I’m not going to lie – religion can be scary. For as long as humans have wondered where thunder and lightning came from, we have been afraid of the Almighty. “God will strike you dead!” if you don’t behave. “Sinners in the hands of an angry God!” was the focus of too many sermons. “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” Proverbs 9 warns us. “You better watch out – you better not cry…” – sorry – different god. Same principle. Humans have always believed that the best way to raise good adults is to scare the $%#& out of them as children. This probably works, to some extent, but it also creates lots of trauma. Then, we grow up and realize that lightning will not, in fact, strike us when we use a bad word, and all that time and effort spent scaring us ends up being for nothing.
I get that a little fear of consequences for bad behavior may have its place in life, but the truth is that God doesn’t work that way. If God did, I – and most of you – would have been incinerated more times than we want to consider. Protecting children from themselves and others takes more than fear. Protecting adults with no power to defend themselves begins with an attitude of love. As we watch our government continue to persecute people they consider to not be “real” Americans, we have to ask ourselves what we will do about it. Will we work towards being a place that tries to love our neighbor, or will we continue to defy God by defining God in negative ways?
There are things we all should fear – we should be afraid of the growing tyranny in our government. We should be afraid of criminals bringing drugs to our country and homegrown terrorists flying under the radar. We should be afraid of the misogyny that is creeping into our laws and practices. But we should be loving each other in spite of our fear. We should be pointing at the real sources of danger and not the false flags of gender and DEI. Fear, ultimately, weakens us. Love makes us stronger. Choose love, not fear; it is so much healthier.
Prayer – Holy God, help us to learn wisdom through love, not fear, so that we can truly know You. Amen.
Today’s art is “Fear Becomes Your God” by Jon Baldwin.