I've noticed that what older people fear is very much like what small children fear. Older people fear going out alone into the darkness; they are afraid they cannot find their way, they are afraid they may have some kind of difficulty and will be vulnerable to people with evil intentions. Children also fear going out alone, they are also afraid they will get lost; if their world ends at the next block or over at the corner of the schoolyard, they are not sure who or what is beyond, and they get scared. Older people and children fear the same things.
Older people fear getting hurt, knowing that they are a little on the fragile side, recognizing that bones may be brittle and skin soft. And children come wailing and weeping when they have been injured, needing for mommy to kiss it and make it well, needing a swatch of Band-aid and a splash of Bactine, because, as far as they know, they may have hurt themselves deeply, this knee might stay hurting forever. How does a three year old know that it heals up? He doesn't, and so he is afraid. Older people and children fear many of the same things. And they acknowledge their fear, they keep no secrets.
The problem is all the rest of us, in the middle. All the rest of us who are old enough to pretend that we know better, all the rest of us who think that we are indestructible.
We are not about to admit that we are afraid of anything. If we have fears, we are going to cover them up; we folks in the middle, we who are no longer children and not yet senior citizens, we are the ones who have to act as though we can handle anything, we can tackle it all, we with our stiff upper lifts and our brave words of piety. We don't believe in being afraid, do we?!
Ah, but you see, what many of us do with our fears is to mask them, cover them up, suppress them. We have fears, fears aplenty, but we don’t want anyone else to know, so we paper them over and hope you don’t notice. And, more important, fear becomes hatred, fear becomes oppression, fear becomes the avenue for crushing somebody else.
Watch what I’m saying here. If I am afraid of you, if I have some reason to fear you and what you can do and what you can do, if I don’t want to tell you that, what I do is to put you down and trample you and try to bully you. All because, in truth, I fear you.
Now I mentioned bullies. Anybody here ever get into a fight with the school bully? Anybody here remember ever cringing behind a tree or around a corner trying to hide from the big guy who always picked a fight? I did I did! I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday the good old sixth grade at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow School, and I remember Patrick, Patrick who had red hair and the legendary temper to go with his Irish name. Sorry about that stereotype, but it was true in his case! And Patrick would lie in wait for me at a certain corner on my way home from school; he would then fall right into step behind me, so that his big clumsy shoes were planting themselves right onto my heels, and he would start his taunting and his mouthing.
"Whatsa matter, four eyes?" You see I've had these since I was about 11 years old – "Whatsa matter four eyes, can't see where you're going?" "Whatsa matter, mama's boy - gotta go home to mommy?" Which was true; if I were more than ten minutes late it seemed like all panic broke loose when I got home. Patrick kept up this business, day after day and week after week, and got bolder, of course, the more I tried to ignore him. If I said something, he twisted it. If I said nothing, he pushed and shoved. It was horrible, just horrible.
Ah, but the story is not done. The day came …and I do not recall exactly how it happened or who started what … but the day came when two schoolboys were rolling on the ground, punching and wrestling and beating on one another. One of them was kind of bulky and feisty and proud of his emerging muscles; the other one had to carefully lay aside his extra two eyes and his Donald Duck lunch pail. But, as the hymn so nobly urges us, "Fight the good fight with all thy might". That we did. That we did. I cannot say I did much to rearrange Patrick's Irish countenance, but it was enough to rearrange his attitude, and it was enough to rearrange mine too.
You see, I learned that day that my fear of Patrick was nothing next to his fear of me. I was afraid of Patrick's bullying and his muscles, yes; but he was afraid of what I could do in the schoolroom and in the school play and in the school orchestra, and his fear led him to be a hater, an oppressor. It didn't look much like fear, but it was. It was fear – hot, violent, angry fear.
Here we are; isn’t that right? Here we are, filled with fears, but we don’t know that’s what they are, we want no one to know that’s what they are. But if our fears are not dealt with, they will oppress someone.
Here on Liberty weekend we remember that some of our ancestors were feared by European governments because they wanted to worship God in their own way, and so many of our spiritual ancestors died the martyr’s death, for no king fearing his throne, no bishop fearing for his authority was secure enough to leave them free. Fear breeds oppression.
Other of our ancestors came to these shores under other circumstances, as victims of the fear that breed oppression. Fearing others different from themselves, fearing men and women born in the soil of Africa, fearing they would not maintain economic dominance, the southern planters and too many others as well gave themselves over to the place of taskmasters, slaveholders. And the longer it went, the more their fear deepened. Fear breeds oppression, oppression breeds fear – great God, who will deliver us from this body of death?
Against all that I hear the gentle voice of the Gospel crying out to us, fear-filled as we have been, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." You do not have to be afraid if you will love rather than hate, if you will lift up rather than oppress. Perfect love casts out fear.
The world was shaken a few years ago by the story of the missionary couples who had gone into the interior of Ecuador to serve a primitive Indian people there. They had gone to learn the language, to translate the Scriptures, to love and to share the Gospel. But somehow, after a long, tentative period of building trust, poisoned darts from the tribesmen too the lives of two men, two missionaries; and their wives had to be evacuated. Fear, fear in the heart of that unlettered Indian, caused him to oppress and to destroy. But a short time thereafter, the world was startled to see, back on the trails leading to that same tribe, the wives, the widows of the very men who had been killed before. Were they not afraid? Did they not fear death? Oh, I suppose they did, to a degree; but there is really only one certain explanation: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear."
All right, preacher, so how do I get this perfect love? If I am going to deal with my fears by loving, just how do I get this love? Come on, preacher, be realistic; that’s a hostile world out there, and these folks are not easy to love! How can I have a love like that?
The Scripture I’ve chosen this morning deals with that issue too. And it’s really very simple. "We love, because He first loved us." We love, because God first loved us. The only way in which I will ever get the strength to love my fears away is to respond to the matchless love of one who loves me first, who loves me just the way I am, who loves and accepts me and dreams about what I can become and who loves me enough to give his very life for me. The way for me to love perfectly is to be empowered to do it, enabled to do it by someone who loves me perfectly.
What can I say this morning about this one who loves and loves first, this one who so loves that I learn how to love, that I am empowered to love? What can I say, for this table says it all? At the table of the Lord I see and touch and taste that the Lord Jesus Christ has already let the fears of this world wash over him. Fearful men, men so very much like you and me, put him on that cross, and oppressed him, destroyed him. They were afraid, you see: afraid of his honesty, afraid of his vitality, fearful of his intimacy with the Father, shocked and awed and dismayed at his transparency. And so they, as fearing men and women have always done – they pretended not to be afraid, they masked it. And it looked like bullying, it looked like the iron fist of authority. But it was fear.
But I tell you that on that cross perfect love cast out all fear. There the Lord Jesus did not fear even death itself, but took it on, took it on with all the terrible powers of evil, and there he won the victory. There the victim of all the world's fear and anger became the victor, and there his perfect love was spread abroad for you and for me.
How do I learn to love? I look at this table and know that he took into his own body all my sin, my guilt, my fears. And I love him because there he first loved me.
How do I get the love that walks into death camps and ministers in the name of Christ? How do I get the love that serves meals to cocaine addicts? How do I get the love that enters prison walls and walks jungle pathways and proclaims liberty, liberty, to those still sweltering in poverty or caught in the tentacles of apartheid? I look at this table and know that there is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel's veins, and sinners – like me, like you – washed beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains, and all their fear-filled anger. And we love him because at Calvary he first loved us.
There is no fear in love. Love brings liberty and life, not oppression, not hatred. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
