Enough is enough

Acts 2: 42-47
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
May 7, 2017

The dancing saints of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

We spend a lot of our energy—physical, mental, spiritual—managing and controlling our anxiety and fear. There’s nothing new in that statement. Psychological theorists like Freud, Jung, and Adler knew it. Philosophers like Camus and Sartre knew it. Plato, Socrates, Kant, and Kierkegaard too. Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, all the way back to Moses and Abraham and Sarah and beyond. 

Managing and controlling our fear and anxiety is where most sin comes from. I’m not talking about anxiety that requires diagnosis and medication. I’m not talking about the anxiety a transgender youth experiences nearly every day. I’m not talking about the fear of not having health care. I’m not talking about the fear of having one’s rights stripped away. Or being deported. Or the anxiety and fear of those who have no idea what it’s like to be someone like this.

   I’m talking about the anxiety, the fear that feeds on our needs, desires, wants, dreams we all have and whether or not they can be realized on any given day—from petty things like finding a parking space or getting through the line in the grocery store, all the way to, are we living the life we’re supposed to? Sometimes when we’re controlling and managing our fear and anxiety, we try to control and manage other people and the ways they manage and control their fear and anxiety. We can get stuck in our limbic brain or what some call the “lizard brain”. It’s our feeling brain, the primary force behind most of our behavior.

   Ironically, some of our miseries come from living a life of privilege, what we call “first world problems”. In her book The Soul of Money, author Lynne Twist speaks to the myth of scarcity that we repeat to ourselves every day. When we wake up in the morning, what are the first thoughts we have? For many of us it goes something like this: “I didn’t get enough sleep. I don’t have enough energy or time to do everything that has to be done today.” She writes that the thought ‘not enough’ occurs to us automatically, without little or no critical thought as to whether it’s true. We tell ourselves things like “I don’t get enough exercise, I don’t have enough work, my company is not making enough profits, I’m not organized enough, I don’t have enough money, I don’t have enough time off”.

   Then it gets personal: “I’m not thin enough, pretty, handsome, successful, smart, educated, happy”—add your own to that ever-growing list. Before the day even begins we’re found wanting, unable to rise to whatever challenge that has been set before us. We’re always behind the 8-ball, like Sisyphus pushing that mighty boulder to nowhere.

   We do this at church as well: we’re not big enough, we don’t have enough money, we don’t have enough members, we don’t have enough time to do everything. Hence we can’t be generous with the life of the church, the Body of Christ. We can’t follow our risky Jesus where he’s going because we’ve convinced ourselves we don’t have enough to give, let alone have enough for ourselves.

   And we do this in our so-called civil society. We still hold to the myth that we don’t have enough to provide healthcare for everyone, to educate everyone who wants to go to college, to pay everyone equally for equal work, to pay a living wage, to feed and shelter every human being. When we try to manage and control this kind of anxiety and fear, we engage those lizard brains of ours and we wind up bullying ourselves and others. We use sexism and racism, homophobia and Islamophobia, and we warp religion, all of us self-righteous, and we judge and we blame to not only to control and manage our anxiety and fear but to bully others to quell our fear and anxiety of them, the “other”. We make life a living hell. Empire is based on fear and scarcity and death. God’s Beloved Community is about courage and love and abundant life.

   Author Anne Lamott asks the question, Where is God when people are bullied? On the cross, being crucified. Being crucified certainly didn’t end with Jesus. Many of those who loved Jesus met their end on the cross and in other horrid deaths. But these early Christians decided they’d had enough of worrying about whether there was enough. They’d had enough of crucifixion, enough of fear—it was time to live like resurrected people. 

   The great philosophical master Yoda said that fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering, which can only mean that George Lucas had read Paul’s letter to the Romans. We’re either citizens of the Empire or servants of the Beloved Community. We either live like there’s enough or we don’t. We either live with glad and generous hearts or we don’t. We either live like resurrected people or we don’t. 

   Our fear and anxiety can cause us to forget who we really are. And so we come to church, to worship, to remember. Jesus said, “Remember me whenever you break bread and drink the cup.” This Table is not only a memorial of a death but a celebration of a life lived to set us free and a love that death cannot kill. When will we hit bottom and realize we’ve had enough of fear and anger and hate and suffering, enough of the cross, enough of making a living hell for ourselves and others? There is more than enough resurrection, more than enough grace and joy and love to go around. It begins with us—each of us and our life together. Are we dead or are we alive again?

Amen.