“Machine gun-toting terrorists are everywhere you turn.  Shadowy figures are hatching evil plots.  And a pack of wolves is on the prowl….  Welcome to the front lines of the political ad wars.” [In the political ad wars, Reno is getting blitzed,” Dallas Morning News, Oct. 25, 2004] There are perks to living in a non-swing state.  We may have been spared the barrage of presidential television ads, but we have heard enough to know where they’re headed.

The politics of fear.  Tobe Berkovitz, professor at Boston University’s College of Communication recently said, “It’s not surprising that both campaigns are looking for the leverage point: scaring the hell out of the American public about what would happen if the other guy wins.” [“The Politics of Fear,” The Washington Post, Sept. 29, 2004]  Terrorist attacks, a quagmire, a draft, the death of Social Security, even the possibility of a nuclear attack on American soil.  If that isn’t enough to scare you in a sermon on Halloween, I got nothing.

Capitalizing on our fears is no new trick for politicians.   Remember the Cold War?  The two world superpowers keeping each other in check with nukes pointed directly at one another.  Remember McCarthyism?  The government looking for communists under every rock.  Always afraid your name had been put on the black list.  And we can’t forget LBJ vs. Barry Goldwater in 1964.  Suddenly the television image of a little girl picking a daisy is replaced with a giant mushroom cloud. 

These images were frightening, but these current presidential pundits have played to our fears more than ever.  No matter what we might think, these guys are smart.  They know what works. 

So the question we must ask ourselves is what is the root of our fear?  Now on some level we hold onto fear as entertainment.  Scary movies.  Haunted houses.  Many of you may put on a spooky costume this evening and get caught up in the ghouls and goblins as you trick or treat.

But there is a deeper, genuine fear that seeks to paralyze us.  We must admit that 9/11 did change America.  I thought seriously this past week about if our lives have really changed.  My cynicism tended to lean towards our supposed return to normalcy.  The spike in church attendance has leveled out.  Most of us board planes without much of a second thought.  We simply ignore any change in color to the Homeland Security’s terror alert.  But I cannot ignore our real fears, anxieties, and rage that remain.  Our world is now a scarier place.  And we ask, “Where is God in all of this?”  

In the Psalms, the Jews more often than not ask this same simple question.  Are you there, God?  Are you going to do anything?  And if anybody had a right to ask the question, it was Israel.  The “bad news Bears” of the Ancient Near East, Israel was always politically coming up on the short end of the stick.  Conquered?  Done it.  Exile?  Been there. -- Another terror threat for Israel, always around the corner.  And in the midst of their fears and doubts, they sing Psalm 46.  God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.  The worshippers then take part in an unusual spiritual exercise: opposite of the power of positive thinking.  A game of worst-case scenario.  No matter if the mountains shake in the heart of the sea.  Though the waters roar and foam.  We will not fear.  For us, their descriptions conjure up earthquakes and floods, but in the cosmology of the Ancient Near East, it would be more akin to our doomsday movies of nuclear holocaust and ice-cap meltdown.  The psalm is referring to the literal shaking of the earth’s foundations.  You see, they saw the mountains at their base as anchoring dry land within the sea, and at their peaks they held up the sky.  If the mountains trembled, the whole world could come crashing down.  

They don’t have to imagine political uproar: they see the nations and kingdoms fighting before their eyes.  To their worst case scenario they respond, “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.”  In a dangerous world, God is their refuge, their shelter, protection, sanctuary. 

Psalm 46 paints a picture of a magnificent and mighty God.  One who provides refuge for his people, but also one who flexes a little muscle.  The Jews sing of God confronting the powers that be on the earth-- breaking bows, shattering spears, and making war to cease.  “Be still and know that I am God” is not just some peaceful, sweet text for a Bible bookmark.  It’s more like “Sit down, shut up, and listen.”  Psalm 46 lets us know who’s in charge.  “I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth.”

But we modern evangelicals aren’t as comfortable with this magnificent and mighty God.  We like God as our best friend and Jesus as our copilot. 

Martin Luther couldn’t afford to forget God’s mighty power as he tacked his Ninety-Five Theses on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517.  How else could a man gather up the courage necessary to fly in the face of the entire Catholic Church?  Today Protestant churches around the world remember Luther’s courage and our heritage on this day, Reformation Sunday.   

When Luther wrote his most famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God,” he was facing his own fears.  Here he was, one man, pressured on one side by mobs of overeager peasants seeking their freedom from ecclesiastical power, and the force of the entire Catholic Church trying to silence him on the other.  In Luther’s Germany, he felt the weight of the world on his shoulders.  He literally saw himself in a cosmic struggle at the end of the age, nations in uproar and kingdoms tottering all around.  Luther had plenty of his own fears.  Often he suffered from depression.  If only he had Lily to his rescue, he could have enjoyed Prozac like the rest of us.  But in his despair, he often turned to his friend and fellow reformer Phillip Melancthon and said, “Let’s sing old Psalm 46, Luther’s inspiration for his famous hymn.  A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.

Luther could not afford to put his trust in earthly powers.  Luther felt he could only trust God.  In fact, Luther understood sin not simply as morality (right and wrong) but instead as where you put your trust.  So even if we put our ultimate trust in good things like our government, Luther saw us alienating ourselves from God.   

At some point, we have to stop trusting in the world, and start facing our fears with God.  In our world, we desperately try to keep our fears at arms length.  But when we stop to be honest with ourselves, our real everyday fears lie close beneath the surface.  It’s the dreams that wake you up in the middle of the night.  That make you sit up bolt right in bed.  It’s in that silence when you see the enemies and confront the fears you cannot see.  You worry about your family.  You wonder about the future.  Will I ever find somebody to love me?  How are we going to raise these kids?  What do we do now?  In these moments, when we have unknowingly allowed our fears to grip us, we are vulnerable.  Our deepest fears do lie close beneath the surface.  Ah, but take heart, for so do our deepest prayers.

The good news is that our deepest fears bring us to a crossroads.  They allow us to see that we are vulnerable in a society where control is the name of the game.  But sitting at a crossroads inevitably requires a decision.  Most often we succumb to the intimidation of the world around us.  Old habits, are hard to break.

Too often we have made God in our image – to look like one of us.  We can’t make ourselves vulnerable to God because we can’t admit our own vulnerability.  In this case, we turn back to Psalm 46.  Eugene Peterson lets us in on a little secret, “The Psalms were not prayed by people trying to understand themselves.  They are not the record of people searching for the meaning of life.  They were prayed by people (instead) who understood that God had everything to do with them.”  God is at the center.  [Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, 14]

Like the realization of the ones who have come before us, this psalm opens up our imagination – to see things differently.  Remember those Magic Eye posters?  At first glance you saw a regular picture, but if you concentrated your stare long enough, another picture would come into view.  This is the predicament we find ourselves in as Christians.  We are able to see the world differently. 

Eugene Peterson addresses this point again, “What is at issue here is size: we require an act of imagination that enables us to see that the world of God is large-far larger than the worlds of prime ministers and presidents, far larger than the worlds reported by newspaper and television.  We need a way to imagine-to see-that the world of God’s ruling word is not an afterthought to the worlds of the stock exchange, presidential politics, and summit diplomacy but itself contains them.  Far more is involved here than us simply asserting God’s sovereignty.  We need a way in which to realize the largeness of God in the midst of the competing bigness of the world.  If we fail here…we will pray huddled and cowering.  Our prayers will whimper.” [Peterson, Answering God, 29]

What does it take to see the world differently?  Martin Luther King, Jr. preached about it on the eve of his assassination.  He imagined that God Almighty had spread time before him and asked in which age he would like to live.  King traced through the Greeks, and the Romans, the Renaissance, and Luther’s Protestant Reformation.  But he continues on to say, “I wouldn’t stop there.  Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” King continues, “Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up.  The nation is sick.  Trouble is in the land.  Confusion is all around.  That’s a strange statement.  But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.  And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding-something is happening in our world.” [King, “I See the Promised Land,” In A Testament of Hope, ed. James M. Washington.  Harper San Francisco, 1986: 280.]

King saw through the violence, the disappointment, and the fears he experienced daily to find God’s presence in the world.  Our fears will not magically disappear.  Our problems will not simply melt away.  More often than not we will go about our business, unable to seek refuge in this mighty God because we, like the rest of the world, cannot see.  Yet when we let our guard down, when our fears and worries almost overtake us, when we let our imaginations run wild, we are able to see anew.  We are able to feel the strong, reliable presence of the one who is Emmanuel, God with us.  And we are able to tune our hearts to hear God’s song, “You are mine.  Do not fear.”   AMEN