Rev. Tom Disrud

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

April 19, 1998

Fear is something we all experience, everyday. It is basic, because on some level, it is connected to our survival. We are wired to survive, to look out. We sense when we are in danger.

Fear has been compared to blood pressure. We need it to be alive, but too much of it can be harmful to our health.

Fear takes all kinds of forms. When we are young, it may be the big blue monster underneath the bed.

As we get older, phobias and fears and worries can run a gambit from everyday fears about riding in small planes to phobias that can make life very difficult. Fear of snakes in the Florida everglades is different than a fear of snakes in a high rise. Some fears are more normal than others.

Those may be called more routine fears. On top of this, these days there is a good deal of fear in our culture.

It may be fears about the education our children are receiving.

It may be fears about our safety when we are in our homes or outside of our homes. This comes amid stories of children carrying guns.

We have fears about our environment, about the food we eat, about the air we breathe.

And it may be we have fears of some other-a person of a different color or class, someone of a different sexual orientation, someone of a different religion. The common factor is a sense that someone is opposed to us on some level. They are different from us and therefore some kind of threat.

Fear triggers something in us that may cause us to retreat. It may cause us to fight. But fear can also spur us into action it is our signal that something must change. It opens us up to making this happen.

Fear can be a great motivator. It can bring us an awareness of how we are alive. It can be a strategic agitator.

Andrew Grove, the recently retired executive of Intel wrote a book recently, "Only the Paranoid Survive. In it Grove talks about the need to anticipate every curve and to adjust accordingly. He tells us not to run from worry, but to embrace it. To be open to what may go wrong and react accordingly is good business sense.

He may have a point. If we let the fear control us, it probably will. What we do with it makes all the difference.

An example from my own life.

For some years I lived my life knowing I was gay and I was absolutely terrified about telling anyone.

The rationale of fear went something like this. I couldn't be open because it would hurt my family and friends. My family and friends wouldn't like me or love me anymore. I would not be able to get a job. Life would be more miserable out than in. All in all, if I came out I was sure to die homeless and pennyless with nobody liking me.

Over time the rationalization grew more difficult. Bottom line was that I wasn't very happy anyway. Everything in my life seemed to be filtered through a screen. I was always thinking Will they find out? Or are they wondering about me? This became the constant fear. It took a lot of energy. I felt very alone.

Finally, over time I realized that something had to give. Whatever the consequences of coming out would be, they couldn't be worse than the place of secrecy I was living in.

So the days went by. I found myself thinking about it more and more. I moved from Duluth to Berkeley, and this certainly seemed to open things up for me. So suddenly the day came. I was having dinner with a new friend from seminary and she seemed like a good candidate to tell. I didn't know her that well, so it didn't feel like I had as much to loose. We went to a sushi restaurant, as new arrivals in Berkeley are prone to do. So not only was I coming out, I was eating sushi for the first time. I was not only afraid of revealing myself, but I was afraid I would not know how to eat sushi.

I managed to do both-just fine--during the dinner.

The sky didn't fall in. My friend didn't seem very surprised. I think she was kind of expecting it.

And I felt like I had just unloaded a 50-pound sack of potatoes from my shoulders.

It was a moment that transformed my life, an act of self love that changed the way I saw myself. I faced my fear and life had a new perspective.

I now think of my life as before that time and after that time. Since then I've come to see my life as a series of coming outs-tome big, some small.

In this process I came to see myself not a person who was cursed with being gay but as a person of worth who was part of something larger. I came to see myself not as separate from others, but a whole person, a person who can be loved. Moving into the fear was an act of self love that not only brought wholeness to my life but also allowed me to be a fuller, more loving presence to the people around me.

Now, some years later, being on the other side of coming out, I wonder what took me so long. I have to remind myself of the power that fear can have on us.

This was a big, big fear for me, and a huge hurdle. Most are not so big. Most are much more routine. But they do keep coming up. What if I do something people won't like? What if I'm not there when someone needs me? What if I can't handle a new responsibility at work?

The fears, depending on our personalities, can take any number of shapes. Some of us are more prone toward fear than others.

As I kid, one of my favorite movies was Mel Brooks' "High Anxiety." He plays the nervous head of a psychiatric institute, and he is a very nervous person. He has just arrived from out of town and is being driven to his new home. As his anxiety rises, in the background is music that sounds like something from an Alfred Hitchcock movie is also rising. As his anxiety peaks, you see a bus full of playing musicians going by in the passing lane. Mel Brooks breaths a sigh of relief and continues on.

When I get into a place of worry, that is sometimes how it feels. I can get worked up. Weather the anxious music is real or imagined, I let it dominate me and hold me back. Life is always a matter of getting perspective on the things around us.

Facing fear is not always easy. The fears that are the most difficult ones for me are those niggling ones, the ones that make me question myself, the ones that hold me back from my full potential. These are the fears that bring me to think of the scripture passage I read at the beginning of the service. Perfect love cast out fear.

Fear and love, I have learned from my story, can be opposites. One can keep out the other. In fear, we are isolated, in love we are in communion with others. In fear we are held back, in love we have the courage to move forward. When we know we are loved and part of something larger than ourselves, fear loses its power.

This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination in Memphis. King was a person who certainly had a great deal to fear: he was followed, he was jailed, he was beaten. Even his sex life was monitored.

King carried on, he knew what his calling was. Despite the risks in this, he followed his vision. On the night before he died, his oration made clear that he may not get there with his people to the promised land, but that he had the faith to continue on. He told them he was not afraid. He told them that he had been to the mountaintop.

In one of his sermons King talks about his fears. He tells the story of a woman named Mother Pollard, a participant in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus protests in 1956. She and other protesters had been walking for several weeks, and when asked if she was tired, she replied, "My feet is tired but my soul is rested."

King tells the story of one night when he was weary. He had been arrested that week, and had received numerous threatening phone calls. He was feeling depressed and fear-stricken, but did not feel he could convey that sense to the people who were there following him. They needed him to be strong and courageous.

At the end of meeting, Mother Pollard came to the front of the church and said, "Come here, son." King went forward the hugged her. "Something is wrong with you," she said. "You don't talk strong tonight." King tried to further disguise his fears. He said he was fine. But Mother Pollard said, "I know something is wrong. Is it that we ain't doing things to please you? Or is it that the white folks is bothering you?" Before King could respond, she looked directly into his eyes and said, "I don told you we is with you all the way." Then her face became radiant and she said quietly, "But even if we ain't with you, God's gonna take care of you."

King said with those words, he stopped trembling. With his awareness of love, his fears were cast out.

Each time we push against our growing edge and we learn a little bit more about who we are and what it is we are afraid of. And hopefully, as we push against this edge, we come to have a sense of ourselves as related to something larger. In each of our lives we have those times when we step forward and those times when we take a step backward. There are lots of small steps, a handful of big ones, and each day we learn something more.

In my role here as a minister in this church I have the opportunity to see a great deal of fear and also a great deal of love.

Looking out at your faces on Sunday mornings, I think of your stories.

I think of people who struggle with terminal illnesses. People who face very scary situations, but meet them grace and courage. I see people moving to places of acceptance and wholeness.

I see people who have experienced great loss. People who are going on with life. People who move past their fears and even reach out to lend a hand to others.

I see people who have lost jobs and are looking at what the road ahead will mean for them. They don't know, but they go on.

I see leaders of the church faced with big decisions about the future of the institution. I see them moving not out of fear but out of love and courage and commitment, looking at the people around them and trusting that together the right decision will emerge.

When I'm afraid and don't know if I'm up to the challenge, all I need to do is look around me and it gives me hope and courage.

It affirms the power of love and relationship in our lives and what it means to be connected. It gives me faith to know that whatever happens, it will probably be OK.

Over time, planted in fertile soil, we are allowed to reach farther out and grow.

The blessing of fear is that it can bring us to a sense of awe. It calls us to stop and see the grandeur of what it is we are witnessing. It allows us to more fully see the holy in our midst. To see the presence of creation and to see ourselves connected to it. It opens us to love.

In my life after coming out, I suddenly was much more aware of the beauty of the people around me. In the act of coming into my own self, I was more able to see people as inherently worthy beings. As the fear has been driven out, I have come to live more fully.

"Real love is always difficult," said the poet Rilke, "because it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for the sake of another; it is a great, demanding claim on us, something that chooses us and calls us to vast distances."

In his book "Snow Falling on Cedars", David Guterson tells the story of Kabuo and Hatsue, his wife.

"At night, Kabuo was subject to disturbing dreams that sent him to the kitchen table in his slippers and bathrobe, where he sat drinking tea and staring. Hatsue found that she was married to a war veteran and that this was the crucial fact of her marriage; the war had elicited in him a persistent guilt that lay over his soul like a shadow. For her this meant loving him in a manner she hadn't anticipated before he'd left for war. There was nothing of charity in it and she did not step lightly around his heart or indulge his sorrow or his whims. Instead she brought herself to his sorrow completely, not to console him but to give him time to become himself again. Without regrets she honored the obligation she felt to him. This gave her life a shape and meaning that were larger than her dream of farming strawberries from island soil. At the same time giving herself over to his wounds was both disturbing and rewarding. She sat across from him at the kitchen table at three o'clock in the morning, while he stared in silence or talked or wept, and she took when she could a piece of his sorrow and stored it for him in her own heart."

We are changed, we see ourselves in new ways. We are connected.

Fear and love are present at all stages of life. As we approach our death, the face of fear may still be present.

I have a neighbor, Ralph, who is dying of cancer.The end time can be a very fearful one for the person dying and also for the family. The other evening, Ralph's wife told me the story of when his twin brother died.

Ralph and Robert were identical twins, they had grown up side by side, but in the last few years, they lived some distance apart. When Robert took ill, a brother and sister visited. They let Ralph know that Robert's days were numbered. He was lapsing in and out of a coma and would by dying soon. When told this, Ralph did not want to visit. He seemed too afraid of saying goodbye to his brother. The days passed and Robert was clinging to life. The doctor had also told them that he seemed afraid and that he was waiting for someone. The family thought that person may be Ralph. Despite his fears, Ralph went to the hospital. He took his brother's hand and held it, telling him he was there. It was just a few minutes later that his brother died. He needed to say goodbye to his brother.

That was some years ago, and now Ralph is the one dying. His family is taking care of him so that he can die at home. He has cancer, and in the past few days as stopped eating except for a few bites of food each day. He is getting weaker. His family says they see him moving emotionally to another place. He is getting more and more distant. And as this has happened, he has taken to gesturing in his chair. He is slowly motioning for someone. It seems he is not quite ready to let go. His family believes he, too, is waiting for his brother.

In living, as in dying, we reach out, we live with fears and we live with love. It is human to do both.

As we gather here on Sunday, and in our homes throughout the week, surrounded by friends and family, we work to create that place of love.

It is in this place where we are allowed to be with our fears and not to let them overtake us, but to keep us whole.

As we mark Passover, may we find our freedom in letting go of fear. In this time of Easter, may we find rebirth, as we claim new life.

May we love and nurture ourselves and others. May that work bring us from our exile, may it help us get to the place where we need to go.

So be it. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.