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.