You Don’t Have to Be Afraid Anymore

Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

The Baptism of the Lord

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

{15} As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, {16} John answered all of them by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. {17} His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

{21} Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, {22} and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Isaiah 43:1-7

{1} But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. {2} When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. {3} For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you. {4} Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you, I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life. {5} Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; {6} I will say to the north, “Give them up,” and to the south, “Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth— {7} everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”

The Sermon

When a little kid is afraid of the dark, there are a couple of things you can do.

One is to turn on a light. This would not seem to require an advanced degree to figure out.

But sometimes, it’s supposed to be dark. It’s supposed to be dark when it’s time to go to sleep for the night, but there’s something special about the darkness, too. It’s the time for looking up at stars; for wondering; for thinking. Sometimes, the darkness belongs; it’s just a matter of what you do with it.

For that matter, there are going to be times throughout everyone’s life when you might like to be able just to flip a light switch and make the darkness go away, but it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes it’s just going to be dark.

So when the option of just turning on a light switch isn’t there, there’s one more thing you can do for a kid who’s afraid of the dark: be there.

When you were little, and you called out for your Mom, or Dad, or grandparent, or whoever was looking after you, and when they appeared in your doorway or at your bedside, you felt safe again, like there was nothing that could happen that couldn’t be handled, that you weren’t left all on your own to cope with a hidden world that you didn’t entirely understand but you knew it was big, and loud, and involved mostly things you didn’t know anything about.

When the person you trusted most in the world was there with you, it was all OK.

Kids may be surprised to learn that adults feel that way too.

Who do you trust to tell you it’s going to be all right?

When I was a younger pastor, in my first, small church, I thought it was my job in marriage preparation to meet with the prospective couple, as many times as necessary, to talk about their personalities, and their pasts, and how they would find a way to be the same people but also be this new thing, together.

I was right about that, actually.

But I also thought it was my job, at the conclusion of however many meetings it took to make sure we’d explored all these issues, to sort of grant them my blessing, to assure them that the pastor, in his pastoral wisdom, had discerned that—yes—this was going to work, and so we can proceed on to the wedding plans.

At the end of the first wedding I officiated—not church members, but, I think, friends of a church family; I didn’t know them—after the wedding, we were all in the small sanctuary, and it was time for the photographer to get the shots he was supposed to get of the beaming bride.

The only problem was she was not beaming. She was the opposite of beaming. The opposite of a wide, happy, toothy smile isn’t a grimacing frown; it’s a total vacuity, just an absent kind of expression. It looks particularly out of place in a wedding dress, particularly when a 500-watt klieg light is illuminating the scene.

And I thought, Am I the only one seeing this? The photographer was shooting; the families were milling; the bridesmaids were waiting their turn. And I think I may have even quietly said, “Smile!” in that idiotic way where you sort of fake a smile as if the person might not remember what it means, so you have to demonstrate.

About a year later I found out that four months after the wedding, the bride had taken off with one of the groomsmen, and that had been the end of that.

I suppose it was somewhere around that time that I began to think, maybe it isn’t my job to try to be the voice of authority and tell these couples that, in my all-knowing pastoral wisdom, I decreed that they were “meant to be.”

I would like to think I do a lot less of that kind of thing these days, but I have no doubt that a lot of us who wear this collar—not all of them youthfully blundering their way through the early years of ministry—offer up a lot of what we think are absolute assurances, but they come from us and our insecurities, rather than the One who sent us; and the people who hear us find that our little “wisdom” wasn’t quite such a rock after all.

There was an older lady in that church facing a major medical scare and I looked right at her and said, “Ruth, look at my eyes; do I look scared to you? You have nothing to be afraid of here,” and I remember being just shocked when, entirely unimpressed, she laughed and said, “I don’t care whether you’re afraid; I’m afraid!”

Nowadays we get our assurances from a lot of different places, in a lot of different formats, from a lot of different people, and I am afraid but also encouraged that people are skeptical when they hear someone say, “trust me; I understand every nuance, and I know exactly what’s going to happen here.” I’m encouraged because it means people are thinking.

But then, the question is: who do you trust to tell you it’s going to be all right? And if you can’t hear the encouraging word because you don’t trust the messenger, what do you do when you’re afraid of the dark?

Because everybody has times when we’re afraid. There are just so many different ways to experience it, we forget sometimes, or just don’t even realize, the things that make us afraid, and how those unspoken and unacknowledged fears shape the way we relate to the world and the people around us.

A few years ago one of my school friends called to say she was part of the committee that was putting together our 20-year high school class reunion. She’d made dozens of these calls over the previous couple weeks and so I was the beneficiary of all the contacts she’d made, and I grilled her for an hour and a half on what some of our former classmates had been up to through their 20s and 30s. (This is so mid-2000’s—before Facebook.)

During our conversation I asked her about the other people on the reunion committee, all of whom I knew or at least had known when I was in school.

She said one of the interesting things was that over and over again, one would say to the other, with the safety of 20 years of hindsight, and 20 years of maturity, “I really liked you in high school, but I was too embarrassed or terrified to do anything about it,” only to hear the other one say, “I spent four years hoping you would call, but I finally figured you must not have liked me very much.”

“Well why didn’t you call me?”

“I guess I was afraid to.”

It isn’t easy being a teenager, when everything is new, everything is dangerous, everything seems to have so much weight. Every encounter feels like it has the potential for humiliation.

And maybe we carry that fear with us in one way or another for the rest of our lives.

I know a brilliant woman whose alcoholic mother would just torment her when she was a little girl, not physically as far as I know, but emotionally, in ways I can only try to imagine, just grilling her I guess, telling her how terrible she was, and such a failure, and such a disgrace, and why did you do this and you always do that.

Somehow that little girl has grown up to be an amazing person of enormous intellect and talent. But I wonder what fears must still linger behind the brilliance, the apparently easy camaraderie, the great sense of humor.

We can stack up our accomplishments, great and small. For some people getting out of bed in the morning is an accomplishment; for some, holding a marriage together; for some, setting educational goals and, year by year by year, achieving steps along the way.

Some people have one enormous accomplishment in life that becomes the way they are defined in the public mind; some have enormous accomplishments that take place without fanfare: raising a child, running a business, recovering from an addiction, building a house.

We all have our accomplishments.

But behind the personal and public accomplishments, what are you afraid of?

I wonder if we’re not any different from the people who came out to hear John the Baptist preaching at the Jordan River.

“As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah”—

Is this the one who had been promised for so long, the embodiment of God’s endless promise that God would be with us? As the word about John the Baptist spread throughout the cities and the countryside, maybe everybody who got wind of this wild-man prophet thought, this is it: all the things that I am so afraid of won’t have control over me any more.

Now I can live for life instead of constantly fearing death, calamity, humiliation. Maybe now I can dare to be generous and kind and giving, not constantly preoccupied with protecting myself against people taking advantage of me.

Is this the one? Is this the Messiah?

And when they went to hear him, he electrified the crowds with the ferocious word about the Son of God: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire!”

John had carried the baton, which had been handed on to him by the Old Testament prophets (including Isaiah), and the baton was the word of God; so no, he said: it’s not me. It’s the one who is coming after me.

And when Jesus finally appeared, and the baton was passed from John the Baptist to the Son of God, the message came in a very different tone.

And he said,

I know what it is to be fragile, and weak and tempted, and vulnerable. I know what it is to be human. I know what it means to be afraid of the dark—I was a kid once, too.

I have asked you to carry your cross, as I have carried mine.

But before you do that, rise up from the water of baptism, with me, and hear the voice of our infinitely kind parent in heaven, who made everything that is, and says,

“You are my child, my beloved, and with you, I am well pleased.”

But now thus says the LORD, who created you: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.

For I am your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

You don’t have to be afraid anymore.