Monday, July 23, 2012

Mary Had A Little Lamb


"Mary Had A Little Lamb"
Acts 9:10-13


Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow;
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.


As part of the message this morning, I would like to ask one question of you.  Take some time to write down a few words in answer to this question.  Get out a pencil or pen--or use the one in the pew rack.  Jot down your answers on your bulletin.  Here’s the question:  What is your reputation?

Here’s a way to clarify that question by drawing a few circles around you and your many people contexts.  What is your reputation in your family?  Go ahead and write a few words down.  And, what is your reputation where you work; or, if you are retired, what was your reputation where you worked?  If you are in school, what is your reputation at school?  And finally, what is your reputation amongst your circle of friends?

Thinking about these questions and quickly writing down some short descriptions was probably hard.  I hope that if you didn’t write anything down, you are at least thinking about it.  Answering these questions may be hard because you may not know what your reputation is.  You might be thinking that only those within the circles of relationships that I drew can answer best for you.

I think we have an idea about what our reputations are.  It’s my hope that we have more than one idea what our reputations are.  Because ultimately, it is not others who are in charge of shaping a reputation.  We are the ones who mold our reputations.  We determine the kind of person we want to be known as.  We make the hard choices that shape the identity that others hear about or come to know.

When I was choosing nursery rhymes for this sermon series, I came across this familiar one about Mary and her little lamb.  When I saw it, and in my mind trying to associate it with developing it into a sermon, I began to think about what kinds of things follow us around like Mary’s lamb.  My immediate and lasting thought was our reputations.  No matter how we might try and shoo them away, or leave them behind, they have a way of following us wherever we go.  Reputations are us.  Trying to get away from our reputation is like trying to get away from ourselves.  It’s impossible.

There may be some people’s reputations that are like the little lamb’s fleece: white as snow.  Some are soiled beyond whiteness.  Probably for most of us, our fleeces are spotted at best.

There was a prosperous, young Wall Street broker who met, fell in love with, and was frequently seen escorting a rising actress.  He wanted to marry her, but being a cautious man he decided that before proposing marriage, he should have a private investigating agency check her background and activities.  After all, he reasoned to himself, I have both a growing fortune and a reputation to protect.

The young man requested that the agency was not to reveal his identity to the investigator doing the report on the actress.  In due time the investigator’s report came back.  It said the actress had an unblemished past, a spotless reputation, and her friends and associates were of the best repute.  The report concluded, “The only shadow is that she is often seen around town in the company of a young broker of dubious business practices and principles.”

There may be a lot of people who would not want anyone prying into their past or present relationships and history.  Just run for public office and you’ll find out.  No one wants something uncovered and then made public knowledge.  And there may be an equally large number of people who wish they could find some way to change or amend their reputations within any of the circles of relationships I had you think about at the start of this message.  How, if at all, do you gain or change your reputation--that thing that keeps following at your heels wherever you go?

One of my favorite novels is Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo.  It’s the story about Jean Valjean, an escaped convict who was put in prison for stealing bread to feed his hungry family.  He escaped, and while on the run, he had an encounter with a priest that changed his life.  He changed his name to go with his new identity.  Over time he became a very wealthy man--a benefactor to many of the poor in the community where

While all those changes were being made in Jean Valjean’s life, there was an inspector.  Javert.  Javert became obsessed with finding Valjean and throwing him back in prison.  The two are finally brought together in the story through a confrontation that forced Valjean to reveal his previous reputation publicly, surprising the inspector.  Despite the powerful and good man Valjean had become, the inspector only sees him for who Valjean was.  The inspector Javert orders Valjean arrested.

Though that is not the end of the story for Jean Valjean (or Javert), it points to a crisis with which many people deal.  What do you do when you may have created a certain reputation, you change, but others will not allow you to change?  You want to begin the process of forming a new reputation.  But everyone who knows you will not let the old you go.  Or, like the children who ridiculed Mary and her lamb, will make fun of you and the new reputation you are trying to create.

With this in mind, we turn to the life of the Apostle Paul.  The part of the scripture story read in Acts picks up Paul’s story at a pivotal point.  Paul is trying to totally set aside an old reputation, and letting God put another one in its place.

Paul’s former reputation was that of a Christian basher.  He hated the Church and Christians with a vengeful passion.  He worked for and earned the reputation as one who, “...kept up his violent threats of murder against the disciples of the Lord.”  I like the way the King James Bible has this verse:  “And Saul was breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord…”

When Ananias was sent by the Lord to Paul, Ananias fearfully hesitated, saying, “Master, you can’t be serious.  Everybody’s talking about this man and the terrible things he’s been doing, his reign of terror against your people in Jerusalem” (9:13).  Paul was the one person no Christian wanted to meet up with in a dark alley.  Or even a lighted alley for that matter.

When looking back, in telling about his life before his conversion to Christianity, Paul would speak about his misguided pride for his reputation of what he called being “...zealous toward God” (Acts 22:3).  The name of Paul was so associated with persecution that the two could not be separated.

I grew up watching Jack LaLanne.  I don’t know what it was about that guy, dressed in his one-piece stretch suit, leading people through calisthenics on TV every morning.  Here was a man who swam from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco, pulling a rowboat full of people, every New Year’s Day.  At one time in his life he said, “I may never die.  It would wreck my image.”  And then he went on to say, “I can’t even afford to have a fat dog.”

People’s names become wedded to their reputations.  Living up to your name means the same thing as living up to your reputation.  In terms of Paul in the way he treated the early church, that became a hellish marriage of his name with the reputation of persecution.  How hard it would be to try and divorce oneself from one’s reputation.  Especially when, as I said earlier, we have worked so hard to create and maintain that reputation.  We are the ones who choose to live up to our own creations of repute.  They aren’t given to us by anyone else.  We choose them by what we accept and deny to be true or best for us and about us.

In so many places we turn in Scripture where it talks about the formation of a reputation, we find its basis is in what we DO, not what we THINK.
The Son of Man will soon come in the glory of his Father and with his angles to reward all people for what they have done.  (Mt. 16:27)

God will reward each of us for what we have done.  (Romans 2:6)

And so, each of us must give an account to God for what we do.  (Romans 14:12)

The dead were judged by what those books said they had done.  (Revelation 20:12)

What we do, our actions, say much more about the kind of person we are and want to be than what we think.  Our reputations then are displayed by our actions, not by our thinking or our words.  I may think I’m a nice person.  But if I act contrary to that, all my thinking has not gotten me anywhere.  My reputation has been established by what I do, not by what I think.

The same was true for Paul.  The same is true for individuals as well as congregations.  The kind of people we are, and the kind of congregation we are is ultimately portrayed by what we do or don’t do.  It’s something visible--as visible as a lamb following us wherever we go.  Our integrity, our character, our name, our esteem is built up or destroyed by what we do and how we do it.

So, what if we want to change our reputation?  What if we don’t like the name we have made for ourselves?  What if we don’t like the reputations by which we allow others to come to know us, even before they meet us?

Maybe there are some like Paul, who really don’t want to change, but need to.  Someone else must decide it’s time for a change.  In Paul’s case, it was God.  I wonder if it’s safe to say that God is behind all reputation changes for the better.

God knocked Paul off his high horse.  After that everything started to spin in Paul’s little self-made circus side show.  The Lord showed him a reflection of his reputation; let him see what he looked like from the eyes of those who were being done in by his persecution; showed him what his reputation looked like from heaven.

That brief glimpse must have lasted a lifetime for Paul.  But in the horror of that glimpse, the Risen Christ also must have shown Paul what his reputation could be if he so desired to make a change.

It’s amazing what can happen to a person when the Lord grabs a hold of you like that.  Your whole life can change.  Everything that was once important to you loses its luster.  Every driving force behind your life can suddenly lose its steam.

And it’s not that everything stops glimmering.  Or that everything comes to a screeching halt.  It’s more that other things begin to shine--things you never suspected could capture your attention.  It’s more that other goals and pursuits fuel the fires of your life and passions--things you had no idea were even flammable.

Paul had no idea that if his life and reputation were ever reoriented, that that reorientation could ever come from Jesus Christ or the church.  But he never fully realized what the Lord could do in a person’s life either.

We may think our reputations are beyond amends.  Are we selling the Lord short?  You, and how you are known, can be changed.  Some things seem impossible to us, but not to God.

Ananias was not ready to accept God’s word either--that Paul had changed his ways.  But Paul began, almost immediately, to demonstrate by his actions, that he had changed.  That he was forming a new identity and reputation.  It was by those actions that he was finally accepted into the Christian community and became one of its greatest leaders.

It was not an easy road for Paul.  The Lord, in speaking to Ananias about Paul, said, “I will show him how much he must suffer for worshipping in my name” (vs. 16).  One of those sufferings was the changing of his reputation.  While Paul’s reputation with the Christians steadily grew, it was quickly diminishing with the Jewish colleagues of his past.

Changing your reputation creates a lot of painful growth.  It may mean dropping certain friends.  It may mean changing the way you talk.  It may mean revitalizing the way you relate to your spouse.  It may mean redoing certain work habits.

And it should mean a renewal in your relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ.  That’s what the Lord was aiming at with Paul.  That’s what the Lord’s main intentions will be with us in whitening the fleece of the lambs that follow us around.  That is, washing, cleansing, and renewing our reputations.

Monday, July 16, 2012

The Itsy-Bitsy Spider

"The Itsy-Bitsy Spider"
Hosea 2:14--3:1


The itsy bitsy spider
climbed up the water spout;
Down came the rain
and washed the spider out;
Out came the sun
and dried up all the rain;
And the itsy bitsy spider
climbed up the spout again.

Or, as in the poem by Richard Armour:
Shake and shake
The catsup bottle.
None will come out
And then a lot’ll.

It may sound trite, but it is nonetheless true:  Life is hard sometimes.  It not always brings roses without thorns, weedless lawns, and blue skies (or raincloud-filled skies, whichever you prefer).  Instead, there are at least little irritants along the way.

I like those lists of irritants that fall under the heading, “How To Tell It’s A Bad Day.”  Some of them go like this:
You know it’s a bad day when you jump out of bed and miss the floor.

You know it’s a bad day when your horn goes off accidentally and gets stuck when you’re following a group of Hell’s Angels down the highway.

You know it’s a bad day when you put both contact lenses in the same eye.

You know it’s a bad day if the bird singing outside your window is a vulture.

You know it’s a bad day when your wife says, “Good morning, Bill,” and your name is George.

You know it’s a bad day when your income tax refund check bounces.

You know it’s a bad day when your four year old says it’s almost impossible to flush a grapefruit down the toilet.

You know it’s a bad day when it costs more to fill up your car than it did to buy it.

You know it’s a bad day when the gypsy fortune teller offers to refund your money.


If all we had to face in life were little annoyances such as these, we might be able to do OK in life.  Maybe a lot better than OK.  But the problem is that beyond these little ripples there are some good sized waves.  They are the breakers that follow a series of smaller waves.  They hit us with a size and force great enough to knock us off our feet, pulling us down with its undertow.  It’s not the continual dreary shower, but the sudden stormy cloud burst that washes us from our high places of security.

There are those times when we feel like the deep sea diver in the Farside cartoon who was walking around in his heavy diving suit, investigating the ocean floor.  Then he looks up and sees the ship above him, to which he was connected by an air hose and lifeline, sinking down towards him.

How do you climb up the lifeline to a sinking ship?  The ship you thought was giving you your unfailing security has sunk.  Where does that leave you?  How do you survive wash-out experiences?  And probably more importantly, how do you, like the itsy bitsy spider, climb back up again?  And how do you do that knowing that the rain just might, and probably will, come again?


We need to turn our attention to Hosea in order to find some of the answers to these questions.  Hosea’s situation was a specific kind of wash-out experience.  We should be able to glean some understanding for our own particular situations.

This portion of the story of Hosea’s life begins at the point where God tersely commands him to, “Go get married.”  Can’t you just see Hosea fumbling around the marketplace, looking at all the women a little bit differently than he had before.  All the time he’s mumbling to himself, “Go get married, go get married…”  When he finally finds “the one,” she asks, “Why do you want to marry me?”
To which Hosea replies, “Because God told me to go get married.”  Not the most romantic proposal.

Hosea found a young woman who consented to whatever reason he gave her to get married.  They had three children--two boys and a girl--in quick succession.  Everything seemed rosy for this happy family.  Whatever the reason was behind God’s odd demand that he go get married, Hosea seemed to find married life quite to his liking.  Hosea was on his way up the waterspout.  But off in the distance a storm was brewing for him--one which no weatherman would have ever been able to predict.

When the rain finally began to fall, Hosea and his domestic dream life were severely pelted.  Everything crashed to the ground.  Hosea went running for cover, a bruised and humiliated man.  What happened was that his beautiful wife, the mother of his three children, Gomer, abruptly left him.  She turned in her wooden mixing spoons and apron and diapers for the life of a prostitute.

Every day, Hosea would go to the marketplace to buy his daily groceries.  He would have to watch his wife display herself for sale to any man who came along.  His heart would break as he saw the woman he had come to love, who bore his children, who had pledged herself to him and to him alone, calling out to any man passing by, disappear into a tent with some louse, come out a short time later only to snag another.  Our hearts must surely go out to Hosea.


I think there are at least three characteristics of the rain storm that dislodged Hosea, and would probably dislodge a lot of other people as well.

One of the characteristics is 90 degree change.  It’s a sharp, opposite direction shift from what was, to what is now.  This kind of change could happen in a person’s thinking, feelings, or ways of acting.  The change could involve a single individual or the relationship amongst a group of people.  Whatever it is, the changes people go through ripple out and affect others who are closest to that person.  The changes Gomer made, totally unsettled the life of her husband, Hosea; their three children; families, and ultimately the community.  Everyone has to adapt and deal with the stark shift Gomer made.

These kinds of drastic changes appear to happen suddenly, but I have found that lots of things have been going on in the person before the shift was ever noticed.  A change may have been going on for a long time.  What happens is that those washed out by such change suddenly “wake up” to it.  Looking back, they begin to piece together how this happened.

This could have happened in Hosea’s case.  He may have been blind to what was going on in Gomer’s life.  But he just didn’t want to accept it or believe it.  How her feelings and ways of acting were changing.  Being suffocated in a life that was not her, she finally made a drastic shift.  It woke up a lot of people about the kind of person she evidently was or wanted to be.  But by making that change, she washed out a lot of people’s lives with the rain storm of her choices.

Another characteristic of the rain storms of life is loss.  It’s hard to separate change from loss.  They both flow from the same thunder cloud.

Loss is experienced y most everyone.  Catastrophic loss is not.  Basically, catastrophic loss is the kind of loss of any major framework that we have built to hold us up.  The building material for that framework, that we thought was strong and stable, is what surprisingly and unbelievably crumbles.  That framework, that building material that holds up our lives may be something like the acceptance of those we love.  It might be the dreams that have beckoned us forward.  It might be the future we thought we were going to live into.  It might be the roles from which we gain our sense of self-respect.  It might be any number of meaningful values upon which our life has been based.  It might be the faith in God that we thought was supposed to get us through anything.  It total, it is the experience of having our foundations being cut out from under us.

One of the 17th century Swedish kings was Gustavus Aldophus.  He had a life long dream of building the mightiest warship.  He ordered such a ship to be built.  It was a splendid looking vessel that could carry 500 people as well as full armaments.  It was called the VASA.  King Gustavus swelled with pride as his prize ship was launched for the first time with two-gun salute.  A large crowd watched from the pier.  The VASA made it only a few yards out into the harbor and promptly sunk.

That’s what loss does to a person who has been washed out.  It makes you go back to the drawing board and start all over again.  Or throwing out the drawing board altogether.  There is so much mourning of the loss of time and plans and people and dreams that were spent in vain.  To what end!?  A sunken ship.  A sunken life.  What now?

The third characteristic is the final circle of a downward spiral.  It is the sense of hopelessness.  It is the debilitating thought that, “I will never make it back up again.”  It’s looking up the water spout and thinking, “I can’t do it; the rains are going to come again; and the fall will be worse.”

Like the character, Biff, in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, who said in desperation, “I can’t take hold, Mom; I can’t take hold of some kind of life.”  For Hosea, this characteristic may have been formed by such words as, “How can I ever love again?  How can I trust again?  How will anything ever change for the better with Gomer?  With anyone?  It can only get worse.”


Which all serves to bring us to the most important part of Hosea’s story.  God gives Hosea one further instruction, after the washout has taken place with his now very stray wife, Gomer.  God says to Hosea, “Start all over: Love your wife again, your wife who’s in bed with her latest boyfriend, your cheating wife” (EHP).

Hosea has moved through the process of experiencing 90 degree angle change, involving a cutting and catastrophic loss, leading to an understandable hopelessness concerning the choices and actions of his wife Gomer.  Now God is asking Hosea to pull himself out of the rain swollen puddle and do it all over again--to go find Gomer and show his love for her.

How do you do that, if you are Hosea?  What does it take to risk doing what God is asking Hosea to do?  To start over again after love has not just been lost, but run over, backed up, run over again, backed up, run over again…  To get back up after life has beaten you down?  To climb the spout again?

Part of the answer comes from paying attention to the words God uses in making this request.  Notice that God doesn’t request that Hosea take Gomer back as his wife.  We may assume that is what’s behind the words of God, but that may be more presumption than assumption.  Instead, listen to the words:  “Start all over: Love your wife again…”

Think about those words.  Think what they mean.  Which would be harder for you to do:  Take Gomer back as your wife; or, Go and show your love?  If I was in that position it would be easier to take her back as my wife, led simply by a sense of duty, but with no love.  It would be much harder, if I were Hosea, to show any kind of love after the way Gomer had stepped all over it.

One of the networks put on a documentary about the Kentucky mountain folks.  They brought to New York a man who had spent his entire life in the mountains.  He was absolutely amazed at all he saw, having no idea something like that kind of a place existed.  But one thing he saw really stuck with him.  In the RCA building, he watched a little old lady walk up to a door.  It slid open and she walked into a box.  The doors closed.  A minute later the doors opened again, and out stepped a gorgeous brunette.  “You just can’t beat science,” he shouted.  “If I’d a know’d about that contraption, I’d a brought along my old lady.”

If God had asked us to start over like God did with Hosea, we would probably wish we had a contraption that would change Gomer over before we took her back.  Then it would be easy to show love again.  But the problem is, Hosea didn’t.  And neither do we.  We don’t have something that will magically transform our washout experiences into fascinating celebrations.

Again, as we ponder how we are able to climb back up the water spout, let’s pay attention to God’s statement to Hosea:  “Start all over: Love your wife again…”  Notice that God isn’t requesting that Gomer be the one to change.  God isn’t pushing Gomer into any contraption either.  The person God is asking to change is Hosea.  He is asking Hosea to change is attitude, his feelings, his heart toward Gomer.  That’s the only way Hosea will be able to start climbing back up.


I hope you’re seeing something much deeper here, as well.  This isn’t just a story about Hosea and Gomer.  It’s a story about God and God’s people.  We are the Gomers who leave our vows to God behind for the allurements of life without attachments.  We are the ones who once climbed to the heights with God.  But we made choices that washed us off those heights.  And then we chose to live on the ground.

God is the one who continually asks himself to start over, and love us again.  God knows we may not change.  But God has chosen to.  God has chosen not to get lost in his hurt and pain over our faithless ways.  Instead God continues to come to us and show his love for us, despite what he may get in return.

So God is not asking Hosea to do something that He (God) is not unwilling to do.  It has become a way of life for God in his love for us.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Little Miss Muffett


"Little Miss Muffett"
Jeremiah 10:1-5


Family of Israel, listen to what the Lord says to you.
This is what he says:
    "Don't live like the people from other nations,
       and don't be afraid of special signs in the sky,
       even though the other nations are afraid of them.
 The customs of other people are worth nothing.
       Their idols are just wood cut from the forest,
       shaped by a worker with his chisel.
 They decorate their idols with silver and gold.
       With hammers and nails they fasten them down so they won't fall over.
Their idols are like scarecrows in melon fields;
       they cannot talk.
    Since they cannot walk, they must be carried.
    Do not be afraid of those idols,
       because they can't hurt you,
       and they can't help you either."

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on her tuffet
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.


You know what I realized this week?  I realized I didn’t know what a tuffet was.  I think I assumed, ever since I first heard this nursery rhyme, that a tuffet was your backside, your derriere, your buns.  As in, “Get up off your tuffet and do your chores!”  But then I wondered if tuffet was a word at all.  So I looked it up.  There are two definitions.  The first is, a tuft of grass.  The second says a low stool. So now you know.

I’d also like to know why a little girl is eating an unappetizing mixture of coagulated milk and watery cheese by-product.  Neither of these things has anything to do with the sermon -- just little side-bars of information.

Little Miss Muffet had arachnophobia.  That is, the fear of spiders.  There was a lame science fiction movie a number of years ago about a bunch of spiders that were killing everyone on this farm.  There must be a lot of people who are phobic of spiders.

There was a married couple who had perfected a vaudeville act.  They were Olga and Sven.  Olga would stand quietly against a wooden background while Sven threw knives, hatchets, etc. into the wood around her.  She would even get strapped to a wooden background that spun.  Sven would throw his knives at his wife while she was spinning around.  One time, when Olga was just standing there, Sven threw a knife and Olga let out a blood curdling scream.  She fell and crumpled onto the floor.  The audience suspected the worst.  They took Olga to the dressing room.  When she revived she said, “I suddenly felt something crawling up my leg and discovered a spider.  Oh, I’m so afraid of spiders!”  I think I would have been more afraid of old Sven and his sharp objects.

Indeed, I could make the case that a good definition for a human being is, “Someone who is afraid of something.”  Research by the National Institute of Mental Health shows that phobias (which are now called “anxiety disorders”) are the most common psychological problem in America.  It is estimated that over 13 million Americans have one kind of phobia or another.  Some people have multiple phobias.  There’s all kinds to choose from:  fear of heights (which is my favorite; the hotel where I was staying at this past week in Cincinnati was built in a square, the middle of which was wide open, floor to very high ceiling.  The elevators were glass cubicles looking out into this open middle area;  my room was on the 10th floor; I could not turn around and look out the glass; I faced the elevator doors and couldn’t wait till they opened.  One day I was on the elevator with a lady who had it worse than me; their room was on the 14th floor and you needed a special key card to get to that floor, and it wasn’t working; her husband said, “We’ll have to go back down and get a different card,” at which point she got down on all fours on the floor and kept saying, “Just get me off this thing!”).  There’s fear of the dark, fear of going outside your home, fear of being in tight or overcrowded places.  And there are some less known fears, such as the fear of eating, the fear of writing, or the fear of vomiting.  I guess if you had the fear of eating you wouldn’t also have the fear of vomiting.

So what are we to do with all our fears, phobias, and anxiety disorders?  How can we eat our curds and whey in peace, without being frightened away?  Alan Shepherd, the astronaut wrote about his first space flight.  When the Redstone rocket began to gather speed, it began to vibrate more and more.  It was as if the whole rocket was about to come apart.  He knew what was happening.  He had experienced it as a test pilot.  He knew that just before you break through the sound barrier, the air resistance is tremendous.

Shepherd’s whole body was shaking.  He couldn’t read the instruments.  He started to radio back to Cape Canaveral, but then changed his mind.  He held on.  Within a few seconds all the vibrations were gone.  He knew he was going supersonic.  No longer any noise.  No longer even any sense that he was moving.  He was flying in outer space.

So how do we get past those times when our fears are making us shake all over, and we want to call the control tower and scream, or get down on all fours, or give up?  How do we hold on so that we can get past the fear and then all the noise and shaking disappears and everything is OK?

The prophet Jeremiah gives us some help here.  His words come in the context of a satire about idols.  Idol worship was a huge problem for Israel.  Part of the attraction, besides the sexual nature of idol worship, was the delusion that because the idol was visible, it must be real.  They were as visible as Israel’s God was invisible.  It bothers Jeremiah that the people have become “terrified” (vs. 2) of them.  Then again in verse 5 Jeremiah emphasizes his point with the statement, “Do not be afraid of them...”

In between these two “do not be afraid” statements Jeremiah preaches a little satire.  What exactly were the people afraid of?  Was it justified fear or imagined fear?  “Don’t you realize what these things are?” Jeremiah laughs.  “They’re trees; pieces of wood!  Some guy goes and cuts a tree.  Another guy carves on it.  Somebody else sticks a bunch of ornaments and trinkets on it.  You’re afraid of that!?” Jeremiah rants, throwing up his arms.

Jeremiah tells the people they shouldn’t fear because:
1)  It would be giving too much credence to a worthless custom carried on by a worthless people;
2)  That which they fear is only an inanimate object (a piece of a tree!) that can’t move, can’t speak, and can’t walk.  That which they are afraid of has no power to do harm.  And, conversely, it can do no good either.
The thing, says Jeremiah, is basically non-functional.

A study was done at the University of Michigan on fears relationship to reality.  The study found that 60 percent of our fears are totally groundless.  Twenty percent of our fears have already become past activities.  That is, they are already done and totally out of our control.  Ten percent of our fears are so petty, they don’t make any real difference in our daily lives.  Of the remaining 10 percent, only four or five percent are real and justified fears.  I think that’s part of what Jeremiah is trying to point out.  There are few things that people really need to be afraid of.  Idols are not one of them.

Jeremiah makes some points about fear that are worth taking a look at.  First, he is saying that our fears are often things that have no life of their own.  We are the ones who give our fears their life, their power.  Our minds produce or conjure up all the energy that our fears bring.

The father of a four-year-old came into her room at night after hearing her scream that there were bears in her room.  After turning on the lights, he said to his daughter, “See, no bears.”
But his daughter was unconvinced.  “The kind of bears I see,” she said, “are the kinds that only come out in the dark.”

Fears, according to what Jeremiah is saying, start out as inanimate objects.  Then our minds give them a pulse.  Then we turn that pulse into a spirit and a power.  The power grows until it’s bigger than ourselves--maybe bigger than our individual world.  The point is, WE give those fears that kind of life.  It isn’t until God comes along and says through someone like Jeremiah, “Wait a minute!  Take a good, long look at this.  It’s only a log with some trinkets stuck to it!”  And then we feel a little silly.  Maybe more than just a little.

Secondly, Jeremiah says that the only legs our fears have are our own.  The only way our fears get around is if we carry them.  We imagine our fears to be so powerful as to be everywhere.  Everywhere we turn, there they are.  How will we ever escape them?  If it’s fear of the dark, the dark is everywhere.  If it’s agoraphobia -- fear of venturing outside your home -- the outside is everywhere.  If it’s arachnophobia -- fear of spiders -- spiders seem to be everywhere.

But it’s not the “everywhere” that’s causing the fear.  It is you and I, who by carrying that fear around in here (heart and mind) that gives our fear the illusion of mobility.  The only way our fears are everywhere is if we take them everywhere.  What would happen if we just left them somewhere so they wouldn’t bother us everywhere?

One of the great physicians of the past century, Sir William Osler, once gave some good advice on how to end the day.  He wrote, “At night, as I lay aside my clothes, I undress my soul too, and lay aside its sin.  In the presence of God I lie down to rest, and to awaken a free man, with a new life.”  What if we did that with our fears as well?  Each night as we remove our clothes, remove our fears and lay them aside.  Just don’t put them back on in the morning.

Thirdly, our fears have voices.  Sometimes they are little voices that go off in our heads.  “Don’t do that.”  “You won’t like it.”  “That’s going to be a big mistake.”  Or the big voice that starts out with two little words, “What if...?”  “What if it’s cancer?”  “What if it hails on the corn before it gets picked?”  “What if I made the wrong decision?”

I was talking to a woman at the storytelling conference.  She asked me what I was doing.  I told her I was writing the sermon for the following Sunday.  She asked what it was about, and I gave her a bit of the run down about our silly fears.  She started laughing and then told me the story of one time she had taken a special desert to her sons college graduation party.  It was something with sherbet in it.  She woke up in the middle of the night and was afraid she had left the sherbet out on the counter and forgot to put it in the freezer at her son’s house.  She didn’t want to call and ask him to go check, since it was the middle of the night.  But she was up all night fearing the worst:  melted sherbet.  All these little voices of our fears.

Those little fearful voices are trying to manipulate us into a very controlled, narrow, risk free, confining life.  In the church we hear that little voice say things like, “We’ve tried doing that before; it’s not going to work.”  Or, “We’ve never done anything like that in this church; I don’t think it will fly.”  The voices of our fear creates ruts out of which we are afraid to deviate.  The fear, and the voice of fear, tries to keep us from anything that looks like change.

Fear’s voice is allowed to control our lives as individuals, couples, families, and churches.  Who allows those voices all that power?  Who ultimately are the ones who listen to those voices and obey them?  And on a deeper, scarier level, who creates those voices in the first place?  If you realize you are the one who creates and maintains most of the voice of fear, at the same instant you realize you can, with God’s help, uncreate them.  The only power the voice of fear has is the power you give it by listening to it.

And lastly, Jeremiah says our fears usually start out simple and uncluttered.  What happens is, if we hold on to them for any length of time, they accumulate more stuff and become more complex.  Like the idol that started out as a simple log of wood.  Then the wood carvers gave it a shape and form and rough detail.  Usually the form and faces they carved were scary looking, as if they were putting their fears into their art.

Then that carved piece of wood got adorned with silver and gold accessories.  Behold!  All of a sudden the thing is much more elaborate than when it started out.  It has become a composite with so many additions that trying to find the original piece of wood underneath it all seems an impossible task.  What started out simple, has become this pretentious and gaudy thing.

One of our most basic fears, according to psychologists, is the fear of abandonment.  Imagine how that fear gets carved into us in childhood, and then takes on further shape in teenage years, and then on into adulthood in marriage.  Then we pass that fear onto our kids and they start the cycle all over again.  The wreckage and devastation caused by that one, ever embellished fear is immense.

The Lord, through Jeremiah, says to to us, “Take a long look at it.  See it for what it really is.  It’s like a “scarecrow in a melon field.”  Or, I like the story about the uncle who wanted to humor his little nephew who had a large balloon shaped like a lion.  “I’m scared of that big lion of yours,” said the uncle.
“Don’t be scared,” said the nephew.  “You ought to see how small he looks when I let the air out.”

That’s what God wants too.  God wants us to allow him to let the air out of our fears.  See them in their smallest state.  Then we can take care of them.


The only thing our fears do is sap our vitality and our very lives.  Jeremiah is telling the people they need a safe place to stand -- a place where fear, like fog, evaporates.  A place where we can use our energy to explore the wonders and possibilities that our True God gives us in the world that God has created for us.

To live in fear is to live under the stress of chronic threat.  But it’s a threat that isn’t real.  We then spend our lives trying to avoid that threat and not end up really living.  If the threat and the fear is not real, think how much of our lives we have wasted.  To really be alive, to live Jeremiah’s kind of life, God’s kind of life, is to live uncontrolled by our fears.