The Rev. Dr. Kevin Frederick, the president of the American Waldensian Society, recently preached this sermon in two predominantly African American congregations in western North Carolina. Kevin based his sermon on Jonah 1:1-12 and Matthew 8:23-27.
What are the things you fear? Perhaps it is growing old and the fear of a stroke, or blindness, or dementia, or cancer, or of a host of handicapping conditions. Maybe you fear the possibility of someone breaking into your social security or bank account and taking your identity and your finances to the cleaners. Perhaps you fear the impact of the “big beautiful bill” on the social safety net and cuts to Medicare and a host of other social programs. Many fear deportation. Our Hispanic neighbors feel fear every time they leave their home for work or to go to the grocery store. Racial profiling is as bad for them today as it was for African Americans in the Jim Crow era.
A couple months ago, I visited the Nkhoma Synod in Malawi, Africa, where I taught a class about masculinity and family well-being. While I was in Malawi with nine others from Western North Carolina Presbytery, I spoke with the chaplain at Nkhoma Hospital. He told me that the recently imposed cuts in the US Agency for International Development had resulted in the loss of medications to treat AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. He said that his patients’ most common question was, “Does this mean I am going to die?” The Nkhoma hospital has been struggling to cut back elsewhere so that these life-saving medications could continue to be provided. But that is a short-term solution. The long-term impact of US budget cuts will be that many people will unnecessarily die. So far, 400,000 people have died in the past five months worldwide because of the loss of funding from the US Agency for International Development. We live in troubled times and as hard as life is already, these cuts mean that many more people live in existential fear.
The question we must ask as Christians is: What is the most constructive response to the factors in our society which have caused so much fear?
Our scripture passages from the Gospel of Matthew and from the Old Testament book of Jonah allow us to critically examine a contrast between two approaches to fear. Both Jonah and Jesus are asleep in the hull of a boat; Jesus is sleeping in a small fishing boat with his disciples in the midst of a storm, while Jonah is asleep below deck in a seagoing vessel with a crew of sailors on board during a raging storm. The contrast of response is dramatic and serves as instruction for us when we face the storms of life. Whereas Jesus is sleeping to be able to continue his ministry of healing the next day, Jonah is running from God.
We learn in this story that the Lord had sent Jonah to Ninevah to preach to the wicked Ninevites. Jonah knew that God wanted him to go preach in Ninevah, but he was afraid to do what God wanted. So, he tried to escape to Tarshish.
Have you ever tried to hide from God? It is a futile attempt because God is always with us and lives within us. You cannot run from or hide from God. Jonah had been instructed to go to Ninevah which was located on the mighty Tigris River. But Jonah had booked passage away from Ninevah. But now there is a raging storm that threatens to sink the cargo ship and drown everyone aboard. Things had become so dire that the sailors had dumped their entire cargo over the side of the ship in hopes of keeping their boat afloat.
They prayed to their pagan gods to no effect, and Jonah, feeling full of guilt and uselessness, said to them, “Save yourselves by sacrificing me, throw me over the side.” Let’s analyze this story a bit.
Jonah is a holy man, a messenger of the one true God, and rather than turn to God and pray for deliverance, he cowers in fear and does nothing. The crew on the boat turns to him to intervene with prayer to Jonah’s God, but he denies his calling as a prophet and says instead, “Throw me overboard and you will save yourselves.”
What kind of religious leadership is that? Jonah is filled by a religion of fear. It is a full-blown pity party fueled by fear, guilt, and shame. “Things are so bad here, just kill me.”
I have been reading extensively about the early 19th century British Navy and have learned that when bad things were happening on a Man of War ship, out of superstition and fear, the crew would often identify someone to blame, and they would call that person a “Jonah” and sometimes they would throw the Jonah overboard in order to change the luck of the crew. Fear can do dastardly things to human beings and relationships.
How is the church called to witness when fear is the dominant theme in our society? Have you noticed how the use of fear has caused this nation to identify all Hispanics as Jonahs? Where I live on Randolph Street, several of my neighbor families are Hispanic and they are all fearful of ICE regardless of whether they are here legally or not. We read of people rounded up who are citizens of this nation. They are locked into detention and sometimes shipped to foreign countries. One couple who have been dear friends of mine for ten years are planning to move themselves and their three girls to Guatemala in the Spring until the madness of fear in this country directed at all Hispanics dissipates. The “big beautiful bill” plans to spend more on border security and immigrant control than on all the other national justice agencies combined, at the expense of other law enforcement and social service agencies.
This spring I had a meeting in Nogales, Arizona, to assess what is happening at the US-Mexico border. Here’s what I learned. All migration across the border has virtually stopped. A 35-foot steel wall runs for hundreds of miles already with hundreds more to build. Several surveillance helicopters and many border control vehicles monitored our actions that day and the border itself is now militarized. The border wall costs 45 million dollars per mile just to build. Then add to that the personnel and equipment to patrol and you have to start asking how far does fear cause us to distort who we are and who our neighbors are?
The religion of fear is communicated each and every Sunday in this country in churches that identify with the Christian Nationalist movement. And the message that they clearly and alarmingly communicate is that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, are forces which are endangering this nation. Their preachers tell fear-driven Christians to ban books from school libraries because they don’t want their children to be exposed to lives and stories different from themselves. In this county the religion of fear communicates the distorted message that teaching about the existence of slavery and the Jim Crow era is too scary for their children. But those same parents will allow their children to endlessly watch horror movies and play video games full of death and violence. There is no harm in that, right?
Fear drives many to build fallout shelters stocked with survival food and gear. We have managed to vilify anyone who thinks differently than ourselves or who expresses their sexuality in ways different from the norm. Fear-driven religion has led increasing numbers of people to shoot strangers or ram cars into crowds of innocent people who have gathered to exercise the American right to protest. America is driven by the religion of fear and we have identified many Jonahs who must be sacrificed to appease the god of fear. Fear looks at climate change and says it is a hoax and tells us that we are distorting reality. Fear puts on blinders as 1000-year floods happen way too often across our nation.
And, to prove it is a hoax, fear-driven leaders will cut out Federal monies for real emergencies and direct them to the politically hyped threat of invasion by brown Americans. The religion of fear has crept into all aspects of our society and the whole world is watching as we do our best to isolate ourselves behind walls of fear while we destroy our relationships with the rest of the world.
So, what path do we Christians follow, the hiding path of Jonah that is ready to sacrifice himself and everything else to appease the god of fear, or do we follow Jesus who remains calm in the storm, who exercises faith, and acts in ways that restore order out of chaos? It is time we awakened from the hull of this ship of state and claim our faith and our strength because the world needs us to act as true followers of our Lord Jesus Christ. Exercise your faith in a God of love and justice. When our nation is governed by fear we Christians must stand strong to oppose the theology of fear that is governing our country. There are things we can do in our lives every day that proclaim that we follow a God of Love.
Old Testament professor and theologian Dr. Walter Bruggemann, who taught at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, wrote these words years ago before he retired. They most certainly apply to today: “The truth is that frightened people will never turn the world, because they use too much energy in protection of self. It is the vocation of the baptized, the known, and named, the unafraid, to make the world whole.”
So dear people, each of you. Do not fear, for Jesus says, I have called you by name and you are mine.
The author, the Rev. Dr. Kevin Frederick, is the president of the American Waldensian Society and the now retired former pastor of the Waldensian Presbyterian Church in Valdese, North Carolina.