be not afraid

God spoke strongly to me, grabbed me with both hands and warned me not to go along with this people. He said:

"Don't be like this people,
   always afraid somebody is plotting against them.
Don't fear what they fear.
Don't take on their worries.
If you're going to worry,
   worry about The Holy. Fear God-of-the-Angel-Armies.
The Holy can be either a Hiding Place
   or a Boulder blocking your way…
Gather up the testimony,
   preserve the teaching for my followers,
While I wait for God as long as he remains in hiding,
   while I wait and hope for him.
I stand my ground and hope,
I and the children God gave me as signs to Israel,
Warning signs and hope signs from God-of-the-Angel-Armies,
   who makes his home in Mount Zion.     Isaiah 8

King Ahaz was between the proverbial rock and a hard place – caught between King Rezin of Damascus and King Pekah of Israel. Both were conspiring and plotting. Both were on the verge of attempting to overrun Jerusalem and install their own puppet king in their great political chess game with the ruling and rising powers both north and south.

Ahaz was panicked and fearful. His fear infected his entire court – and amplified the fears already resident in the general population.

As Isaiah reports it, “When the house of David was told, ‘Syria is in league with Ephraim,’ the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.” Just think of our recent wind “microbursts,” power outages and downed trees, and you get the picture.

Isaiah called for a meeting in “Washerman Field” outside of Jersualem.

What does Isaiah say to the trembling king?

“Be careful, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because of these two smoldering stumps of firebrands, at the fierce anger of Rezin and Syria and the son of Remaliah.”

“Be not afraid.”

It’s one of the most oft repeated phrases in the Bible.

That’s probably because we all so naturally gravitate towards fear. Quiet trust doesn’t come naturally, for the simple reason that there is really so very little that we can control. Our fear ultimately betrays us. It betrays our lack of heart and soul. It betrays a pragmatic mind that doesn’t really believe God is sovereign and in control, and if he’s not, we better be, but ultimately we're faced with the fact that we can’t be, and so, well, we live in fear. We make decisions in the shadows of fearful calculations and prognostications. And like Ahaz we grasp at Assyrian straws while turning away from virgin signs of Immanuel. We figure it out. We break alliances, we make alliances, we trade alliances, we push the pieces around the board of home and work and church, and in so doing earn the same epitaph as Ahaz: “If you do not stand by faith, you will not stand at all.”

While reading and pondering all this in Isaiah 7 and 8, I came across this statement by Richard Rohr in his book Everything Belongs:

I believe faith might be precisely that ability to trust the river, to trust the flow and the lover. It is a process that we don’t have to change, coerce, or improve. We need to allow it to flow. That takes immense confidence in God, especially when we’re hurting. Usually, I can feel myself getting panicky. I want to make things right, quickly. I lose my ability to be present and I go up into my head and start obsessing. I tend to get overfocused, and I hate it because then I’m not really feeling anymore. I’m into goal-orientation, trying to push or even create the river – the river that is already flowing through me.

Faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing; we are in it. The river is God’s providential love – so do not be afraid…Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for “false evidence appearing real.”

Ask yourself, “What am I afraid of?” “Does it matter?” “Will it be there anyway in the end?” “Is it worth holding on to?” We have to ask whether it is fear that keeps us from loving. I promise you, grace will lead us into those fears and voids, and grace alone will fill them up, if we are willing to stay in the void. We mustn’t engineer an answer too quickly. We must not get too settled too fast. For it is so easy to manufacture an answer to take away the anxiety. To stay in God’s hands, to trust, means that to a certain degree I have to stop taking hold of myself. I have to hold, instead, a degree of uncertainty, fear, and tension…

What must be sacrificed, and it will feel like a sacrifice, is the strange satisfaction that problem-solving gives us. Don’t you feel good when you’ve solved problems at the end of the day? We say to ourselves, “I’m an effective, productive, efficient human being. I’ve earned my right to existence today because I’ve solved ten problems.” I do want us to solve problems; certainly there are plenty out there to solve. But not too quickly. We mustn’t lead with our judgments and fears. We shouldn’t lead with our need to fix and solve problems. This is the agenda-filled calculating mind that cannot see things through God’s eyes. We must not get rid of the anxiety until we have learned what it wants to teach us.

There must be Someone to trust, there must be a prior experience of the river flowing through us or we will surely take control. Why wouldn’t we? If there’s not someone else in control, why wouldn’t we be pre-occupied with taking control? There’s really not much alternative in a secular culture. No wonder we have an entire country of control freaks. And it gets worse as we get older. It gets harder because we get used to the way we like things. We start organizing and shoving other people around to fit into our agendas.

Ouch. Rohr doesn’t even know me, but yet he very clearly sees who I too often have been.

Just how driven am I by my own Ahaz ways, rather than entering the flow of Immanuel?

How often still do I activate my own cleverly devised Assyrian gambits – my latest plans to rescue myself or this person or that situation?

How naturally do I still fester in a culture of fear rather than fostering a path of deepening, quieting faith and trust?

How often do I still wish to fix my story or eject it, rather than stopping long enough to hear what God is already saying in the midst of it? Will I again resume work on the latest verison of my “wave machine,” or will I stop long enough to once again feel the River?

As I stand alongside Ahaz in Fuller’s Field, will I choose to stand my ground and hope and wait upon sign and wonder mysterious and hidden…or will I yet again yield to the so easily prevailing winds of fear carrying the latest cries of “conspiracy!” "trouble!" "calamity!" "doom!" and drive and be driven…