FROM FEAR TO FREEDOM BY PAUL NIXON (with an assist by Kurt Young)

When have you ever been afraid?  I came here this weekend to come to Kaleidoscope at Toledo School for the Arts.  And it was great trip.  But we came via Train trip this weekend. We took Amtrak from DC to Toledo, and got in very early Friday morning (5:30 AM), about the time that the rooster crowed good morning.  (Not a casual thing to catch a train in this town, or others).

Twenty-years ago, I went on an overnight train trip to Russia. We went with a church group to get a hospital going and start an Alcoholics Anonymous group.  It should have been a great trip. But our guide had lived under communist rule.  And they we were dealing with paranoia over the rise of the Russian mafia. 

And with her paranoia began mine and my group’s descent into irrational fear of the Russian mob.  We became convinced our conversations were being recorded, so we started passing notes that we then burned.  A person took a polaroid picture of us and we thought it was for the hit man, etc. 

Fear has a life of its own.  And when it gets out of bounds, it can suck all of the goodness out of life.  Fear becomes dread.  It moves in like bad relatives, and just throws its baggage and dirty underwear all over the house.

There are fears we have as kids, some less grounded in reality than others.  But as adults we have it too, and it can become dread on adult things.  For instance, dread of upcoming job loss.  I have a friend who knows the grant for her job runs out Nov 30, 2016.  She is not supposed to know, but she knows.

It can be a parent’s dread of a teenager’s bad choices, and the tragedy of lost dreams and also the attending shame.  It can be a young person’s dread of failing a class, or of not being able to complete a degree. I teach a master’s level course in DC at one of the schools in town. It’s crazy watching grown people turn as nervous as cats over a silly exam.  I have a student, we’ll call her Samantha, who has a ton of obstacles to overcome including learning disabilities.  We knew she would flunk my written exam, and she did.  But, working hard, she passed my class.  And she will do amazing things in life, when it’s not about passing written tests.  But you know, she was the calm one taking the exam.   

This year in politics, we have seen the politics of fear played more shrewdly than in any time since I was a kid.  Back in the day, there was a political ad for President Johnson’s 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater that showed a mushroom cloud (follow this link if you want to see the actual ad, Kurt who has a degree in campaign management had that one handy - https://youtu.be/dDTBnsqxZ3k).  Basically Johnson was telling us about his opponent, “Vote for him and we all die.”  Johnson won that election by a landslide.  This after an era where we were all encouraged to fear that the guy or gal cutting our hair, was a closet communist.

Fast forward fifty years, and the fear of the other is still a major strategy in motivating voters and potential voters.  Fear of the Chinese person, who is going to get your job.  Fear of the Muslim person, who just might be a terrorist.  Fear of the Hispanic person, who is ostensibly going to rape and pillage your neighborhood.  Fear of the gay scout leader, who is really only there in order to recruit your future Eagle scout to literally spend his weekends at a bar called The Eagle.  (You knew that, right?)  Just plain old fear, is what many use to motivate us. 

The Bible teaches us a lot about fear.  We are told more times than I can count, “Be not afraid.”  It’s no new issue.  The week that Jesus was executed, you recall.  The disciples all wilted in fear, with Peter being the classic.  Before the rooster crowed early on Good Friday (just about the time that Amtrak gets into Toledo), Peter had denied three times that he had ever been associated with any dude named Jesus of Nazareth. Now what was that all about except fear gone amuck inside Saint Peter?  

Fear had just gone wild inside the guy who was supposed to be the Rock.   Some people think it was kind of a joke, that he was a cowardly guy.  But I think he was a pretty solid, talented guy whom Jesus could count on, and build a church. And even he turned to mush in the fear. 

It has been noted that by the time Jesus died, there were four of his friends and family with the wherewithal to show up at the feet of the cross and to be associated with him, 3 of whom were women.  Four is not a statistically valid number for a survey, but it does lend some support to the idea that women often handle fear differently than men – and despite all of those damsel in distress images handed to us by Hollywood, women may be more likely to get a grip than men when life gets really scary.  Especially when life gets scary at home.

It was those same women who had the guts to come back to the tomb on Easter, and who also, then became the first witnesses of Easter. 

Fear gone amuck… rips us apart.   It rips apart friendships.  It rips apart churches.  It rips apart families.   It is currently being carefully manufactured in order to rip apart our nation.  It’s a challenge.

After all those Easter appearances, Jesus basically disappeared.  A few reported seeing him rising up into the clouds, but for most folks it was more like, “Last week we see him, now we don’t.”  

Now, today we remember Pentecost.  It had been ten days since his last appearance, and 120 of his followers were huddled in an upstairs room in Jerusalem, overwhelmed with fear, and the dread that the Romans would be coming for them any minute.

  Eleven of the twelve disciples were there, so far as we can tell.   But there was no script as to what happens next, no manual, no template, no relevant Bible stories to read as the New Testament would be written by them or about them.

All they knew that the same people who killed Jesus might want to kill a few more of his followers to make a statement once and for all, that you really do not want to be publicly associated with anything having to do with Jesus of Nazareth.

And that is where our scripture comes in.  For those reading along from afar, get out your favorite translation and read Acts 2:1-18, 37-38.  It’s an amazing story of how they overcame fear and performed amazing acts this day, a few millennia ago.  

One moment they are afraid, and locked away in a safe house.  A couple hours later they are out in public, not just freed from fear, but unleashed and they are proclaiming Jesus. 

Peter, the one who fell apart before is preaching boldly in the street.  I guarantee you that soldiers and officials hear his sermon.  And it’s a pretty good sermon, if you want to judge it by the three thousand who decided right then and there to be baptized into the Christian movement.

What happened exactly?  A group of people, who had been cowering and living in fear became great, bold leaders.  There was a rushing wind in a room with closed windows, a holy wind that seemed to correspond to the indwelling of people with a fresh experience of God.  The Spirit of God came upon them.  Literally. 

I am not a Bible literalist.  Because I know the Bible is a library of many books, and different kinds of literature.  Some things in the Bible are metaphors.  Some things are poetic.   A few things are remnants of earlier, primitive, understandings of God, which were corrected by Jesus.  But some of it is just literal, “And then that happened.” 

Pentecost is not a poem, folks.  It is literal.  First in the room, then in the streets – and then three other times documented in the first few chapters of the Book of Acts, the Holy Spirit came down and was on them.   Teaching us that Pentecost was not just a single event, to launch the church, but a classic part of the whole process of the faith’s expansion. 

And when the Spirit came upon them, all of the sudden, they found their mojo again.  Two hours earlier they were cowering, but then they started a church we worship at today. That was then, but that Holy Spirit still comes to us today. 

It was scary to follow Jesus in the first century Roman Empire.  It was a scary time to be alive period if you were not in the one percent of that time.  And the Spirit came to empower people to live lives where joy, peace, and love could triumph over fear. 

 The 11 apostles, plus friends and Christian family, as we track their lives from Pentecost forward, best we can tell, they all died.  Well they all died.   Don’t we all, but the traditions strongly suggest that they all died in the hands of the Romans as martyrs.  All 11.  The Romans got them after all.  Every one of them.  Which is not a great moment for encouraging you today.

You see, they were right to be worried in that Upper Room.   History proved that their fear was justified.  The Romans killed them, one after the next, until they all were dead.  It is said that when Peter found out that he was to be crucified in Rome, he could not bear the thought that he would die in the way that Jesus had died, after he had denied him.  He felt unworthy. 

One of the amazing miracles of the Bible narrative is that people facing that real fear and threat, found their mojo. There are a lot of amazing things that occur within the Bible narrative.  Easter is pretty amazing.  But seven weeks after Easter, that still did not change the game significantly for the Christ followers in terms of a miracle inside of them.  They were still bogged down, still off-balance, still locked up in fear.

Pentecost changed them.  The coming of the Holy Spirit is about my transformation.  It is about our transformation.  It gives us amazing fruits or talents.  It allows us to be world changers.  If you read the Village Statement, we are called to change the world. 

It’s not like there are not real threats in our world, like there was in their world.  There are legitimately things to be afraid of. 

I know this, there are people in this room who feel fear, real fear.   How is fear screwing up your life?  Where is dread stealing from you the peace and joy that God wants you to have from day to day?  Where are you feeling overwhelmed by the stuff out there?  The people out there?  Naming the fear to ourselves, and articulating what is the worst that could happen as we imagine it – that is a good exercise, and will get you part of the way home.

But God will take you the rest of the way to the place of peace and poise.   Where we all want to be.  Those disciples in the Jerusalem marketplace after the Spirit came.  They were poised, they had their act together.   I want my act together.  Don’t you?

In the Christian tradition, the way to get there, to get to the deep beyond, is to welcome the inflowing, the indwelling of God reality into our hearts, and minds, and into our lungs.  Whatever there is haunting you, bugging you, messing with your life, there is good news.  The Holy Spirit is here to help. 

Pastor Cheri then led us into a simple exercise, Breathing, and it really can be this easy to let go of fear:

Breathe out fear.  Breathe in Holy Spirit.

Breathe out anxiety.  Breath in peace.

Breathe out death.  Breathe in life. 

Visualize the one thing you fear most in life, whatever it is.  See it and I want you to pick up what you see.  With your hands and look at it.  I invite you to pick it up, and lift it up and give it to God. And breathe in Holy Spirit and say I’m free.