Psychologist Wayne Dyer, author of many self-help books, tells of attending his twenty-year high school reunion. At that reunion he met a former classmate on whom he’d had a secret crush. She was beautiful and confident even in high school, and Dyer could never muster up the courage to ask her out. To his surprise, at the reunion this woman whom he had yearned to date confessed to Dyer that she’d had a secret crush on him all through high school, and she would have been thrilled to go out with him if only he had asked. His adolescent fear of rejection had robbed him of an incredible opportunity to date the girl of his dreams. (1)
It is a frivolous example, perhaps, but that’s what fear does to us sometimes, doesn’t it? It shuts the door on great opportunities. Fear is the very opposite of the faith to which Christ has called us. Today’s lesson from John’s Gospel tells us that “on the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.”
We can identify with these anxious, fearful disciples of Jesus. After all, it was the Sunday evening following Jesus’ crucifixion. This had been a traumatic weekend for these disciples. Can we blame them for hovering nervously in the Upper Room? The doors were shut, says John, “for fear of the Jewish leaders.”
How tragic it is any time the doors of the church are shut because of fear. There was a time when many churches in this land were never locked. Few churches would risk that today. We fear that someone would carry the church away.
There were other doors that were shut, however, in those allegedly golden days of old when many of us were growing up. There were doors, for example, that were shut against people of other races. How tragic it is when fear . . . which is at the heart of any prejudice . . . shuts the doors of a church.
How tragic it is when fear shuts the door of a person’s heart. That happens to people too. They draw into their own private worlds because something “out there” is just too threatening. How about you? Are you living behind closed doors because of fear?
One reason the disciples were hiding behind closed doors may have been the proliferation of rumors in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. John says that the disciples were behind closed doors because of “fear of the Jewish leaders.” There is no indication in the Scriptures that such fears were justified. There is no evidence that the violence of that terrible weekend went beyond the torture and death of Jesus. But surely there were rumors. It’s always that way. Whenever there is conflict between rival groups, rumors fly. Fear escalates. Reason is suspended.
Sometimes the results of such rumors are relatively mild. In a 1973 comic monologue on The Tonight Show, host Johnny Carson repeated a rumor that had been making the rounds in local newspapers that local stores were running out of supplies of toilet paper. You want to guess what happened? That week, millions of shoppers ran out and stocked up on extra toilet paper just in case the rumor was true. It was a national phenomenon. Just the rumor of a possible toilet paper shortage almost led to a real toilet paper shortage all over the U. S. (2)
Rumors can sometimes provide us with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rumors fly that the country is running out of toilet paper and, because of the fear engendered by the rumor, people start buying it up and soon the country nearly does run out of toilet paper. Sometimes, however, the power of idle rumors can have much more tragic consequences.
The late columnist and author Nell Mohney was for many years a popular religion writer for the Chattanooga, (TN) Times-Free Press. In her columns Ms. Mohney related many moving stories from her personal experience.
One of her stories goes back to her college days at a small liberal arts school in Greensboro, North Carolina. There was a girl in that college named Amy Pruett. Amy was a junior transfer from a prestigious school in the East. Mohney said that she and her friends immediately assumed that Amy had failed to make it in her fancy Eastern school. They concluded that Amy probably felt that a small Southern school would be a “push-over” for her and that is why she transferred to their school.
Amy’s participation in class, however, proved that their assumptions were wrong. She was extremely bright and very capable, but that didn’t change her classmates’ behavior toward her. Amy was a very talented person but she was not well-liked, and Mohney and her friends did nothing to help the situation. They consciously did not open up their tightly held friendship and social groups to Amy at all.
Mohney wrote that, in retrospect, she realized that it was a mixture of prejudice and envy on their part. In actuality they envied her dark, sultry good looks, including the fact she had a fabulous figure. Making them even more envious were her expensive clothes that she seemed to have in abundance. Disdainfully, they called her “over-dressed.” Amy’s Northern accent and her no-nonsense, straightforward manner were certainly not appreciated in that small Southern college. These girls had been trained to believe that ladies should be soft-spoken, genteel and indirect, not assertive.
As time went on Amy’s life did not get better. Rumors flew because she left school every Friday immediately after classes and did not return until late Sunday night. After Thanksgiving another ugly rumor began that Amy was having an affair with an older man who picked her up each Friday afternoon and returned her to campus late Sunday evening. It was thought that he was married and that “for services rendered” Amy was given the beautiful clothes and spending money. The invisible wall dividing Amy from her classmates was growing even taller.
And then, immediately after Christmas, news spread rapidly through the girls’ dorm and across the campus. Amy Pruett lay in a Greensboro hospital near death from an overdose of sleeping pills. The school psychologist called the students together and told them the real story. Amy’s mother was dying of cancer, said the psychologist. Amy was lonely and friendless on campus. She was the only person assigned to a single room that year of college life.
Nell Mohney’s words tell it best. “The shy but brilliant only child of wealthy parents, Amy had returned home from Vassar to be near her mother during her terminal illness. [That is why she had transferred to their school.] It was . . . traumatic to leave her friends . . . as well as to face her mother’s impending death.
“It became an almost impossible situation when she met our walls of prejudice and hostility,” Mohney continued. “But it was the ugly rumor that pushed her over the edge. After all, the older man who transported her to and from the campus each week was her father.”
As you can imagine there was an outpouring of anguish and repentance across the campus following that revelation. Fortunately Amy recovered and her new classmates, now her friends, had a second chance to take her into their social groups and their hearts. But Nell Mohney never forgot the devastating power of rumor. (3)
Idle rumors can ruin a life. They can start a rebellion. They can trap good people behind closed doors because of fear. There was no evidence that the Jewish leaders intended any harm to Jesus’ followers, but there were rumors and that was enough to destroy the sense of well-being for those first followers of our Lord.
We should be able to identify with those early disciples. There is much fear in our society. That fear is often fed by rumor. We have perfected the rumor mill in our society. We have the press. No paper or television station wastes ink or air time on good news. Bad news IS good news for the nation’s media. A steady stream of bad news feeds many people’s fears.
And we have blogs on the Internet, many of them characterized by “fake news,” that are dedicated to stoking people’s fears as well. Fear can be so irrational. Did you know, for example, that you are 11 times more likely to die from a stroke than to be murdered? If we were as careful to watch our diet as we are to lock our doors at night, we would all be in much better shape. The disciples were hovering behind locked doors, first of all, because of the proliferation of rumors.
In the second place, they were hovering behind closed doors because they had temporarily misplaced their faith. These were not atheists or agnostics that Jesus had recruited. They were not religious scholars by any means, but they surely had some familiarity with the Psalms. They probably grew up reciting, “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” in their synagogues. They were familiar with Joshua and Moses and the other heroes of the Old Testament. They knew that the Lord was the Rock of their Salvation who would never forsake them. Where was their faith now--the faith that had sustained them from the time they were infants?
Besides, they had been with Jesus. Some of them for three years. How many times had Jesus told them not to be afraid? Someone has noted that there are 366 “Fear not!” verses in the Bible--one for each day of the year and an extra one for Leap Year! Had not any of it rubbed off on them? A time of crisis came and they had gone back to acting as they did before Jesus ever called them to follow him. Where was their faith?
It’s like that small boy who was riding a bus home from Sunday school. He was very proud of the card he had received that day in class which had a picture and a caption that read: “Have Faith in God.” Then to his dismay the card slipped from his hand and fluttered out the window. “Stop the bus!” he cried. “I’ve lost my ‘faith in God!’”
The driver pulled the bus to a stop, and as the boy climbed out and went to retrieve his card, one of the adult riders smiled and made a comment about the innocence of youth. A more perceptive adult observed, “All of us would be better off if we were that concerned about our faith.” (4)
Under stress, something like that often happens to us. We temporarily misplace our faith and go back to acting as if we never heard the Gospel. We do this even though we know that faith is our greatest ally. Those who trust in a good and just God never lose hope. They are perennial optimists. Such faith not only makes us easier to live with but is also of great benefit in dealing with some of our greatest fears.
Henry Ward Beecher once said, “Every day has two handles; we can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.” The disciples had hold of the handle of anxiety. They were hiding behind closed doors because of the proliferation of unfounded rumors. They were hiding because they had temporarily misplaced their faith. Principally, however, they were hiding behind closed doors because they felt abandoned.
There was something about the presence of the Master that gave them a sense of calm even in the presence of imminent danger. There was that time that he calmed the storm and walked out to the boat where they were huddled. The first words he spoke were these: “Fear not. It is I.”
Where was he now? Crucified. Body stolen from the tomb. Absent from them in flesh and in spirit. There they were--sheep without a shepherd--children whose parents had abandoned them and left them to face the cold cruel world on their own.
Psychologists tell us that this is one of the greatest fears of childhood. Parents leaving children in the church nursery for the first time have to give the children a lot of reassurance. Deep in the hearts of many children is the fear that their parents are never coming back. That fear continues with us over a lifetime. This is one of the most crippling results of divorce on some children. “Why has Daddy abandoned me? Doesn’t he love me anymore?” Teenagers have much of the same devastation when called upon to handle the death of a parent. We are usually not aware of it, but that emotion stays with us through our entire lives. A new widow or widower will often have an overwhelming sense of abandonment. Such is also the experience of life without God. But God has not abandoned His people.
The story’s told about a small village in Poland the day the Nazis came to town. It was on a Sunday and the people were in church worshiping when troops of the Third Reich swarmed into the village. The soldiers entered the church and ordered everyone outside. Then the troops set fire to the structure. Then the soldiers pointed their weapons at the congregation.
But instead of shrinking in fear, these people began to sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Remember, it was a German, Dr. Martin Luther, who wrote this hymn. The people in the congregation as well as the German soldiers grew up singing this hymn. The people sang a verse, and then went on to the next verse, waiting for the bullets. They truly expected that rifle fire would stop their singing. But the bullets didn’t come.
Finally, looking around at the German soldiers surrounding them, they were astonished to see guns lowered and every hardened Nazi face, streaming with tears. The soldiers, one by one, two by two, slowly turned and climbed back into their trucks and jeeps. They pulled away from the little town. The soldiers left behind a congregation of the faithful, standing outside their burning church, singing. (5)
The disciples huddled behind closed doors because they felt abandoned. But they were not abandoned. Listen, here’s the Good News. Christ can penetrate the closed doors of our lives. Listen to the reading from John’s Gospel once again, “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.” (RSV)
There is the best antidote I know to the fear that so easily besets us. It is to experience the presence of the Risen Christ--to see the marks of his love for us in his hands and side--to hear him say, as he said to those early disciples, “Peace be with you.”
1. Wayne Dyer, Wisdom of the Ages (New York: Quill, 1998), p. 151.
2. Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo, The Hollywood Walk of Shame (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1993), p. 29.
3. Kingsport-Times News (TN), 10-21-94, p. 12D, “Rumors and Innuendo Could Destroy a Life,” Nell Mohney. Contributed by Dr. John Bardsley.
4. http://www.stjosephsbeaverton.ca/Bulletins/May%201%20%202011%20make%20up.pdf.
5. Adapted from Clark Tanner. Cited by Eloy Gonzalez, http://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/being-ready-means-living-in-faith-eloy-gonzalez-sermon-on-second-coming-52813.asp?Page=2.