Love and Fear  

Meditation for Christmas Lessons and Carols
Thompson Memorial Chapel - December 11, 2005

Angels are messengers who say things to us that we need to hear. Sometimes they’re things we know already; sometimes they’re things we could never imagine in the whole span of a universe. But in both Hebrew and Greek, “messenger” is the simple sense of the root word – which leaves open the interesting question of how to tell one kind of messenger from another, or one kind of message from another for that matter.

How you know that an angel is a messenger is by that telltale cargo of tidings. Maybe we first realized that angels must have wings as we began to consider the need to heft very large pieces of news into space and time where they can move and travel and arrive somewhere.

And how do you know that a particular messenger happens to be, of all things, an angel? Ah, that’s harder. Maybe by the direction in which life turns when the cargo arrives, when the news touches down. Maybe by the way the arrival of the message changes the way we see things that are already there. If, as the Talmud says, “we do not see things as they are – we see them as we are” – then maybe how you know that you’re the destination of an angelic message is by the way its arrival changes, not the “things,” but the “we.”

Fear not, says the Christmas angel-messenger – and of all the pieces of news that follow, that first one may be the hardest one to get aloft – at least in present atmospheric conditions. Actually it’s rather familiar cargo: messengers are always touching down in the biblical landscape to urge the people at their destinations not to worry. This is usually a sure sign of imminent spiritual earthquake. For if the bending of life toward love and justice suggests that an angel may have a hand (or, wing) in the message, then it’s likely that somewhere in the throes of the turning fearful things are being dislodged, displaced, unleashed. Fear not is one of those pieces of advice that has joy and danger, apprehension and anticipation, vulnerability and possibility woven together in it so tightly that, at first, it can be all but impossible to tease them apart.

Several summers ago I spent some sabbatical time in Israel and Palestine - hoping to get caught up in the stories of my faith at a deeper level, and sensing somehow that what I needed to do was to hear their message to me in a way that I hadn’t yet been able to hear it for myself.

What I caught there instead, at least at first, was a terrible cold. My head and my chest were a misery, to me and I’m sure to the others in my study group who had to listen to all the liquid sounds of my slow suffocation. Finally, probably in desperation, one of my classmates, an Irish nun named Margaret, kindly offered to give me an upper back massage. I found the offer startling and a little disturbing: uncomfortably intimate, for one thing, and medically improbable as far as the implication that mere fingers on the surface could reach the deep inner congestion. Never fear, she said – which should have been a tip-off. While Margaret worked on my shoulders and neck we compared notes about what felt like the risk of coming to this simmering and volatile landscape, and we talked about feeling overwhelmed by the flood of passions seething through the streets of a city that is simultaneously holy to three religions. After a while there was a moment of silence – just the working of Margaret’s fingers – and the next thing she said is something I can’t forget. They must have been the words I needed to hear; in fact I’ve wondered if maybe it was even the words she spoke that cured the cold – because the congestion was completely gone the next morning. Margaret said, “You know, I think there’s really only two emotions: love and fear. If you think about it, everything else comes somehow from one or the other of them. Or a combination.”

So much of the story of how the gospel arrives in this landscape of ours – like so much of the story of our lives – is an alloy of love and fear. Wasn’t it the volatile chemistry between love and fear that set Jesus and his friends on their journey through the passions of this seething landscape in the first place? Wasn’t it the welling up of both love and fear that finally flooded the narrow streets of Jerusalem in those few intense days at the end of his life? And isn’t it love and fear that flood those streets to this day, etching uncrossable lines between shrines of love and walls of dread? Every thread of feeling you can trace along the way of the story of Jesus seems to wind its way toward the confrontation between love and fear – from the challenge to think about God and one another in new ways to the terrifying tidings of an empty tomb. The agony of prayer and the heaviness of sleep in Gethsemane... the denial of Peter...the expediency of Pilate and the anger of Judas Iscariot... the cries of Jesus from the cross, pinned somewhere between pain and compassion... the fleeing of his friends and the solitary devastation of Mary... the skepticism of Thomas... the astonishment of the two who walked to Emmaus... Love and fear are the primary colors from which comes a spectrum of human shades in that story that’s as wide as the whole span of a universe.

It’s in the nature of fear to constrict and constrain. Fear cramps the musculature of the spirit, and dulls the very senses that would drink in what Saint Paul called the “still more excellent way” if only they could allow themselves to take the risk. It seems more than a little circular to try to soothe fear with the words “Don’t be afraid” – but vulnerability is the only hope the message of love has of opening the clenched heart that’s waiting at its destination and that needs so desperately to hear news to untie the knot of fear.

For love, of course, is the language in which God utters these tidings of great joy. The arrival of these tidings, of course, sets off ripples of fear, spasms in the spiritual musculature of a human race so tightly wound up against vulnerability that the invitation to “unclench” seems unthinkable – or, worse, impractical. And fear, of course, is the language that this world is trying to teach us.

“There is no fear in love,” John the Evangelist wrote to a world in which, by then, fear was casting a longer and longer shadow. “There is no fear in love,” he said, “but perfect love casts out fear.” But we love imperfectly – and so our love casts out fear imperfectly. And anger and denial and despair and doubt and cynicism and pragmatism and all the other forms that inner congestion can take – all the combinations of love and fear in which love remains unrecognizable for what it is – are still highly contagious, and seem always ready to suffocate us. And until we have understood them for what they are – the disguises that fear wears – how can we really begin to get caught up in the story of our faith, or hear them calling us to love one another?

In the landscape of fear, congested as we are, the language of love sounds almost unintelligible in the night. Desperate as we are to hear it, it seems all but impossible to clear a place for it to touch down in this world.

But now love is born; now holy love has arrived among us! It lands to speak a brave message that can cast out fear. And this room is full of its angels. And in this world, at this time, if we are willing to speak this message to each other – then this birth will untie clenched knot that used to be our heart, and sail us where it will across the landscape of a world that aches even now to be set free from fear.

The Rev. Richard E. Spalding
Chaplain, WilliamsCollege
Williamstown, Massachusetts