Fear I - First Sunday in Lent 2010

This Sunday is the first Sunday in Lent, which is a season in the Christian Calendar. Lent is the 40 days (not counting Sundays), or 6 weeks, that leads up to Easte—it ends on Easter Saturday. It’s a time of preparation - preparing our minds and hearts for the intensity of the Easter story, which sits at the heart of the Christian experience.

The season of Advent in November/December invites us to wait. It acknowledges our longing for the coming of light into our darkness at Christmas. Lent invites us to pare back…to simplify. It acknowledges our need to look full in the face of Christ’s Passion, without distraction. Each Easter we try to walk with Jesus the darkest road…we give ourselves to the fact that the light that came into our darkness was extinguished. And then, and only then, we celebrate with joy the truth that there is life beyond death, and that ultimately the darkness cannot overcome the light.

Because the cycle of Holy Week and Easter can be transforming, if we allow ourselves to participate in it in a deep way, the church observes this Lenten season of preparation, making fertile the soil into which God will plant seeds of hope and change. The themes of Lent have to do with self-denial, fasting, discipline, and resisting temptation. These might feel like old fashioned words, aligned with an unhealthy mistrust of the body and its enjoyments, and of the ‘world’ and its pleasures. But these words also describe a process of strengthening our ‘yes’ and our ‘no’.

Walking the spiritual journey is an ongoing commitment to saying yes and saying no – yes to those things that bring us close to God and others, no to those things that disctract, block, and diminish our connection with God and others. Ultimately, we are strengthening our ability to say yes to dying with Christ, and yes to rising with him, and saying no to denial, betrayal, and violence in all its forms. We are choosing to step onto the Way of Jesus, all the way to his cross and beyond.

So, you might observe Lent in the traditional way, by giving something up for 6 weeks, such as alcohol, or coffee, or television, or facebook, as a way of learning to say ‘no’. Or you might observe the season by taking something up, a habit that teaches you to say ‘yes’ in a focused and disciplined way…such as prayer, or exercise, or dancing. Or you might do both – give something up and take something up. You might want to use Mark’s little Lent reflections booklets, and say ‘yes’ to five minutes in each day to read and reflect on the page for that day. These are available for you today – they’re free – take one if you think you might use it, or give one to a friend.

Lent actually began on this past Wednesday, called Ash Wednesday. Services on this day involve being marked by an ash cross on the forehead, as a sign of our own mortality, our need for God, and our recognition that the darkness that tried to swallow the light of Jesus has a source inside our own selves. Confession is a significant theme of the Lenten journey, as we confront and accept the ways in which we distort ourselves and the world by our habitual impulse to say yes and no to the wrong things.

Because many of us are unable to get to a church service on a Wednesday, here at Cityside we observe Ash Sunday on the first Sunday in Lent, and later in our service this morning there will be an opportunity for those who want to, to receive the ash cross.

Over the course of Lent, I will be speaking and offering reflections on the theme of fear, particularly as we observe fear in the characters surrounding Jesus in the gospel stories leading up to his death. Because fear is, I believe, one of the primary distorting mechanisms that blocks us from walking an authentic spiritual journey. Fear is the enemy of love. It’s something we all experience, in different ways, and express in different ways. For almost all of us, in some way, spiritual transformation is about learning to identify what we are afraid of, how it manifests, and then learning to trust that a loving God calls us into a larger life, free from that fear.

The Passion narrative, or the story of Jesus’ betrayal and death, is a story of how the energies of evil take root in fear…fear that manifests as aggression and denial and disintegration. And it is a story of how a person who loved more than he feared, who understood that love is stronger than death, embraced his own destruction, to free us from the grip of our fears.

The Passion narrative is a dark and gruesome story, a fearful one…but also a transcendent one. And this is actually quite important. Because in our wider culture we are beset with fears, but have few outlets or mechanisms for holding and interpreting fear. This diminishes us. What some of us do if we want to experience vicarious fear, or to be confronted with our own fear, is go to horror movies. And these are becoming increasingly pathological in their depictions of torture and pain, as they attempt to be a kind of dialysis for our culture’s poison stream of fea—fear of incapacity, of failure, of death, of ‘not succeeding’, of moving down the status ladder, of terrorism, of the ‘other’, of ‘them’.

We live in fearful times, if you consider the numbers of people who suffer from some form of anxiety, in particular that generalised feeling of ‘not coping’ and panic at doing what we might consider normal daily tasks. I don’t consider myself to be a particularly fearful person, but I do resonate with that sense of unnamed anxiety that lurks at the threshold of my consciousness and that leaps the fore in ugly ways when I perceive a threat of some kind to my wellbeing. My fears, as you will have probably realised, most often manifest themselves in behaviours of distancing and control.

Alongside what seems to be an increase in fear in our society, is an increase in our commitment to safety – especially regarding children, but also in wider contexts. We don’t know how to dwell with things that make us feel uncomfortable…with things that tap into our fear…fear of illness, of pain, of death, and of grief. We avoid them, to keep ourselves safe. Which means we don’t have the experience of feeling fear, knowing we can cope, and that we can come out the other end of that experience still in tact, maybe even stronger.

Paradoxically, what may seem to be to us to be keeping ourselves safe, and keeping others safe, might actually be having the opposite effect, in the long run. There’s some writing I’ve been coming across recently about how some young adults engage in really unhealthy, dangerous activity (such as young women who binge drink to paralysis), simply to feel fear, to know what risk feels like, to taste danger. And that this in some cases has to do with being so protected in childhood that they never had to learn to measure a risk, or to know the difference between a healthy fear that leads to caution in a dangerous situation, and an unfounded fear that can be overcome.

The Christian faith has at its heart a story of terror: of loss, torture, disintegration and death. Of physical and emotional pain and suffering. And, it has stories of fear…the anxiety of the disciples when Jesus talks of his death, the repressive, violent fear of the religious leaders as their power and status quo are subverted by Jesus’ teaching, the various reactions of Jesus’ followers to Jesus’ arrest and trial, the fear of the mob who find themselves baying for blood.

But it also has a figure who returns from beyond the other side of all this terror, with the Easter Sunday words ‘Be not afraid.’ It is this resurrected Christ who leads the disciples beyond their fear into confidence and love.

We need to be able to recognise our fear and to name it for what it is. We need to learn not to avoid our fear but to stay with it and move through it. In the Christian community, one way that we can learn to do this is by leaning into the Passion narrative of Christ, walking the road of fear unflinchingly day by day through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Saturday, before celebrating Easter Sunday and the overcoming of fear. It is a narrative that holds and contains fear and is not embarrassed to show the disciples, and even Jesus in the garden, at their weakest and most vulnerable.

As people who look forward to Easter as a high point in our religious life, we are invited to engage with our own experiences of fear, and the ways these have limited and harmed us, and others. This Lent, as we prepare our hearts for Holy Week, I invite you to dwell seriously with these questions, as they impact on you, and also the way you respond to, and care for, others, within this community and beyond. As we reflect on the theme of fear in the Gospel story, I invite all of us to take small steps towards saying no to fear and yes to love, knowing that we are held by the greatest love there is…love that took everything we could throw at it, and returned from the grave.

Elements of this sermon were inspired by the writings of Gavin and Jo Knight: www.mindandspirit.org.uk