First Baptist Church on Littleton Common    

Consideration of “Antidotes for Fear”

By the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

1 John 4:7-21

Face your fears

Be courageous

Master perfect love

Be filled with faith

This week around the country,  the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will be remembered in school assemblies, church services, newspaper articles and in public memorial services.  Many will hear his vision, his valor and his courage and will be motivated and asked to do something, to make a difference through acts of service, acts of kindness and acts of justice.   

I have been inspired through out my life by Rev. King because of his vision, his courage and his leadership in the Civil Rights movement, but also because of his Christian faith which motivated and sustained him to go forward and fight for justice.   And so on this day before his 78^th birthday, it is my privilege to bring one of his many sermons and simply share his eloquent, his intelligent and faith filled words to this Baptist church.

Martin Luther King was the son of a Baptist pastor who was licensed to preach in 1947 when he was just 19 years old.  He was a preacher’s kid and therefore he grew up immersed in church and the church community.  King was ordained into the Christian ministry in 1948 and became the Associate pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church where he served with his father. He graduated from Morehouse College with a degree in sociology in 1948 and entered Crozer Theological seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania where he would receive his Bachelor of Divinity degree.  It is while he was at seminary that Rev. King was inspired by the work and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.  In 1954 he was appointed as the twentieth pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, after receiving a PhD in Systematic Theology from Boston University.   While he was in Boston he met Coretta Scott, who was music major at the New England Conservatory of Music.  He married her in 1953 and they would have four children; Yolanda, Martin Luther III, Dexter and Bernice.   In 1960 the family would move back to Atlanta where Rev. King would again serve as co-pastor with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church and as director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference until his assignation in 1968.  It was just this past year, in January 2006, that Coretta Scott King passed away.

Through out his career as a Baptist minister and pastor, I imagine Rev. King doing all the typical pastoral duties and functions that are part and parcel of the calling and the job.    As a man with a deep and abiding Christian faith I imagine him spending time in prayer, silence, reflection, Bible study, and sermon preparation.   He would have spent time visiting church members in their homes, making hospital and nursing home visits, counseling and praying with people during times of crisis or ill health.  He would have done funerals, weddings, served Communion and performed Baptisms.  He most likely spent hours in meetings at the church.  I imagine him at a Church Council meeting involved in ordinary but important conversations that all churches discuss such as the Sunday School curriculum or a plumbing problem.  Maybe he had to give an opinion on new choir robes, where to send mission money or a Stewardship campaign.  He may have had to answer the church phone, deal with solicitors or talk with lonely people just calling to hear a friendly voice.   Rev. King experienced all the typical pastoral duties that come with the ministerial role in an active and flourishing faith community.

But there was something else that Rev. Dr. King had to deal with that went beyond the typical pastor’s job description.  It was something he couldn’t ignore or dismiss. From the moment he was born Martin Luther King had to deal with the relentless oppression of racial injustice and the fear and the hate of segregation.  While he was a pastor, husband and father, the Civil Rights movement was picking up speed and Rev. King was compelled to speak out and to get involved.  In 1954 the passage of Brown vs. the Board of Education ended school segregation and was quickly followed by Rosa Parks and the bus boycotts of 1955.  As Rev. King spoke out more often, he began to feel the effects of his public words upon a community filled with fear and hate.  He was arrested countless times for silly things; for going 25 miles an hour in a 30 mile per hour zone; another time for loitering or failing to obey an officer; another time for falsifying his state tax returns.  Once he was arrested at a sit in and then transferred to a State Prison while others were released.  He was arrested and convicted during demonstrations and prayers vigils in Georgia, Alabama and Florida.  Twice bombs were thrown onto the porch of his home; he was stabbed in the chest in New York and then stoned in Chicago.   All because of the color of his skin. 

During this time, President Eisenhower forced the segregation of schools by having nine young black girls escorted into an all white school by the Arkansas National Guard. The Freedom Riders left on a bus from Washington, D.C., however their bus was burned; they were beaten, arrested and put in prison for sixty days.  Dogs and fire hoses were released with force on protestors which included children; civil rights workers, both black and white, were murdered and then four young Black girls were killed – in their Sunday School classroom when a bomb was thrown into their church.  All because of the color of their skin.   During this time the Vietnam conflict began to escalate and Rev. King met with Vice President Nixon, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.   He traveled to India to study methods of non-violence and in 1964 he met Pope Paul VI and received the Nobel Peace Prize. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man of faith, called by God to work for justice for all God’s children was assassinated on April 4, 1968.  [1]

I wonder if Dr. King was ever afraid.

There was a great deal to be afraid of.

Nothing seemed to stop him, but fear could have paralyzed him, and he could have just continued on quietly as a pastor at a church or as a professor at a university.  

Fear could have stopped him in 1956 - when the first bomb was thrown onto his porch.

Fear could have stopped him in 1958 - when he was stabbed in the chest.

Fear could have stopped him - when he was handcuffed the first, second, fourth, or eighth time.

Fear could have stopped him in 1963 - when four little girls were killed inside their Sunday School classroom.  

But fear did not stop this man of faith and of conviction and so what was his antidote for fear?  There is still fear all around us and within us.  What are Pastor King’s words to us about fear?

In a sermon entitled Antidotes for Fear, Pastor King says we are to:

Face our fears

Be courageous

Master perfect love

Be filled with faith

This sermon, with these four antidotes for fear are based on 1 John 4:18 , “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”

He begins this sermon presenting the problem of fear. King says:

In these days of catastrophic change and calamitous uncertainty, is there any man who does not experience the depression and bewilderment of crippling fear, which like a nagging hound of hell, pursues our every footstep? [2] 

He goes on to list a number of fears; fears about our physical health and well being, as well as threats from the physical world.  He mentions our phobias, our emotional and mental fears, our economic fears, our religious fears, the fear of the atomic bomb and the fear of death.  But Pastor King also challenges us to see how fear can be healthy.  King says:

“Fear is a powerfully creative force.  Every great invention and intellectual advance represents a desire to escape from some dreaded circumstance or condition.   The fear of darkness led to the discovery of the secret of electricity.  The fear of pain led to the marvelous advances of medical science.  The fear of ignorance was one reason that man built great institutions of learning.  The fear of war was one of the forces behind the birth of the United Nations.  Angelo Patri has rightly said, “Education consists in being afraid at the right time.”  If man were to lose his capacity to fear, he would be deprived of his capacity to grow, invent and create.  So in a sense fear is normal, necessary and creative.” [3]

King explains using snakes as his example, saying that there are normal fears and abnormal fears; a fear of snakes in the Amazon is a normal fear, but a fear of snakes in a city apartment is abnormal.  He summarizes “normal fear protects us: abnormal fear paralyzes us.”[4] 

I think this is interesting and a challenge – for us to think about how our own fears are healthy.  To think through which of our fears are normal fears and which are not and ponder how our fears could be a creative force within us.  Pastor King then suggests that we not try to get rid of our fears, but to master them and he gives us these four antidotes to fear: 

Face our fears

Be courageous

Master perfect Love

Be filled with faith.

First we must face our fears and ask why we are afraid.  Many of us have a lot of fears and many of us spend wasted years finding ways around them, rather than confronting them head on and going through them.  We avoid things, imagine all kinds of things and often make it worse.  We are fearful even take the first steps, because fear controls our mind and we don’t even want to think about it.  King points out that we will never be cured of our fears by escapism, but that confrontation will give us power over our fear.

The second antidote to fear is to master our fear through the use of courage.  Courage is the power of the mind to overcome fear.   Not all our fears are imaginary ones.  There is pain in this world; there are unjust systems and unfair practices that still affect our lives.  We live in an anxiety filled culture.  We can see natural disasters or the results of terrorism or war up close and personal, in color on CNN, moments after they have happened.  King says that “courage is an inner resolution to go forward in spite of obstacles and frightening situations” and he challenges us to “build dykes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.”  

Third, fear is mastered by love.   Rev. King turns to his text in 1 John 4: 18 “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear” and then he goes on to explain the strength of this perfect love.   King explains that “love” was not a mamby pamby wishy washy sentimental love.  Love was not the cheap love we see splashed all over the pink and red cards and candy that are already displayed in the drugstores for Valentines’ Day.   This past week Necco Candy Company came out with their 2007 heart sayings like: Bear Hug; Love Bird; Cool Cat; UR A Tiger; and Take a Walk.  This is not the kind of love that King was talking about.  This was not the kind of love that was going to help us master real fears and be courageous.  He was talking about a perfect love, a redemptive love evidenced in the type of love that Jesus Christ displayed on the cross.  King preached and spoke often about this kind of strong love – this agape love which is the highest form of love that would change the world. 

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”

It is hard work to love this way.  To follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ and to love with out any hate at all.  Without any external hate and any internal hate. An internal hate is an internal violence of spirit and we are called to love without any hate at all. It is hard and a discipline to work on this kind of love.  Jesus displayed this perfect love towards those who were nailing him to a cross.  He showed no desire for retaliation and at his arrest, he told his disciples to put away their swords.   King believed that his kind of perfect love was what we should be practicing to master our fears.   This kind of love – loving at all costs – is hard work. 

And it is his last antidote for fear that will sustain us and help us practice that love.  The last antidote for fear is that which is mastered through faith.   King believed that it was faith that will sustain us and give us that inner resolve to keep going.   Our faith gives us additional and powerful spiritual resources to use in a fear-filled world and he says this: “the fear of death, nonbeing, and nothingness, expressed in existential anxiety, may be cured only by a positive religious faith.  A positive religious faith does not offer an illusion that we shall be exempt from pain and suffering, nor does it imbue us with the idea that life is a drama of unalloyed comfort and untroubled ease.  Rather it instills us with the inner equilibrium needed to face strains, burdens, and fears that inevitably come and assures us that the universe is trustworthy and God is concerned.”  [5]

And he continues with these eloquent and comforting words:

“Above the manyness of time stands the one eternal God, with wisdom to guide us, strength to protect us, and love to keep us.  His boundless love supports and contains us as a mighty ocean contains and supports the tiny drops of every wave.  With a surging fullness he is forever moving toward us, seeking to fill the little creeks and bays of our lives with unlimited resources. This is religion’s everlasting diapason, its eternal answer to the enigma of existence.  Any man who finds this cosmic sustenance can walk the highways of life without the fatigue of pessimism and the weight of morbid fears.” [6] 

It is this kind of courageous, perfect love and faith that changed the world through the actions of Jesus Christ and also sustained the hard work of Rev. King through all the real fears that could have stopped him.  May that same love do the same for you, and may your faith “transform(s) the whirlwind of your despair - into a warm and reviving breeze of hope.”  [7]

Amen

Rev. Deborah J. Blanchard