Beyond Fear

Isaiah 12:2-6
The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost 2010


We’ve all experienced it at one time or another: fear. I was running late on my way to step-father’s funeral. It’s true enough that they wouldn’t start without me; but I knew that my mother would be worried, and I knew that the colonel at the head of the military honor guard would be looking at his watch. To make up lost time, I cut across Fort Bragg on a deserted two-lane road at a speed concerning which I shall forever take the Fifth Amendment.

In an instant of inattention, the right-side wheels of my Tahoe slipped off the pavement into a deep rut gouged over the years by Humvees and heavy trucks and tanks and military machinery that I don’t even know what it’s called. I’ve never seen a roadside rut so deep. It was a narrow canyon along the edge of the asphalt just wide enough for my tires to drop all the way down into it and give me one of those vibrating chair experiences with the additional thrill of a ridiculously high rate of speed.

It was a moment of fear in which seconds lasted an eternity. Random thoughts raced through my mind. Random thought number 1: “I’m tearing the suspension out from under my truck.” Random thought number 2: “My mother will be attending two funerals this week.” Random thought number 3: “I wonder if I will go airborne?” And then I actually laughed at my own inadvertent joke. “Fort Bragg”? “Airborne?” How ironic is that? “I’m going to die on Fort Bragg on the day I was supposed to bury my stepfather on his beloved post.” In the meantime, my heart was pounding furiously, and I was sweating profusely, even though the air conditioning in the truck was working just fine. Fear.

It’s a survival mechanism practiced and perfected on African savannahs for millions of years before we humans moved into cities and suburbs and belted ourselves into SUVs and sedans and trucks in which we die in truly amazing numbers every year. “Fight, flight or freeze” is a chemical and electrical response in our bodies to a stressor. That morning on Fort Bragg “freeze” saved my life. While every nerve ending in my body screamed, “Do something, stupid!” something else said, “You’ve already done something really, really stupid. Do nothing, stupid.” That part of my brain that won locked me down in a freeze: “Do nothing stupid.”

I aimed for the rut and I prayed I could keep the tires in it while I took my foot off the gas pedal and let friction and the gravitational pull toward inertia slow the truck down. At about thirty five miles an hour, I began to tap the brake pedal, and at about fifteen miles an hour I turned the wheel and tapped the gas and the front tire popped up out of the rut and the rear wheel followed. Back on the pavement, my heart was still pounding furiously, and I was still sweating profusely. I thanked God, and I thanked “fight, flight or freeze,” especially freeze.

There are any number of simple morals to that story. One is when you find yourself in a rut, don’t jerk the wheel. The rut is frightening, but jerking the wheel is fatal. Would that we understood in our marriages and our businesses and our politics and our economics, when you’re in a rut, don’t jerk the wheel. Do nothing stupid. A second one is if you insist on traveling at a high rate of speed, keep your life insurance paid up and always wear dark pants.

In a more subtle reading of the story of my experience with excessive speed while crossing Fort Bragg it becomes something of a parable. The fascinating thing about our “fight, flight or freeze” mechanism is that it kicks in so fast that we don’t run because we are afraid. We become afraid when we discover that we are already running. Our subconscious chemical and electrical survival response mechanism is so quick that our conscious mind only subsequently interprets our experience as “fear.” And that’s why what we call “fear” can save our lives: chemical and electrical reactions in our bodies that work faster than our conscious mind can drive our action—or our inaction, as the case may be.

But that is also why what we call “fear” can destroy our lives. When we human beings abandoned the savannah to move into urban centers and then into “sub-urbs,” we carried our internal chemical and electrical reactions with us into the overcrowded boxes and canyons of city life and from there to the sedentary isolation of the cul de sac. Far from the savannah, we human beings have become our own primary predators by automobile, diet, substance abuse, firearms, inactivity, isolation, loneliness, and 24/7 news of national disasters and human atrocities and political rhetoric and cultural commentary that triggers our fight, flight or freeze mechanism when there is nothing for most of us to fight or flee or freeze to survive. This repeated and constant triggering of the survival mechanism that we call “fear” turns our own body into our own worst enemy from the inside out in relation to ourselves and in relation to each other.

In this morning’s Old Testament lesson, Isaiah 12, we heard words spoken in and to Jerusalem in a time of great fear, a time of national and international terror and crisis. It’s impossible to be exact in dating the words of this poetry that form the conclusion in chapter 12. Isaiah the son of Amoz was active as a prophet for more than 40 years and maybe more than 50. It’s pretty clear that his words in chapters 1-12 were used and reused, applied and reapplied, at different times even during his own lifetime. (Don’t tell me you’ve never heard a preacher preach the same sermon more than once!) It’s also clear that Isaiah’s words were reworked yet again when they were included in the mammoth anthology that is the book of Isaiah as we have it.

But let me set just a little of the historical stage of the decades from which these verses originally come. In 745 B.C.E. (or “B.C.,” as you may be accustomed to thinking), a new king came to the throne in Assyria, modern-day Iraq. His name was Tiglath-pileser III, and if you knew your ancient history well, just hearing the name “Tiglath-pileser III” should make you shudder with fear. Tiglath-pileser III was an aggressive and effective field general in command of the most powerful military apparatus that the ancient Near East had ever seen up to his day. He was a ruthless and effective administrator of his nation’s internal and imperial affairs who built the ancient Near East’s greatest empire up until his time in fewer than 20 years on the throne.

Beginning in 742 B.C.E., the year that Isaiah was called to be a prophet, according to Isaiah 6:1, Tiglath-pileser III began campaigning—as in military campaigning—repeatedly into Syria and eventually into Israel where he captured Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, in 732 B.C.E. And when he did, as was his practice, he deported tens of thousands of Israelites from their homeland and brought the threat of Assyrian military might within miles of Jerusalem. The Old Testament scholar in me would love to spend a month of Sundays—thirty or thirty-one of them—describing the international and national stage on which Isaiah the son of Amoz proclaimed the words of deliverance and thanksgiving and salvation that are our Old Testament lesson this morning.

They were decades of terror and hope, of recurring war and intermittent peace, of political infighting and courageous alliances—and foolish ones too. They were decades of nationalism and internationalism, decades of religious pluralism and religious reactionism. They were decades of destruction and building, decades of high taxes and great wealth for some and destitution for others. In such a time as this, Isaiah of Jerusalem sang of deliverance and and thanksgiving and salvation: “Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and my might. . . . Give thanks to the Lord, call [God’s] name. . . . Sing praises to the Lord. . . . Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.” “I will trust, and will not be afraid.”

There is a consistent word woven into the fabric of Scripture, spoken by prophets and priests and angels and messengers: “Fear not,” as the King James translates it. “Fear not” to Abraham when the future of his household was in doubt (Genesis 15:1), and “fear not” to Hagar when she was expelled from Abraham’s household (21:17). “Fear not” to Isaac in a time of conflict (26:24), and “fear not” to Rachel when she was in hard labor (35:17). “Fear not” to Jacob on the prospect of leaving all he knew behind in Canaan to move to Egypt (46:3), and “fear not” to Jacob’s sons in Egypt (50:19). “Fear not” to the people of Israel in the wilderness at Mount Sinai (Exodus 20:20), and “fear not” on the verge of entering the land of promise (Deuteronomy 1:21). “Fear not” to Joseph (Matthew 1:20), and “fear not” to Mary (Luke 1:30). “Fear not” to Simon Peter (Luke 5:10), and “fear not” to the women at the empty tomb on the first Easter morning (Matthew 28:15). “Fear not” to the father of a dying daughter (Luke 8:50), and “fear not” to all who are faithful (Luke 12:7).

In time of uncertainty and anxiety, in times of terror and war and infighting, nationalism and internationalism, religious pluralism and religious reactionism, again and again the gospel words, “Fear not!” are woven through Scripture, spoken by by prophets and priests and angels and messengers. It is true enough that fear-mongers frequently succeed in capturing public attention and swaying entire populations to fight, flee, or freeze. But it is just as true that voices that call us beyond fear are those that give us the courage to live and to love and to create, to plant and to build and to paint and to carve and to dance, to sing and to laugh and to give thanks even in the most difficult times and the most desperate straits.

“I will trust and not be afraid” is not a statement of denial. It’s not an escapist sentiment. It’s not the posture of an ostrich with its head in the sand. In January of 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered an inaugural address that is counted among the great pieces of American oratory, not because of its political program or its partisan persuasiveness but because it spoke of a spirit beyond fear in a fearful time. He rightly characterized that time as a “dark hour of our national life.” But in that dark hour he spoke words that have resonated ever since: “first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt was not in denial, nor was he an escapist.

He called on the American people to “face our common difficulties” with the recognition that “They concern, thank God, only material things,” he said. “Happiness,” he went on to say, “lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow [human beings].” Each member a minister, anyone?

Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” (John 14:27). The words of Jesus and the entire body of Scripture insist that fear is no way to live. So do not fall prey to your fears or anyone else’s. Don’t jerk the wheel.

Fear is an evolutionary survival mechanism, but when it is repeatedly and constantly triggered in the life of an individual or a family or a society or a nation, fear destroys life, the very thing that it evolved to save. So take these words to heart. Commit them to memory. Live with them and in them and by them: “God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid.”


This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.