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Facing the Things We Dread
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 18, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 7:7-21 Matthew 10:26-31
“If the various writers of the Bible were composers,” observes Jack Miles in God A Biography, “the Deuteronomist would be Bach in his utter majestic confidence….It was [the Deuteronomist’s] gift to take the earlier [disparate] materials… and to make them seem in combination, down to the phrase ‘the Lord our God’ or ‘the Lord your God,’ not just plausible but inevitable, and not just inevitable but thrilling…. [Nevertheless] as Israel’s apostasies at Sinai and Peor (Peor being the place, by the way, where Moses delivers the extended address to the Israelites that is the Book of Deuteronomy), Israel’s apostasies prove the Israelites did not always find their own God inevitable for them.” Neither do we for us! And so we turn the page to the Book of Deuteronomy and consider, at the edge of our own present wilderness, the things we dread. The things we dread in the first place: dinner with an acquaintance who is boring, doing our taxes, a root canal, a twelve hour drive with children, the taste of brussel spouts or calves’ liver or lima beans, shoveling the driveway after an ice storm, cleaning a teenager’s bedroom, Monday morning, Saturday night alone. The things we dread, of course, are contextual. Imagine the litany if you were a mother in Iraq, a homeowner in Pearlington, a child in Chester, an inmate at Graterford, all of whom must dread mundane things too, even as they are made to dwell in extraordinary circumstances. To dread, says the dictionary in the first place, is to anticipate with alarm, distaste or reluctance. I think of the study conducted by Gregory Burns at Duke University on “The Neurobiology of Dread”. Subjects were given the choice between receiving an electric shock that was about a third of the subject’s maximum tolerance for pain after waiting 27 seconds, and another that was about two-thirds of the maximum bearable coming in 9l seconds. The “extreme dreaders” [those whose brains lit up the most in anticipation of the shock] chose the shorter waiting time by taking the higher shock. In other words, dread was actually the anticipation of the thing dreaded rather than the experience of the thing itself. For the “mild dreaders” there likely follows a life of procrastination; but for extreme dreaders the sooner they ring the doorbell, add up the numbers, open wide for the dentist, turn the ignition on, bite down, chew and swallow, tackle the mess, catch the 6:51 to the city or curl up alone with a book, the sooner the present dread dissipates even as the next anticipated dread enters in. Then there are the things we dread in the second place: the fatal reading of a CAT Scan, a phone ringing in the middle of the night, our break-up with a lover, a pink slip at work, a formidable adversary on the horizon, the loss of a friend, brain surgery, retirement, a certain defeat in battle, the way we will die. To a point this dread is also contextual, though the sense of an ending, the feeling for our mortality that is involved in each instance, is universal. Dread, says the dictionary in the second place, is a great fear or apprehension of the unknown, anxiety over what may happen in the future, a feeling of uncertainty and helplessness. Consider the “prominent Socialist [who was] living in Germany when Hitler came to power,” writes preacher, psychologist and existentialist Rollo May. “Over a period of some months, he knew that some of his colleagues were being imprisoned in concentration camps or taken off to other unknown fates. During this period he existed in the continual awareness that he himself was in danger, but he could never be certain if he would be apprehended, or if he were, when the Gestapo would come, or, finally what would happen to him if he were arrested…. The threat confronting him was not merely that of possible death or the inconvenience and discomfort of the concentration camp; it was,” says May, “a threat to the meaning of his existence….” Dread, May writes elsewhere, “is the inward state of my becoming aware that my existence [as far I know it] can become lost, that I can lose myself and my world, that I can become nothing.” Consider, in the third place, the dread of the Israelites on the border between the wilderness and the Promised Land, lost yet found in the time it had taken them—forty long years—to arrive, their very existence--not as individuals but as a people—threatened even now by nations more numerous and gods less powerful than the God who had chosen them in love. “Have no dread of them,” Moses insists, of the enemy, the stranger, the rogue nation, the false gods, “for the Lord your God, who is present with you, is a great and awesome God.” That is to say, according to the Deuteronomist’s thrilling fugue we must dread in the third place, the archaic place, the place where dread is worthwhile, only one thing. Here there can be no litany because one thing alone, one subject of human anticipation and expectation is worthy of our dread: that One is the living God. Dread, says the dictionary in the third place, in the archaic place, in the outdated, antiquated, old-fashioned place means “to hold in awe or reverence.” But as Miles reminded us from the start, the Israelites did not always find their own God the inevitable subject of awe, of reverence, of dread…nor do we! There is a sense in which everything else we dread joins a pantheon of false gods whose power over us is a power we cede day by day. We live in dread of those things that fill the time of our living with great fear or apprehension of the unknown or with anxiety over what may happen in the future or with uncertainty and a feeling of helplessness. We live, in the pettier place, sweating the small things too, anticipating the details of our days with alarm or distaste or reluctance. We are the Israelites at Peor, with our apostasy on one page and the unknown future on the next page, not knowing which page to turn. Funny, but you would think, after all these years, Israel’s repeated dealings with the great and awesome God might begin to have a cumulative effect! You would think that the Israelite’s survival thus far might finally cause them to dread the God who had brought them out with a mighty hand, redeemed them from the house of slavery and now is about to usher them into a land promised long ago. You would think the dread of God rather than the dread of nations more numerous than they might consciously determine their destiny. For that matter, you would think the same of us in relation to the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ and redeemed us from the powers of sin and death: think we might dread going under the knife or before the judge or over the hill less because we revere and live in awe of the living God more. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” says Jesus. But like the Israelites, it seems we do. Apparently there is something about being human, being finite, being mortal that keeps us from waiting upon God alone as we anxiously anticipate the shoe dropping, the door closing in our face, the nation advancing, the grave opening to swallow us up. I think the something is sin in the archaic, outdated, old-fashioned sense of the term: sin not as our refusal directly to face God; but sin as our refusal to face death, to face our finitude, to face our mortality…and so to embrace the astounding gift of our human existence. Here I cannot help but return, for a moment, to the garden and our choice literally to hide when it comes to facing the One in whose presence dread is worthwhile. Seems that when the choice was made, a choice we each have made subsequently, to know good and evil rather than to know God, to attempt a refusal of our limits, human beings chose an apparent freedom made possible by our leap from innocence into sin, said Kierkegaard. Dwelling as we do east of Eden and in the only context our reason presently will entertain, simply everything is given the power to exact dread from these lives we are so afraid of losing forever, lives we end up losing in the living. The great physician William Osler “was once said to have referred the writer Henry James to a colleague. The colleague diagnosed James as having ‘a dread of the unknown.’ I suspect,” another physician commented, “this outcome is rarely measured in the trials. Evidence-based medicine may prove, for example, that we should screen for breast cancer, cervical cancer and each of our other subliminal nightmares. But who has measured the increase in ‘the dread of the unknown.’? Which variable measures the iatrogenic [the doctor-induced] deceit that we can cheat death? Twenty years ago James McCormick put it thus: ‘Since death is the inevitable consequence of conception, a morbid preoccupation with its avoidance and the state of Holy Dread which such fear engenders, may diminish the quality of life.” All of which is to say that until we face what we truly dread more than all of these, until we do business with our dread of death, neither shall we face the One in whose love death no longer has dominion. The great and awesome God who is present to you, said Moses to the Israelites that thought they were up against yet another army, is the God who has chosen you in love. “It was not,” he said, “because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you….It was because the Lord loved you….” “What does the Lord require, then [of us in return],” asks Jack Miles, “love or fear? An easy answer is that [the Lord] requires both, but in fact the two are alternative words for essentially the same [action]….The love in question is not a spontaneous, interpersonal emotion but covenant love. Loving the Lord your God ‘with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might’” means dreading—in the archaic, outdated, old-fashioned sense—God alone. It means not fleeing but facing and fearing the One who can destroy both body and soul in hell even as it means standing fast against those who can destroy the body for the love of Him who died for us. And it means anxiously awaiting the return of him in whose love we eternally will be set free from life without him. Until that day, be it as 27 seconds or 9 seconds away, may our minds not be anxious but alive to the gift of each mundane or momentous moment. “The force of circumstances,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer from prison, “has brought us into a situation where we have to give up being ‘anxious about tomorrow’. [Though] it makes all the difference whether we accept this willingly and in faith or under continual constraint….There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as if it were our last, and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be a great future….Being ready to go any day without fear or anxiety—that, in practice, is the spirit in which we are forced to live. It is not easy…but it is imperative.” Therefore have no dread of them, for the Lord your God who is present with you is a great and awesome God! |