Today I like to reflect on Part two of living joyfully in a culture of fear. In part one, I talked about the fact that there is so much fear, anxiety and paranoia among people these days. Especially after the events of 9/11, America has become a besieged society.
The gist of my last sermon was that we have to use the God within us, to calm our fears and use it as a shield against potential dangers and threats. Instead of relying on guns and other man-made gadgets, we can use the image of God as a protective shield; the light within us as a flashlight to dispel the darkness around us.
So part one of the security shield is focusing on the God within us. Part two is focusing on the God with us. What is the difference? The God within us is like a torch in our hand. The God with us is the sun, the source of light itself. Or, the God within us like a drop of the ocean, the God with us is the ocean itself. Like the ocean that creates, contains, sustains and protects the drop, God has created us, sustains us, protects us.
Apostle Paul says: “If God is with us who can be against us.” Do you really believe that?
Let us start with one of the most repeated phrase in the Bible. More than eighty times, God tells someone. “Don't be afraid," or "Fear not."
He says it to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob. He says it four times to Joshua after the death of Moses because Joshua was so afraid to take on the leadership of his people. He says it to each of the prophets, and tells them to say it to the people in his name. In the New Testament, Jesus repeatedly tells his disciples not to be afraid. In fact, the first words out of the mouth of Jesus, after his resurrection was “do not be afraid.”
In spite of hearing “be not afraid” so many times, we are still afraid. You know why? Because we don't totally trust the promises of God. We think that if we have to survive in this so called crazy world, we have to take care of business. We have to take matters into our own hands.
So many, bible believing, church going Christians have told me: “Paul, but we have to be practical. If we wait for God to take care of us, it could be too late.” “A good bible and a good gun offer the best protection” one guy told me. So we try hard; we use all human gadgets and weapons to defend and protect us.
From this day forward, I want you to stop trying so hard. Stop relying on your frantic efforts, but on God's generous grace; stop depending on your performance, but on god's providence; stop covering all the bases and turn your face towards God. Stop feeling abandoned in the middle of the ocean called life and start feeling embraced by the unending ocean of divine Grace.
We should live fearless lives not because we are brave, but because God is benevolent. We should be fearless, not because we are smart, but because the Lord is my shepherd. We can be free and fearless not because of our faithfulness to god, but because of God's faithfulness to us.
Now, listen carefully. I did not say, our faithfulness to God. Faithfulness is usually understood as an initiative we take, a discipline that we follow, an effort that we put forth to please God and we are blessed in return.
I invite you to imagine and experience the whole process in reverse; as God's faithfulness to us. It is initiated and sustained by God. We can see it in the history of salvation. God's faithfulness to the Israelite even when they were not faithful to God.
I' m inviting you to have a paradigm shift; a shift in consciousness to see God's faithfulness to us rather than our faithfulness to God.
It could change your life; It changed mine.
First, we have to abandon our notion of God as a old man with a white beard sitting on a golden throne somewhere up in the sky. We have to believe in a God who is part of us rather than apart from us. We have to experience God as a PARTICIPANT in our sufferings rather than the PERPETRATOR of it. We have to see God more as a PRESENCE, than as a PERSON.
It is the God of psalm 139:
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the havens, you are there; if I make my bed in the d depths, your are there; O Lord, You have searched me and you know me;” Then comes this powerful verse: “You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mothers womb, I praise you because, I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
I cannot imagine a God who created us with such love and care, will abandon us to fend for ourselves after we are born. I can't imagine Jesus promising us an abundant life and then pushing us into the abyss of an awful existence. Almighty God whom Jesus told us to call abba father, cannot and will not act that way towards his children.
A human father wouldn't do that to his child. Then how can God the father do it to us? I am thinking of my son Tommy. When he graduated from high school, I didn't say: “You are now 18, go to college and do what you need to do.” His mother and I prepared him for college with meticulous care. We drove him to Gainsville, set him up in the dorm, paid his rent and tuition, gave him a debit card, bought him a car, paid the insurance, gave him money for gas.
When saying good bye, Judy and I wailed like crazy people. We began missing him the minute we left him there. We anxiously waited for his phone call. It took three days for him to make a call to me. When I saw his name on the caller ID I was so excited. I thought he was going to ask me how I was doing. Or say he missed me. None of that. The first 9 words out of his mouth were:
“What is the pin number of my debit card?”
I was not offended. I smiled. That is Tommy. He is not touchy feely emotional guy. He is a teenager:
I think of him every day, I pray for his safety every day. I pray for a great future for him. I love him beyond measure. He is one of the tree people in this world I am willing to die for.
If we humans do all that, I can't imagine a God creating us and then abandoning us to be alone and afraid in this world. We are surrounded by Grace, all the time. But we don't acknowledge that; we don't respond to that.
We don't know how to immerse ourselves in that ocean of grace and thrive; we would rather barely survive in a scary world.
How do I know this God is going to protect me from all dangers?
To find that out, I turn my imagination towards the beginning of my life. I want you to join me in this fantasy tour; you can do it with you as the main character. I am 5.6 tall and weighs 167 pounds. There are about 75 trillion cells in this body. That is 75 with 13 zeroes! 75 million, million.
But this me standing before you, started out as a zygote, in a remote village in southern India. When I started, I was just 1 cell and each day, it multiplied exponentially and through an amazing process of miraculous metamorphosis and of meticulous manufacturing, I began to grow in my mother's womb. As weeks and months went by, I began to take shape. In the beginning I was just an undifferentiated mass of flesh. Hands had no fingers; legs had no toes; They were just stumps. Eyes had no lids; heart had no chambers.
Inside my mother's womb, God was at work. God was knitting me together. He made sure that I had a heart and it had four chambers;God made sure that the arteries and veins were properly attached. Then came the biggest project; the digestive system. It is four times longer than my height; Our digestive system, is about 24 feet long; but it stays so nicely tucked inside of us.
The mystery of my evolution in my mother's womb is that neither of my parents had to remember to do anything else after that night they came together. It is not like three months into her pregnancy, my mom said: Today is the day, the baby's lungs are made, I need to breath harder; or 6 months into her pregnancy, my dad said: “Today, he is going to get his legs; let me make sure he has two of them.”
No involvement; no participation; no planning; it all just happened with so much beauty and precision. Think about the first nine months of your life in your mother's womb. Do you remember worrying if God is going to give you one leg or two legs? Do you ever remember swimming in the amniotic fluid and wondering if God would remember to attach ten fingers to your hands? Were you anxious that God would remember to close your belly button and open your mouth at birth? Do you remember saying to yourself: “I hope my lungs that are flat like a pan cake will open up like a balloon when I come out.”
You didn't worry about any of that; you didn't become anxious about any of that. God, The creative force, the ground of your being, the alpha and the omega, took care of the entire process. And you came into this world perfectly beautiful. God was totally in charge; you totally relied on him during that time.
And I believe that providence and faithfulness of God never changes during the entire course of our lives. Because, God is constant in his affection for us. Jer 31:3 says: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”
Unlike human love which gets easily frustrated, turn fickle fast, suddenly fizzle and fade away, God's love for us is EVERLASTING, NO MATTER WHAT!
So, I live fearlessly, not because of promises pending, but because of promises kept.
I am not looking to the future with anxiety; I am looking at the past with gratitude.
I am not looking at the 75 trillion cells that I am today and worrying if some of them might divide fast and grow into cancer, but I am thinking of the single cell that I was, and how marvelously it turned out.
So life is not about being anxious and fearful, fighting and struggling; It is about trusting God, being in the moment and having a grateful heart.
Remember the words of Apostle Paul to Romans. He said: “All things will work together for the good, at the end.” Focus on two words: “together” and “end.” Don't give up in the middle because certain things may not be working out at a particular time in your life. We have to trust in the enduring faithfulness of God towards us.
There is a movie called, The Best Exotic Marigold hotel. In that movie, a group of retirees from England are looking into the option of moving to India because it is much cheaper. But they get angry frustrated, and impatient trying to adjust to the unfamiliar routines of living in a crowded city like Mumbai. Some of them wanted to quit and return home.
So the hero of the movie gave them this advise: “Everything will be alright at the end; if it is not alright,it is not the end.” He was echoing apostle Paul. He was right, because it worked out OK for all of them except for one lady who got frustratedly and angry, quit in the middle and returned to England.
British saint Julian of Norwich used to say: “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” She did not say, all is well!
When you feel afraid of something or some one or feel anxious about a diagnosis, or worry about losing a job or something negative happening to you, or quitting in the middle of something, trust, trust and trust some more, because as Ann Lamott says: “The mystery of Grace is that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”
What God told prophet Jeremiah gives me so much peace: “Before I formed you in your mother's womb, I knew you.” Pondering that one phrase should be enough for a fearless life.
Let me end with these words of 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal. This is God saying to Pascal:
“You would not seek Me if you had not already found Me, and you would not have found Me, if I had not found you first.”
