There does seem to be a general fearfulness rippling through the society. Some say the couple of weeks we have just had on Wall Street reinforce the notion that, like the passengers on the Titantic, we are dancing on a wobbly deck. Last week the fifth-year anniversary of the Oaklahoma City bombing and the first-year anniversary of the Columbine high school slayings were observed. Events triggered by rage at one level but beneath the rage a profound terror. We live in times not unlike those of Scott Fitzgerald – who, by the way, lived behind this church for a couple of years and became friendly with Westminster’s turn of the century pastor Dr. Holmes. Our times are not unlike those Fitzgerald so masterfully described as giddy yet weirdly out of kilter, sparkling, brilliant, yet constantly on the edge of breakdown.
But the fear that Easter and the Risen Christ address runs deeper than current waves of social or financial jitters. It is an intensely personal, often daily experience. Ann Landers receives 10,000 letters a month. The predominate problem in them all she says is fear. 90% of chronic patients that see physicians have one common symptom – fear. One preacher says that he and his psychologist, health care and even legal colleagues agree the one thing that holds their professional lives together and defines their relationships with clients and parishioners is not sin but fear. Fear – the thing that holds us together, yet keeps us from being whole. Everybody is fearful – of some public or private demon; or some unnamed fear that gnaws away even in the midst of our joy; or some cloud that hangs over us or in the recess of our hearts.
Last year’s centennial of Ernest Hemingway revealed that more than anything else, it was fear – the private demon, the hanging cloud – that obsessed and drove his writing. Hemingway’s personal brushes with death hunting/fishing, bull-fighting, in war became the focus of his stories. "He is our poet, in prose, about fear and the imagined encounter – before we die – with death. Fear was his subject matter, his stock in trade."
Or Duke Ellington in this centennial year of his birth. The story goes that in 1964, when his longtime friend and musical collaborator Billy Strayhorn was diagnosed with esophageal cancer Ellington’s life changed. His first reaction was, "how could this happen to Strayhorn," says Ellington’s son Mercer. Then he concluded, "why couldn’t it happen to me." Like Hemingway’s writing, Ellington’s music as he grew older and confronted his own mortality was his on-going attempt to answer his fear. Especially, in his sacred music and classics like "Come Sunday."
Not just great artists but children too can be acutely aware of their own mortality, vulnerability and be plagued by fear of death. The great worry by so many this weekend is what demons of the soul little Elian Gonzalez struggles with. What fears plague him? One baby boomer mother tells this story. She says, "when my son Paul was 8 years old, he became fixated on the subject of death. He was desperate to know what happened to people when they died. But there were no ready answers in our household. "Although my husband was the son of a minister and I was raised in a devout Catholic family, we had abandoned formal religion and were raising our child with an ideology loosely defined as secular humanism. "I still vividly recall the night Paul shook me awake at 2am with an urgent question: ‘do you go somewhere after death, or do you just die, and everything goes out like a light?’" I gave him what I now realized was a cowardly reply: ‘some people believe there is life after death and others believe that death is the end.’ When he pressed for proof I told him there was no proof and left him to fend for himself in his existential crisis."
One of the gravest criticisms of the mainline Protestant church of the past generation is that we have not shared with our children the life-changing news of Easter morning. Since about 1950, we have successfully communicated to our kids that religion is good but all religions, taken moderately are much the same. We have convinced our children to be religious but not particularly Christian; to be idly curious about Jesus and Christianity, but not to engage themselves deeply in wrestling with his words or ideas; to value the role of the church in society, but not to deeply commit themselves to any one particular congregation’s inevitably ambiguous life. Yet, the gospels know no such moderation. St. Paul. The martyred disciples. The women at the empty tomb. Our faith was not born out of a rational discussion of the pre- and post-Easter Jesus. Our faith started as the immoderate result of spine-tingling, life-changing everyday encounters with the Risen Christ.
If the question today is how do we deal with our fear, and what can we pass on to our children to enable them to deal with their fear the answer is the Risen Christ. One colleague preaches occasionally at a homeless shelter. He says after a recent service one man told him, "You know, when I went to prison seven years ago, in the midst of my fear and turmoil, I prayed to God that he would give me peace. And he did. I know that Jesus is alive because every night in that prison I felt him with me. I am a Christian today because I know that Christ is alive." The foundation of our faith is the tangible everyday experience at home or work or school, where ever we are imprisoned by fear, that Christ is alive and with us.
Physiologists say that when we learn to swim or ride a bicycle our brains are literally rewired. New synapses are established and used to perform new skills. What happened 2000 years ago when those women first and the disciples later encountered the Risen Christ and learned to trust him is their hearts and minds were spiritually rewired. When the women came to the tomb early that first Easter morning they were not expecting Jesus to be alive. They were still in mourning. Laden with spices. Prepared to observe the ritual of anointing the dead, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome had not yet formed the new synapses of their faith. But one of the best indicators of the complete Easter-reversal of their thinking and feeling is the word they used to describe the Risen Christ – the word "resurrection." It was not a general term for "life after death." Among the well-developed biblical language for continuing existence of those who had died resurrection was different. It means the concrete, living re-embodiment of Christ and of the dead.
We are like the woman who was buried with a fork in her hand because she said she always remembered those wonderful church suppers when the waiters would come along and say keep your fork, something better is coming. Dessert is on the way.I want people to know that something better is coming when we die she said. I want them to know that I trust that and that they can too. "Be not afraid, the best is yet to come." Those are the first words of Easter. The good news of resurrection is that fear need no longer hold us in its grip. Fear of failing in some good cause, or succeeding in some bad one. Fear of love or being loved. Fear that I will not have enough time. Fear that I have too much time because life is painfully lonely. Fear that what I believe and trust are not so. Fear that I am untrustworthy. Life begins when you realize by removing the fear of death, Christ has given you, for the first time, full possession of your own life. What you have always had, you now own. Free and clear.
Last week I took a tour of the Buffalo Police Facility with the board of the National Conference for Community and Justice. The tour concluded with a visit to the holding block. 37 cells. Six feet by four feet. Each with stainless steel washbasin and toilet. Heavy sliding doors with thick bars just a few inches apart. The cell block was empty that morning. All the doors had been slid open. As I stood in the narrow hallway between the cells on the one side and the concrete wall with reinforced windows on the other, I noticed that you could see from those prison cells the next door neighbor of the holding block. A church. St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Cathedral to be exact. I wondered how many of those prisoners over the years found some source of comfort or strength from being able to see that house of worship. How many God may even have spoken to sitting in their prison cell, seeing in that church – built for one reason and one reason only because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead – I wondered how many of them saw an opportunity to begin a new life.
Maybe you sit in some prison of fear this morning. Some gnawing worry for a child or your health or an aged parent or relative. Maybe you fear for your marriage or your career or some valued relationship. The good news today is that the door to the prison cell of your fear is open. And you are free to go and live.
Amen.