Letting Go of Fear – Opening Up to Blessing

2 Samuel 6: 1-19

Roger Lynn

February 5, 2017

(click here for the audio for this sermon)

Last week I preached a sermon which I called, “Learning to Tell a Different Story.” The sermon this morning could be “Part 2.” Like the story of David and Goliath, the text for today provides us with a dramatic illustration of what happens when we get distracted from the reality that God is the God of love and abundance. 

I remember reading this story back in the days when I still thought that everything in the Bible had to be taken literally and at face value. Within those parameters I couldn’t make sense of this story. Why would God kill Uzzah just because he touched the Ark while trying to prevent it from falling off the cart? I had not yet come to the understanding that for the Bible to have relevance and value it needs to be read through a variety a filters, including the one labeled, “It says this was God’s doing, but that doesn’t seem to match up with everything else I know about God.” It hadn’t yet occurred to me to question the basic underlying premise, that God would kill anyone for any reason. But even so, I was left in a quandary, the solution to which was to assume that I must be missing some piece of the puzzle – I just didn’t understand enough. I am now convinced that I did, in fact, understand enough. Even then I was beginning to catch glimpses of the basic problem. When we see the world through a filter of violence, the pieces just don’t fit. It is not who we are created to be. It is not the framework in which the world makes sense. Sometimes the lesson of scripture is to show us what happens when we lose sight of God’s true nature, and our true nature as well. Sometimes the lesson of scripture is, in the words of Rick Lowrey, “Don’t do this!”

In the story from 2 Samuel, look what happens when David tries to use violence as the defining theme for who God is and how God works in the world. For a while everything is fine. There is singing and dancing and celebration. The Ark of the Covenant (the symbolic dwelling place of God) was coming to Jerusalem. It was an exciting day filled with joy. And then something happens. One of the honor guards assigned to accompany the Ark dies. Who knows why? Maybe he had a heart attack. Maybe he got food poisoning. Maybe the lesson about God’s terrifying wrath had been so drilled into him that he died of fright when he touched the Ark. The bottom line is that we don’t know why he died. What we do know is that in David’s understanding, and in the understanding of the writers of 2 Samuel, God killed him. The message – God’s awesome power is not to be messed with. 

And then the really telling thing happens. David is so unnerved that God would kill Uzzah that he changes plans and redirects the Ark away from Jerusalem. He literally sends God into exile. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with that kind of God. And why would he? Why would anyone want to deal with that sort of god? When we proceed from the understanding that violence and fear are defining realities of God, we cut ourselves off from any meaningful connection with the Divine presence, because that is not who God is. We allow our fear to send God into exile. Sometimes it’s dramatic and obvious – someone dies, we blame God and the door slams shut. Sometimes it’s subtle and nuanced – the understanding of God we grew up with no longer fits our experience, we keep going through the motions but our heart just isn’t in it anymore. Either way the results are the same – our lives are diminished to the extent that we are not fully in touch with the God of life and love and abundance.

For David, it is only when word comes that the people who had been given charge of the Ark were actually experiencing the blessing of life with God that he was able to let go of his fear long enough to allow that blessing into his life. Fear keeps us locked into prisons of our own making.

Rachel Naomi Remen, in her book “Kitchen Table Wisdom” (pp. 86-87) tells the story of her father and the fear which kept him prisoner in his own home. “My father was the son of immigrants. He had worked since childhood and held two jobs most of his adult life. In the evenings he would often fall asleep in his chair, his feet in a basin of warm water, too exhausted to talk. . .

I grew up on the sixth floor of an apartment building in Manhattan. All through my childhood, there was a game my father and I would play. He would talk about his house, the house he would someday own. . .

I was almost twenty when he and Mom bought a little place on Long Island and he retired. For a while his dream seemed complete. Some months after the place was his, I stopped by on a Sunday visit and found him asleep exhausted in his chair. A familiar sight from my childhood, but I had thought that things would be different now. My mother told me he had just taken a little job, so that they could keep the place up. Things are always deteriorating.

On my next visit, he was asleep in his chair again. “Are you enjoying yourselves?” I asked. “Well,” Mom said, “your father is afraid that someone will break in and take away everything we’ve worked for. He’s still working because he wants to put in an alarm system.” . . . Months later, my father continued to look weary. Concerned, I asked when they would be taking their vacation. My father shook his head. “Not this year – we can’t leave the house empty.” I suggested a house sitter. My father was horrified. “Oh no,” he told me. “You know how people are. Even your friends never take care of your things the way they would take care of their own.” They never took another vacation.

In the end, my parents rarely left the house together, not even to go to the movies. There could be a fire or some other sort of vague and unnamed disaster. And my father worked odd jobs until he died. The house turned out to have far greater control over him than any of his former employers ever had.”

As long as we experience life and God through a filter of fear and scarcity and violence, we close ourselves off from the blessings of God, the blessings which are our birthright and our inheritance. We are like David, sending God into exile for no good reason except our own fear. We stay locked up in our own house, holding both God and the world at bay. Let me be as clear as I possibly can – violence is not who God is, and because we are created in God’s image, violence is not who we are, deep down in the core of our being. It certainly is the story we’ve been told, over and over again, for a very long time now. But, as I said last week, we need to begin learning to tell a different story. Perhaps then we can begin to let go of our fear and open ourselves to the blessing. In the words of the poet Hafiz, “Now that all your worry has proved such an unlucrative business, why not find a better job.” (from The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky) May we share the Good News of God’s Love – with our words, with our actions, with our living, with our loving.