Will Fear Win?

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Will Fear Win?
By E. Glenn Hinson, Professor of Church History
Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, Lexington

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told us as another terrorizing event cast its dark shadow across our world, and our age is throwing his challenge at us again. From that apocalyptic moment to our own resounds the urgent question: Will fear win? Or will we find the courage in ourselves to face the mother of all challenges?

The ancient apostle who gave us our text believed we could. "God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God and God in that person. Love has been perfected in one who abides in God so that we may have boldness in the time of apocalyptic crisis, for we are in this world just as he is in the world. There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts fear out, for fear torments, and a person who is afraid has not been perfected in love" (1 John 4:16b-18).

If John is right, something is missing from American religious life, for we are afraid, terribly afraid, shaking in our boots. How ironic! The United States has amassed the most formidable weapons systems the world has ever seen. Piles upon piles of nuclear weapons. Delivery systems capable of reaching any spot on earth. Technologies of detection which count the hairs on our heads from heavens` orb. The only country now meriting the sobriquet of "superpower." Yet the destruction of those twin symbols of global economic dominance left us quaking and trembling. It led us into war. We are afraid. By consensus judgment on the reelection of George W. Bush to a second term, Americans are dreadfully afraid.

Why Such Fear?

What lies behind such fear? James gives us one factor that begets wars and fights-our desires at war within us. "You lust for it and you don`t get it, you murder and are jealous and don`t obtain it, so you fight and go to war" (Jms 4:2). One might expect that in a land as rich as ours, with a seemingly endless supply of the world`s goods available, the "haves" would reach a point of contentment, of satisfaction, of enough. But you and I know our thinking does not work that way. Rather, enticed on and pushed forward by a market economy, the more we have, the more we have to have. Like old King Midas, we want everything to turn to gold. More and more is our entitlement. We`ve made a virtue of selfishness and greed.

This may sound like an awfully harsh thought, and I apologize if it`s too harsh. As I meditated during preparation of this message, I began to wonder whether we in America were morally bankrupted by our materialism before the invasion of Iraq and whether the war has completed the process. Need I mention more than Enron and MCI, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Jesus asked us questers the most disturbing question: "What will you benefit if you acquire the whole world and lose your own soul? Or what will you take in exchange for your soul?" (Matt 16:26, adapted to the second person). There`s no doubt that war diminishes the human soul, but the readiness to fight to protect and to obtain what we claim as entitlement had its source somewhere else. Was that not in the materialism which possesses our culture to the point that we would launch a "preemptive strike" to safeguard our goods and way of life and that we would accept the flimsiest of evidence as "proof" of the threat to our security?

A Deficiency of Love

Here is where John takes us to a deeper level in our quest to understand why we are afraid. "One who is afraid has not been perfected in love" (l Jn 4:18). I don`t think John meant here that love would remove every little trace of fear. Insofar as I can see, the only people who have absolutely no fear are in cemeteries. We who are alive possess some fear, and some fear is healthy. Fear makes you jump out of the way of a car headed your way. It gets your adrenaline pumping when you sit down to take a test. Indeed, it incites you to study in advance of that test.

No, John is talking about fear that immobilizes, fear that causes you to lash out mindlessly, fear that prompts a nation to launch a preemptive strike against an imagined enemy. Fear in excess. As John sees it, only God`s love can bring that kind of fear under control. In our culture that means that we, religious people though we claim to be, are not giving the love of God a chance to do its work in us. We are letting our culture shape us in its mold. It beats, hammers, molds, engraves us in its ways. It`s blocking the beams of love that can come in and turn fear into hope.

Can Love Trump Fear?

You are probably asking, "Can love, perfect love, God`s love, do what John believed? Can it `cast out fear` and enable us to live in peace with the rest of humankind?" You and I should pray mightily that it can. As Thomas Merton said, "There is one winner, only one winner, in war. The winner is war itself."

John is not speaking here about romantic love, a love that bills and coos. Notice that he used the Greek agape rather than eros and was careful to qualify it with the adjective "perfect." Obviously he is talking about God`s love, the Love God is. If I may call on Paul`s great hymn of love in 1 Corinthians 13 to help us, he`s talking about a love that "bears up in all circumstances, goes on being faithful in all circumstances, goes on hoping in all circumstances, endures in all circumstances," a love that "never gives up" (1 Cor 13:7-8, my paraphrase). A love William Blake spoke of in that wonderful line, "We are put on earth a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love." "Love divine, all love`s excelling" can trump our fear, but we have to open-to let such love stream into our inner rooms and dispel the darkness and gloom where fear lurks.

Ah, there`s the catch-opening. We have to open from the inside. God doesn`t drive a bulldozer. The catch is . . . it`s so hard to open in a culture which keeps us on a treadmill of activity for activity`s sake and which endlessly distracts us with its cacophony of noise and its whirl of psychedelic lights. Life`s storms cause us to pull our shutters to and to bar our doors from the inside. But if you can open just a crack, love will slip in through the teeniest aperture and create deep-down security, God`s shalom. Energies of fear can become energies of hope for peace.

No, fear, you will not win! God is Love!

Prayer: "O God of infinite love, Love itself, we gather here as people concerned about the cost of war, this war, the war in Iraq-

the shedding of blood,
the wasting of innocent life,
the demeaning of people, a whole nation,
the destruction of property,
the poverty,
the hate.

Forgive us, O God, American people, for being part of the problem.
For wanting too much for ourselves, too many comforts and conveniences.
For ignoring how our desires impact the lives of other people.

How wanting becomes needing.
How denial rouses our anger and, yes, hate.

For pressing those who lead us to follow practices which hurt others.
For creating a world not healthy for humankind as a whole.
For overlooking and overriding our own consciences.

As we come before you, we come as penitents seeking change and transformation in the thinking of American people.
May we humble ourselves under your Mighty Hand.
May we put aside aspirations to world rulership.
May we adopt as our own the sufferings of the peoples of the world-

the AIDS afflicted of Africa and Asia,
the gaunt and starving masses of Ethiopia,
the droves huddled in Palestinian camps of refuge,
the families jammed together in barrios around cities without life`s amenities,
the immigrants seeking places and livelihoods in this world,
your children everywhere on the face of the earth.

May we surrender the false idea that force and violence will solve political problems.
May we begin to ask what we are doing that evokes hatred of others.
And now, O God of Love, we put ourselves in your hands as instruments of Peace.

Where there is hatred, may we sow love.
Where there is conflict, peace.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is despair, hope. Amen."