By Pastor Marcia Moret Sietstra

Based on a series by Forrest Church, Chautauqua Institution, August, 2003

Phil. 4:6-12

If you were here the past 2 Sundays, you know that today is the 3rd part of a sermon series on fear, based in part on a sermon series preached last summer at Chautauqua by Forrest Church, the senior pastor at All souls Unitarian Church in New York City. The theme running through all these sermons is, in a way, the theme of the 1st one. In it I suggested that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear. Fear drives what we do in our personal lives, how we function as a society and fear even drives our international affairs. I also suggested that the antidote to fear is love, and I will return to that idea this morning.

I want to begin by talking about one of the most common causes of fear—the fear of not having enough, which could mean suffering in the future. We try to save money for retirement, we buy long-term insurance in case we’ll need to go to a nursing home, many of us work too many hours or put off retirement because we fear we have not saved enough. Certainly planning for the future is both necessary and prudent, but excessive worry and fear about the future isn’t healthy. While fear is part of the human condition, ancient Christian wisdom can help us keep our fear in check.

The apostle Paul wrote about the fear of not having enough, the fear of deprivation. Paul traveled constantly and relied on people’s hospitality, since you didn’t call ahead for reservations in the 1st century. He also seems to have had a chronic health problem. Yet Paul wrote: I know both how to be abased and how to abound. I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want. I can do all things in God who strengthens me.

I can do ALL things? Doesn’t that sound a little over-confident? ALL things? Was Paul so extraordinary that he never felt a twinge of self-doubt? No. Paul was a human with very human weaknesses, as anyone who carefully reads Paul’s writings in the New Testament will quickly discover. Paul had a bad temper sometimes, and was prone to exaggeration and stress at times. And remember the chronic pain—surely he had moments of doubt.

All of us know about self-doubt. We most often feel it when we compare ourselves to others perhaps you compare yourself to a co-worker or neighbor, thinking she is far more capable than I am she’s thinner too and I’m sure she’s more creative even her house is cleaner than mine! Never mind the fact that that her marriage is falling apart, she smokes too much, and never accepts a volunteer task. Maybe you compare yourself with your wealthy cousin. He may be a successful farmer or CEO of a big company. But you may not know that he kicks his dog, who bites the cow, who kicks the wife, who yells at the kids, and so on! We don’t have the composite picture of our neighbor, so it’s no good comparing the worst traits in yourself with the best traits in them. And yet we do that all the time, fueling self-doubt and fear.

We also tend to compare ourselves to some ideal. Go to the self-help section at Barnes and Nobel, a section I often enjoy. But you have to have a sense of humor and balance when you read these titles. For example, How To Get Rich in 15 Minutes a Day, How to Lose 60 Pounds in 60 Days, How to Run a Marathon in 3 Months, How to Get Your Man and Keep Him. Think about the biggest New Year’s resolution you ever made you were going to run 10 miles a day!’you were going to write a best-selling novel!’you were going to look like a model by Easter! Did you keep those resolutions to change your life dramatically? Probably not, if you set such unrealistically high goals. You most likely ended up blaming yourself when you didn’t reach them, and worrying.

On the other hand, if you decided to start walking everyday instead of jogging 10 miles every day, you may have achieved this more realistic goal. Or perhaps you could commit to writing an article or regular letters to the editor instead of a novel. Forrest Church reminded us, in his sermon, that much of the guilt and fear we experience are the result of wanting to do what you can’t, to have what you don’t, and to be who you aren’t—in short, to indulge in wishful thinking.

Dr. Church suggested, instead, 3 practical strategies to combat fear’s arguments: 1) Do what you can, 2) Want what you have, and 3) Be who you are.

First, to do what you can means you reject the selective memory of the past and fantasies about the future, in preference for doing something good in the present. To do what you can, is to take seriously Jesus’ great double commandment to Love the Lord your God and Love your neighbor as yourself. I would remind you that neighbor is a moral term, not a geographical location. It refers to all the people God created. When we get the focus off ourselves and onto taking care of our neighbor, our fears and preoccupation with self subsides. Love casts out fear, is the way the ancient biblical writer put it (I John 4). Or one might say, Love is the antidote for fear. Freed from preoccupation with self, one begins to wish for the grace to give one’s self for others, the patience to help others, the strength to do it today and again tomorrow.

Dr. Church’s second strategy, to want what you have, is to live in the realm of the possible. Instead of wishful thinking, you think to wish for: courage to bear up under pain, grace to take your successes and failures lightly, energy to do what God gives you to do. To want what you have replaces wishful thinking with thoughtful wishing. It moves us from fear to gratitude.

For example, if you think to wish for that which you already have, you will pray for health even if you are healthy, you will pray for your children if you have them already, you will pray for the love of all who already love you, and you will pray for the miracles of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste if already blessed with them. If not, pray for what you are blessed with instead, remembering that life itself is a miracle! Do you know the incredible odds against your even being born? Your one unique combination of DNA could result from the union of only one particular sperm with one particular egg, each carrying the genetic code of only that specific set of ancestors, all connected by a single unbroken thread to the very moment of creation. ‘ The earth was pregnant with you when it was born!’ We take daily miracles for granted.

I’ve always loved what the poet and pastor John Donne wrote: There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature but would seem a miracle and exercise our attention, if it were done but once! Wish for what you have instead of moaning that you want something else, or asking, what did I do to deserve such and such, and you will find yourself grateful instead of fearful.

Finally, Dr. Church’s 3rd strategy: Be who you are. There is a story that one of our members (Bert) reminded me of a couple weeks ago in our theological issues study group. It is an ancient Jewish story of Rabbi Gamaliel. Rabbi Gamaliel was asked one day by a student if he thought he had done enough with his life. Rabbi Gamaliel thought for a moment and then answered, When I die, God will not ask me, ‘Gamaliel, why were you not an Abraham or a Moses? God will ask me, Were you Gamaliel?’

Even Jesus appears to have struggled at times to know who he was, but he always came back to himself and the journey he believed was his. Toward the end, he appears to have known he was risking death by teaching people to resist injustice, for surely the Roman authorities viewed him as a potential rebel leader. Yet he risked going to Jerusalem, the site of earlier Passover rebellions. It was part of who he was. In our te’t today we read about a woman disciple who anointed his head, a sign that she understood he was going to die and yet she named him as her king anyway—because that was who he was, the one who brought wisdom like no other she had eve r known. She loved him, but she accepted that he, to be true to who he was, would probably die.

Each of us needs to accept who we are, and learn to love ourselves. We are told to do so in the Great Double Commandment if you look closely. Jesus said, Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself. To love one’s self is to accept who you are, and reject the fool’s gold of self-delusion. It is to learn that the joys of imperfection beat the worries of perfectionism any day of the week. It is to say "yes" to the life God has given you.

The apostle Paul, I think, understood these things, and so he was able to say, I have learned in all things to be content I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I have a hunch that all the things he referred to were the product not of wishful thinking, but of thoughtful wishing, so he was able to do them. Thoughtful wishing is doing what you can, wanting what you have, and being who you. Oh, and one last thing—the best part about thoughtful wishes is they generally come true. Thanks be to God. Amen.