Fear is a Villain

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Jan. 8, 2017   Community Christian Church       Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor 

“Fear is a Villain”      

“Fear is a Villain” by Theo Bard

What drives a man to lock his doors and bar his windows tight

To leave his lights on timers so his house appears so bright

A ten foot fence around his door and cameras on the wall?

A fortress so secure that he can hardly get in at all?

Fear is a villain when it grips you late at night

He’ll catch you when your back is turned…he’s watching you.

We’ll sing a song for beauty, sing a song for me

Sing a song for flowers in bloom and snow upon a tree

Sing a song for those who don’t see beauty but see a shame

The beauty shall be end and ashes will remain

What drives a man to jealousy to beat his loving wife

What drives a man to hatred to take another’s life?

What drives a man to spend his life regretting chances lost

For when a man has lost his chance what man can count the cost?

Fear is a villain when it grips you late at night

He’ll catch you when your back is turned…he’s watching you.

I’ll fight the man that turns on me if I must fight or die

I will fight for justice against laws I can’t abide

I’ll try to fight with courage, to always give my best

Though I must fight the fear itself that grows inside my breast

Fear is a villain when it grips you late at night

He’ll catch you when your back is turned…he’s watching you.

Well people talk of weapons with threats to life and limb

They blame different types of demons for the state that we are in

But fighting is fear’s firstborn son, it’s what the fear is for

It just undermines you people’s trust so you can start a war

Fear is a villain when it grips you late at night

He’ll catch you when your back is turned…he’s watching you.

During his lifetime, many people in the world were comfortable in the conviction that Albert Einstein was the smartest person in the world. I don’t know if it was possibly some false humility or, more likely, that the exchange is apocryphal, but there is at least a story that says that when he was asked what it felt like to be the smartest person in alive, he is said to have replied, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Nikola Tesla about that.”

But since both Tesla and Einstein are no longer with us, let me ask you, who do you believe to be the smartest person alive today? In all fields, science, politics, religion, philosophy… is there someone who stands out in your mind as being at the top of the pile?

I am a big fan of John Spong but I don’t thing he is the smartest religious scholar alive today. I would have to hand that distinction to Karen Armstrong, but that being said, Spong is a lot easier to read! In the same vein, I am a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson because he makes science exciting and accessible but I doubt that he is the smartest scientist in the world. That distinction probably belongs to Stephen Hawking, or maybe even the impossibly young British physicist, Brian Cox.

But, not to drag this out too long, in my opinion, the smartest person alive today is the MIT emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy, Noam Chomsky. He is not a bubbly public speaker and he doesn’t try very hard to be easy to understand but he is one of the few people in the world that you are basically impugning your own intellect if you disagree with him.

Last month Chomsky spoke to a packed house in New York’s famous Riverside Church, reflecting on the meaning and the implications of the election of Donald Trump to be the next President of the United States. And when one of the most intelligent people in the world is speaking about one of the most confounding yet vitally important events in modern history, it behooves us to pay attention.

I’m not going to lie to you, most of what he had to say was rather dire. Chomsky is the sort of person who, as my friend Dan Goodwin likes to say, will tell you exactly how the cow ate the cabbage. I’m going to talk more about this speech one Sunday next month but for now let me just say that Chomsky is deeply concerned about two issues that could lead to the end of the human race. One is global climate change, made many times more important by the cascade of cabinet appointments in the Trump administration of climate denying, and science denying who clearly intend to accelerate the very activities that are making our planet uninhabitable to our species.

Chomsky very clearly says that Donald Trump wants us to march toward the destruction of the species.  That doesn’t feel good to say but we need to be clear about what is at stake over the next few years.

His other concern is about the very real threat of a renewed nuclear arms race with a narcissistic and clearly incompetent president in possession of the nuclear launch codes. My own muscle memory of the bad old days of the Cold War almost refuses to acknowledge, once again, the prospect of a nuclear war, but

Chomsky, and a number of professionals in the field, fear that it is more like than it ever has been before. I don’t want to believe that this could possibly be true but this is why I am quoting one of the smartest people in the world who clearly believes that it is true and we would be foolish to not take his warning seriously.

Now, any sane person who is taking either me or Chomsky seriously at this moment has plenty of reason to be in fear. That fear is what I really want to talk about today.

I’m a big fan of the sadly nearly unknown British folk ballad singer, Theo Bard. I asked our musicians to sing one of his songs as our wisdom lesson today because I think that Bard captures a very important awareness in his poetry.

Why, he asks, do people choose to live behind 10 foot tall security walls, with bars on their windows, and cameras on their walls? Why does a suspicious man beat his wife?

And I could add, why do millions of Americans keep buying handguns when handguns are made exclusively for shooting other people? Please don’t act like there is a “sport” behind handguns. If you have an IQ higher than the cabbage the cow is eating, you know that handguns are for shooting people and the only reason to have one is because you are afraid.

Fear, Theo Bard sings, is a villain. It keeps you awake at night. It fills you with dread. And here I need to say something specifically to men, especially young men. Men, you have been told a lie about what it means to be a man. Men have been sold a myth that anger is a macho reaction to the world. It is not. The root of anger is fear. Anger isn’t macho, it is the opposite of being a brave and strong man. Anger is almost always just cowardice fueled by the adrenaline of the fight or flight fear response all mammals share with rabbits and squirrels.

The next time you feel the need to abuse the woman in your life, or beat your own kids, or buy a new gun, let me suggest that you try growing a pair and just stop being such a coward. Try being a man.

Fear is a villain that robs us of our ability to think with maturity, clarity, and reason.

Fear erodes our social skills and divides families and races and communities. Fear is what makes us react negatively to people who speak a different language, who love differently, or who act differently. Have you noticed how every time the police shoot someone around here that our media says that the victim had mental health issues? And when there is yet another mass shooting like there was in Florida on Friday, the media immediately scours the horizon to find someone to say he had mental health issues.

Give me fifteen minutes to question anyone and I can come up with a defensible diagnosis of some kind of mental health issue. People who have mental health issues are not “other” than us, they are us. And frankly, if you own a gun, you are 90% of the way to a solid diagnosis right there so why do we still sell these lethal weapons to clearly unstable people? And by “unstable people” I mean, ALL OF US!

Let me close today with some comforting observations. Although Chomsky’s December address contained such dire warnings as I have described, he also cautioned his audience against giving up. We have come to a pretty dangerous place in American politics but it isn’t like we have collectively chosen a right wing dictator.

The majority of votes cast in our presidential election, a majority counted in millions of votes, were not cast for Donald Trump. Our nation has not collectively lost its mind. And, though Chomsky, like many of us, was deeply saddened by the failure of the party to seize a once in a lifetime chance at substantive change in the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, still, if the election were decided purely by voters under the age of 40, Bernie would have won the nomination and the general election.

Older voters were not willing to go that far in the direction of democratic socialism but the people who will run this country when my generation has been laid to rest are not so afraid of real progress. If we can keep from either blowing the planet up or irreversibly poisoning it in the immediate future, if we can just give the next generation a chance, they may be the America we have dreamed of being.