The Intersection of Fear and Hope

Ten years ago, give or take a few months, I began a sermon on a passage from Isaiah with: "We live in a time of fearful hearts." It went on from there, as sermons tend to do. It has begun to occur to me recently that the starter might have, quite unintentionally, been one of those thoughts that operates on kairos as well as chronos.

Let Madeleine L'Engle explain better: "Kairos. Real time. God's time. That time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, that time we do not recognize while we experience it, but only afterwards, because kairos has nothing to do with chronological time."*


She explains that in Greek, at least in the Greek spoken in and around the first century of the Common Era, there are two words for time. [Kaire is, or was, also the basic greeting, translating as "Hail."]

At any rate (backing out of that extremely interesting rabbit hole), why is it that "We live in a time of fearful hearts" is so, uh... timeless?

Where history, theology, and sociology braid - choose your continent, era, and forms of government. This is, perhaps, an infinitely repeating pattern. And yet. (Or, if you prefer, "And at the same time.")

Where is the hope? Where is what Carl Sagan called "a candle in the dark" in one of his book titles?**

Is it possible that the intersection of fear and hope is also the intersection of us and God? That would be my reading of the map. Though I am notorious in my family for lacking an internal geographical compass, I trust this map reading.

And then how do I live in the intersection, maybe even in the (ahem) cross-walk? How does any of us? How do our hearts accommodate fear and hope, not antagonistically but intertwined, which they seem to be evolutionarily - which for me also means how the Creator of the Universes made us?

We do as Mister Rogers said that his mother always told him when he learned of something frightening: Look for the helpers.

There is in my family of origin a small myth about me at age 3 or 4: that my father, teasingly, asked me an existential question: "Why are we here?" And that in reply, without hesitation, I said, "To help others." (I know, I know.) The myth continues. My father asked a follow-up question, as good reporters will: "Then why are the others here?" Deft at a press conference as only toddlers can be, I answered, "To be helped!"

That'll preach. The older I get, the more strongly my theopraxis (my practice of God) is rooted in relational community. Back when I began that sermon (Isaiah 43 or 55, maybe), I was just beginning my year of congregational internship. A year later, at the approval interview at the synod office, one of the interview committee remarked on what he saw and heard in my essay answers and face-to-face answers about a "theology of community."

All of which is to say that that seems to  be how I find myself living in the intersection of fear and hope.

*Quoted material taken from Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. By Madeleine L'Engle. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2001.

**The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. By Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. New York: Random House (reprint), 1997.

The Intersection of Fear and Hope