Sermon for 8th March 2020:

What do we do with our fears?

by The Revd Preb. Marjorie Brown

Coronavirus. We can’t avoid thinking and talking about it. It’s causing a good deal of anxiety around the world, it hardly needs saying. In some parts of the world, like my birthplace, the USA, fake news has taken natural fear to rather silly levels. Apparently large numbers of American consumers now refuse to drink Corona beer in case it contains the rogue virus. And in the White House Donald Trump has decided that his hunch is a better guide to the epidemic than WHO statistics.

Here in the UK, we have a long tradition of staying cool in a crisis, keeping calm and carrying on. But even so, we are in an unprecedented situation and many people naturally feel worried about the unknown. At least we have the expertise of Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty to help us stay rational while social media and fake news whip up fear of what a pandemic might mean. And there are plenty of perfectly sensible precautions that we can take, to reduce the impact of the illness even if it does spread widely.

Franklin Roosevelt in his presidential inaugural address in 1933, during the dark days of the Depression, famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Dr Whitty is determined that we will not go down that road. We are taking preventive steps here at St Mary’s, as families and institutions are doing all over the country, and together we will face whatever crisis lies ahead.

The constant talk about feeling afraid has made me wonder: can I, can you, remember the first time we ever felt panicky fear? It’s probably buried in our unconscious, long before the time of identifiable memories, but I’ll bet that it concerned the fear of separation from our primary caregiver. That’s a foundational fear for every young human being, and also for young mammals in general. If that fear is not regularly allayed, a person, or an animal, can grow up to be anxious and untrusting.

As we get older we develop lots of other fears. We may remember being frightened of strangers, of traffic, of high places or small spaces. Perhaps like me you went through a phase of being terrified of spiders. One of my children developed a phobia about citrus fruit, another became deeply uneasy about small lids. Who knows what triggers these irrational fears?

As we mature our fears may seem more reasonable as they tend to focus on health or money or relationship issues. Or on a macro scale, we may well be anxious about the environmental crisis or political developments. We learn in various ways to live with these fears, to do what we can to deal with them and to bear the uncertainties that we cannot fix. Our response to the coronavirus epidemic will show how well we have managed to master our fears.

There are perhaps two really existential fears that all of us encounter, starting usually quite early in life. One is of course the fear of our own mortality. And the other is the fear of being cast out, shunned and humiliated.

That second one may bring vivid memories to many of us. Every school classroom has what Charlie Brown in the Peanuts cartoon called the goat, the anti-hero, the loser whom everyone else tries to keep away from. Such persons may not have any obvious goat-like characteristics – they may look fairly ordinary and behave in perfectly acceptable ways – but somehow the hive mentality decides that they are unacceptable outsiders.

Here’s a challenge for you. Do you remember who the outsiders were in your schooldays? To my shame, I can recall vividly the full names and faces of the boy and the girl who bore this burden during my junior high school years. I was never actively cruel or unkind to either of them, but just like everyone else I did what was ultimately worse – I simply shunned them. I hope devoutly that they went on to have successful lives and happy relationships, but our herd behaviour certainly didn’t help them. It is hard to bear the thought now of how much they must have silently suffered.

The fear of being the goat, the loser, the outsider, is deeply embedded in human beings. Many of us have had at least a fleeting experience of the horror of that status, when we were the last one picked for a team, or the one everyone else pointed the finger at as the culprit in a childish misdemeanour. The shame of those moments can still be fresh decades later.

The gospels are full of stories of the shame of the outsider. The woman who is about to be stoned for adultery. The beggars suffering from leprosy, deafness or blindness who long for healing. The Gerasene demoniac who is chained among the tombs. No-mates Zacchaeus who climbs a tree to see Jesus. 

The gospels are also full of examples of people who shun the outsider and turn on the scapegoat. Peter denies knowing Jesus when his friend and master is in trouble. Simon the Pharisee scorns the woman of the streets who anoints Jesus. The rich man ignores the poor man at his gate, until he needs his intercession after death. The pompous man thanks God in the Temple that he is not like the sinners.

It’s almost as if there is a theme, a golden thread, running through Jesus’ encounters and his stories. In today’s reading we have a very interesting conversation with a character who is terrified of losing his precious status as an insider. Nicodemus is as establishment as you could be. He is a highly educated and respected Pharisee, and also probably a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme Court. That’s why Jesus refers to him as a teacher of Israel.

Nicodemus cherishes his status, but he is also a spiritual seeker, and he has been intrigued by what he has heard and seen of Jesus. But to protect his position, he can only seek Jesus out on the sly, by going to him at night. What would his colleagues think if they knew he was secretly checking out this charismatic rabbi?

When Jesus speaks of being born again from above, Nicodemus scoffs at this image. One life, lived in such a privileged position, is quite enough for him. But Jesus is speaking of what his death and resurrection will mean for anyone who believes in him. Jesus is going to become the ultimate outsider, the scapegoat for his own people and for all humankind. He will be shunned, accused, tortured and executed. Most of his dearest friends will run for their own lives. He will be put to death in the most dehumanizing, humiliating way that the Roman occupiers, who are masters at this sort of thing, can come up with. 

And yet he will return, mysteriously, without hatred or resentment, and he will heal the broken spirits of those who abandoned him. It will become apparent that death, that universal fact that even the Son of God could not escape, has no ultimate power to defeat our humanity and our relationship with God.

We can be born into that new life here and now. But to do so, we have to abandon the self-centredness that casts out others and seeks only our own success and survival. The ego that says I’m all right, shame about the others, is what must be reborn. We can no longer define ourselves over against others, in competition with them. We have to let go our own goodness and righteousness. The resurrection reveals the love that transcends all our petty rivalry and mutual blaming.

The Church, the new community that comes into being around the witnesses to the risen Christ, is the place where we can slowly be transformed by that love. Being born from above will be our life’s work that will carry us through the grave and gate of death to the joys of eternal life with God. The Australian theologian Sarah Bachelard, whose book on resurrection ethics has been inspiring both Mark and me recently, writes that “the community of the church is an embodying structure for learning to hand over one’s life in trust to transcendent otherness, growing in self-dispossessing prayer and living responsively to grace in penitence and gratitude.

Now that sounds quite a tall order. But we learn to hand over our life in trust to the God who so loved the world that he gave his Son so that the whole world, the entire cosmos, might be saved through him. The outsiders, ultimately, are all of us because we constantly cast each other out, but Christ’s circle of love is drawn widely enough to take us all in. The outsider, the scapegoat, the one we point at, blame and shun turns out to be the one whose generous forgiveness makes us all insiders in the love of God.

So our deep-seated fears of death and being outcasts can gradually be dissolved in transcendent otherness, as we learn, each of us, that we are not the centre of the universe after all, and that we can trust the purposes of God. That may even help us to deal with the daily fears that plague us, be they financial, emotional or even the dreaded coronavirus.