by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given January 14, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

OPENING WORDS

Come into this house of worship,

all who are afraid, all who are weary.

May we find here a place of love,

a place where hope and joy are present.

May we lift every voice and sing.

Come and let us worship here together.

To be alive is to experience fear. Creatures large and small experience it. When we feel threatened, physically or emotionally, it is how our bodies let us know. It happens with things soon forgettable and forever memorable.

As children, we need to feel safe and protected, but invariably things come along that make us afraid. And whatever else happens, when we find ourselves alone in the dark, our imaginations take charge and we can suddenly think of all kinds of creatures there with us.

As we grow, our capacity for fear grows with us. It can take on all kinds of dimensions. We may still be nervous in a dark room. We may feel it when we are in a new place, or even a place that is very familiar to us. It comes when we are startled, or threatened. It comes when we are about to try something outside of our comfort zone.

And no matter how much we think we’re prepared, things come up that frighten us. I don’t think of myself as being particularly afraid of dogs, but when I’m out taking a walk, if a dog comes at me—even on a leash or a chain—my body reacts. I’m pulled away from the thought I was having and ready to run. I fear I’ll be attacked. My internal systems go on alert.

That is the most immediate kind of fear. Our world is safe and suddenly it is not. We react with the classic fight or flight response. We need this to live and keep ourselves aware of what is happening around us. Without it we would be in trouble.

But that is not the only dimension of fear. While it can keep us out of harm’s way, it can also keep us away from people or things that might actually be good for us, people and things that open us up to new experiences.

As we learn and grow, we can develop, over time, fears of all kinds based on the fact that we perceive someone else as somehow unlike us. We see them as other. It may be people of a different size or gender, people with body piercings or tattoos or blue hair, people with different abilities than us, or people of a different color.

Some fears may be grounded in experience, but many are not. We may well not even be conscious of the fact that we are doing this. But on some level we come to see others as a threat. And over time we come to do things without even thinking. Maybe someone is approaching us and we cross to the other side of the street. Or maybe we simply shoot a stare in their direction. We find that we are not opening ourselves to others as much as cutting them off.

We live in a culture where there are many things to fear. We legitimately ask whether there will be clean air to breathe and pure water to drink. We worry about war and violence, we worry about what the future will be for our children. We worry that we might not be safe if we dress in a certain way to express who we are.

When we are feeling afraid of things around us, a natural response is to try to shut ourselves off. There are times when I will be stopped at a traffic light and I will look around me. I note all the sport utility vehicles people are driving and I will have this image of how we each have our own little armored tank to protect us from harm. We can’t control much of what happens in life but we can do our best to shield ourselves from as much of it as possible.

Of course, in shielding ourselves, we find we are distanced from others in all kinds of ways. Yes, we want to protect ourselves, but we can lose in the process.

Our challenge is to pay attention to the fear. It is a sign that we need to look at something. It may be something bubbling up in our unconscious, it may be our reaction to a person we are with or our reaction to any given event. If we are resisting something, there’s probably a reason why we are resisting something.

When we set out on any journey in life, be it a relationship, parenthood, a job, some new challenge, retirement, we are going into the unknown. We can’t know exactly what is going to happen. One writer has described the spiritual journey as setting out on a small boat and sailing into the ocean. We may be inspired for the journey, but at some point we are going to experience fear. We are eventually going to get to the edge of the horizon and we will not know whether we’re going to fall off the edge or not.

You know how it works. We get ourselves up on the roof. It may actually be kind of fun. We get our job done up there and then it is time to come down. We look at that first step of the ladder, and we think, "How did I get up here?" And we find that we need to summon the courage to take that first step down the ladder.

The Buddhist writer Pema Chodron writes about a man who was determined to get rid of negative emotions. He struggled against anger and lust; he struggled against laziness and pride. But mostly he wanted to get rid of his fear. His meditation teacher told him to stop struggling and just try to be present, but the man just couldn’t do that. He didn’t know any other way than to struggle.

So finally the teacher sent him off to meditate in a tiny hut in the foothills. He shut the door and settled down to practice. When it got dark he lit three small candles. Around midnight he heard a noise in the corner of the room, and in the darkness he saw a very large snake. It looked to him like a King Cobra. It was right in front of him, swaying. He was so afraid that he couldn’t move. All night he stayed totally alert, keeping his eyes on the snake. There was just the snake and himself and his fear.

Just before dawn the last candle went out, and he began to cry. All of a sudden he found himself opening up. He cried not in despair but from tenderness. He was filled with a sense of connection with other living things. He came to accept—really accept—that he was angry and jealous, that he resisted and struggled, and that he was afraid. And at the same moment came to accept how he was precious beyond measure, how he could be wise and foolish, and never be known completely. Filled with gratitude, he stood up in the total darkness, walked toward the snake, and bowed to it. He then fell asleep on the floor. When he awoke, the snake was gone. He never knew if it was his imagination or if it had really been there, but in the end it really didn’t seem to matter. That much intimacy with fear, caused his dramas to collapse.

And it may be that is what we need sometimes.

Chodron quotes a student as saying: "The Buddha nature, cleverly disguised as fear, kicks our ass into being receptive."

The trouble with fear is that we don’t always feel all that receptive. Our defenses are up and we want to resist because we don’t know what will come. It feels like it would be a whole lot easier to simply not push it.

But fear is that force that pushes us to do things we may not be able to do otherwise. It is the creative juice that moves us to do things that take us out of our comfort zone. It tells us where we need to stretch and grow. It keeps us moving forward.

Every time I prepare to preach a sermon, I’m fearful. I know ministers who, even after preaching for years and years, still throw up every Sunday morning before they preach. I’m lucky that I usually don’t have that strong a reaction.

Call it the spirit at work, but I would get really nervous if the fear were not present. I would be worried that I had lost some edge.

This is a common story. I hear it from artists and performers as well. When an artist puts his work out for the world to see, there is fear. He is making himself vulnerable, putting his creativity out there for the world to see. And when you do this, there is a letting go. You can’t control the reaction, and this is scary.

I know I would just as soon not have the queasy stomach every Sunday morning and I know I would worry if the fear was not there.

In life we need this necessary juice to spur us to creativity. When it is present, it calls us to look at what is going on inside of us. It calls us to look at where the passion is.

It asks us to open ourselves to our potential to grow, to create, to love and be loved. Learning to trust and to be receptive calls us to move to the edge of where we are comfortable. It calls us to go to the place where we don’t know what it will be like.

If we are able to be present with our fear, we are able to see life with a new richness. Instead of running from it we find ourselves face to face with life. We don’t need to pursue the fear, but just pay attention to it and move from that place.

The Talmud calls fear the necessary gate through which one must enter in order to have a relationship with God. It is the moment we face the void that underlies our lives.

It is that force that calls us into relationship with something greater than ourselves, a force that can open us and help us to find our way. We face our fears and we are able to come to a deeper understanding of who we are—even when that place is very frightening.

Martin Luther King was certainly a man who knew fear in his life. At the young age of 26 he found himself serving his first church in Montgomery, Alabama. It was a time when African Americans were growing increasingly agitated about the laws of the segregated South that kept them in a very unequal place.

In 1955, blacks were starting to challenge the laws that required them to give up seats on busses to whites. Several were refusing to do this. Finally, in December of that year, police arrested Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her seat. The NAACP believed that her arrest presented an opportunity to mount a legal challenge to the city’s segregation laws. The night of her arrest, in secret, members of the Women’s Political Council drafted and mimeographed a letter protesting the arrest and asked every black person to boycott the Montgomery buses the following Monday.

That Monday, empty bus after empty bus went by. The boycott worked. That night, the young minister King was elected by other black leaders as President of the Montgomery Improvement Association.

That night, he gave his first public address to thousands of black citizens of Montgomery, quoting the Prophet Amos, to whom he would return speech after speech. "And we are determined here in Montgomery—to work and to fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!"

And in assuming his position of leadership, King immediately became a target of the white Montgomery police department.

About a month later, King was arrested on a bogus speeding charge and went to jail for the first time. The boycott was continuing and King and the other boycotters faced increasing violence and harassment.

That night, home from jail, King was up late, unable to sleep. The phone rang with an anonymous white caller threatening the young leader. Historian Taylor Branch writes how that night, King was overwhelmed by the juxtaposition of images and memories;the threats from whites juxtaposed with the memories of white mentors and colleagues in seminary; the middle-class blacks who were distressed by King’s assertive calls for justice juxtaposed with the hopeful courage he saw in the poor blacks who were the backbone of the boycott. It mirrored the tension he knew in himself—the reality of evil in human nature and the hope for progress and justice.

On one hand, King felt the potential in himself to think anything, and to be anything he wanted to be. On the other, he was constricted by the realities that paralyzed and defined him. On this night King buried his face in his hands at the kitchen table. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left, that the people would falter if they looked to him for strength. Then he said as much out loud. He spoke the name of no deity, but his doubts spilled out as a prayer, ending, "I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone." As he spoke these words, the fears suddenly began to melt away. He became intensely aware of what he called an "inner voice," telling him to do what he thought was right. Such simplicity worked miracles, bringing a shudder of relief and the courage to face anything.

For King, the moment awakened and confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was something grounded in experience—something that opened up mysteriously beyond the predicaments of human beings in our weakest and our best moments. It was a connection with some force outside himself.

In our lives, we may not face a trial like King’s, but we can see in his example that the burdens we bear are often not of our choosing. We find ourselves in a situation and don’t always know what to do with it. We are afraid and don’t know where we should go.

Each of us is on a journey, and the particulars of that journey will be as unique as the individuals we are. Each one of us is called to look at those things that hold us back, those things that keep us from being in right relationship with ourselves, with our neighbors, with the ground of our being.

It is easy to want to run away from our fears, to distract ourselves by taking a pill or going to the store or spending more time on the internet. But even if that is what the culture might tell us, to move away from the fear, what we want to do is move into the fear and to see what it has to teach us.

We are called again and again to be with our fears, to not let them take over, but to help us move through into a place of awareness and peace. Pema Chodron writes that fear is the natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. That as we strip away our denial and constructions of reality, we come to a place of understanding. The fear helps us to open ourselves to the truth we know and have been afraid to acknowledge.

The scripture says, "perfect love casts out fear." If we are overcome with fear, we are not able to open ourselves to love and to give love to others. Instead, we are living in the fear and that only cuts us off from knowing ourselves and knowing others.

In fear, we isolate ourselves.

In love, we connect with others.

In fear, we become immobilized.

In love, we are empowered to act.

In fear, we judge others.

In love, we seek justice.

In fear, we distrust.

In love, we trust.

In fear, we retreat.

In love, we reach out.

--Sara Moores Campbell

A woman is told that she does not have a long time to live. She is dying of cancer at an age that seems way too young. She is there with her partner and their two young children and they are trying to hold it all together.

They are all afraid. They are afraid of the future, and they don’t quite know what to do. They are tired and realize that all they can do is simply be there together in the moment. They sit together quietly. They let the tears flow and with the tears, they are aware of a shift in the room. Yes, they are afraid, and yes, they are together, and yes, there is love in this circle they create. There’s sorrow and grief and many other emotions, but in the end, finally, there is love.

The dying woman says, "It will be all right."

In all the chapters of our lives, may our fears bring us to a place where we are open, a place where we can know all that life has to offer to us, a place where we know, at last, that we are free.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of life, we give thanks this day for all that is our life. We give thanks for those who have gone before us, those who, with courage, have worked for freedom, for justice, for love in the world. Help us to not be afraid. May we, in all the days of our lives, live not with fear, but open to the ever-abundant source of love and grace in the world. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May love hold you and keep you in your waking life and in your dreams. Go in love and go in peace this day. Amen.

Copyright 2001, by Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.