Security and the Risk of Faith
Third Sunday after Pentecost
Eugene Peterson’s colloquial translation of the bible, The Message, began in anger. The object was his congregation. Peterson had been the pastor of this small Presbyterian church for many years, preaching and teaching, leading them in worship and gathering them for communion. He had reason to think that the people under his care were beginning to live into the freedom that Christ offers. But then, in the early 80s, race riots broke out in nearby Baltimore. At the same time a deep economic recession was taking hold. Peterson watched as his church turned from freely loving their neighbors to installing security systems and buying guns. As he later wrote, “These free people in Christ were becoming enslaved right before my eyes to their fears and anxieties, their world reduced to their possessions and their neighborhoods.”
Peterson was angry and frustrated, he felt as though the last 20 years of his ministry hadn’t made a dent. His anger turned to action, though. He decided he’d call his congregation back to the way of Christ through another pastor’s plea for freedom: Paul’s fiery letter to the Galatians. The problem he ran into, however, was that the standard translations just didn’t convey the passionate tone Peterson had caught in Paul’s Greek. Eventually, he decided to translate Galatians for his church, rendering the letter in a language his people would sit up and hear.
I thought of this story as I read our scriptures for this Sunday. In both Galatians and our Gospel reading, we encounter profound and challenging calls to freedom. And these calls for bold freedom come in stark contrast to the anxieties and fears all around us. Like Peterson’s church in the early 80s, our time is marked by economic decline and rising violence. Mass shootings have brought terror to the common places of our daily lives from schools, to grocery stores, and even churches. Beyond that, many fear that our basic public institutions are on the brink of failure. And these realities are all playing out before the background of pandemic disease and climatic upheavals that make the future seem all the more uncertain and unprecedented.
In response our world is becoming ever more obsessed with security and safety in all its myriad forms. Safety, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, is becoming its own kind of ideology—safetyism. From the ideas we take in to who we allow ourselves to interact with, there is a general scramble to the close circles where we feel secure. When something moves from being a common sense concern of human life and into an ideological force, it is becoming a Power in rebellion. Security and safety have become our more common idols, and the temptation we now face is allowing our fears and anxieties to make us their slaves. Instead of casting our cares upon Christ through prayer and turning outward to our neighbors in ministry, far too many churches are asking, “should we hire armed security guards?”
Maybe, given this reality, it is time for us to hear a word from Paul, who preached in angry love to those “foolish Galatians” so long ago. Maybe it is time for us to hear from Jesus who was so set on risking his own life for the sake of love, that he couldn’t concern himself with those opposed to him or wait around for those who wanted to tie up the loose ends of their lives. Our scriptures are powerful messages of the call of the Kingdom of God on our lives. Safety and security, not being biblical virtues, are not among them.
What Paul is concerned with is how faith is embodied. Like so many before and after, the Galatians had concluded that being faithful to God had more to do with a mark on their bodies (at least male bodies) than it did living with love for their neighbors. Like armed guards or other safety schemes, circumcision was a means by which they were seeking security. It may seem strange to us, but in a world where such signs mattered a great deal, this bodily mark was a way of quieting the anxiety of faith. “Are we right with God?,” they asked. “Yes, because we have received the mark of participation in God’s covenant people,” they answered with circumcision.
For Paul, this mark was just another way to avoid living into the fullness of life that God had to offer them. What Christ had given them was a whole new way of being embodied in the world; a way of life marked by love and joy, peace and patience, kindness and generosity, gentleness and self-control. This life was available to the Galatians, but it couldn’t be claimed if they were still set on securing their own safety.
It is freedom from the need to secure oneself that is also at the center of our Gospel reading this Sunday. There, Jesus is moving toward Jerusalem, intent on the risky confrontation that will mean the cross. In this short passage we find him so focused on his movement toward God’s reign that he doesn’t care much that the Samaritans don’t approve of him. Jesus also has no patience for those who want to hold onto the safety of their society, social obligations, and family. The coming of God’s reign is urgent, and Jesus knows that it is all too easy to seek to enclose the Kingdom in the safe walls of the familiar that we imagine we can control.
It is important at this point to say that though what I’ve been offering here may seem like some bold words, I am not personally bold. I’m trying, as best I can, to offer what I hear our scriptures saying to our times. And yet, personally, I feel many of the same anxieties and fears as the rest of us. I can work myself up imagining a shooting at church or the complete dissolution of political order. I often worry about the rapid unraveling of our ecosystems and the disasters it is bringing. An itemized list of my anxieties could fill many pages.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in prayer with all these anxieties, cares, and concerns. Usually in these sits I just offer all these things up, knowing that God receives them and I don’t hear any clear response. Nevertheless, I feel a bit more peace having handed them over. But this time I heard something more certain within me. A voice said: “Seek first the kingdom.” It was simple but clear.
“Seek first the kingdom.” It should be our central concern, our daily call, I knew that. And yet, it is easy to forget that vocation in all the worries and wants of life. With this reminder I was called back to what should be our constant focus. It is in looking for God’s kingdom that we become curious about our neighborhoods and neighbors rather than afraid of them. It is in seeking the reality of God in this world that we are made bold enough to risk our security for the sake of love and truth. It is in seeking the kingdom that we can let go of the enslaving Powers of safety and security and find instead conviviality and flourishing as fragile and finite creatures.
In Galatians and the Gospel we are offered a vision of a life where the kingdom is our first desire. It is a life of freedom, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the world that is lost in fear and confusion. By letting go of our own anxieties and offering them to Christ, we can begin to live in the pattern of Jesus—a bold and determined life centered on love without fear. Eugene Peterson has rendered this message clearly in his translation of the close of our reading from Galatians:
Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified. Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives.
Seeking the kingdom in every detail of our lives. That is our call, and if we get busy with that work, we won’t have time to be worried about anything else.
