Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid, fear not, have no fear, these are the most commonly repeated phrases in the bible.
There’s a lot to be afraid of these days. And clearly, there’s been a lot to be afraid of since the beginning of time, or I imagine there would be some other phrase most common in the bible.
I don’t have to tell you the downsides of being afraid. The wear and tear on the body, mind, and soul or overall being. I also don’t have to tell you that the media is playing us when it comes to being afraid. 24-hour news cycles, words cycling through the bottom of the screen as if what was being said wasn’t bad enough. Fires, earthquakes, epidemics, global warming, unemployment, poverty, opioid addiction, gun violence and these last few weeks white supremacy and domestic terrorism. I’m sure I missed a few.
When Jesus was speaking to his disciples they were living in a world of domination and violence. The wealthy and powerful rule over the weak, take advantage of that weakness, use tactics that divide and conquer with fear and chaos. It’s a world in which Caesar is both king and god, a cruel, irrational tyrant who takes vengeance against his enemies.[1]
I don’t know about you but that sounds an awful lot like the world we’re experiencing today…And the disciples and we get these words, these three little words, Do not be afraid…. Over and over again. How much are we listening? How willing are we to listen? Is it somehow easier to walk around being afraid and throwing our arms up in the air as though there’s nothing to do but baton down the hatches…or are we going to live out the core of our faith and live into the trust we proclaim as a people of God’s?
Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
What can we say about this promised kingdom? First, we can understand it as here, now available and still coming. (19:11, 21:31) It’s here available to us and it’s coming again when Christ returns. I encourage you to let go of old ideas of the kingdom as a faraway place we go to when we die, but instead understand it a gifted to us here and now, shown to us in the flesh through Jesus Christ.
In the 37 times that Jesus describes the reign of God in the Gospels, not once is the kingdom of God like a kingdom of earth. Thirty-seven times Jesus reshapes the imaginations of his followers. Thirty-seven times Jesus tells them a story to help them remake the only world they know.[2]
Stories, parables, the kingdom is like this, the kingdom is like that….drawing the listener in…into a place where we imagine together what it means to live into something better, richer, more meaningful. But not in the ways we’ve grown accustomed to.
For Luke’s Jesus the kingdom is good news for the poor, blessed are the poor, (4:43, 6:20) and the least of these, and the oppressed, the sick, the ones no one wants to be around. Geographically, the kingdom is small, (13:18-19) like a seed, but it grows and spreads and finds it’s ways to places we never imagined. But the kingdom of God is also in your midst, (17:21) it’s within you as much as it’s around you. We are made in God’s image, and the kingdom flows out of you, lives between you and the person next to you and it requires something of you to enter it. (14:33) As we talked about last week, a costly grace because it’s not easy, it’s hard, it means so often doing what’s right over what’s easy.
And Jesus in this morning’s scripture is letting us know about the barriers that get in the way of living into this gift, this kingdom. Wealth is a barrier. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Jesus is drawing a line in the sand between worldly treasure, the kind moths can make holes in, the kind carried in purses that wear out. Sell those, give those up, in exchange for what eternal life, that is, the good life, which cannot be eaten away at or destroyed.
This message from Jesus is old, and yet I can’t imagine a better time to hear it again. We are the self-help culture who has completely bought into something out there that will make us happy. Just a little more money, a little more fame, a little less weight. Status, money, and power will not get us there. Fear that we are not enough, or that the world is not enough will not get us there. The kingdom that Jesus is steering us towards lives in the trust of a God who throws the world upside down and says lose yourself to find yourself in me. When we allow our fear to dominate our lives we attach to all the wrong things, because that’s what we’re being sold. When we attach to a good economy in order to justify xenophobia, we’ve got it backward. When we attach to our bank account and our 401k savings account as more important than the well being of the air we breathe or the water we drink, perhaps we’ve got it backward? When isolation and depression lead to the highest suicide rates we’ve ever seen and the statistics of trusting one another as human beings are at an all-time low, we can begin to understand why so many columnists are describing where we are in our country as a spiritual crisis.
My experience tells me that when a crisis of any kind hits, there’s a rebound around the corner. That’s the God I know. We’re ripe for healing, for social change, for cultivating a culture that trusts in the goodness of one another and by the grace of God weave together the gifts of connection and intimacy, vulnerability, building community through trust rather than tearing them apart through fear.
That’s good news for the church because to be the church means all of this at it’s best. When churches become places of relationship, of service, of dedication to something bigger than self they become the place to learn what the kingdom can look like when we work together, grow together and love together.
Henri Nouwen is a wise teacher in the art of listening for God’s calling and framing our lives by God’s values. In Spiritual Direction, he shares this:
From the beginning of my life, two interior voices have been speaking to me: one saying, Henri, be sure you make it on your own. Be sure you become an independent person. Be sure I can be proud of you; and another voice saying, Henri, whatever you are going to do, even if you don’t do anything very interesting in the eyes of the world, be sure you stay close to the heart of Jesus, be sure you stay close to the love of God.
“You are here for just a short time,” Nouwen writes elsewhere in the same book, “for twenty, forty, sixty, or eighty years—to discover and believe that you are a beloved child of God. . . . Life is just a short opportunity for you during a few years to say to God: ‘I love you, too.’”[3]
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The Genesis scripture you heard this morning holds one of my favorite images in the bible. After God tells Abram not to be afraid, he takes Abram outside…
After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision:
“Do not be afraid, Abram.
I am your shield,[a]
your very great reward.[b]”
Then a few verses later-(God) took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.”
I looked up the artwork depicting this moment. They all have Abram standing alone, looking up at the stars….which is not how I imagined it. I rarely imagine a personified God, but so often the old testament draws me so deeply into the story, I forget my own theology, and I too see the old man standing there with a long white beard…and I see him with Abram on a porch, in a couple of rockers on a warm summer night. Just two old men, delighting in the earthly treasures of scotch and a cigar. And after a few minutes of just rocking and breathing in the night air, God asks Abram how he is, really is, and Abram gets to the heart of it; I’m going to die soon, and I’ve never had kids, and my 401k is going to someone I’d rather not leave it to, but what choice do I have?
And that’s when God stands up, as God always seems to do whenever we’ve convinced ourselves we’re out of choices… And He walks over to the edge of the porch and says, come here, Abe. God puts his arm around his old friend and says, look up…lookup at the sky and count the stars, if you can. This is your life, it’s filled with more possibility than you can wrap your head around, it’s infinite in ways you’ll never understand…which is why the best thing you can do is to trust me. You always have a choice. I won’t let you go. No matter how big it all seems, no matter how alone you think you are, no matter, I’ve got you. Trust me.
I don’t imagine Abram having any huge epiphany that night, but I do imagine he exhaled some as he and back into his rocker. I imagine hat he turned to offer God some coffee only to find the rocker empty now. I imagine that Abram shook his head and chalked it up as a dream or a childish fantasy or foolishness. Something we all tend to do after we’ve been touched intimately by God.
And yet Jesus tells us in order to enter the kingdom we must have the faith of children who wonder and imagine, and hold the possibility of an inchworm in their hands and marvel at the seed growing roots. Foolishness is to believe in the power of the cross, a symbol of power that makes no sense in this world, but makes every bit of sense to a God of love whose kingdom turns power upside down and creates a place of love for the least, the sick the hungry, the forgotten, the depressed, the addicted, the fearful….The people in God’s kingdom are not fearless, but they listen and they hear the God who says, I’m here, do not be afraid. Look up at the stars and follow me.
[1] https://sojo.net/articles/kin-dom-christ
[2] https://sojo.net/articles/kin-dom-christ
[3] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/august-11-ordinary-19c-luke-1232-40?code=PWSFHdGaPpEaKG4U52sM&utm_campaign=c4724a54b5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_09_11_08_32_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_term=0_b00cd618da-c4724a54b5-86220231