On Sunday, May 5th, Turner
Chapel AME invited my church, Crestline First United Methodist, to a joint
worship service at their church. It was
an awesome celebration of our unity in Christ!
Below is my sermon.
No Fear!
1 John
4:7-21
There is
no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
Since becoming a parent
six and a half months ago, fear has taken on a whole new meaning for me. I wouldn’t say I’m consumed by it, but I do see
danger everywhere. Plop the baby on the
bed for a minute? Danger! He might roll off. Take the baby outside? Danger!
He might get cold. Baby’s gonna
walk soon? Danger! We need a fence to keep him in the yard! I want to protect my son, but there comes a point
where I just turn into a crazy mama bear.
I used to make fun of my mom for doing the exact same thing. When I was a teenager she’d clip newspaper
articles about young women who’d been attacked to our bathroom mirror to remind
my sister and me to never go out alone at night. We thought she was crazy—but now I’m the crazy mom. And now my mom makes fun of me!
Before my husband Joe
and I moved to Crestline, we lived in Washington, DC for 5 years. Joe taught at a public school in the city,
and in 2010 we bought a house just down the road from his school. It was a neighborhood that wasn’t considered
the best. There had been some recent
shootings in the area, and I admit to being a little scared. There were some things I avoided doing, like
walking to the Metro by myself after dark.
But we got to know our neighbors, and they got to know us. When we walked to the grocery store, people
said hi, and we said hi back. We came to
really love our neighborhood. Several
years later, when we announced we were moving to Ohio, well-meaning friends and
family members said “DC’s not a place you’d want to raise a family, anyway”—but
I couldn’t help thinking they weren’t exactly right about that. Yes, there may have been a little more crime
in our neighborhood—and of course I want to protect my children—but I think
growing up in a multi-cultural environment where we could sit on the porch and
chat with neighbors from Ethiopia and El Salvador—people who looked different
from us and had different life experiences---would be an awesome gift to our
kids.
Now my son is a white
male, and I want him to be aware that he’s been born into privilege. I want to protect him, but I also don’t want
him to live in fear of his neighbors. Journalist
and Mom Sandi Villareal puts it this way: “I want my children to be smart about
their surroundings, but I don’t want them to fear everything and everyone
around them.” And then she asks the
question, “Where does ‘stranger danger impede ‘love your neighbor?’”
Where does stranger
danger impede love your neighbor? I
think that’s a question we should all be
asking. Are there times when our fear of
the stranger blocks us from obeying Jesus’ command to love our neighbors?
1 John 4:18 says that “There
is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” Our text for today also says that God is love, that God loves us—and through Christ, God makes it
possible for us to love one another, despite our sin and brokenness.
You’ll notice John
doesn’t mince words. In verse 20 he says
“If anyone says, I love God, and hates a brother or sister, he is a liar.” If we say we love God, but hate a brother or
sister, we are liars. We may think,
well, I don’t hate anybody, and I’m certainly not a liar! We’re not haters—we’re good churchgoers--so
good we’ve gone to church twice in
one day! But when we fear someone,
hatred is not far off. In his sermon “The
Mastery of Fear,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it this way: first
comes “fear, then hate, then war, then deeper hatred.” Fear—even the tiniest, most innocent-seeming type
of fear—can lead us to hatred—and we need to watch that.
This week you couldn’t
turn on the news without seeing images of rioting and looting in Baltimore
after Freddie Gray was arrested and died while in police custody. If you google “Baltimore” and “Freddie Gray,”
hundreds of stories and images pop up—from stories about the riots to stories
about misconduct and potential misconduct in the Baltimore police department. You have to work a lot harder to find stories
of the peaceful protestors, like the group of 55 United Methodist clergy who
walked the streets of Baltimore singing hymns and praying for peace. You have to work hard to read about the
churches who rallied to feed children who rely on school lunches every day,
while they were out of school. You have
to look hard to read about the pastor, a former gang member, who went out to
the streets to urge gang members to avoid violence—and even the current gang members who tried to stop the
violence! And you have to look real hard to find the many stories of people
who fight for justice and peace in Baltimore and cities around the country
every single day—government workers, churches and non-profit organizations, counselors
and teachers, and moms and dads and grandparents—and yes, police officers.
The media knows that
fear is one of our most basic instincts.
They know what images trigger our fears and our fascination with
violence—and we do have a fascination
with violence--and they know those stories will get the most hits. Don’t get me wrong—we need to be informed about what’s
going on, and journalists have a critical role to play in that. But many news outlets know just how to pull our triggers. Someone from church recently shared an
article on Facebook about how we can make an idol out of fear—the devil knows
we’re afraid, and he’ll use our fears to keep us from loving as Jesus wants us
to love. Right? He knows how to get at us. So I want to urge you, as followers of
Christ, to be aware of what you’re watching—to be aware when you are thinking
and talking and responding, not out of a place of love, but out of a place of
fear. In the words of 2 Timothy 1, verse
7 “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and
a sound mind.” God has not given us the
spirit of fear—but of love. So test your
thoughts—and if you find fear, pray that God will cast it out and fill you with
love instead.
“Perfect love casts out
fear.” If we read the news and feel our
anxiety rising—fear of neighbors, or enemies near and far, or fear for the
future—we need to get on our knees and pray that God will make us perfect in
love—“For those who fear have not been made perfect in love.” Really, we should get on our knees even if we don’t feel afraid—and pray for God’s
love to fill us and the entire world.
I am well aware that I’m
speaking as a white woman—and that there are some very real fears and dangers
that some of you have had to deal with in your lives that I can only
imagine. But what I can do as a white woman is pray for justice and peace—and work hard
in my life to try to get to know people who come from different backgrounds
than me. I can seek understanding, and
pray for God’s mercy when I fall short.
The first day I started
my job as the pastor at our church, I met a black man named Kenny from Daytona,
who had traveled up here to work for a friend painting the outside of our
church. Every day Kenny and I talked for
a few minutes, and we got to know each other a little bit. One day, I noticed Kenny was taking a break,
and I asked if I could sit and eat lunch with him—so we sat outside and chatted
over a meal. Months later he told me he
had never had lunch with a white person—and that people were driving by and
staring at the two of us out there on the church lawn. When he told me that, I thought, “What
century are we living in, that it’s so unusual to see a black person and a
white person having a meal together?”
I’m not telling this
story to champion myself as some amazing, barrier-breaking person—because I
know I’m not. I am well aware of my own
fears, and I’m well aware of how short I fall from the love that Jesus calls me
to. But I’m telling you this because I
believe that each time we go out of our way to get to know someone who’s
different from us, we are getting to know a beloved child of God—and we’re witnessing,
whether we know it or not, to the boundary-breaking love of God in Christ
Jesus. Isn’t that what followers of
Christ should be all about?
I mean think about
Jesus’ life. Did he live in fear of strangers?
No! His ministry was all about
breaking social and religious and ethnic barriers—at a time when Jews were
supposed to stay away from certain people, he spoke with and had table
fellowship with women, and Samaritans, and all kinds of people who were
supposed to be off-limits. Jesus came to
proclaim that God’s love and forgiveness was not for just a chosen, select few—but
for all.
As I look at you all
today, I think about how we originally planned to have this service in February,
then April— and now here we are on Sunday, May 3rd—and I don’t believe it’s an
accident. I believe the Holy Spirit
gathered us together on this day, so we can be a witness of Christ’s love that
casts out fear, one week after Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore. I believe the Spirit has called us together
to say to each other “You are a beloved child of God, and I love you.” I believe the Spirit has called us here to
ask for forgiveness for the times when we’ve let our fears take over. And I believe the Spirit has brought us
together so we can pray for peace for the people of Baltimore—and for our
nation.
God loves each and
every one of us, and God’s perfect love casts out fear. Sisters and brothers, let’s throw off our
fears and be free—full of the love
and grace of our resurrected Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Let’s pray.
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