What About Fear? [Lent 1B]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Genesis 9:8-17
What About Fear?
I know it doesn’t seem like
it, but this part of the Noah story is about what is left when fear is no
longer in the picture.
You should know, I am not a
seafaring man. I knew the fields and
hills of Ohio as a boy. On those rare
occasions, when I would gaze over the vastness of Lake Erie – or even
rarer still, the impossible expanse of the Atlantic Ocean – those
bodies of water seemed to me strangers.
But not kindly strangers, not friends one has just not yet met, but
mysterious strangers, foreboding strangers.
I suspected danger was lurking just below the surface.
I am still suspicious of water that
has not yet been domesticated. I am very
fond of the water that comes from a tap, that courses through the copper pipes
of my house. But I prefer to keep the
water that fills lakes, rivers and oceans at an arm's length. There is simply too much unknown in there. Under the surface are creepy creatures that I
cannot see, that I am pretty sure want to touch me, even bite me. There are currents that are trying to pull me
under, as if that body of water was hungry enough to swallow me whole. I am not interested in that. Am I afraid?
Maybe. I prefer to say I am
sensible.
But if am afraid of the water, I am
in good company. The ancient Israelites
were too. They were a desert
people. They wandered in the emptiness
of rock and sand for generations. They
led their flocks from sparse pasture to sparse pasture. When they settled down, they built their
Temple in the rocky hills of Jerusalem.
They were not a seafaring people.
In fact, as far as they could tell,
the sea was simply chaos with a shore.
The sea was the realm of monsters and terrors. It consumed ships and ate sailors alive. To a desert people the sea was a stranger – a
mysterious stranger teeming with danger.
And this fear surfaces in their
sacred stories. God's command of the
waters is proof of God's might and power.
Only God was able to tame their most worthy adversary and the
existential fear it inspired. God split
the water of the Red Sea. God brought
water from a rock in the desert. God
gave the prophets the authority to control the rain, to shut up the heavens and
open them back up. That Jesus was able
to tame the angry sea was enough to cause the disciples to start asking some
pretty dangerous theological questions.
But it all began in the
beginning. “In the
beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless
void and darkness covered the face of the deep waters, while a wind from God
swept over the face of the waters.”
It all starts with this wrestling match: God versus the Waters. In the creation stories found at the
beginning of the book of Genesis, God's most significant challenge is to tame
the chaotic waters. And so we read that
God created a dome in the sky – something
like a force field to protect the creation from the chaos; the dry land formed
the earthly boundaries. In creation God
tamed the water – that
terrifying water. That is how the people
knew God was powerful; God wrestled what they most feared into submission.
With the waters under God's
control, life could emerge and thrive on the earth. But it was always there, that dangerous water
–
threatening to destroy them, threatening to drown them. Chaos barely under control – in that
ancient worldview it was hanging over their heads, lurking at their shores,
rumbling beneath their feet. In the
desert not enough water would eventually lead to famine, would cause them to
pull up the tent stakes and journey on; but too much water too quickly would
mean a flood – instant
devastation and death.
And we know that is exactly what
happens. In the Noah story, God releases
the chaos. Biblical scholar Tony
Cartledge points out that, “God does
not say 'I will make it rain' but 'I will bring a flood of waters upon the
earth...' The word translated 'flood' is...a technical term for the waters of
chaos, not a simple flood.” The Bible says that “the
fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were
opened.” Cartledge continues: “Water comes
up as well as down, and the very order of the universe is threatened, like
creation in reverse. In Genesis 1, God
separated the chaos waters from the dry land. During the flood, that part of
creation was reversed and chaos again imperiled the earth.”[1]
This was the nightmare
scenario. This was the worst case: the
sea coming to find them. Their deepest
primal fear realized. That is what the
Flood story is – the story
of their fear come to life. And that is
why today's passage is so important.
They need to know this will never happen again in the future, that God
will always protect them from the threat of chaos, from existential destruction.
Today we begin this Lenten season
in the aftermath of the Flood, after God again tames the waters. And while the passage, in English, repeatedly
uses the word “covenant”, this is
not a covenant. It is a promise. You see, a covenant is an agreement between
two parties. When we renew our baptismal
covenant with God, God promises to love and keep us forever. And we make vows too. We promise to live lives worthy of God's love. We of course continue to fail to live up to
our end of the deal. But God, in God's
inexhaustible mercy, continues to renew the covenant with us.
But this is not that. This is one-sided. And a one-sided covenant is a promise. God promises Noah, and his descendants, and
every living creature: never again.
Never again will chaos reign.
Never again will the water overcome them. Never again will their worst fear be
realized. God is strong enough. They can trust God; they can look into the
future with hope, not fear. And to seal
the promise, God hangs a bow up in the clouds as a reminder – not for
us, but so that God will always remember the promise.
We all have fears. Israel's greatest fear was the chaotic
depths, the waters. It represented to
them the thing they could not control, could not tame, could not overcome. In their minds, water posed a threat to their
very existence.
We all have fears. I am afraid; I am afraid for my children. This week, in our nation, there was yet
another mass shooting, another mass shooting of children, another school shooting. This is the fear that haunts me: that, at any
time, my children could be taken from me in a chaotic flood of bullets. My children are in kindergarten and
pre-school and they run through drills so that they are ready in the event
someone comes to their school to kill them.
That’s where we
are; this is the reality with which are children are living; this is their
normal. And I’m also
afraid that our country is so broken and divided, so partisan, that this plague
will only grow worse. I’m afraid of
that. To try to keep from losing my
mind, I try to assure myself that it won’t happen to me and my family. But there are grieving parents all across
this nation who probably thought the same thing until it happened, until they
lost their child on what was a normal day until it became the worst day of
their lives.
This is what my wife and I talk
about. We talk about it every time it
happens. And so pretty often. And we talk about how we feel desperate and
helpless and sad and afraid. This is the
existential threat of our time. The fear:
it is so big; it feels overwhelming, paralyzing, like it might devour the
future. It can cause one to sink into
despair, to lose hope. The fear is so
invasive; it chips away at our ability to trust in God, to believe in love, to find
the beauty in the world. And it so
stubborn. We spend our lives locked in a
staring contest with fear. And in the
face of fear, we have two choices: allow the fear to devour us, to plant seeds
of hatred and violence in our hearts until we rot from the inside out or we can
hand it over to someone or something strong enough to handle it.
This season of Lent is a time of
self-examination, repentance, and prayer.
Many of you are probably planning to make a change, to give something
up. What about fear? Just because there are things in this world that
are scary doesn’t mean we have
to be afraid.
Fear causes us to lock up our
hearts and makes us want to hide away from the world and all the bad things
that happen out there. When fear takes
over trust fades and hope withers and love grows cold. And when that happens the future feels bleak
and everyone everywhere starts to look like an enemy, a threat. God wants better for us, a better world, a
better future; God wants “on earth as
it is in Heaven.” That will not happen until we learn to love
better than we fear. Trust and hope and
love are risky in this dangerous world but they are the only path into a better
tomorrow.
What the Noah story, especially the
piece of it we heard today shows us, is that God is rooting for our
future. In the story, God hangs a bow in
the sky. We tend to think of this as a
rainbow, a weather event – and that
is true enough. But the text does not
say rainbow; it says bow – as in bow
and arrow. God transforms a symbol of
violence into a sign of hope. That is
why we don’t need to
fear the terrors that await us in the future.
Because while God is here with us today, the God of the promise is also
there, in every moment beyond this present one, calling us to walk boldly into
that place where fear thrives. God is
strong enough to carry our most haunting fears so that we can keep moving ahead.
And when we give our fears to God,
when we trust God with our fears, the bad things don’t go away,
but our hearts open and our love is set free in this scary world, this world
that desperately needs to be confronted by the power of love – a love
that is stronger than violence, stronger than hatred, stronger than division, stronger
than fear, stronger even than death. Rather
than allow fear to take us out of this world, we can transform this world
through the power of love. Because God
is with us.
Abba
Doulas, the disciple of Abba Bessarion said, ‘One day when we were walking beside the sea I was thirsty and I said to
Abba Bessarion, “Father, I am very thirsty.” He said a prayer and said to me, “Drink some of the sea water.” The water proved sweet when I drank some. I even poured some into a
leather bottle for fear of being thirsty later on. Seeing this, the old man
asked me why I was taking some. I said to him, “Forgive me, it is for fear of being thirsty later on.” Then the old man said, “God is here, God is everywhere.”[2]
In the
chaos of the sea. In the suffocating depths
of our fear. In the darkness of the
darkest night. In the big scary
future. Ever calling us to plunge into
the dangerous future armed with only trust, hope, and love. God is here, God is everywhere. And God is strong – strong enough to handle even our greatest fears.
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