American Idols – Security

American Idols – Security
Genesis 11:1-9
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
March 7, 2010

[Note to reader: This is a manuscript and not a transcript.  While I prepare a manuscript, I don’t preach from it.  All the major points are here, but there are bound to be some small differences from the sermon as it was preached live.  Also, expect some “bonus” material that wasn’t in the live sermon.]

[Standing behind a “bulletproof” Plexiglass shield with security guards on either side]
Do not be afraid, Friends!

You may be wondering why I’m standing behind this Plexiglass barrier.  Well, the reason is simple.  My security.  There has been an increase in church shootings, and I thought it best for your pastor to be safe on Sunday morning.  I am sure you will understand.  It is better for us all if your pastor is safe.  So, let us continue with the message…

Today’s story comes from Genesis 11.  It is the story of the Tower of Babel.  Hear God’s story for us today:

Genesis 11:1-9
¹ At one time the whole world spoke a single language and used the same words. ² As the people migrated eastward, they found a plain in the land of Babylonia and settled there. ³ They began to talk about construction projects. “Come,” they said, “let’s make great piles of burnt brick and collect natural asphalt to use as mortar. ⁴ Let’s build a great city with a tower that reaches to the skies — a monument to our greatness! This will bring us together and keep us from scattering all over the world.” ⁵ But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. ⁶ “Look!” he said. “If they can accomplish this when they have just begun to take advantage of their common language and political unity, just think of what they will do later. Nothing will be impossible for them! ⁷ Come, let’s go down and give them different languages. Then they won’t be able to understand each other.” ⁸ In that way, the LORD scattered them all over the earth; and that ended the building of the city. ⁹ That is why the city was called Babel, because it was there that the LORD confused the people by giving them many languages, thus scattering them across the earth.

This is God’s story for us today.  Thank you, God.

Why was it wrong to build the tower?  I’d like to focus on verse four to explore an answer to this question.  Let’s read it in the NRSV: “Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’” (Genesis 11:4).  Here I think we find the crux of the matter.  The focus of their motivation to build the tower is for security, particularly security for themselves.  The problem here is that security focuses on oneself.  Security rests in a desire to stay with what is familiar and to associate with people who are the same as we are.  In the end, that focus on oneself creates a barrier between you and the people you are trying to protect yourself against.

[Coming out from behind the Plexiglass barrier…]  Ah.  Isn’t that better?  Yes.  You see, when I try to build a security for myself, I put a barrier between you and me.  Security has the tendency to do that.  To separate.

We also see in this same verse the root cause of this desire for security of oneself: fear.  We read that they were afraid of being “scattered abroad.”  They wanted to consolidate their power so that their fears would not come to pass.  In doing so, they were actually defying God’s command to both Adam and Eve and Noah: “Now you must have many children and repopulate the earth.  Yes, multiply and fill the earth!” (Genesis 9:7, NLT).  The irony of this story is that their fears ended up coming to pass!  Proverbs has a saying for this: “The fears of the wicked will all come true; so will the hopes of the godly” (10:24, NLT).

In contrast, those who seek after God by following Jesus are called to live not by fear, but by faith.  The command “do not be afraid” shows up over sixty times throughout the Bible.  The most famous of these is the angels in Luke who announce at Jesus’ birth, “Don’t be afraid!…I bring you good news of great joy for everyone!” (2:10, NLT).  It seems that people are regularly afraid (not too far from our own experience), or God’s call tends to cause fear.  Either way, we are called not to act upon that fear but to act upon faith.  Live by faith, not fear.

On the day when my call to be a pastor really crystallized, I went home and wrote down in my prayer journal all the things I was afraid of.  Here are some of them I wrote down that day:

1. I fear going to school and ending up more confused.  (Well, I didn’t end up more confused, but I did gain a healthy sense of the limit of my knowledge and understanding.)
2. I fear I’ll end up in a traditional church.  (Um…that certainly didn’t happen, did it?  Actually something even better happened.  I came away from seminary willing to serve in whatever church I was appointed.)
3. I fear being bored with worship.  (Worship certainly isn’t boring at SCC!)
4. I fear all the interruptions in my life by being a servant.  (Ah.  I’m finding those “interruptions” really are often times the ministry itself.)
5. I fear not fitting in to this Methodist mold.  (I grew to love my church.)
6. I fear getting cynical by being stuck in a system that I don’t like and can’t change.  (I actually came to find a great sense of freedom in the system of our church.)
7. I fear the uncertainty I feel in this call, and that I might not be called.  (You make the call on that one.  Am I called to be a pastor?  I think God knew what God was doing.)
8. I fear telling everyone and then changing my mind later.  (Didn’t happen.)
9. I fear not having the financial resources to make all this happen.  (We ended up with only about $5000 in debt and two master’s degrees.  We also were able to hold on to our house in Petoskey.  Money is a tool, not an end.)

It’s an amazing experience for me to read over that list today.  There certainly are some things (not many) that I haven’t shared that I still fear, but here this huge list of things that I did fear has almost totally evaporated.  I don’t fear any of these any more.  Writing this list and reflecting upon it later, helps me face the things I fear today and act out of faith rather than out of that fear.

What are some ways that we want to stay in our safe secure places of familiarity and sameness?  I’d like to look at this internationally, nationally, locally, and in our own church.

First, internationally.  We tend to have a built in defense mechanism when we are traveling in a foreign country.  We are hyper vigilant about our safety.  I had many different experiences while traveling in the Middle East for three weeks while in seminary.  Every night after our touring and learning, I tried to find an internet café to blog about the day’s events.  While we were in Damascus, Syria, I left the hotel looking for an internet café.  I didn’t speak the language, but I saw a mobile phone business that had advertising in both English and Arabic.  So I went in and asked for directions.  They were very friendly and even wrote down the directions in both English and Arabic.  I left the store and headed down the crowded street.  I soon had no idea where I was at.  I saw a policeman, and showed him the directions.  He smiled and motioned for me to follow him.  He walked me down the street to the intersection I needed to find and pointed me in the right direction.  I walked down that street, but I wasn’t seeing anything that looked like an internet café.  I went into a restaurant and showed them my piece of paper with the directions on it.  The host called a cook up to the front, and the cook motioned for me to follow him.  We walked across the street, down an alley (yes, down an alley and it was dark!), and there at the end of the alley in bright lights was a sign that read in English “Internet Café”!  The man smiled and went back to his restaurant.  All this hospitality happened in a country whose government was labeled as one of the Axis of Evil!

Then there was the time I got lost in Aman, Jordan walking back to the hotel at night.  The only people out were guards who looked like teenagers wearing fatigues and carrying machine guns.  I had no choice.  I showed him the key card with my hotel name on it, and he pointed me in the right direction.  When I got to a fork in the road, I looked back and he was waving me the right with a big smile.  Was I afraid?  A little, but my experience was extremely positive.

Another time Sarah and I were in France and we got invited to join a couple for lunch back at their apartment.  Were we being scammed?  Were we about to get jumped as dumb American tourists?  We weren’t sure, but we decided the opportunity was too good to pass, and we accepted the offer of hospitality.  We went back to their apartment and they treated us to lunch.  It was a wonderful time!  Not every foreigner is out to get you.

Second, nationally.  In 2011 our national budget is $3.8 trillion (New York Times).  Of that President Obama is asking congress for $708.8 billion for defense (New York Times).  That’s about 19% or 1/5 of the budget.  According to one source, “The 2009 U.S. military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined and is over nine times larger than the military budget of China.”   Another website points out that much of our current debt is from past wars.  If you add that into our spending on defense the cost goes up to as much as 54% of our current budget!  The numbers can probably be argued back and forth, but the overall point is, we Americans spend a lot of money on security.  If money is an indicator of what we worship, then Americans definitely worship security and defense.  Something seems wrong here.  I don’t know what the answer to this problem is.  I’m not a politician, but something is definitely wrong.

Third, let’s look more locally.  I think one of the prime ways that we act out of fear rather than faith is by building friendships only with people who live in neighborhoods that are similar to ours ethnically and socioeconomically.  Why is this the case?  What fear lays behind this act of security?  I need to bring up a significant fear that I think hinders many of us, especially women, from doing so and that is the fear of being raped.  Perhaps this shows up when one thinks about tutoring in an urban school, delivering a food box to a family’s home, or volunteering at a city boys and girls club.  According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) one in six women and one in thirty-three men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, and 73% of sexual assaults are perpetrated by a non-stranger, someone the victim knows.  In other words, the likelihood of being sexually assaulted by a complete stranger is much smaller than being sexually assaulted on a date.  This is not a sermon about sexual assault, but I do want to touch on it briefly.

In their book, The Female Fear: The Social Cost of Rape, Margaret T. Gordon, dean of the graduate school of public affairs at the University of Washington, and Stephanie Riger, director of the women’s studies program and professor of psychology at University of Illinois-Chicago, say, “Until society and the major institutions in this country are willing to take responsibility for female fear and do whatever is necessary to reduce both rape and the burden of fear of rape on women, it would be unwise to advocate that women completely stop being afraid…Although fear appears disproportionate to the actual risks women face as measured by victimization and reported crime data, women’s fear is proportionate to their own estimates of their own risks.  The rates do not give an individual woman any comfort with respect to her own chances of being attacked…Whatever the causes of rape and other violence against women, a major effect of these crimes on even nonvictims is self-imposed restrictions.  Men are more frequent victims of every violent crime except rape yet they do not react by restricting their behavior, suggesting that something more than crime is implicated…It seems that crime against women, whatever the  motivation of the individual criminal, has the cumulative effect of reinforcing social norms about appropriate behavior for women” (118ff, emphasis original).

I would hope that SCC would be a community of healing for the painful and debilitating fear caused by sexually assault.  This would come through small groups, support groups, prayer, spiritual friendships, worship, communion, service, and more.  At the same time, I would hope that SCC would also be a community that acts out of faith rather than fear.  There are many things we could be afraid of that we don’t act on.  As Scott Bader-Saye says in his book, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear, “According to the Center for Disease Control, the top three causes of death in the United States in 2002 were, in order, heart disease, cancer, and stroke [Actually, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the top cause of death is birth!].  Yet these are not what we are afraid of, at least not in the same way we are afraid of terrorism, pedophiles, road rage, school shootings, plane wrecks, risky strangers, monster moms, killer bees, serial killers, new addictions…, and a host of new medical and psychological conditions (such as mad cow disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and super viruses such as West Nile, SARS, bird flue, and Ebola)” (15).

Perhaps a personal example is in order.  Sarah and I love backpacking.  Whenever we talk to non-backpackers, one of the first things that comes up is bears.  Our friends and family want to know how we can hike while bears are around.  Aren’t these predators stalking us on the trails?  The reality is that the likelihood of being mauled by a bear is tiny (Backpacker Magazine).  You are much more likely to die driving to the park than you are to get mauled by a bear.  And once you’re in the park, you’re more likely to fall off a cliff, be struck by lightening, or die of hypothermia than you are to get mauled by a bear.  Fear isn’t rational is it?  We’re still much more afraid of being mauled by a predator.  We don’t even think twice about driving to the park.  So while the fear of bears does lead Sarah and me to take precautions, it doesn’t stop us from enjoying God’s creation.  We are called to live by faith, not fear.

Lastly, our very own church.  How do we act out of fear rather than faith when we come together?  Here are some ways I think we do that.  We join small groups with people who are like us rather than try a small group that is made of different kinds of people.  We also join small groups based around what we’re interested in learning.  What if you joined a small group that would stretch your interests?

On Sunday morning we are tempted to talk to people who we know rather than branch out and talk to people we don’t know.  Here’s a basic way to introduce yourself to someone you don’t know: “Hi, I’m Tom.  I don’t think I know your name” or “Hi, I’m Tom.  I know we’ve met, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”  Then use their name immediately.  “So John, are you from around here?”

What about the places where we serve?  I think we are again tempted to serve in places and ministries that are familiar and comfortable.  If I had followed this way of living, I wouldn’t be here today as your pastor.  I’d still be on staff at another church doing what was comfortable and familiar.

Friends, we are called to live not be fear but by faith.  What is God calling you to today that you are afraid of?

Do not be afraid!

Prayer (BCP – 8^th Sunday after Epiphany):
Most loving Father, whose will it is for us to give thanks for all things, to fear nothing but the loss of you, and to cast all our care on you who cares for us: Preserve us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties, that no clouds of this mortal life may hide from us the light of that love which is immortal, and which you have manifested to us in your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Next Steps (share your experience with these next steps in the comments section):
1. List your fears and share the list with someone.
2. Conquer a fear by take a step of faith in a new direction.
3. Look up the “Don’t be afraid” passages in the Bible.
4. Other…