4.24.21 - On Fear and Anxiety (Kenny Camacho)
Good morning, everybody. Thanks for watching with us today. This week, we are talking about our final “valleys” in the current series, which are fear and anxiety. Just like the previous weeks, we are going to be exploring how God recognizes and addresses our feelings in the stories and words which are preserved and passed on to us in Scripture. But before we get there, I want to start by talking a bit more about the feelings our verses today are addressing. What is fear? Why is the experience of it woven into our lives in the first place, and what is meant to produce or meant to do? And finally, how does God work in our experiences of fear or anxiety in order to bring his perfect love to bear in the world, and in our own lives?
Fear, of course, is the easier of the two terms to define: fear is an instinctual response to a perceived threat to our health or safety. We feel fear at a base level, and when fear comes over us, our body floods our system with adrenaline in order to help us fight or flee from danger. To answer that second question, fear is woven into our lives in order to protect us from the kinds of harm which exist in a Creation that is no longer safe for us. In this sense, fear isn’t primary to being human--which is to say, it isn’t an echo in us of God--but it is something we have developed, over time, in order to survive. When it comes to how we best process our fears, the work “feeling afraid” gives us to do has two parts: first, we need to identify what is dangerous...and then we need to escape that danger. So, when we are standing on a ladder and it begins to wobble, we first feel that rush of adrenaline shoot through our system, and then we have to try and figure out what’s going on and how to react to it: did something break? Is someone shaking the ladder? Is it our sense of balance? And the adrenaline gives us that almost-superhuman burst of strength to respond.
All that to say that, when it comes to fear, we’re not dealing with a state or condition of existence so much as we are dealing with a way we have adapted to survive. Fear isn’t something we share with God--God, being God, can’t be afraid. But it’s also not very long-lasting: we feel fear in short bursts of time.
Interestingly, “fear not” is the most common command in the entire Bible, and I would wager this is largely because the sudden sound of the voice of God or the appearance of an angel in our lives would feel a lot like shaking a ladder we’re standing on: it would cause a jolt to run through our system--that shock of fear--and, recognizing that, God is quick to try and calm us down: no need to run, no need to fight; it’s okay!
But, if that’s all true, then fear isn’t exactly a “valley,” is it? It’s more of a crack in the earth or a crevasse: deep, sure, and dangerous...but momentary, and something to be navigated quickly.
But what about that other way we use the word fear, the one that might also carry the label of “anxiety”? Which, to extend that metaphor, we might think of as a crack or crevasse we fall into: what happens when we don’t get out of the danger quickly and instead, we end up living with that sense of unease and worry over and over again, all of the time? That experience can become a valley...and a particularly dangerous kind of valley, since it’s a kind with no clear way out.
I want to make the case today that that kind of fear--the anxious kind--rises out of a threat not to our literal selves but to our idea of ourselves…and that God challenges us to navigate the valleys of anxiety is by 1) naming what we fear, 2) remembering what he wants for us, and 3) resting in what he believes to be true about us.
To talk about all of this, I’d like to look at someone who I often think of as the most anxious person in the Bible: the first king of Israel, King Saul. To set the stage for our verses this morning, we need to remember who Saul is and how he came to be in the place where we find him. Saul is the first king of Israel after their deliverance from Egypt and their establishment, under the reign of the Judges, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean in a place called Canaan. But crucial to Saul’s story is that Saul shouldn’t have ever been king: he is anointed by the prophet Samuel, who is also the last of the ruling Judges, after the people of Israel, who had grown comfortable in their prosperity, cry out to God demanding a human king, that they might look more like their political neighbors. God, we must remember, had established himself as Israel’s king, with the Judges serving as his emissaries. But once the people of Israel are safe enough to pause and realize that this arrangement is weird in their context, they demand to be more normal in their governance. God at first rejects this call...but, in time, he decides to allow them their king...although with a warning that the king’s kingship will be disastrous and unjust.
Then, in that context, Saul is chosen. All of that backstory then haunts him: insecure in his kingship, Saul is overly dependent first on Samuel’s approval, and then his overdependence on the approval of the people--which he wins through military campaigns--leads him to impatience and cowardice. Three times during his kingship he gets himself and his armies into risky situations and then, only when faced with his mistakes, does he seek God’s aid in propping him up. And three times, God’s silence towards Samuel becomes his undoing, as the pressure on him builds and he panics, trusting his own wisdom over God’s instructions.
The last of these instances is the one we’re going to talk about today, and you can find it in your Bible in 1 Samuel 28. The Israelites have once again gone to war against the Philistines, their neighbors, but as the armies gather for battle, Saul runs into a problem: Samuel, the prophet who anointed him and who he trusts to communicate God’s promise of victory for him, has died. After he died, Saul followed one of his final instructions in the kingdom and, as verse 3 tells us, he had “put the mediums and necromancers out of the land.” He got rid of the psychics. But on the eve of battle, Saul
1 Samuel 28:5-6
saw the army of the Philistines [and] he was afraid...his heart trembled greatly. And when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him, either by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets.
Saul experienced that first kind of fear: his life was threatened, and he was trying to find a way to survive. All that is reasonable! And then, that fear led him to ask God for help. Also reasonable! But then, getting no answer, something else happens to Saul: he ties God’s silence to that bigger worry that’s always hovering in the background for him, which is that he isn’t really supposed to be the king. His identity, in other words, comes under threat...not just his life.
We know this because of what he does next: he calls his advisors together and tells them to go find a medium, a psychic behind enemy lines in Philistine territory. Then, he disguises himself as a peasant and goes to her to seek counsel. Which is to say that Saul’s fear isn’t really that he might die--he does something extremely risky here! Something that could easily get him killed!--it’s that he might lose. Meaning, his army might lose. And finally,hear me on this: he reveals that he has no confidence in who God has already told him he was. Saul was anointed: like it or not, God chose him to be king. But Saul found his confidence, his hope, in his performance as king--which is to say, how others saw him.
You see the irony, right? Israel wanted a king because they were overly on what other nations thought of them. And then the king they got becomes overly focused on what they thought of him. It’s a shell game: when we look to solve our own insecurities by putting our identities in the hands of other people, we are placing our trust in people with their own insecurities, which they might be trying to solve by placing their trust in us. There’s no anchor here, there’s not fundamental stability: we’re all just performing for an audience of performers who are themselves performing.
And so, for Saul, things go about as you would expect: he finds a woman known (amazingly!) as the Witch of Endor (yes, just like the Ewok moon!). And he asks her to summon Samuel...and, in what is frankly one of the more puzzling passages in all the Bible, it works. Samuel appears, and here’s what they say to each other:
1 Samuel 28:15
Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” Saul answered, “I am in great distress, for the Philistines are warring against me, and God has turned away from me and answers me no more...Therefore I have summoned you to tell me what I shall do.”
Let’s pause and note how relatable this content is: Saul starts with what is understandable, his apparent fear: the Philistines are going to kill me! He adds to that a bit of self-pity: God won’t talk to me anymore. But that’s just a deflection for what is really bothering him, his anxiety, which is that he doesn’t know what to do in order to win and hold on to his power. To which Samuel says,
1 Samuel 28:16-17
“Why then do you ask me? [...] The Lord has done to you as he spoke by me, for the Lord has torn the kingdom out of your hand and given it to your neighbor, David.”
Samuel’s words cut right to the heart of Saul’s fear: it’s not about the Philistines, it’s about you, and your worry that you will lose the throne. You will lose your title. You will lose what you feel, at your deepest, makes you who you are. And the irony? Although the Israelites will lose this battle, it’s this battle that will set the political stage for David’s rise to the throne.
So, what to do with any of this? What grounds what we’re talking about here? I think what can reach out to us in the valleys where we experience the crushing weight of anxiety in our own lives--a weight many of us are carrying right now, as we look at the uncertainty of the year ahead, of the uncertainty of our jobs, of the uncertainty of our lives in a country where so much around us feels so broken--is a challenge to try and name our real fears. Part of what leads Saul so far astray is that he has this whole military battle to distract him from his deeper insecurities, from his real problems. And, being king, it’s a distraction he has created for himself! Now, most of us can’t start literal wars to avoid facing our own insecurities...but we can do the same kind of thing in other ways:
We can create tensions in our relationships to try and distract us from the fact that we are putting too much of our identity into what our partner thinks of us. Have you done this?
We can numb ourselves by drinking a bit too much, binging Netflix a bit too much, being on our phones a bit too much, in order to avoid confronting that what we’re really afraid of is that we’re not as successful as we thought we were going to be, we’re not as in control of our lives as we imagined we would be.
We can overwork ourselves to a point of misery in order to avoid confronting the fact that we struggle to know who we are if it’s not tied to a job, tied to what we do.
That’s where I find myself so, so often: I’m scared of failing as the pastor of this church. I’m scared of Revolution suffering because I’m not good enough, not creative enough, not visionary enough. And so I try to keep as busy as I can, so I can justify myself if the thing I’m afraid of comes to pass. But here’s the truth: what makes me worth loving, what makes me worthy, isn’t succeeding as a pastor. To name my fear--my real fear--is to acknowledge that I’m scared I’m not good enough. I’m scared I only matter to people if I am useful to them. Which is to say, I’m scared I don’t matter. But to put my hope, to put my trust for that, in this job and what all of you--people I really care about!--think of me is to build a house on sandy soil. It’s to set myself up on an eroding foundation.
I’m chasing likes. Rather than allowing myself--allowing myself--to be loved. I’m trying to take control of the ways other people value me...rather than trusting that my value is secure. Saul isn’t king because he wins victories. He’s king because God anointed him.
This is the first big thing this morning: when we are anxious, we need to name our root fears. When we do this, something kind of magical can happen: by turning something big and existential into something specific, we give that other half of the equation this morning--that classic fear response--a chance to do some good work! When our anxieties are unmasked and fears are named, we have an easier time assessing what real threats are posed and what we might be able to do to protect ourselves. To go back to that somewhat silly illustration of standing on a stepladder, it’s the difference between thinking we just have a wobbly ladder--there’s nothing we can really do about it; I just live with this--and pausing to really look at what’s going on down there. What if it’s not a wobbly ladder, but there really is someone shaking it! What if you didn’t set it up on a flat surface to begin with? When we name the real fear here--I might fall!--we can do better work to get to the bottom of what the source of the insecurity is.
Second, we can recognize something really profound in the rest of Scripture, beyond the story of Saul, which is that God very specifically does not want us to live anxiously. There are a litany of verses to this effect:
Philippians 4:6-7
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
Psalm 55:22
Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.
Proverbs 12:25
Anxiety in a man's heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad.
Fear is part of how we are made to be: it’s a tool God has given us to protect us. But anxiety isn’t part of the plan: it’s a problem, which develops when big fears prey not on immediate dangers but on our insecurities, turn themselves down to a simmer inside of us, and put on masks to keep us from seeing them! Unmasking them...and recognizing, as we unmask them, that they are not part of God’s plan for us are steps one and two.
And finally, step three is to rest in what God promises to be true, which is that our worth is something he alone can guarantee. In the end, Saul’s insecurity is the reason he falls apart. He can’t bring himself to trust that God’s anointing is enough; that, once God anoints Saul, it’s God’s reputation that is on the line! That point is so, so important, and it’s the one I would like to end on: when God anoints Saul, God is the one saying Saul is the king. Which means that, if Saul is a poor king, God is, in a sense, the one who was wrong about him. God wants Saul to succeed; he is going to work towards Saul’s effectiveness. What sabotages things is that Saul fears that God is always on the verge of cutting him off, of being displeased with him. But that’s not what happens in the story: Saul ends up cutting himself off, metaphorically by failing to trust in who God says he is and symbolically by going behind enemy lines to consult with a medium and a ghost. What Saul could have done, had he not succumbed to his anxiety, would have been to rest in the God who has named him the king.
And the comparison to us begins to come into focus, right? Because God has declared things to be true about us, too, right? Specifically, he has said that Jesus’s solidarity with us has made us children of God. If God’s reputation was staked on Saul’s kingship...what is staked on our sonship, our daughtership? Is it not God’s love? God will not let us go. We are God’s children, of infinite worth to him. No sin, no failure, no weakness can unmake us, can destroy our value, our worth. If the root of my insecurity and anxiety is that I don’t matter, God says otherwise.
I want to listen to that more. I want to feel that more. I want you to tell me that; I want to have chances to tell you that: God thinks we’re worth it. God thinks we’re worth it.
As we close, I want to say that we’re in this together. Our responsibility, as followers of Jesus, is to testify to the loving character of God with our whole lives. To do our best to imitate his kindness, his selflessness, his servitude. And so this is a role we really can play in one another’s lives: we can remind each other of the way God sees each one of us. We can love each other beyond our material successes, beyond our positivity or our pleasantness. We can be people who are quick to say, God think you’re worth it. Worth all of it. Your dignity isn’t negotiable; it’s not contestable.
So first, let us be allies with one another against the insecurities which lead to our anxiety.
And second, let us be bullhorns in our city, shouting out on behalf of those whose infinite value as children of God is under assault. You are worth it. You are valuable. You are secure...and I, to the best of my ability, will be the hands of God wrapped around you to protect you, to embrace you, to lock arms with you.
REFLECT:
What feelings do you sometimes find yourself “stuck” in? What are your “valleys”?
How have you seen God be present with you in these moments?
How have you experienced the presence of others in these moments?
Lots of the sermons here talked about naming what we are feeling as a critical step: name our powerlessness, let ourselves give up, accept our grief, be ‘long-nosed’ and reflective on our anger, name our fears when we are anxious. What is the power naming has? From a Biblical perspective, does this strike you as interesting? (See: Genesis 1-2!)
How can our group be a refuge moving forward? How can we be intentional about caring for one another in “valleys”?
Our theme for this years is Permission to Hope. How does this series connect to this theme?