give some order and predictability to our experience.  We become those stories we tell about ourselves and our relationship to our world, and we use them to rationalize and justify what we think, and say, and do.

But when they are based on fear they are based on falsehood, they are not true or real.  We just make them up.  We invent enemies out there and move to protect ourselves, and in protecting ourselves we cut ourselves off from each other and from reality, and thereby we tragically create a world of enmity and violence, scarcity and loss, pain and threats.  Then this nasty, invented world we have made comes back to bite us.  It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that seems to justify the fear that generated it.

This is the human condition generally, and the situation of the people of God, stuck in a horrendous mess as exiles in Babylon, metaphorically and symbolically represents what we all go through.  And when we see what God does for them, we are informed about what God is always doing for us.  

That is why we keep reading and cherishing these words from the book of the prophet Isaiah.  That is why Christians in particular are always drawn back especially to chapters 40 and onward.  They resonate with our own condition of “exile,” for all of us are, in a sense, born homeless refugees stuck in a foreign land, which is to say, in more theological terms, all of us are sinners, that is, we are caught in a churning mechanism of falsehood, fear, anger, and violence, we are all living by bad and untrue stories, and we all participate in projecting and maintaining this web of lies.

So when the Lord who created everything communicates to the people that they must not fear, the Lord is striking at the foundation of this whole mess.  If we can get beyond our fear, we become open to hope.

II.

So the next words received by the prophet contain the good news that God has redeemed the people.  The people who deemed themselves to be wretched and worthless nobodies, have been re-deemed as God’s precious children.  God gives the people a new self-image; God reminds the people of the good and blessed self-image they have always had from the beginning but just managed to forget or discount in their fear. 

“For I have redeemed you,” says God.  Not “I will redeem you;” no, “I have redeemed you.”  It is a done deal.  It is a fact of your life.  It is finished.  It is not yet another thing you have to work hard to earn or deserve.  It is not some future reward for your good behavior.  It is not something that you can only now after you die or when the world ends.  It is the eternal truth about who you are.  

God says, “You deem yourselves to be this; but forget that.  I deem you to be something else, and it is what I deem you to be that is true.  I have redeemed you in my own heart.  I refuse to accept your self-image; I insist that you accept who I am telling you that you are.”

“Because you don’t even belong to yourself.  You do not get to decide who you are  You do not have enough information to make that determination, anymore than a caterpillar gets to conclude that they will always be a caterpillar or an acorn that it will always be an acorn.  I made you; I have decided who you are and what you will be.  I have called you by name, you are mine.”

How much of our life is about learning not to believe the stories we have invented about ourselves, learning not even to believe what we are telling ourselves we see in a mirror, and coming to trust in this wider, broader, higher, deeper, more interior understanding of who we truly are?  It’s a rhetorical question: a whole lot of our life is about this!  And where we are on this journey of discovery determines how we act and what kind of world we choose to live in.  

God is not telling this to a bunch of affluent, privileged, well-adjusted people.  This an oppressed community stuck in the urban ghetto in Babylon.  These are people who have lost just about everything.  They are exactly the kind of people we might expect to be most cynical, negative, dark, and nasty about human nature.  Their memories, especially of the older people, are filled with unspeakable horrors, similar to many African-American or Native-American people today who remember things that the rest of us have self-servingly edited out of our history books.  They are people we might expect to harbor the most nihilistic, hateful, hopeless, and violently terroristic views, fantasizing about revenge, retribution, and even the righteous destruction of the whole world.

III.

But the prophet does not feed that flame.  He does not stoke that fire.  He does not encourage or incite more fear.  He does not point to scapegoats. He does not advocate for the building of walls.  He does not advise the people to buy weapons.  In truth, he does not bring up any of the knee-jerk reactions that human sinfulness normally inspires.  

No.  He reminds the people that God is with them…. not in their power and violence, but in their suffering.  And that God will carry and deliver them in and through their suffering.  Because who they think they are is not who they truly are.  And nothing can ever separate them from who they truly are, because that is given to them by God.

“When you pass through the waters,” says God, “I will be with you.”  That is, the Creator, the Source, the Goal, the Foundation, the One who breathed the whole world into being, the One who channels and controls and reforms the waters, the One who gives life… that is the One who is with you.  The One who redeems you and reveals to you who you truly are… that is the One, and no less, who will be with, within, and among you.

In God we do not escape the waters of chaos, falsehood, and disorder; but we do with God come through them.  Instead of drowning in those waters, instead of those corrosive, dissolute, suffocating forces taking our life away, God the Creator turns them into a source of life, renewal, rebirth, cleansing, purification, and connection.  Because nothing has the power to stand against or oppose God’s truth and life.

In fact, when we pass through the waters of change all they have the power to destroy is our false self, our little, fearful, cowardly, paranoid, resentful, angry, weak, ashamed, broken, and sinful self.  So, unless we choose to hang on to our false self, our ego-self, what Paul calls the “flesh,” by which he does not mean our physical bodies but the selfish and self-serving stories we use to interpret our lives, the more we choose to cling to that as if it were who we really are, the more painful going through the waters will be.  It will feel like what the prophet Malachi calls “the refiner’s fire.”  

But even here, Isaiah says, “When you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”  The flame will only consume everything that is not us.  It will only consume and burn up everything we are not, but that we think we are.  That is the alchemy that God does in the world.  In God the things we think will destroy us can really be the things that give us life.

IV.

Here we find the purpose and meaning of baptism.  In our baptism we symbolically pass from one kind of existence, through death, to new life.  Baptism washes away the lies, false stories, and the habits and violence they spawn.  Baptism washes away our fear by bringing us through and beyond what we fear, thereby neutralizing it.  Baptism is how, to quote that famous monastic motto, we “die before we die” so we “won’t die when we die.”  In other words, it is the way we release and let go of our old selves, so that our new selves, which are actually our original and true selves, may emerge.  It is the way we wash away everything false in us, leaving what is real and therefore impervious to death, and able to receive the Holy Spirit.

On one level, baptism is just a ceremony.  Whether it “works” or not, that is, whether what it symbolizes is something that actually takes root, grows, and bears fruit in our life, that is, whether it changes the way we actually live in terms of behavior and the world we inhabit, depends on how deeply into us we allow this new life to percolate, and how much of our false, sinful existence — with its fears, hatreds, resentments, and closed-mindedness — we relinquish.

And that process is called repentance, the development and growth in us of a new mind, the mind of Christ, characterized by love, forgiveness, courage, blessing, freedom, justice, and peace.  And we may see the degree to which our baptism is “taking,” that is, how effective it is and how real, by the degree to which we start doing the things that Jesus does.

The goal and destination for the people of God in exile, to whom Isaiah was preaching, is the Promised Land.  For us, of course, this has nothing to do with geography.  The place of God’s promise for us is Jesus Christ and the life he gives us.  In him we are delivered by God to the people we truly are, to the place where we truly belong, into God’s shalom, the beloved community.

Even though the ceremony only happens once, it is the beginning of something, not the conclusion.  It is kind of like washing a very dirty window in that baptism is an ongoing process.  Maybe I spray on the cleaning fluid once, but the elbow grease, as it were, is then applied continually, as I buff off more and more of the grime, dirt, grease, and other accrued gunk.  We are baptized once, but the repentance, the work, the release continues, and the vision, the light, the blessing, and the Spirit  received is increasingly greater.

This is what the church is for.  It is where we gather to do and reflect on and help each other with this process of revealing to ourselves our true nature, the humanity we share with Jesus Christ, in whom we also participate in the presence and work of God.  

+++++++