Living in Fear

It’s true – this is the place in which we live, breathe, love, cry and die … or so the Shadowed World purports. A world where it’s me against you, us against them, where he who yells loudest wins the precedent, where she who wields the largest weapon gains the right to become sovereign – for a day, a week, forever …

A week prior to my holidays from the ministry in which I currently walk at The United Church in Meadowood, our family of faith was violated. Our building was broken into, damage occurred and things were stolen … as with many moments of distress and loss, what could have been could have been much worse. That does not ignore the reality that any break-in, any theft makes us feel vulnerable, it tempts us to want to dig in, retaliate, entrench – discern who is with us and who is against us … temptations to adopt an agenda of the Shadow World …

Saint Luke the Evangelist

The responses varied from concern to support, from questions to moments of despair, some of these were others’, some mine, and some shared. But as the fugue and numbness began to recede, what struck me most and continues to strike me is the response from the Dominant Culture. What I had hoped would be ‘an under-the-radar’ approach to reaching out through local media resources to those who had stolen from UCiM, to request a return of some of the necessary things that make a church tick (i.e. computers and back-up USB drives) turned into 15-minutes of illusion, of temptation to condemn those who made a poor decision …

What has struck me most was the focus, especially within the TV media, on privacy and the resulting fear that can occur when personal information becomes public. I do not mean in any way to belittle or detract from the reality that such information can be and is misused. Anonymity, however, in a digitally cyber-connected world is no longer possible. We float as bits-&-bytes where images and names are bandied about recklessly, organically, and seamlessly. Being responsible with how our information is shared is practical, yet when pragmatism devolves into paranoia, the Shadow World takes a hold of us …

We live in a world of fear – which is not so different than the one in which the early church struggled to find hope and meaning. The Roman Empire was the social milieu – economic, social and political – in which our early Brothers and Sisters in faith struggled to find and be the light that Jesus’ ministry offered to a broken and hurting world. The early church struggled as it was expelled from the synagogue and faced persecution from the Roman authorities who were threatened by the inclusive radicality that people of The Way modelled.

We may share a faith with the early church, but most of us are far removed from the oppression and death that following Jesus meant. As those in the early church had choices – so too do we now: the angel told the shepherds, the angel told Zechariah (Luke 1.13), the angel told Mary (Luke 1.30), and Jesus told Simon (Luke 5.10) DO NOT BE AFRAID.

DO NOT BE AFRAID means to choose the other path that the media would like to disguise, one where Hope is offered to the hurting, to those who cry for help by stealing from a place of the Sacred. How we respond, how we choose to react illuminates whether we are the light in the world, whether our role as part of the Body of Christ is whole in our collective attempt to heal or whether we have become afflicted with the paralysis of fear that whisper to us with the seduction of safety, but which ultimately strips human beings of their value and leaves us, each and everyone of us, isolated, longing for belonging and love, but unsure where to look.

DO NOT BE AFRAID means to become leaders, as opposed to couch potatoes, it means to testify to a world that embraces abundance over deficit, where the rally of voices comes together in unison, in a harmony that imagines an Alternative Community where we are renewed and our consciousness shifts toward Hope and the recognition that there is something larger, grander and filled with such beauty that the only symbol that adequately, in its inadequacies, sums it up: God.

Living it out, well there’s the rub …