November 8, 2024
Our Scriptures, Perspective, and Fear
Our church chose to follow the discipline of the Church Year before I arrived, a practice we continue. In particular, we commit a large part of each worship service to the proclamation of scripture, in both the reading and preaching of the assigned texts for that day. In the free church world of worship, this is not typical. But in this post-election season we find ourselves in, it is a great resource.
We have just lived through one of the most unusual and contentious presidential elections in decades—maybe longer. Both sides appealed to fear as a reason to vote “for us” and “against them.” Both sides portrayed this election as a tipping point in our nation’s history—at times even human history. The fork in the road we faced this year was presented as choice from which we could never turn back—elect the wrong person and you ruin our country and its democracy.
However, we hear these claims in the context of the preserved writings of God’s people over many centuries before Christ, and the Christian texts written in the first century of the Church. Together these texts that we faithfully read and proclaim each Lord’s Day testify to God’s ongoing steadfast love and commitment to this world and all its people, and the “sometimes faithful, sometimes not” responses of people to God’s faithfulness. We read repeatedly of great rulers and tragic rulers, of disasters both natural and of human creation. We also read again and again of people holding on to the hope of a loving God in what appeared to be hopeless times. And these scriptures give us the perspective with which we experience the ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys of our existence. Until God chooses to make all things new, as we read last week in worship, there will always be a tomorrow after a today.
This is not unimportant. Each new day affords us hope, an invitation for a new start. Each day we can choose to hope or fear. And we all know first-hand fear is real. Consider this reflection from Civil Rights leader Howard Thurman from his book, Jesus and the Disinherited, to consider the prevalence of fear.
There is nothing new or recent about fear—it is doubtless as old as the life of humankind on the planet. Fears are of many kinds—fear of objects, fear of people, fear of the future, fear of nature, fear of the unknown, fear of old age, fear of disease, and fear of life itself.
In the end Thurman offers the classic Christian response to fear: confidence in the abiding love of God, as we read in 1 John 4.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as God is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (16b-18)
So even as we acknowledge our fears, we place them in the ongoing story of God’s people through the ages. And we strive to be perfected by God’s love, through the victory of the risen Christ who has defeated all that we might fear.
Let us together face the unknown season ahead with confidence in a God whose love goes before us, abides with us, and has created an undeniable resumé of loving faithfulness to people through the ages. Might we have confidence knowing that “as God is, so are we in this world.”
With audacious hope,
~ Pastor Todd