Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC July 13, 1986
Human beings are creatures plagued with fears and insecurities. That we have clearly established, that we talked about in certain ways last week. Of course we are a great deal more than that too. We are vastly more than a bundle of fears and neuroses and anxieties and insecurities. We are in fact motivated by so many feelings and so many drives that it defies the efforts of the best psychologists, the finest students of human nature, to get at what makes us tick. We are, in a word, complicated, complicated. Show me someone you think is just a simple soul, uncluttered and uncomplicated and I will show you that beneath that apparently simple exterior there remain motives and feelings, hopes and fears, too complex for words. We are complicated, all of us.
And so this business of fear is complicated too. What it is that we fear and how we react to it, how we choose to try to handle it, that too is complicated. Fear makes us make some very peculiar, complicated choices. And those complicated choices end up further complicating our lives. It's the old idea of a vicious circle, and put in simplest terms, my thesis this morning is this:
Because I am afraid, I compromise my integrity. And because I compromise my integrity, I become yet more afraid.
Try that again: because I fear, I choose to complicate my life by compromising my integrity, by letting the moral standards slip, by trying to manipulate the truth.
And when I do that; when I chip away at my integrity, then I become even more fearful, even more afraid. What a vicious circle! What can we learn about it?
There is a peculiar and fascinating and yet enlightening Biblical story that may help us on this issue. It's the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah, traveling through southern Canaan, and they stop for a while in the city of Gerar and encounter the king of that placed named Abimelech. Genesis 20 tells us of a set of transactions among Abraham and Abimelech and Sarah that just may help us get some handles on fear and integrity. Remember my thesis:
Because we fear, we compromise our integrity. But it backfires on us, it becomes a vicious circle, and integrity broken leads to a more terrible fear. Recall Sir Walter Scott, “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we purpose to deceive.”
And note too what I am going to do after I have read the Biblical account: I am going to speak as if I were each of the three persons involved. I am going as best I can to play the parts of Abraham and, unlikely as it may seem, Sarah, and then of King Abimelech. You just change gears with me as I present each of these three characters and we’ll see if we cannot learn something about fear and integrity, integrity and fear.
Genesis 20:1-20
I am Abraham. You know me as the patriarch of nations, you think of me as the example of faithfulness, you remember how God called me to leave the land of my father and to trek all across the desert to a new land. You know me, Abraham, because by now you have forgotten all the unpleasant things that happened in my life, you suppose that God uses only plaster saints whose unearthly perfection is never marred by any sins, any doubts, any faithlessness.
Well, I am the Abraham you have forgotten about. I might even suggest that you forgot about me because you see too much in me that reminds you of yourselves, and it’s unpleasant to confront that. Your reasoning is: if Abraham could slip and fall, then I might be vulnerable too. I too might mess up.
I must tell you today of the time I did mess up, I made a royal mess; and since it involved the King of Gerar, I guess it really was a royal mess.
You see, Sarah and I had been traveling with all this flock of family and servants and cattle and sheep for such a long while, and it seemed the longer we went the worse things got. Every place we went the people were rougher and cruder and more immoral than the last. We suffered through violence, theft, sexual deviants I cannot tell you about. Your – what is it? – your Meece Commission wouldn't let me. We went from place to place and found very little more than ruffians and scoundrels everywhere. Why, you know, the last place we stayed in before Gerar was a pair of little towns called Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom and Gomorrah had invented perversions and wickedness we hadn't even thought of yet. And we saw the judgment of the Lord God rained down on those towns as fire and brimstone; that's how bad this whole country was.
And so when we came to Gerar, and when we met King Abimelech, I thought I saw him casting envious eyes all over my Sarah. It seemed to me he practically undressed her with his eyes.
And so r decided on a trick: I knew, or at least thought r knew, that if he supposed Sarah were my wife, why, all he would do would be to have me killed so that he could take Sarah for himself. So, since I was not too excited about losing my life to defend the honor of my wife, well, I just told Abimelech that Sarah was my sister. If she's my sister, you see, well then, Abimelech will think she's available and marriageable and that I won't mind, and he'll do whatever he wants to do with Sarah and I'll get off Scot free -- or would that be Hebrew free? – anyway, no matter what happens to Sarah, I thought I won't have to be afraid.
Now wait a minute, don't get so upset at me. Don't get all hot and bothered. It was true, you know, or almost true. Sarah and I had the same father; we just didn't have the same mother. So she was, kinda, my sister. You don't think that's the point? Hm, well Abimelech didn't think so either.
Oh, I see now what I did. I see what my fears did to me. I see, for one thing, that I was afraid of Abimelech even before I knew him; I didn't trust a fellow human being, and so I tried to get around him by lying to him. I compromised my integrity because I was afraid to trust this man. I prejudged him. I assumed he was intent on harming me, but I never really knew that. My fears were imagined, and they led me to lie.
And I see, too, that my fears led me to compromise my integrity by using my wife. I used her, I treated her like a throwaway. I really didn't care what she thought, what she felt, what she wanted. She was just a problem in my way, so I pitched her to the lions. I was afraid for me, I feared for my skin, and so my fear led me to compromise my integrity and to sacrifice this one whom I ought to have loved above all others. What will become of me? What have I done?
II
I am not accustomed to speaking much in public or to explaining my feelings, for I am the picture of a dutiful, subordinate, submissive, yes sir, kind of wife. I am Sarah. And even though throughout the pages of your scripture you do see me with a touch of spunk here and there or with even the temerity to question the Lord, for the most part you see me as merely the companion of my husband. You see me as the partner, but the very much junior partner, of Abraham. Wherever he went, I went. Across the burning desert, into these wild and woolly Canaanite towns, down into the dry fastness of the Negeb, wherever he and his relentless God went marching, there I went too.
I cannot pretend to you that I was always pleased to do that. I cannot convince you, I expect, that tramping around over white-hot sand so that your complexion dries up like a fig – that riding on camels when your back is already bent like an ancient olive tree – is comfortable. Great day, give me the Hammurabi Inn back in Ur of the Chaldees any day over the dumps I’ve stayed in: hovels in Kadesn, a hot walkup in Shur, tents in Mamre. There were some pretty fancy places in Sodom and Gomorrah, though, for a while, that is.
Well, I must tell you now about my fears, my conflicting and destructive fears. And I must tell you what they did to me.
First, can you hear me when I tell you that I feared my husband? Yes, I did, I feared my husband. I mean feared him. Not just respected; not just stood in awe of him. I genuinely feared him, because he had the power of life and death over me. He could do with me just as he wanted. The law, such as it was, was on his side and ignored me altogether. I could be divorced, I could be set aside, he could take concubines, rivals – and he had done that, in fact. Why, I already knew about his dalliance with Hagar the Egyptian. And so because I was afraid of my husband, I went along with whatever he asked me to do, terrible though it was.
You see, he had this idea that in all the places we went some of the men would find me desirable and would want me for their own. And though you and I might think it would stop the whole romantic bit dead cold if they knew I was Abraham's wife, if I were a properly married lady, I should be off limits, right? But no, his lordship there had the idea that they might lop off his head and take me away from him, so I was to agree with him whenever he would say, "Who, Sarah, oh, meet my sister." His sister, what a farce! But I didn't call him on it, I didn't stop it. Why? I've told you, I was afraid. I feared for my position. And so I went along with the lie.
In essence what I am telling you is that fear led me to compromise my integrity by permitting me to treat myself as less than a person in my own right. I was afraid, not of him, but I was afraid to me be. I acted as though I were not a God-created person. I acted as though I were a helpless victim of circumstances. Oh, I didn't lie, exactly; I just went along. I stood by while a wrong was being committed, and I did nothing to stop it, out of fear. I was afraid, and so I compromised my integrity by taking no moral stand, by pretending not to hear what was being said, by seeing nothing. Don't you in your time have the three little animals, monkeys, I think, you call them, each holding his eyes, his ears, his mouth: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil? Well, that’s the way I have been; my fear led me to compromise my integrity, but then, as it always happens, when I compromised my integrity I only got involved with a deeper fear.
Can you imagine what I feared at the hands of those muscle-bound, smelly warriors in Gerar? What had I done to myself, and what had Abraham done to me? What had my fears and my compromises done to me?
III
In all my years of ruling in Gerar, I have never had such a fine pair in front of me as Abraham and Sarah. All this talk about God and divine leadership and being the father of the chosen people: what rubbish! What garbage! If you don't believe it, just hear it from King Abimelech.
They waltzed in together, one evening, with their noisy entourage – some story about having gotten out of Sodom and Gomorrah just before the fire fell. I'll have to run over there and check it out. I used to know some feisty fillies in those towns. Anyway, here are these two people from way, way up north, full of how they need a place to camp for a while. I was not too eager to give in to the old boy, because it looked like they had enough sheep and slaves and whatnot to eat me out of house and kingdom, but I kinda liked the lady's looks. She caught my eye, you know what I mean? So I agreed to their staying, got started on settling them in, and then decided to make my move.
I went over to the lady and just made some small talk, you know, just to see what could lead to what, and then the old boy comes over and says, “Hey, how do you like my sister?” Oh, his sister. Well, this is really looking up. I think this could turn into a very long and very pleasurable visit. So I invited her to follow me down the corridor at her leisure, and guess what? She did.
But that night I had a dream, and in the dream one whose voice was like the voice of many waters, one whose countenance was brighter than the noonday sun, this one spoke to me and said, "The woman you want, the woman you would take, is someone else's wife." And then the dream went on, "Do not touch Sarah. I have kept you from sinning, give her back to her husband, or you shall surely die.”
Well now, Abimelech's mom and dad raised no fools. I got her back down the hall to Abraham's room so fast arid I confronted him very, very forcefully. “What have you done to us? You have done to me things which ought not to be done. What were you thinking of, that you did this thing?”
Well, as Abraham told me how afraid he was of what I might do to him; as he admitted what a terrible thing me was prepared for his wife to endure just because he was afraid for his own skin, I recognized that I had to do something for this poor scared soul. I had to do something that would show him that not everyone is on the take and that he could trust others.
And my instincts were confirmed when I heard Sarah, poor, sniveling, cowed Sarah confess her insecurities: how she was afraid she couldn't make life work for her on her own, how she feared to be her own person just the way God made her. Again I knew I had to do something to build her up and to assure her that life did not have to be lived in dread.
I gave them gifts, that's what I did, magnificent gifts, gifts of cattle and money, gifts of esteem and of trust. Abimelech is king in Gerar not only because of his muscle but also because of his wisdom. I know how to use a little insight to good advantage; you see, what I knew and what I taught Abraham and Sarah, these two who allowed fear to compromise their integrity and then got in deeper and deeper – what I knew and what I taught them is this: there is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.
