Knox (Westport) Presbyterian Church

Sunday, September 19, 2021

Good morning!  Welcome to Knox (Westport) Presbyterian Church on this Sunday, September 19, 2021.

We are still making adjustments for Covid-19 with restrictions impacting what we can do and how we can gather.

We continue the practice of no greeting one another with a hug, no coffee hour, no passing of Offering plates or using hymn books or pew Bibles.  When you join us in singing hymns and praise songs, we encourage you to reduce the volume of your voices or just hum along.   According to current guidelines regarding indoor gatherings, masks or face coverings are still required.

Following our worship service, people can feel free to linger and visit with each other outdoors when the weather is good.  Masks and face coverings are no longer required for outdoor gatherings if you are fully vaccinated.  Please be aware that not everyone may be fully vaccinated and wearing a mask or face covering may still be advisable to protect everyone.  As more and more people receive the two shots of the Covid-19 vaccine and complete their incubation period, we will be able to resume a more friendly approach to each other.

We ask you to be patient and respectful with the rules that prevent us from being a more friendly people.

Thank you for being here.  Let’s stay safe and be well.

Announcements

Greeting One Another

We are delighted that you chose to join us this morning as we come together in fellowship to celebrate our shared faith in Jesus, the Messiah.  Let’s stand and greet one another by applause instead of the customary hearty handshake or caring embrace.

A Moment for Reflection

Take a moment now to prepare for worship.

Let the many things that have occupied your attention this morning, even as you were planning to come for worship with us, fade into the background to give space for thoughts about God, about life and about faith.

I’m going to ask Barb to play a brief musical selection as we come into the presence of God.

Call to Worship – Isaiah 41:10

The Call to Worship is from the Book of Isaiah, chapter 41, verse 10:

Fear not, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed. I am your God. I will strengthen you; I will help you; I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.

Praise and Worship

Through All the Changing Scenes of Life

You are My Hiding Place

Still

Prayers of Adoration and Confession

The Lord’s Prayer

Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.  Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our sins as we forgive sinners.  And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil; for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.  AMEN.

The Offering

Offering plates have been placed at the entrance into the main auditorium for you to leave your offering as you enter or leave this morning.  Thank you.

Sharing Our Thoughts on Life and Faith

In these days of rapid change, chaotic social disruption, the lingering risk of Covid-19, and international tensions, who has not experienced fear?  Everywhere there are people depressed and bewildered, irritable and nervous because of the fears that grip us.

In our continuing study of the Book of Proverbs under the theme: “Wisdom for the Ages and Today”, we are going to look at Fear and Faith to see if there is an antidote to the many different fears that we face in life.

In order to get you thinking along with me about this issue, I want to ask you this question:

What are you afraid of?

I am afraid a lot of the time. Scared, anxious, nervous, worried.  In my mind, these are all synonyms for fear in some way.

Our fears assume many different disguises and dress themselves in strangely different robes.

There are those superstitious fears that range from the fear of walking under a ladder to a fear of Friday the thirteenth.

There are those fears that fall under the category of “personal anxiety.”  They are afraid of getting sick; so, they begin to find evidence of disease in every meaningless ache and pain.  They fear growing old; so, they take the latest drug advertised to keep them young.  When they are not worried about their physical health, they are worried about their relationships; so, they are driven through life with a sense of insecurity, a lack of self-confidence, and a nagging feeling of failure. They end up with what the psychologists call an inferiority complex.

Sometimes our fears are dressed in the garments of mental phobias. These nagging phobias take many forms — fear of water, fear of high places, fear of closed rooms, fear of darkness and fear of being alone.

Then there are those economic fears which are especially real in this highly competitive society. Karen Horney has set forth the thesis that most of the psychological problems of our age grow out of this gnawing economic fear.  Many entrepreneurs are tormented by the possible or actual failure of their businesses. Others are tortured by the uncertainty of the stock market. A lot of people are afraid the unemployment or the collapse of their careers in the aftermath of this Covid-19 crisis. One of the tragic things about unemployment is that it crushes a person's sense of pride, attacking the spirit, and leaving him or her standing before others as a disastrous failure. Our economic fears are frustrating and real!

There are, above all, the ontological and religious fears. People are afraid of death and nonbeing.  The atomic bomb and nuclear weapons have lifted the fear of death to morbid proportions. Hamlet's soliloquy, “to be or not to be,” is the desperate question falling from many trembling lips.  The fear of death confronts us with the reality of our final destiny and the judgement of God.  Will they be found wanting when the scales of justice are balanced?

So, the problem of fear is one of the most serious problems of modern life.  It drains one's energy and depletes one's resources.  It is exhausting and debilitated, unable to seize either the opportunities of life or the delight of living.

Now this does not mean that we should try to eliminate fear altogether from human life. Such an undertaking would not only be humanly impossible but practically undesirable. Fear is the alarm system that warns us of approaching dangers.  Without it, a person could not have survived in the primitive world, nor could he or she survive in the modern world.

Fear is a powerfully creative force.  Every great invention and every intellectual advance has, as a part of its motivation, the desire to overcome some dreaded thing. The fear of darkness brought about the discovery of electricity. The fear of pain led to the marvelous discoveries of medical science. The fear of ignorance was one reason that great institutions of learning were established. The fear of war was one of the forces behind the birth of the United Nations.  If we were to take away humanity’s capacity to fear, we would take away their capacity to grow, invent and create. Some fear is normal, necessary, and creative.

But it must be borne in mind that there are abnormal fears which are emotionally ruinous and psychologically destructive. The best illustration of the difference between normal and abnormal fear was given by Sigmund Freud himself. A person tramping through the heart of an African jungle, he said, should quite properly be afraid of snakes. That is normal and self-protective. But if a person suddenly begins to fear that snakes are under the carpet of his city apartment, then his fear is abnormal, neurotic.

Are not most of our fears so based?  Psychologists tell us that a normal child is born with only two fears — the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises — and all others are environmentally acquired. Most of those acquired fears turn out to be snakes under the carpet.

When we speak of overcoming our fear, we are referring to this chronic, abnormal, neurotic fear.  Normal fear protects us; abnormal fear paralyzes us. Normal fear is a friend that motivates us to improve our individual and collective welfare; abnormal fear is an enemy that constantly poisons and distorts our inner lives. So, our problem is not to get rid of fear but to harness and master it.

How, then, is it to be mastered?

1. Face our fears without flinching

First, we must face our fears without flinching. We must honestly ask ourselves why we are afraid. The confrontation will, to some measure, grant us power. We can never cure fear by trying to escape it.  Nor can it be cured by repressing. The more we attempt to ignore and repress our fears, the more we multiply our inner conflicts and cause the mind to deteriorate into an immobilized condition.  By looking squarely and honestly at our fears we discover that many of them are the residues of some childhood need or apprehension. Here is a person, for instance, haunted by a fear of death or the thought of punishment in the after life. By honestly facing this fear the person soon discovers that it is a projection of an early childhood experience of being punished by parents, locked in a room, seemingly deserted. As an adult, the person unconsciously projects this childhood experience of aloneness and punishment into the whole of reality. Or take the example of the person plagued with the fear of inferiority and social rejection. By looking squarely at this fear, the person soon discovers that it is rooted in a childhood experience of parental rejection.

So let us take our fears one by one and look at them fairly and squarely. By bringing them to the forefront of consciousness, we may find them to be more imaginary than real. Some of them will turn out to be snakes under the carpet. Let us remember that, more often than not, fear involves the misuse of the imagination. By getting our fears out in the open we may end up laughing at some of them, and this is good.

2. with courage

We can master fear not only by facing it and understanding it; we can master it through courage. Courage has always been considered a supreme virtue. Plato considered it the element of the soul which bridges the gap between reason and desire. Aristotle considered it the affirmation of one's essential nature. Thomas Aquinas considered it the strength of mind capable of conquering whatever threatens the attainment of the highest good. The stoics considered it the affirmation of one's essential being in spite of desires and anxieties.

So, courage is the power of the mind to overcome fear. Fear, unlike anxiety, has a definite object which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, and endured.  So often the object of our fear is fear itself.  Epictetus says, “for it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.”

Courage is that quality which enables us to stand up to any fear. It is the final determination not to be stopped or overwhelmed by any object, however frightful it may be. Many of our fears are very real, and not mere snakes under the carpet. Trouble is a reality in this strange medley of life and dangers lurk beneath our every move. Accidents do occur and bad health stands as an ever threatening possibility. Death is a stark, grim and inevitable reality. We do ourselves and our neighbors a great disservice when we try to prove that there is nothing in this world to be frightened at. In this conundrum of life evil and pain are inescapable realities. The things that make for fear are close to all of us. These forces that threaten to negate life must be met and challenged by a daring “courage to be.” Courage is the power of life to affirm itself in spite of its ambiguities. It involves the exercise of a great and creative will. It is a bottomless resourcefulness that ultimately enables a person to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. Courage is the inner determination to go on in spite of obstacles and frightening situations; cowardice is the submissive surrender to the forces of circumstance. The courageous person never loses the zest for living even though his life situation is zestless; the cowardly person, overwhelmed by the uncertainties of life, loses the will to live.  Courage faces fear and thereby masters it; cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it.

3. through love

Fear is also mastered through love. The New Testament is right in saying:

To Love, to Be Loved

God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.  We, though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first. (1 John 4:17-19)

Now the word “love” in the New Testament is not something soft, anemic, and sentimental. It is a very strong love that carried Christ to a cross.   It is a love that faces evil with an infinite capacity to take it without flinching to overcome the world by the cross.

Now what does all of this have to do with the fears so prevalent in the modern world such as the fear of war, the fear of economic displacement, the fears accompanying racial injustice, and the fears associated with personal anxiety?

We can find examples of these kinds of fear at almost any point.

Take our deteriorating international situation. It is shot through with fear — Russia fears America and America fears Russia; China fears India and India fears China; the Arabs fear the Israelis and the Israelis fear the Arabs. The fears are numerous and varied — fear of another nation's attack, fear of another nation's scientific and technological supremacy, fear of another nation's economic power.

Fear is one of the major causes of war. We usually think that war comes from hate, but a closer scrutiny of responses will reveal a different sequence of events — first fear, then hate, then war, then deeper hatred. If a nightmarish nuclear war engulfs our world — God forbid — it will not be because Russia and America first hated each other, but because they first feared each other.

So we are called back in these turbulent, panic-stricken days to that wise affirmation of the New Testament: “Perfect love casts out fear.”

Take the problem of racial injustice.  The whole system of racial injustice is buttressed by a series of irrational fears — fear of losing a preferred economic position, fear of losing social status, fear of intermarriage, fear of adjusting to a new situation. Some people follow the path of escape by running away from the problem or by ignoring the question of race relations altogether.  Others seek to deal with fear by legal maneuvers to keep in place the status quo.  Still engage in acts of violence and meanness to subjugate or assimilate the minority into the dominant culture.  But all of these remedies are futile!  Instead of reducing fear, they bring deeper fears, fears that leave the victims inflicted with scars and paranoia that is passed on from generation to generation. Neither repression nor massive resistance nor aggressive violence will cast out the fear; only love and goodwill can do that.

The wise affirmation of the New Testament declares: “Perfect love casts out fear.”

This truth has a great deal of bearing on our personal anxieties.

4. Through faith

A final way to master fear is through faith. One of the commonest sources of fear is the consciousness of failure, guilt, and shame as a result of some kind of inadequacy for life.  All too many people are attempting to face the tension of life with inadequate inner resources.  They look at themselves and find they are lacking.  The fear of death, nonbeing and nothingness expresses itself in existential anxiety which can only be cured by a positive religious faith. Such a faith imbues us with a sense of the trustworthiness of the universe, and a feeling of relatedness to God. A positive religious faith does not leave us with the illusion that we will be exempted from pain and suffering, nor does it imbue us with the idea that life is a drama of unending comfort and untroubled ease; rather it instills us with the inner equilibrium to face the strains, burdens and fears that will inevitably come.

Faith endows us with the conviction that we are not alone in this vast, uncertain universe.  A wise and loving God established the heavens and the earth with wisdom to guide us, strength to protect us and love to keep us.  The God who brought our whirling planet from primal vapor and has led the human pilgrimage for low these many centuries can most assuredly lead us through death's dark night into the bright daybreak of eternal life.  His will is too perfect, and his purposes are too extensive to be contained in the limited receptacle of time and the narrow walls of earth. Death is not the ultimate evil; the ultimate evil is to be outside God's love.

Jesus always stressed the trustworthiness and love of God when he dealt with the problem of fear. He knew that nothing could separate us from God's love. In the tenth chapter of Matthew, we read his majestic words:

 “So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed or hidden that will not be made known. What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.  And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:26-31)

The Apostle Paul expresses it this way:

“For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7).

The Prophet Isaiah gave us this promise of God:

“Fear not, for I am with you, do not be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand. (Isaiah 41:10)

There is an old familiar saying which says:

“Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. There was no one there.” (Unknown)

Prayer of Response

Closing Hymn – “Simply Trusting Every Day” - #689

Benediction  – 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.

Choral Blessing

Go now in peace. Never be afraid.

God will go with you each hour of every day.

Go now in faith, steadfast, strong and true.

Know He will guide you in all you do.

Go now in love, and show you believe.

Reach out to others so all the world can see.

God will be there watching from above.

Go now in peace, in faith and in love.