“Stranger Danger!” from Joe Heikman, July 16, 2017 - Part 3 of “Got Privilege?” summer series

What are you so afraid of? I’m going to assume that we are all aware of the culture of fear that surrounds us. If you’ve turned on a tv, radio, computer, or smartphone in the past, oh, decade, you’ve been told about something that you really should be more afraid of. Maybe it’s fentanyl, or terrorists, or recession, or aging, or climate change, or foreign governments, or our government, or gangs, or gluten, or the media, or the Stamps or Eskies.

There are lots of reasons to be afraid. And those are just the public, shared things. We all have our own list of personal things that terrify us, as well, about our health or finances or relationships, etc. When I’m talking about fear today, I’m mostly thinking about that wide, public list of fears. But if you’re thinking about your personal fears and wondering if what I’m saying might also apply to that stuff, well, that’s a thread worth pulling on. But mostly, as part of this summer series on Privilege, I’m thinking of the civil, popular, shared side of fear. Because it’s that side of fear that is driving much of the conversation about our shared political and social realities. Particularly the many “isms” that are bubbling under the surface: racism, sexism, tribalism, agism, and so on. At the core of all of those is fear of someone or some thing. Look again at this haphazard list of public fears. While this is mostly a list of impersonal things, ideas and institutions, most of them come with faces. For each “what,” there is a “who,” a group or a figurehead that we have learned to associate with the cause for fear.

I might be afraid of the concept of “terrorism,” but I also have a couple of pictures in my head of what a “terrorist” looks like. I wouldn’t recognize fentanyl if I saw it on the street, but I have a pretty solid image of a drug dealer, by age, style, ethnicity, and attitude. Those faces makes my fear much more personal and intense. Fear is a relational emotion, most of the time, even when we hear about it in the abstract. I feel fear… and it’s because of them. I’ve talked about the idea of “othering,” defining people and groups by how they are different from me, keeping them at arm’s length because they’re “not like me.” That othering instinct is often driven by fear. And it is an instinctual process. Something like this:

From an evolutionary standpoint, the physiological responses of fear are meant to help us survive by making snap judgments, to quickly distinguish between threat and non-threat, and taking evasive action. This is a good thing. But there are a couple of problems with this equation. When you were growing up, how many of you learned the phrase “Stranger, Danger!” As the parent of a 5 year-old and 3-year old, it seems like such an obvious idea: it’s simple, clear, and it rhymes. In my head, “stranger danger” protects kids from all of those sinister characters that would do them harm on the playground or kidnap them in their windowless white van… In reality, according to Statistics Canada, “Strangers were the perpetrators in one in five violent offences against children and youth.” 21%. “Violence committed by family or by friends or acquaintances accounted for 8 in 10 police-reported violent crimes against children and youth.” Stranger Danger misses the mark, and might make me and my kids less responsive to more common threats. Even further, Stranger Danger creates a suspicion of all strangers, when in reality most strangers are benign and potentially helpful. If my kids are afraid to ask for or accept help from a stranger in a crisis situation, they will be less safe than they would be otherwise. Instead of Stranger Danger, what is most helpful is to teach kids to recognize safe and unsafe situations and behaviour and to identify signs that a stranger is trustworthy or not. Statistically and logically that’s a better way to go than avoiding all strangers, all the time. A thoughtful, nuanced understanding of the world is the safest and most healthy. That’s tough to manage when you’re afraid. The physiology of fear is actually intended to do the opposite, to narrow our focus, to make quick judgements and take immediate action. That’s helpful when you need to outrun a bear. It’s less helpful when you’re trying to address an international humanitarian crisis. Fear as an emotion is an unhelpful way of dealing with a complex reality. It clouds our judgment, it narrows our vision, it hides the deeper issues.

There’s a second problem with this equation. This week my kids brought this book home from the library. The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig. As you’d expect from the title, this time it’s the wolves who build the houses and the big bad pig who tries to blow them down. But when the pig can’t blow down the wolves’ brick house, in this story, he comes back with a sledgehammer. So the wolves build a stronger house, basically a concrete bunker. Which is no match for the pig’s jackhammer.

So then it’s iron bars, barbed wire, iron plates, and vault doors.

So the pig brings dynamite.

Finally the three little wolves decide to change their strategy. This time, instead of bricks, concrete, and steel, they build their house out of flowers. So when the big bad pig comes to blow their house down…

“As he took a deep breath, ready to huff and puff, he smelled the soft scent of the flowers. It was fantastic. And because the scent took his breath away, the pig took another breath and then another. Instead of huffing and puffing, he began to sniff.

He sniffed deeper and deeper until he was quite filled with the fragrant scent. His heart became tender and he realized how horrible he had been in the past. In other words, he became a big good pig…” This time, the wolves and the pig played together and when the pig asked to be let into their house, they invited him in warmly and nobody huffed and puffed at all.

What a load of hippy-dippy nonsense, right? (Sarcastic Voice!) It’s fine for kindergarteners to hear that stuff, but we live in the real world, where if you want to keep out the bad guys, you need to build better walls, bigger guns, larger armies. We declare War on Crime. War on Drugs. War on Gangs. War on Terror. We increase defense spending. We hire private security and install alarms and cameras. We build firewalls and buy antivirus protection and hire cybercrime police units. We invest in insurance against theft, against identity theft, against accidents, and crop loss and professional liability, insurance against employment loss, disability, even insurance against death itself. (I don’t know why I have the urge to read that list in a southern accent… :)

It’s quite impressive, really, the amount of money and time and creativity that we invest in security. Simple question: how’s that working for us? Is it making us feel safer? Are we actually safer because of all that we invest in security and protection? Or, are we stuck in a cycle of action and assessment, where we keep responding with greater and greater investments in protection, because our fear doesn’t allow us to try anything else?

That’s my question: is this fear equation actually making us safer? And what if we ask, “safer for whom?” For me and my circle? For people who are like me, in class or race or nationality? The world’s not all pigs and wolves, so what about the innocent who get caught up in all the conflicts fought in the name of my security? And even further, what about those who I am afraid of--are “they” really just the “big bad wolf”? Or, might there be more than a single story that defines them? And what if we ask not just “do we feel safer,” not just “are we actually safer” but “is this a better way of living?” And again, better for whom? Fear narrows our focus to the immediate, to a simplified way of understanding conflict, and allows us only a limited set of possible solutions. So. What’s the alternative? The first generation of Jesus’ followers had a lot to be afraid of. For one thing, life in the first century Roman Empire was simply precarious. Roughly half of children didn’t reach the age of 10. For those who made it that far, life expectancy was then age 47. The majority of the early Christians were lower class laborers and artisans, and even those who had wealth were far from secure. Only Roman citizens had any political rights, and there was a tremendous amount of social instability. For the first three hundred years, Christians were a minority within a minority, at best viewed as a bizarre cult, at worst persecuted as a seditious religious sect and political revolutionaries. And on top of that, following the Way of Jesus demanded a complete change of worldview. This wasn’t just changing churches, this was leaving behind everything they thought they knew about God and religion. No more temple, no more festivals, no more commandments, no more solid ground. If anyone had a reason to be afraid, it was them. Yet in the midst of that chaos, the early Christians kept returning to the way of Jesus, of sacrificial love.

Does it sound less hippy-dippy coming from an apostle? This was far more practical, more immediate, for them than it is for us in cozy little Saskatoon. As I said, for John and the Apostles, their whole worldview shifted. And while that kind of shift can be terrifying, what they’re describing is that the shift ended up being incredibly liberating. Allow me to illustrate with napkin-drawings: To greatly oversimplify one common 1st century worldview, the dimensions of reality looked like this:

Up above was God, the heavenly realm, above and beyond and transcendant and holy. In the middle was earthly reality, central and meaningful, but limited and flawed. And below, the mysterious underworld, Sheol, the shadowlands.

These three realms defined reality, and they were separate, but the lines between were permeable, blurred in some places. There were places where heaven touched earth, like the Temple in Jerusalem. And there was traffic in between, messengers and movers, angels, demons, prophets, the Spirit of God. And that’s what the followers of Jesus first assumed was happening, that Jesus was a prophet, a theophany, one who was filled with the Spirit of God.

But as he taught, as he died, as he was resurrected, and as his followers themselves became filled with the Spirit of God, their picture started to change. They started to talk about Jesus being in God and God in him. John’s gospel in particular likes this word “abide.” Before, they saw the Temple as the dwelling place of God’s Spirit, in a limited, occasional way. But now, somehow, in the person of Jesus, God was dwelling among them, fully and completely, God With Us. God wasn’t just up there, God was here and now, with us, in the Spirit and Body of Christ.

And that meant that the whole picture had to change. The old way of thinking about the world just didn’t line up to their experience of Jesus and the Spirit. So John in particular began painting a new image:

This picture started with the reality of God, with Jesus abiding in God-- “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…” Which was heresy for a Jew. But that was how they experienced Jesus, so they had to start there. And as they worked out how such a thing was possible, John settled on another word: Love. Love explained Jesus’ purpose on earth-- “for God so loved the world…” Love is what connected Jesus to God-- “Love is from God, and anyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”

And so, John concludes, the whole thing is love - “God is Love and those who abide in Love abide in God and God abides in them” Which, as you’ve noticed, isn’t just about Jesus anymore--this is plural and general--anyone who loves is born of God… “those who live in love live in God.” That is the way of Jesus, that through the Way of Love, we live in God. The whole thing is Active Love.

So that’s the new picture of reality. And that doesn’t solve all the problems. In fact, it raises lots of questions leftover from the old way of seeing the world. What about everyone else? What about sin and judgment? How do we respond to all the pressures of the world?

That’s what the letter we call “First John” is about, how to work those real-world problems out in light of this new way of seeing God. (Another sermon/series for another time?) And this is the climax:

If we live with love, we do not need to fear. Love is the ultimate state, the purpose, the point, so if we live in love, we are living in God, and that’s it. There’s no fear, because there’s no better way than love itself, so if you’re already doing it, if you are living in it, what is there to be afraid of?

Easier said than done, of course. As with the first followers of Jesus, this demands that we replace our current way of seeing the world with a new one, orienting ourselves around the way of love. James Finley says it this way:

A lot to unpack in that as well. First of all, notice that this is an If...then… statement. There are a whole lot of absolutes, and alls, and nothings in this quote, but it’s framed as a choice. If we choose this way of being... then this is the outcome that we can expect. Already that’s different than the certainty of the fear equation. Fear begins with the worrisome outcome, and demands that unless we protect ourselves, the worst will happen.

It’s tempting to try to blend the two, to try to fit our faith into this fear equation. Maybe if we pray hard enough, believe hard enough, live well enough, God will protect us from the things we’re afraid of. We try to squeeze Jesus into this, imagine him on my side, that he’s insurance against the negative stuff.

That’s what the early church wrestled with, trying to fit Jesus into their old way of thinking. But John eventually said enough, there’s something more going on here that the old image doesn’t capture. We need a new image, a new paradigm, one that begins with the Love of God in Jesus and works outward from there. We have a similar choice. Will we begin with our fear

equation, with the very real emotion and drive for survival and security? Or will be we begin with the Love of God and work out the details of survival and security from that paradigm? If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God. That’s John’s new image of God and Reality as Active Love. It’s not absolute in that it explains everything, or that we can know it for certain. Beginning with this is an act of faith. It’s absolute in the sense that it is the starting point, the thing that we keep coming back to and orient ourselves around, to choose as the ground we walk on, to abide in it, to live in it. ...love of God that protects us from nothing… The Way of Jesus loses a lot of people at this point. We want this to say, “God protects us from all things,” that God is our fortress, our wall, our insurance, our Saviour. But what if that doesn’t look like we want it to look? What if this (outer circle) isn’t a wall to protect us from the bad stuff of life? In Disney’s Finding Nemo, Marlin the clownfish has been searching the whole ocean for his lost son, Nemo. At one point, Marlin and his friend Dory have been swallowed by a whale, and Marlin despairs:

“I promised Nemo I’d never let anything happen to him.” To which Dori replies, “That’s a funny thing to promise. Well, you can’t never let anything happen to him, then nothing would ever happen to him… Not much fun for little Harpo.” That’s an image of God. For better or worse--and the promise is that it’s for better--God lets things happen to us. I can’t understand it, or

explain it or why it’s better. But it does seem to be more honest than claiming that God protects us from things when bad things really do happen to all people. Is our faith large enough to admit that bad stuff happens to innocent people, that pain and suffering exists even in a world of love? But that doesn’t mean that God’s not doing anything.

God is like Marlin the clownfish, crossing oceans, staring down sharks, befriending sea turtles, risking everything to be with his offspring. Not to protect us, but to sustain us. To encourage us, to carry us, to give us strength, to walk with us through the storm, through the fire, through life and death. That’s the image, that in love we live in God and God lives in us. Pain doesn’t break that, suffering doesn’t separate us from God’s love. Is that enough? That’s the question of faith. Again, it’s an “if,” a choice. If we begin there… then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and ourselves with love.” I don’t know about you, but that is what I want. Those are the kinds of people that I want to be around, that I want to be like. That kind of life is far better than hiding behind my walls of insecurity. That is better than money in the bank, better than all the stuff I use to distract from my not being that. That is freedom, and justice, and grace, far superior to fear and security and protection. That’s the opposite of fear, not the absence of emotion, not blindly charging ahead, not barricading ourselves behind walls so we don’t have to engage with the world as it really is. But having courage, courage that feels fear but acts rightly anyway. And tenderness, leading with compassion and curiosity and vulnerability. To be courageous and tender is not to be without fear, but to not let fear harden, compel, or separate us. To get to that place, the path begins with a repeated, determined choice, a choice to live in love. To begin with the Love that is God, the ultimate, the ideal, and move that into the practical realities of loving all you messy, complicated, human people.

Yes that’s risky. It’s demanding. It’s a little hippie-dippy. :) Will that keep us safe? I don’t know. I believe it’s better. Better for the other, better for all of us, for the whole. And I trust that what is good for the whole is ultimately more important than what is good for me as an individual. Again, there’s a lot to work through there, a whole lot to live through. This rocked the very world when a group of Jesus-followers in the first century began to orient their lives around this way of understanding. Maybe it will do the same for us. In the meantime, a simple prayer, from the band Switchfoot:

Let me know that you hear me. Let me know your touch. Let me know that you love me. And let that be enough.