Fear Itself: Sermon for Lent 2 by Susan Daughtry

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you!" -Jesus, Luke 13

In 2004, a humor writer for the Washington Post magazine wrote a feature article for the magazine that was not humorous at all. It was called ‘FEAR ITSELF: LEARNING TO LIVE IN THE AGE OF TERRORISM." This was just 3 years after 9/11. The train bombings in Madrid had just happened. And this writer, Gene Weingarten, took a trip to Israel to ride the bus routes that had been bombed most often in Jerusalem. He did it to explore the psychology, not of terrorists, but of the terrorized. His premise was that we in America were coming to know fear more and more in ways that were new for us, and that if he could go to Israel and see how people were coping in the midst of the intifada, there might be some wisdom for us here today.

Early on in the article he writes, "There is a Hebrew word, hamatzav, that is used to describe the state of dread that has swaddled Jerusalem like damp, clammy gauze since the Palestinian intifadas made merely living a daredevil act. Hamatzav literally means "the situation," and it seems to cover everything: the high security, the high anxiety, the high-stakes game of chicken. Palestinian militants believe they can make the Israelis so fearful, so desperate for peace of mind, that they will end their occupation and surrender more land than they ever bargained for. Israeli leaders believe their fierce reprisals will, in time, crush their attackers' will to kill. Both sides, of course, know fear: Plenty of innocent Palestinians have been killed in Israeli military actions -- for Palestinians, the act of living must also, at times, seem like a mortal risk. Each side accuses the other of terrorism. Each side describes its own actions as self-defense. And so it goes." (Gene Weingarten, "Fear Itself," 2004. washingtonpost.com)

This fear-fear that in doing something as simple as taking a bus to work, or stopping in a café for lunch, or buying bread at the market, you could encounter death or dismemberment without any warning-he explores this fear very thoughtfully in his article. I've printed several copies, and they're on the Lenten Book Table in the parish hall if you'd like to see them, and will be linked to this sermon on the website as well.  How do you go on in an atmosphere of such fear? Weingarten describes the ways people cope. People make deals with themselves. One man never gets on a bus, because his job is to be a photographer, and he has taken pictures of bus bombing after bus bombing, often the first person on the scene. He rides a bicycle to get around town. He tells himself, I will take the risk of riding my bicycle next to one bus, but not next to two. Next to two buses, your chances of getting blown up are doubled. Too much risk. Won't do it.

People make deals like that with themselves and with their loved ones. Their tolerance for bad news changes. When five people out of seven in a family have either been at the scene of a bombing or know personally someone who has died in one, they find ways to take care of each other in the midst of daily life, tools for coping, moving on, staying alive despite their acquaintance with death.

Thankfully, most of us Americans do not have this kind of daily awareness of the precariousness of life. Weingarten gets on the number 18 bus, which has been blown up several times, and he describes his experience of knowing he's on a bus route that could incinerate at any minute. "This is what an American thinks, on his first ride. An American watches every new person as he boards, prioritizing his concerns. Old woman, good. Old man, okay. Young, skinny person in tight clothes, no problem. Fat person: Is his flesh jiggling, or might it be something more rigid than protoplasm under that baggy shirt? Why is no one watching the back door? Someone could slip on, undetected, as a passenger gets off. No one is watching! Good, a soldier got on. But maybe that isn't good, maybe it makes us more of a target.

By minute 10, the American is pretty exhausted. But by minute 30, he's let down his guard a little. By minute 40, he has reached a state where he actually notices the pretty woman in shorts. Because, really, isn't that what life is about -- noticing the pretty woman in shorts? Isn't that what the human animal does? Life, as they say, goes on. "  (Weingarten)

Weingarten describes the mundane-ness of the security measures, the fact that Israelis think it's normal for civilians to walk around with concealed weapons. They are inured to the guards, the guns. The checkpoint where a Muslim woman is detained on her way to get eyeglasses for her daughter well after the soldier's supervisor tells them to let her go.  He says, "Never in my life had I felt so much ambient mistrust, fear and hatred in one place at one time."

And yet, he says, the lives of the Israelis he knows are not totally shuttered by fear.

"In Israel, I think, the constant grind of terrorism has not only penetrated people's sense of denial, it has sanded it almost completely away. But what it has exposed is not blind, paralyzing fear ... It is something else altogether. The Israelis live defiantly, indomitably, with a heightened intensity, as though each day might be their last. After a bomb killed two dozen young people at a Tel Aviv disco a few years ago, Israeli youth refused to be cowed. They resumed a robust nightlife. Today, outside the scene of the bombing, beneath a stone memorial listing the names of the dead, is a single inscription: "Lo Nafseek Lirkod." It means, 'We won't stop dancing.'" (Weingarten)

In the passage of Genesis we read this morning, we're fairly early on in the story of Abraham, so early that his name is still just ‘Abram.'  God calls him to get up and go to a new land, on the remote promise that his elderly and infertile wife will bear him countless descendents. And Abram is afraid. He is afraid of change and risk, but he's also afraid of the people whose land he's about to try to take by force. He makes choices over and over that reveal that he's quavering between trust and courage,  and then utter terror. God shows up and makes this promise to him several times, and this time, in the verses that were politely cut out of this morning's readings, God tells him some hard facts. God says, as a result of following me, generations of your children will be enslaved and terrorized in Egypt. But it will work out in the end; I will bring them to the Promised Land. God tells Abraham, Do Not Be Afraid. I will do amazing things for you and for your descendents.

And then later on in the story of our faith, in the Gospel reading, Jerusalem is under foreign control. Jesus says that  God would like to gather his children there up like a hen gathers her chicks under her wings-what a beautiful image of maternal care and comfort. But Jerusalem has become so afraid that they are too busy stoning the prophets and messengers of God. They are too fearful to see the new thing God is doing in their midst. And even later, in the story of Jerusalem, is the story Weingarten tells about going to that city in the midst of the intifada and seeing both clawing fear and defiant life. Weingarten's article does not tell the story of the Palestinians, who are currently punished as a people for the sins of a small group. It does not tell how Palestinians find ways, or don't, to keep dancing. When you are cut off from your jobs, your fields, from electricity, and from social gatherings by a dominant military force, when curfews are enacted that keep you from leaving your home for days, when you can be detained for hours at military checkpoints just on your way to get groceries, when fear and mistrust of your neighbor rules your daily existence, dancing may be a very difficult thing to do.

It is down to the question of fear versus life.

How do we deal with the reality of our own mortality so that we can live lives of beauty and meaning in a violent world? Is it our defiance, our steely refusal to let fear take the joy out of our lives, as Weingarten describes the young people of Jerusalem who refused to stop dancing? Is it our trust in God to somehow catch us in the end, to fulfill his promises? I think for most people there's some mix of both.

Either way, we have the choice to fear death, or to befriend it, to accept it. I want, for myself, I want to choose the latter.  I want to choose to befriend mortality because I believe that the fear of death leads us to be afraid of all kinds of things-afraid of change, afraid of not being in control. Ultimately, being afraid of death might make us also afraid of the risk and unpredictability that is life, afraid of the risk and unpredictability of love.

Do not be afraid: June tells me that God's messengers say that 168 times in the Christian bible. Do not be afraid.  

So what is it that you need to do to befriend your own death? There are all kinds of practical things. Living wills, estate planning, advance medical directives will ask you questions that are uncomfortable and detailed and will force you to make decisions that entail thinking about what will happen when you aren't here any more. I had a conversation with a parishioner just the other day who told me about the remarkable experience of having her mother, a grief counselor, help her understand the emotional process of dying as she was going through terminal cancer. There are things you can do to learn more about and plan for your own end so that it's not an unknown. It is a little harder to be afraid of something that you've prepared for than something that's a taboo subject.  

But at the end of the day, confronting one's own death is always a spiritual task, and as much as you can prepare for it conceptually and legally, there is no one who can make that journey for you. So many of you have profound wisdom on this topic, and I would love for you to share it with us somehow.  In my limited experience, I wonder if the best thing we can do to confront death spiritually is pay attention to how we live our lives, to try to choose trust in God and others, and risk loving God and each other, and boldly defy all that would make us afraid, so that we've had some practice in letting go of control. Because the moment will come for each of us when we will have to let go.

Here we are in Lent, remembering that we are dust and to dust we shall return. We are talking about death not because the season of Lent is supposed to be somber and depressing. We are talking about death because talking about it frees us to be unafraid. Befriending mortality means that we can befriend life, to say yes when God calls us into change and risk, to say yes to God's call. It puts us one small step closer to grasping what Jesus was doing in Jerusalem, confronting the looming reality of his own death. And it puts us one step closer to having a real engagement with what it might mean that death does not have the last word. In Lent the story of our death and the story of Jesus' death has to be real for the Resurrection to have any meaning at all.

Amen.