Philippians
4:4-7
4 Rejoice in
the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 5 Let your
gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 6 Do not worry
about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving
let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the
peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and
your minds in Christ Jesus.
Rejoice!
Joy!
Peace!
Love!
Those are words we associate with Advent and Christmas.
But - With the terrorist attack in Paris ,
and the more recent events in San
Bernadino , California . Americans are gripped with fear.
We are afraid.
We want to build a wall around this country – because we are gripped
with fear.
We want buy a gun – because we are afraid at work and at home and in
the car.
We want to buy security alarms and video cameras for our homes –
because we are afraid of who might break in.
We want to keep our children away from the public parks – because we
are afraid of strangers.
In this age of fear, what can we do to make sure that we and our families
are safe?
(long pause)
Nothing.
The world is a dangerous place.
Get used to it.
Want to buy a gun? No one will
stop you, but understand we are a nation in which there are 88 guns for every
100 people, and it has not made us a safer place.
Want to put up an alarm system in your house? Fine.
But burglars can still break in, steal your new TV set and be out the
back door before the police arrive.
Do you put your seat belt on when you drive? I do this every time. But am I safe? No. I
am certainly safer than I am without one – but I am not completely safe. If I’m hit by a tanker truck going 70 mph and
carrying a ton of gasoline – well, I’m pretty much doomed even with the
seatbelt I insist on wearing and that keeps me safer – but not completely safe.
The world is a dangerous place.
But this has always been true. ISIS and mass shootings have not introduced us to a
sudden change – life has always been this way.
Now, yes - we can do some things to make the world around us safer for
our selves and our children – wear that seat belt, take precautions, but
understand that you will never be completely safe.
What you can do
is deal with this fear that is taking over the lives of so many people in our
country.
It is this fear that
is the most dangerous enemy in our society.
George R. R. Martin, in his book, A Game of Thrones, writes, “Fear cuts
deeper than swords.”
It is fear more than anything else that will destroy our lives and our
nation.
And that is – after all, what terrorist want. Terrorists don’t want to bomb buildings or
kill people – that is a means to an end, and their end, their primary goal is
to cripple us with fear.
Terror -- the very word comes
from Latin verb that means to frighten.
And we are frightened.
We are afraid.
Now against this fear is the Scripture.
The Psalms are full of such words of courage. Psalm 118 (5-7):
6 With the Lord on my side I
do not fear.
What can mortals do to me?
What can mortals do to me?
Well, mortals can do a lot to us. After all, it is a dangerous world.
It is not safe.
But in a world that has always been unsafe, we can say, as
the Psalmist did, “With the Lord on my side, I do not fear.”
Remember Psalm 23?
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will
fear no evil.”
But we are deadly frightened of evil.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
In a world that has always had evil, we do not have to fear. We can still have peace.
Frederick Buechner, in his reflection
of the 23rd Psalm, reminds us that this psalm does not pretend that
evil and death do not exist. He says, “Terrible things happen,
and they happen to good people as well as to bad people. Even the paths of
righteousness lead through the valley of the shadow. Death lies ahead for all
of us, saints and sinners alike, and for all the ones we love. The psalmist
doesn't try to explain evil. He doesn't try to minimize evil. He simply says he
will not fear evil. For all the power
that evil has, it doesn't have the power to make him afraid.”
Rather than struggling to find a safety that we will never
completely have, we need to seek courage.
We need to find that attitude of being at peace in an unsafe world.
We do not have to succumb to the terrorist’s effort to
terrorize us with fear.
You know what Jesus
said in the New Testament about how to be safe?
This is what he said
– he said it in Luke’s Gospel, chapter 12.
“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after
that can do nothing more…Are not five
sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight… Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
Now – wait. Jesus didn’t tell us
here how to be safe. What he did say was
how to be free of fear in a world that was filled with people who, as he put
it, could kill the body.
In a world of evil, we will not fear. We will have peace.
Throughout the letter there is a sense of informality, friendship,
optimism. But there is also a sense of
impending death and a reflection that Paul is in prison and suffering a harsher
prison environment than he had previously endured. He has every reason to be afraid, but
instead of fear he says, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice.”
And he goes onto say in the midst of this chaotic time in his life when
his very life is being threatened, “May the peace of God, which passes all
understanding, guard your hearts and minds.”
In a world of dangers, we will have peace.
One of the great quotations about fear comes from an American
President, Franklin Roosevelt. He said
that great line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Great line.
Those words were spoken in his first inaugural speech in 1933. The nation and the world was in the grip of
the Great Depression.
One out of every four people was unemployed.
Homelessness was at an all time high.
Hitler had just been elected as chancellor of Germany and
Nazism was rising.
The future looked bleak.
And it was bleak.
It was at that time that Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, and
when he was inaugurated he gave a speech to the nation and in it he made this
statement:
The withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side;
farmers find no markets for their produce;
the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone…
A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence,
an equally great number toil with little return.
Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.
But the one line that is remembered in that speech was the line that
came very early in his manuscript: “The
only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Now, here is an interesting bit of history about that speech.
If you look at the earliest draft of this speech – which is arguably
one of the greatest speeches in American history, you will not find that famous
line about fear.
In its place you will read these words.
“America is a
sick nation in the midst of a sick world. We are sick because of our failure to
recognize economic changes in time, and to make provision against their consequences.”
Man! Thank goodness
somebody changed that depressing line.
Now, here is what happened to change the words of the speech
between that first draft and the final delivery.
Like most Presidents, Roosevelt had a speech writer, a Columbia University
political science professor by the name of Raymond Moley. He delivered a first draft to FDR and then he
joined the President-elect and others on a relaxing trip to Florida .
While he was here in
the Sunshine state, FDR was delivering some informal remarks to a crowd when
gunfire rang out. The gunman killed the
mayor of Chicago , who was also in that Florida crowd at the
time, but he missed his intended target -- FDR.
Moley witnessed the
entire event. Later that evening, expecting to find a very frightened
Roosevelt, Moley instead noted how relaxed, calm, and perhaps even peaceful Roosevelt was in the face of mortal danger.
Two days later,
while flying from Florida to Cincinnati
in a two-seated Army airplane, Moley’s pilot lost his way and ran out of gas;
they crash-landed in a farmer’s field near Maynardville , Tennessee .
Remarkably, both the pilot and Moley were unharmed.
In the face of those frightening
experiences, Moley came up with this now famous line for FDR’s speech –“the only thing we have to fear is...fear
itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes.”
More recently, our current President addressed the nation just a few
nights ago and he told us, “Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than
fear.”
And an even greater weapon against fear is love. 1
John 4:18
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”
So those of us who are paralyzed by
fear – let us remind ourselves of the Gospel.
It does not have to be this way.
But in a world that has always had
its dangers, we will not fear. We can
still have peace.
When Paul said, “Rejoice always,” he was in
prison facing eventual death.
And if Paul was with
us right now, in this place, and reading about the terrorist attacks in Paris and in California ,
he would tell us that we do not have to be afraid. There is something greater than the evils
that frighten us.
I believe Paul would
say to us, as he said to his friends 2 thousand years ago, “Rejoice in the Lord
always; again I will say, Rejoice. Do not
worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the
peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and
your minds in Christ Jesus.”
And now unto
God the Father,
God the Son,
And God the
Holy Spirit be ascribed all might, power, dominion and glory, today and
forever, Amen.
Copyright 2015.
Dr. W. Maynard Pittendreigh
All rights reserved
Ministers may feel free to
use some or all of this sermon in their own ministries as long as they do not
publish in print or on the Internet without ascribing credit to the author.