Where Is Your Faith?

"....He said to them, 'Where is your faith?' They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, 'Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water and they obey him?'"

A temptation before preachers, Sunday in and Sunday out, is to use the biblical story not as text but as pretext for what one really wants to say. Having chosen these stories months ago, in the midst of a dry Maine summer, on the one hand [Give us water to drink!]...and in the presence of an expansive Maine coastline, on the other [Who is this that commands even the waters?]...I am left to wonder if they were not, from the beginning, merely pretext for some burning theological question long since forgotten. Frankly, I have no idea why these stories surfaced then. I do not remember! But now, I must confess, their characters--fearful of the desert's drought and terrified of the sea's tempest--were, this week, a haunting backdrop for another story, a story set in the wilderness of Wyoming, a story of fear and terror, of sin and death.

So, in a context never imagined months ago, I again listened to the Israelites' so-called faultfinding, and underneath I heard the angry fear of a people who would rather return to the reliable order of slavery than risk the fearfulness of God's boundless freedom. I watched the disciples as a storm came up, and recognized the fear of human vulnerability in the face of waters too deep to tread. Reread in a week when fear has been at issue within these borders and without, the wilderness question strangely rings true, Is the Lord among us here?...even as our trembling lives evoke Christ's question of us: Where is your faith?

So, whether text or pretext, I do not know. I only know, because of these stories, I am presently wondering how it is that our lives are too often shaped by the things we most fear, even as I am sure there is One able to transform our fears into a wide and certain trust in the God who is among us.

First, then, to the question of our fears and the power of fear to shape human life or distort human community: "Fear," writes Karl Barth, "is the anticipation of a supposedly certain defeat." There is so much you and I come to fear over the course of a lifetime, so much we suppose will defeat us, such that life becomes an exercise in securing ourselves against our own insecurities, steeling ourselves against every possible threat.

From the beginning, what child does not fear the dark...checking beneath the bed and behind the closet for things that go bump in the night...supposing certain defeat awaits as the lights go out? Annie Dillard writes in her autobiography of a strange light that would traverse her bedroom wall hour after hour and night after night. "When I was five," she wrote, "I would not go to bed willingly because something came into my room. This was a private matter between me and it. If I spoke of it, it would kill me....I lay alone and was almost asleep when the damned thing entered the room by flattening itself against the open door and sliding in....I dared not blink or breathe; I tried to hush my whooping blood. If it found another awareness, it would destroy it." Then one night, she says, "I figured it out....It was a passing car whose windshield reflected the corner streetlights outside....Figuring it out," she goes on to say, "was as memorable as the...thing itself. Figuring it out was a long and forced ascent to the very rim of being, to the membrane of skin that both separates and connects the inner life and the outer world." There are those fears that haunt us until they are found out to be false and we are freed for sleep, freed to live lives no longer ordered by some silly fear.

Yet I also think of a friend who lived in fear for years, utterly undone, completely stopped short in his tracks, unable to face the future until one day, the doctor told him that his worst fears were true. "To know that I have AIDS and that I am going to die," he said to my brother in the days before AZT and AIDS Walks, "means that I don't have to be afraid anymore. I know what I am facing." So he lived and so he died. There are those fears of certain defeat that haunt us until they are found out to be true and then we are strangely freed, at long last, to live.

But more, for there come upon us fears which seem to be in our bones from birth, or built into our very psyches until death, shaping our lives by the shadow they imperceptibly cast. The fear of certain defeat in relationships which keeps us from intimacy or pulls us back from commitment...the fear of certain defeat in families that keeps us from confronting a parent or comforting a child or speaking our heart...the fear of certain defeat in a job that finds us laboring but increasingly heavy laden, unable to break free. There are those fears which, paradoxically, define the person we are and deny the person we most want to become, defeating us day in and day out.

But there are also tangible fears which threaten to defeat us from without, holding us hostage, silencing our voice, dismantling our humanity. "The first time he hit me I was nineteen," says Anna Quinlin's character named Frances Benedetto, renamed Beth Crenshaw lest her husband find her in hiding only to begin the assault anew. "I can hear his voice now, so persuasive, so low and yet somehow so strong, making me understand once again that I am all wrong. Frannie, Frannie, Fran, he says. That's how it begins....How huge was his rage. It was like a twister cloud; it rose suddenly from nothing into a moving thing that blew the roof off, black and strong. I smell beer, I smell bourbon, I smell sweat, I smell my own fear, ranker and stronger than all three."

There is the fear which threatens us from without--physically, verbally, psychologically--because our world seems to be ordered by way of power and powerlessness, by way of strength of arm and weakness of spirit, by way of bullies and the beaten. So it must have been for Matthew Shepard in a Wyoming wilderness. So it surely was for James Byrd as behind a pickup truck he was dragged to his death because of his blackness by men who, because of their whiteness, could. So it continues to be for spouses certain they deserve the beating regularly received or children waiting in the dark to be assaulted by the adult given to protect them.

Though here the reality of fear, the location of fear, the naming of fear, takes a subtle turn, ordering the life of the threatened to be sure, but more insidiously possessing the life of the one who would dominate, or the community of those who would exclude, abuse, exterminate, hate, until nothing human remains.

"Hatred," wrote C. S. Lewis' Screwtape to Wormwood, "is often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate." Which is to say that the darkest fear of all, the fear which has the power not only to shape a life for death-dealing, but to distort an entire community, is the fear which lurks beneath the pretense of power and privilege--abuse is no respecter of economic class, the fear which crouches behind the doorways of prejudice and attacks with rage like a twister cloud, the fear which preys upon the least of these. It is, most often, a righteous fear, in the name of a greater Power, which must exclude or exterminate the "other," whose difference threatens our dominant hold on the present order. Fear reimbursed by hatred: Albanians slaughtered, Rowandan tribes floating dead down the river, Palestinians bombed and Israelis ambushed, gay men beaten and left for the vultures while Right Wing Christians notch their crosses, African Americans so commonly threatened that racism seldom makes the headlines anymore, spouses stalked or silenced or shot before they are believed, children abandoned to nightmares from which they will not soon awake.

"Others become scapegoats," writes Miraslav Wolf, a friend and theologian from Croatia, in his most provocative book entitled, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation. "Others become scapegoats, concocted from our own shadows as repositories for our sins and weaknesses [and fears] so we can relish the illusion of our sinlessness and strength." We exclude, he implies, because we are fearful of "anything that blurs our boundaries, disturbs our identities, and disarranges our symbolic cultural maps. Others strike us like objects that are 'out of place,' like 'dirt' that needs to be removed in order to return the sense of propriety to our world." This is how fear shapes a human life, distorts the human community, denies another the humanity given them by One whose power was made perfect in weakness.

So, then, to that One we now must turn, to Him who transforms our fears into a wide and certain trust in the Living God. Text or pretext, we dwell in the wilderness and the storm as fearful human beings with little trust in God's providence, in Christ's power to save. Would that we could return to a time when our lives were reliably ordered...would that we could row to the shore's safety on our own. But we live in a land where we cannot give ourselves what we most need to sustain our lives: Give us water to drink! We sail upon a wide ocean in a vessel small, having drifted too far out to return to shore. And whether our fears are tinged with hatred or marked by terror, we, one day--even this day, may find ourselves at the end of our wits, crying out: "Is the Lord among us or not?" "Master, Master, we are perishing." Then he wakes and rebukes the wind and the raging waves; they cease and there is a calm. He says to us, 'Where is your faith?' And we are afraid and amazed...."

There is, says Luke to the likes of us, yet another fear, a fear which transforms our trembling to awe, our anger to amazement. On one hand, it may be a fear which makes of us men and women who "shut the door and sit by the fire," in T. S. Eliot's words, "who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted; who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God; who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the first in the tavern, the push into the canal, less than we fear the love of God...." There are no guarantees that our encounter with the God who is among us in wilderness and in storm will find us trusting Him anytime soon.

Though on the other hand, it must be said with Karl Barth that "...only here--with all due respect to our fear of life [only here before the revelation of the Living God] is it really worthwhile to be afraid. Here hearts and reins are tried. Here the question is awe and not agitation. Here no one can escape and no one can console himself. Having reached the ultimate limit of all that we fear, where God is revealed to us, we are no longer afraid of this or the next thing, but of [God] alone."

If in the wilderness of our fears, we cry out for the God who is God, there God in Christ bids us "Fear not," gives us living water, calms the winds of our angry souls, humbles us before the greater power of love's tenderness, accompanies us to a land promised. This is no pretext, my friends, but the text of God's love writ upon the life, death and resurrection of Him who was crucified by our fears and raised by the God now among us.

There are those today, in these pews or surfing the internet, living lives of quiet desperation, afraid of a door cracked to their closet, trembling in a household of terror, alone in the dark of another's anger. There are those here whose rage is like a twister cloud, whose faultfinding only hides the shadows of sin and weakness, whose grip on the present is a stranglehold on the other, the different one, the exception.

I promise you that there is One very near you, in whose presence you will be afraid and amazed. He has awakened to the storm without and within, asking even now, "Where is your faith?" Learn of him, seek him in the nightwatches, cling only to him, for even the wind and the waves obey him and he will finally save. Write these words upon your heart, that your days may thus be shaped not by fearful anger nor by terror's silence, but by his tender command, "Fear not." Thanks be to God.

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