Thought on Chicken Little

Chicken Little is afraid. The sky is falling and she needs to tell the king. She dashes off as fast as she can, running into friends along the way with whom she shares her fear. "The sky is falling!" she yells, and her worried friends join the race to find the king.

The well-known misadventures of Chicken Little and her friends tell a tale of fear and its infectious grasp. Chicken Little had been minding her own business when out of nowhere an acorn fell on her head. Her assumption and subsequent proclamation of the absolute worst-case scenario caused hysteria wherever she went. To me, the derived moral of the story is usually something about the dangers of jumping to conclusions or believing everything you hear. But, these days, the message I have seemed most to have identified with is one pertaining to fear. Chicken Little's mantra, "The sky is falling," has become a phrase used to indicate the belief that disaster is imminent, however reasonably or unreasonably surmised. While closing out my seventy first year, my father’s words keep ringing in my ears, “what is this world coming too.  

From continued reports of worldwide Muslim extremist terrorism, the threat of international economic collapse, unanswered political corruption and unrest throughout this country, the increasing global epidemic of diabetes, all sounding an uninterrupted alarm.  From where I stand the current worldwide tenor is one of fear and uncertainty. The sky indeed seems to be falling, and depending on the knock these stories make on my head I could easily join in the commotion. Broader cultural anxieties also add to this sense of fearful doom. If I were not consumed by increasing cancer rates among close friends and acquaintances, I could well be fearful of the multiple ways in which my grandchildren face dangers that I thought unimaginable at their age, within a world where uncertainty now seems the only certainty. 

My observation finds that those exploiting these anxieties are politicians, marketers, and media producers knowing well that fear is a compelling motivator, and a profitable one at that. Like the music man in the Broadway musical, if they can convince me that "There's trouble right here in River City," I will hear what they have to say and open my mind (or wallet) to do something about it. I remember the absolutely silly inquisitive blurb, "Will staring at a computer screen make you go blind?" commanded my fearful attention as I opened Aol, one day, while checking my e-mail.

While the worry and unrest that is ever being stirred into the orldwide cauldron may indeed be based on real concerns, the combined ingredients in this pressure-cooker are at best a recipe for misconception. I read the "terrifying true story" of the Shingles virus running rampant in a long term care facility and became far more terrified that I would die of a super-virus than I have ever been impressed with the eradication of serious illnesses like polio, measles, or smallpox. I’m convinced by focusing on my fears, ever-reacting to my worries, and accepting this culture of fear as a given, not only affects my subsequent reasoning, living, and faithfulness, that fears in fact will become me. My fears will tell me how to spend my money, secure relationships, lead my grandchildren by example, vote in an election, and participate in (or isolate myself from) society. I can become no different than Chicken Little or the slave in Jesus's parable who withdrew in fear of his master and buried his talent in the sand.

Yet the harsh rebuke of this slave in the parable of the talents makes it clear that safe-living is not an option, nor an ultimate value, in the kingdom of God. I’m wondering, as I write, if there might be a distinctively Christ like alternative to the atmosphere of fear that is so pervasive and contagious? I find the parable of the talent asks me to see the power and control I allow to masquerade as security and so convince myself that I live wisely, perhaps even morally upright, when I am really living in fear. These fears will move me to withdraw from the kingdom Jesus has called me to join and join with him in announcing. Instead of moving further up and farther into the kingdom he proclaimed is in and around me, I dig for my soul a place in the outer darkness.

Father, God, I thank You this morning that there is indeed an alternative. But I confess I’m finding it neither safe nor easy. It is involving, intentionally, laying down my fears to follow Christ, Your Son, with faith's daring.  It involves opening my life to a world that often scares me, and realistically rejecting the anxiety of a world convinced the sky is falling. May Your beloved Holy Spirit guide me into the alternative of a cultural kingdom of hospitality and abundance, vulnerability and generosity, love and self-sacrifice; all of which I’ve found Christ shaped with his living and dying, and has invited me to do the same. I pray this in accordance with what Your Son told His disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Amen

Lesson Of My Admiration

It hasn’t been but the last few years that I have found infant children to look adorable.  But as a passenger on a recent flight I was completely overwhelmed and exasperated with a pushy grandparent holding an infant grandson, sitting next to me.  The hour and a half flight was taken up with attempt after attempt to persuade me with such questions as "Isn't he a doll?" "Have you ever seen a more loveable face?" “He’s the sweetest of all my grandchildren.” “Isn’t he so good?” 

To this grandparent, working on my conviction was an involuntarily part of the job. Loving her grandson seemed to include the act of telling me to love him. Her admiration alone did not seem enough. She found her adored twenty two month old thoroughly worth the adoration of others.

I very well know it to a behavior recognizable to more than proud parents and beaming grandparents because I am one. I delight to commend what I enjoy not only because it expresses my enjoyment but because it also seems somehow to complete it. "I sing because I'm happy, I sing because I'm free," the song goes. Saying it aloud, bidding others to see what I see, sharing it with my friends or strangers, somehow magnifies my delight.

Last night, I rode the ATV to a place of heavily forested property that Bettyann and I own. She is, away, at our home in Florida.  I sat in the midst of the ever so peaceful, cool, solemn, canopy, listening to the Carolina Chic-a-dee’s voice colliding with the mountain spring, of which we discussed, ten years ago, of how we might develop. I thought, “wow, what an awe moment!” Not having my partner there to comfort, affirm, and share the moment of personal gravity, I was overcome with the longing to carve her name on the tree by which I sat.

I suppose there have been thousands of times in my life, I’ve been overcome with commanding in excitement "Look!” “Stop, listen!” “You’ve got to taste this!” ”Do you feel that!” I like to imagine it’s like the psalmist who wants everyone to see what he sees. He not only praises God with his own song, but asks others to join him. "Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to God with cries of joy. How awesome is the LORD Most High, the great King over all the earth!" Psalm 47:2-3. In his delight, David calls on others to taste and see the goodness of God. "O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together" Psalm 34:3. He has found God worthy of praise even beyond his own.  

Yet I am a bit saddened when I meet folks, my age and older, for whom this call to praise is problematic. Friedrich Nietzsche once stated, "I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." C.S. Lewis stated a similar difficulty in his own coming to belief in God. He found troubling the thought that God ordained his own praise. He was also irritated by the clamorous demand of believing people to join them in praise of their God. 

I believe it to be true that such invocations to praise are often heard, and heard also in the mouth of God. "The people whom I formed for myself will declare my praise," God says through the prophet Isaiah. It is a demand at which we would cringe in the mouth of man, woman, or child. If the little fella my traveling grandmother found so loveable suddenly demanded that she continually fawn over his delightfulness, she would likely found him something other than delightful. But what if he approached grandmother with arms extended and the edict on his lips "love me"? The command to love would only further be intertwined with her delight of him.

I ask myself: how much more so might this be true of One who is worthy to receive glory, honor, and power?

The first inquiry of the Westminster Catechism concludes that the chief end of humanity is to love God and enjoy God forever. As praise is the spontaneous by-product of delight, the command to love and the promise to enjoy are paired inseparably. It is this hopeful alliance that C.S. Lewis eventually came to see. Knowledge of God brims forth in me the overwhelming desire to praise God, while God's worthiness stirs within me a longing for everyone else to join in. 

Father, God I thank You for the not so insignificant fact that Your love and approval of Your son, Jesus, was a declaration You chose to share with me, my family, friends, colleagues, and the world. I visualize that when Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan River, the Holy Spirit - Your Spirit descended like a dove and You declared: "This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased."  Father, You shared with the world Your love for the Son by the Spirit so that, not only me but every person might take notice and come to delight in You also. I believe that Christ's worthiness is a truth that You wanted everyone of us to hear and know—and subsequently, to praise along with Him.  Continue, I pray to help me do just that!  Amen