Well, there goes another bad and discouraging week in America. It’s hard to stop scrolling through the news, but also, like probably everybody, I am afraid of what I’ll see and don’t want to look. The instinct to look away is only intensified by the now routine nature of the sort of violence that we’ve all come to expect. Every few weeks or so there is some number of people killed, for racial or religious or political reasons. We are appalled. And then we return to normal twitter. A few weeks later it happens again.
Like so many I have a strong desire to write it off as mental illness—whoever it is must be unhinged and crazy, and that’s what motivated him to take matters into his own hands. But that way is to be cautioned. Almost everyone I know is struggling in this brave new world. Mental health is elusive, emotional health is the property of only the humble few. I don’t know very many people who aren’t getting through life with the help of a counselor, and in many cases, mind saving medication.
So maybe it is hate. One person, soaking up the hateful rhetoric, takes it upon himself to do away with those people who, he thinks, don’t even deserve to live. The man who tried to shoot up a church, this week, and failed, and so went to the grocery store to accomplish what was in his heart, the man shooting up the synagogue, both don’t have to reach down very far to find loathing for other kinds of people, a loathing so intense they will pick up a gun.
But I think the root is more insidious and more dangerous. More dangerous because it is a property all humanity shares. It might not manifest itself in violence and death, but it is always destructive, and it spoils the cosmos in a thousand small but heart breaking ways. It opens the door to hate, and to insanity, but more usually it abides in the mundane dishonorable choices every human person makes. What is it? It is fear.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, so sayeth the wise man, and the fear of everything else is total folly. I search about through the news but I cannot find a fear of God in the cacophony. Everywhere I look I see fear, but not of the one Person who really matters.
And this does not surprise me, because when I look at the contents of my own heart, I see plenty of fear. I am afraid of failure, of other people being upset with me, of not being admired and adored, of my children coming to ruin, of running out of hours in the day, of getting in trouble, of feeling unhappy and anxious, of having to do more work than feels fair…sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and taste humiliation mingled with fear. What happened during the day crowds into the night and the two are joined, dragging me into a shadow kingdom of anxiety, the foundation stone of which is my own self.
It is the rare and strange day when I fear God as I should. I should, because if I were going to rightly and duly consider the nature of myself and my life, taking into serious consideration the one who upholds the cosmos and who has the true and real power over life and death—not just for today but forever—I would find my usurping, anxious fears misplaced. That my greatest fear, on any given day, is not being comfortable and happy about who I am, is utter folly. I should fear the one before whose holiness and perfection I am an offense. I should desire the mercy of the one who can, because I deserve it, cast my soul into hell.
Misplaced fear is so insidious because every single human person has it. It’s the thing that keeps us up at night and makes us difficult to live with during the day. It doesn’t usually manifest itself in a shoot out, but it spoils everything it touches. It ruins families. It inhibits relationships in the church. It props up corruption locally and nationally. It keeps the economy ticking along at its deficit defying pace.
If every single person stopped and properly feared God, a lot of ways of life that we know and love would come crashing down.
But we don’t need to worry about that happening right away, really, because the scriptures promise us that we will only go on in the usual way, perhaps getting worse, until Christ returns. It will take the cosmos being undone for human kind to stop fearing himself and begin to fear God.
Even so, there are small revolutions all over the place. The person who sits in church and discovers that she has been truly wrong, and repents, and sets out a new life of trying to please God. An abandoned husband who, though destroyed in this life, is able to see the truth about himself and the other person. A community that proclaims the forgiving power of the gospel in the face of unspeakable violence.
Fear is so closely related to love. If you lie awake at night afraid of humiliation and suffering, it is because you love yourself. If you fear the powers and principalities of this world, it is because you love what you have and who you think you are. But if you fear God, well, that is the ultimate love. It is letting go of yourself and bowing before the one who has the true power over your life, over your death, over your happiness. Your fear turns to awe, which turns to reverence, which ultimately turns to love—and perfect love casts out fear.
It is the opposite of the dark moment when Adam and Eve, clothed in the death of the animal, were cast out of the garden. Fear and hatred dogged their steps, and ours. But then, all those millennia later, their redeemer hung, naked, humiliated, alone, swallowing up the totality of their rebellion, their anxious cosmos destroying pride. So totally was it cast out that he then stood up out of his grave, alive.
Fear the Lord. Go to church.
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