Category Archives: fear

Every Day is Saturday

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The first Good Friday brought death and despair and shock to the band of followers of the prophet from Nazareth. On the day after — what we now call Holy Saturday — there was grief. And fear. And regret over what could have been done, what should have been done.  And there was blame, plenty of blame, for whose fault it all was. 

I used to muse about what it was like that first Holy Saturday, what it was like to be stunned by what had just happened.  I imagined what it felt like to be overcome by the shadow of unexpected, brutal, solitary death.  I thought about how, with all hope gone, time must have seemed to pass slowly.  I pondered the fear in that Upper Room — fear that those huddled there might be next to die.  

I don’t wonder any more. 

Now, in the year of our Lord 2020, in the year of the Great Pandemic, it seems every day is that Saturday. I see death all around me and feel helpless to stop it. I am hunkered down in my Upper Rooms, admitting no one, venturing out only under exigent circumstances, hurrying back to the safety of my closed universe.  I watch the news trying to figure out who is to blame and who I can trust.  And I am afraid.  I am afraid that despite all my precautions, that illness — and even death — will come for me next.

It is not all the time, of course. Most of the day I soldier on, working, cleaning, doing crosswords, cleaning, Zooming with friends and family, and then cleaning some more. But there are moments when I feel the weight of Saturday, when I see pictures of the unthinkable. Mass graves being dug for the dead, just miles from where I grew up. People, exhausted beyond measure, who are keeping the world running while we hide and wait. Funerals being held via cellphone. There are times when the water seeps through the cracks in the dam and I am overcome.

Of course, I know what the apostles did not know on that first Saturday.. I know that although the hours of grief and fear and confusion passed slowly that Saturday, they did pass. I know that on Sunday morning, when they unlocked the door and let Mary in, everything changed. The joy of seeing a risen Jesus overshadowed all the pain. How can you fear death when you have seen that He conquered it? How can you grieve for someone who is not dead? How can you blame yourself for betraying Him when He has forgiven you for it?  

All that is true and I am profoundly grateful that I know what they did not. Yet, I think it is a mistake to fast-forward over Saturday to get to the happy ending. We are here, now, and it is right to mourn.  After all, Jesus mourned for his friend Lazarus and saw death as the great enemy to be conquered. It is right to remain cut off from the world, for now, as the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for our neighbors. We should not be ashamed of fearing illness or death — Jesus Himself asked for the cup of suffering to be taken from Him.  

I believe that God respects and honors our human experience.  He doesn’t ask us to pretend that there is no pain in death or that we are not afraid. He doesn’t set up the false equivalence that faith is incompatible with feeling pain (it’s people who do that).  

If you don’t believe me, read the Psalms.  Every form of human emotion — anger, anguish, physical pain, mental torment, vengeance, jealousy, bitterness, you name it — is there, part of Holy Scripture.  Yes, the Psalms always end in praise, and that is a great balm.  But they tell me that God respects and welcomes the expression of our emotions. 

In that spirit, I offer a Psalm for Saturday

My heart is broken, Lord.

for the sick and the dead, and those who love them.

for those who have seen their livelihoods vanish and struggle to provide for their families.

For those who are lonely

The unbelievers ask, “Where is your God?”

And then I see where you are.

Where you have always been, a breath away from anyone who calls on you.

The unseen hand comforting the dying and giving strength to the caregiver.

Inspiring your people to generosity and selflessness in a time of need.

Showing your immeasurable love on the Cross.

Standing outside an empty tomb, triumphant over this world’s pain and death.

And through my tears, I praise your holy name.

Just like that first Holy Saturday, this seemingly endless one will end, although we don’t know when, or how, or what the world outside our isolation will look like when it does.  I do know two things.  That God is with us now, in all our fear and confusion and grief.  And that God will be with us on the other side, offering us a hope we never dreamed of. 

In God We Trust

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I spent this morning in a room full of pain. It is not a space designed for comfort, physical or otherwise. The wooden benches are hard and the heat is stifling even on a frigid January day. An aisle separates the “sides” in this judicial proceeding — the victim’s family and friends on the right, defendant’s on the left, like some sick joke of a wedding. It lacks the majesty of movie courtrooms: no dark wood panelling, high ceilings or gold inlay. Just a drab little box of a room with scuffed linoleum floors and a microphone that doesn’t work. It hardly seems a worthy setting for the drama unfolding.

I have come to this most unprepossessing place to hear sentence pronounced on the man who killed my friend. I sit in the same seat as I did during the trial, although at least this time, I have a soft down coat to cushion that unforgiving bench. The same cast reprises its roles: the young prosecutor, the bumbling defense attorney. The victim’s grieving husband, brother and friends. The defendant and his grieving wife and children. The judge, whose words will change so many lives. We meet again, in the same room where a few months ago, I willed myself to stay and see the autopsy photos, where I listened to the defendant deflect all blame for taking my friend from us all.

Something is different, though. I notice for the first time the words in large, gold block letters that hang over the judge’s head:

IN GOD WE TRUST

Funny, they must have always been there, but I just now see them. In God We Trust. I look at the red eyes of my friend’s husband, at the sagging shoulders of her brother, then at my husband’s hand holding mine. I look across the aisle at the defendant asking for mercy and the women who love him weeping, and I wonder what those words mean, here in this room full of pain.

In God We Trust.  Is the State of New York and its legal system declaring their trust in God? To hear courts tell it, no. In response to legal challenges over the years, courts have declared these words have no more than “patriotic or ceremonial character”  and “have lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.”  Ok.  As far as the government is concerned, these words are just a quaint, patriotic, meaningless decoration.  

But for me and for many of us here today, “In God We Trust” isn’t just some patriotic trope. These words are the only oxygen in the room.

We came praying, trusting God for justice, although what that would look like depended on which side of the aisle you were sitting on. Was it God’s justice or man’s that we witnessed here today?  I don’t presume to know.  But I do know that, regardless of whether God “answered” our prayers for justice, we trusted Him enough to pray in the first place, knowing that answered or not, God would still be with us.  

We trusted God for comfort in our grief, although for some that grief was over a brutal, untimely death, and for others it was over a life irrevocably changed by having caused that death.  We put our trust in God to help us absorb whatever blow the sentence would inflict.

After the sentencing, one of the defendant’s relatives approached my friend’s husband.

“Can you forgive him?” she asked.
“Yes, I forgive him. This is what our faith teaches us.”
“May I hug you?” she said, tentatively, tearfully.

They hugged and I was in awe of this God in whom we put our trust. This is a God who fills a room full of pain with strength and solace.  We trust this God who sits next to us on those hard benches, whether we are grieving violence done to us, or the violence we have done to others. We cling to the God, who, in the words of one of my favorite hymns is “a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.”

 

 

Jesus Is

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“It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.” This was the famous response then-President Bill Clinton gave to a question asked of him about the scandal that rocked his presidency. Much fun was made of his lawyerly parsing of the question, of his squirrelly, squirming attempt to avoid telling the plain truth.

Oddly enough, this phrase came to mind when I considered the third aspect of Advent: the Advent of the present tense. In between the Advent of history — when Jesus came — and the Advent of the end of history — when Jesus will come again — is the Advent of the present, when Jesus comes into our personal history. It is here that we consider the Jesus of the here and now, the Jesus who is.

But what does it mean that Jesus is? In Advent, we contemplate Jesus’ Incarnation, His becoming human. But having “put on humanity” in the Incarnation, did He shed it once His earthly assignment was done? In other words, is Jesus still human? When we speak about Jesus in the present tense, are we talking about a purely spiritual being that has gone “home”, reverting to some pre-incarnation state? Or are we talking about someone who retains His humanity even as He has been glorified and is seated on the throne?

This isn’t merely a matter of splitting semantic hairs. It makes all the difference in the world to me. I always took great comfort in knowing that Jesus was human. He laughed and loved and mourned. He was hungry and tired. He became angry and frustrated and felt pain when his friends betrayed him. But if Jesus’ humanity isn’t just past tense, if it isn’t just some sense memory, if He knows what it is like to be human because he is still human — that adds a dimension of intimacy and immediacy that someone who is merely remembering an experience can’t give.

Jesus is — and not just in an ethereal way, at great remove. Now, maybe this isn’t the revelation to you that it has been to me. Perhaps you are one of those people who talks about and actually has a personal relationship with Jesus. Maybe you talk about Jesus as your friend or brother. I’ve long felt like a second-class Christian because as often as I’d heard these words, that was not how I saw Jesus.   Until recently, that is.

I was in a prayer session and during a guided meditation, I was asked to recall an early childhood memory. What surfaced was a frightening one: I’m five years old, blinded by the bandages covering my eyes after eye surgery. My cousin taunts me about all the monsters I can’t see lurking around every corner. I am helpless and afraid and vow that I never will be again. This was a seminal experience; so much of my life has been spent trying to protect that little girl.

My prayer partner asks me to imagine Jesus in the scene. I see Him sitting next to me, I feel His arm around me. She asks, “What does he say to you?” “He is says ‘I’ll take care of little Laura. You go and do what you have to do’.”

Jesus has never been more real to me than at that moment and all the moments since when I feel weak and small. Jesus comes, body and soul, to reassure, to comfort and to free me to move forward. In His eternal humanity, He comes as my brother and friend, who knows firsthand the joys and sorrows of this life. He comes as “the image of the invisible God” to offer me hope and healing as only God can. And every time is a new Advent, a new coming of Jesus into the world, my world. Jesus is.  

 

The Day After

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On this Day After, I feel I should be adding my voice to the chorus of lamentation over the death and suffering in Paris. I believe that somehow I should have something to say, some insight to offer, some outrage to give voice to, some balm for our aching souls. I have none.

I feel I should be posting encouraging Scripture verses that reassure us that God is still on his throne, despite the evidence to the contrary. Or perhaps I should be offering prayers of comfort. Maybe my contribution is a clenched fist of solidarity and a vow of “No retreat, no surrender!”

I can’t seem to muster any of these things. I am just sad. And mad. And afraid. The words of the Isis statement claiming responsibility are meant to strike fear in my heart, and although I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of frightening me, they do. They are words of darkness and chaos; people who say yes to this kind of mass murder are not likely to say no to much else. And while I feel safe here, now, I know I have no more reason to than those who innocently went out to dinner, or to a concert, or to a soccer game yesterday in Paris.

I ache for the lives lost, for the suffering ahead for the wounded, for the people afraid to leave their homes for fear of what a trip to the bakery might hold. And I know that God wants me to feel compassion, to mourn with those who mourn. I know that when I do this, I am most like Jesus. And yet, I somehow have to do this without being overcome by the horror of what has happened, I have to hang onto some hope. Hope that God will comfort. Hope that God’s justice will prevail. Hope that this will not be the final word.

But maybe The Day After it is too soon for me to hope. This morning, I opened my Bible app and this is what I saw:

I lift up my eyes to the hills — from where will my help come?

My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

                                                             (Psalm 121:1-2)

On The Day After, as I resist being pulled into the vortex of death, darkness and despair, all I can manage is to lift up my eyes to the hills and wait for the Lord to send his help.

Faith and Fear

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walking-on-water-christ-saves-peter-began-to-sink.jpg!Blog

When I was 30, I thought that my life had become too safe. I decided that every time I went on vacation, I would do something that terrified me. So I parasailed over the Atlantic Ocean. One time, despite my fear of heights, I climbed a series of rickety ladders leaning unsteadily up against the side of a mesa in Arizona. I keep pictures of these accomplishments on my bulletin board to remind me that it is possible to not let fear rule my life.

Fear is just part of being human, which is why the Bible talks about it a lot. (The word itself appears 399 times!) Scripture assumes that we will feel fear. The question it asks is, “What are you going to do about it?”

One of my favorite stories is from the book of Daniel. Here we find Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, condemned to die because they would not worship the golden idol of the king of Babylon. They expected God would be faithful to His faithful promise to be with them, even if he didn’t save them from the fire.  Now it’s easy to think that their great faith in God meant they weren’t afraid. I think they were plenty afraid.

But faith is about what we do with our fear.

Do we allow our fears to set the boundaries of our lives, then resign ourselves to living within them? Or do we acknowledge our fear, even respect it, but make it subject to boundaries set by God – what God expects of us and what we can expect of God.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego did that. Afraid or not, they knew what God expected of them: You shall have no other gods before me. Afraid or not, they knew what they could expect of God: God would be faithful to them, too.

Now, they weren’t sure how God would do that. They just knew he would. And when they are thrown into the furnace, we see how God fulfills his promise. A fourth man, “who had the appearance of a god” enters into the fire with them, and all four emerge, unharmed. Instead of removing these three faithful believers from the danger and pain, God was with them – in the most literal sense.
And for a completely different picture of faith and fear, I think of Peter. Peter and the disciples find themselves in a storm — the wind is howling, the boat is pitching back and forth and when he sees Jesus walking on water towards him, he thinks it’s some ghost come to finish them off. But even though it looks like Jesus, and sounds like Jesus, Peter needs more proof. He says, “If it is you, tell me come to you on the water.” Peter gets his proof – he is able to walk on the water towards Jesus. Then Peter looks at the storm and sinks because in that moment, he doubts that God is with him.
In the middle of the fire, you can almost hear Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego look at the fourth man and say, “God is with us!” as if they expected him all along. Of course God is with them! That is what God does.
In the middle of the storm, Peter seems to say, “God is with us?” as if he can’t quite believe it.  Peter not only didn’t expect God to be with him in the storm, he didn’t believe it when he was.

Faith is about what we do with our fear.  It is not about some unshakable certainty. It is not some superhuman bravado. It is expecting God to show up when what we fear has come true.
When you are in the middle of the storm, or the fire, or the health crisis, or the family problem, what are you expecting?  Do you expect God to show up?  More importantly, do you recognize it when he does?