Tag: fear

Bad Does Not Become Good

Good will come of this, even this pandemic. Yes, it is true. Perhaps we will re-prioritize, perceive and experience community in a better way, maybe have more meaningful greetings than a tossed-off, “Hi howya doin’?” But what is true does not always have to be spoken, at least not without great care for the circumstances of the intended recipient. The issue? Good can come from the bad; this does not make the bad good.

 Consider what you go through in a personal crisis (which might be the case now in conjunction with the public one). When you are in the midst of anxiety, uncertainty and pain, how helpful is it for some chronic advice-giver to come along and point out to you all the good that will come of it? Not very. Not at all. It just makes things worse. It is good and important, at some point, to find reason for gratitude in our circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:18), but never for all circumstances. That would make the bad good. Good can and will come out of the bad. That is God’s doing. That means God is good, not our circumstances.

Let’s be careful about pointing out the good that will come from bad things. Some of us will be nowhere near ready to hear it.

The Fear-Power Matrix

The first of three messages I’m calling Essentials of Community on Sunday May 5 considered peace to be the first essential. That’s peace as the opposite of fear. While, thankfully, we do not have the big obvious reasons to have a culture of fear, not, say as we would if we were living in Syria, fear seems to be the seething undercurrent of much of our life. It’s beneath the anger that seems to spew forth at the slightest provocation. Fear creates distrust; it is behind self destructive behaviours. it ruins relationships, diminishes community.

Fear has a cousin, or maybe more like a sibling: power. Fear and power feed off one another. I call it the fear-power matrix. You do not have to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to recognize that there are those whose power depends on, feeds on, and promotes a culture of fear. The human’s first sin, we read in Genesis 3, was for a power grab, and fear immediately was born. Hiding from God ensued. God asked, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9).

The last part of John 14 pictures a God who wants to reside with and in us, displacing these trespassers in our lives, fear and power. They do not belong. We accept them as given parts of reality, but it is not what God intends for us, at least that’s what I get from this. Jesus said if we follow his word, he and the Father will dwell with us. If we pattern our lives after Jesus’ self-giving service and obedience to his will, we will experience a new resident in our lives. In answer to the question of John 14:22, Jesus says that instead of some earth-shaking public spectacle, he will continue to work through a community of people to share this new possibility in and to the larger community. And at the heart of it all will be a peace, such as the world cannot give, a peace that accompanies the gift of the Spirit, the “counselor” or “helper” or “advocate” (as paraclete is variously translated) whom we will find alongside us. We find God, then, within and beside us. The world cannot give this peace. The world can only express peace as a wish on a Christmas card, or by imposing order aimed at controlling external factors associated with fear, without touching – and perhaps increasing – the fear we find within anyway, because of our basic insecurity, which Christ offers to shatter.