Fear is a Choice
Hebrew 12:18-29
You might be like me: someone who grew up inheriting a faith in Jesus that was wrapped up in fear of punishment. I hear constantly as a pastor the frequent story of people’s experience of Christiantiy being solely about punishment, guilt, and fear. I think that it’s the reason I meet so many people who are done with Christianity altogether.
This domination-centric form of Christianity being so common and rising to the forefront of the public’s imagination just might be why it has such a challenging reputation and is suffering from decay and decline. Fear and guilt and be powerful motivators to start a life of faith—but it can’t fuel a life long relationship with God. God doesn’t operate on guilt and fear; God is love.
The author of the book of Hebrews wrote, “you have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest.” (Hebrews 12:18 NRSVUE) When we are taught to worship what we fear, we take love out of the equation! When fear and guilt are the primary ways of understanding our response to God’s work in our lives, we neglect the relationship God is trying to actually have with us: a relationship not of domination but of mutual love.
And when fear and guilt are our primary motivations for worshipping God and being a part of a faith community, we neglect the really wonderful parts of being a faith family. Instead, we become, at best, a social club or, at worst, a group of people lifelessly going through the motions… keeping struggles secret, and slowly atrophying our faith and connection to God.
While we know what is wrong with it, how do we deal with how popular it seems this domination-centric form of Christianity is? Fear and guilt are very tangible emotions for us. They are less complicated than love. They make more sense to us than the faith that claims a hope in the impossible.
Fear being so much easier to exploit is not just a faith problem, we are seeing how valuable fear is playing out in our country today. We are investing hundreds of billions of dollars into the incarceration and detention of immigrants (both documented and undocumented) in order to stoke a latent fear among many in our country that people who aren’t fully citizens and are outsiders are “dangerous.”
The altar of fear is being visited quite often in our country—our government is also militarizing the police in Washington DC to tap into unsubstantiated fears about crime, too.
Can we turn away from fear and focus on something else in our worship of God? The author of Hebrews wrote, “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for indeed our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:28-29
I think we can short circuit how predictable and easily fear can take hold of us. What if, instead of fear, we turned to gratitude? I’ve said it before and I will say it again, we can focus on scarcity or we can focus on abundance. No matter where we are, God’s abundance is always near us. So instead of focusing on fear of the unknown, I wonder if we can focus on gratitude for the blessings that surround us instead.
Rather than fearing the immigrant, we could be grateful for the new perspectives, art, food, and life that immigrant communities bring to our neighborhood. Rather than fearing the unknown future, we could be grateful for the blessed present. Rather than fearing a mighty God, we cuold be grateful for God’s “consuming fire” which might even hurt, but also transforms and heals us.
