Here is my message from Sunday. The text was
Matthew 14:22-33:
One of my earliest memories comes
from when I was probably around 4. I was spending the day with my grandmother
and we had gone to the store, and one the way back home we decided to stop at a
tasty-freeze for some ice cream. I was sitting in the backseat of my
grandparents 1966 Ford Galaxy 500, which was an aircraft carrier, especially
when the top was down, but we had placed our order and I looked down and on my
left arm was a tarantula. Now in my memory it was huge, although I don’t know
if that is because I was small or because of the trauma, but I screamed and my
grandmother turned around, saw it and swatted it off my arm. And this I
definitely remember, but it then jumped onto the front seat, ran down it, then
jumped onto the dashboard and squeezed into one of the air conditioning vents
and disappeared. My grandmother used to comment that she never saw it again.
And we drove off before we got our order. I happened to be wearing a bright
yellow shirt that day, which had a puffy lion on the front, and at the top of
the grocery bag was a bunch of bananas, and so best guess is it came out of the
bananas saw more yellow and was coming over to check it out. But the moral of
this story is that FDR was wrong in his first inaugural address when he said
that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but that we should fear
fear itself and also spiders. We should fear spiders, although while I still
can’t deal with tarantulas or any big spiders, I have gotten much better about
regular spiders as I’ve aged.
And so, with that
we move on in our series on the nots of Jesus, or the things that Jesus tells
us not to do, by moving onto the injunction: “Do not be afraid.” Of the things
we are not to do, and the things that cause us to get ourselves all into knots,
this may be one of the harder ones because fear is hardwired into us. And
living entirely without fear is not only unhealthy it can be downright
dangerous. There is a reason why we have fear of snakes and spiders and tigers,
because they can be life threatening. Fear is a primal urge that comes to us
from the most primitive part of the brain known as the amygdala, and located
close to the base of the brain at the spine. It’s what trigger the fight,
flight or freeze response when we sense danger. And it’s played an important
role in keeping us alive and uninjured over time, both as people and as a
species. Fear in proper doses, or natural occurrences is healthy and
productive. It teaches us to not touch hot stoves, to not play in traffic and
to avoid spiders. And so fearing things is not a sin, and in fact not fearing,
or living without fear, could just be plain and simple stupidity. And so, we
start with that reality because I don’t think that’s what Jesus is talking
about when he tells us not to be afraid. But it’s about the what and the why.
