The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scripture: Mark 12:38-44
I’ve been thinking a lot about fear this week. There’s been a lot of it going around, not just this week, though it feels particularly profound for some of us since Wednesday morning.
Fear is a survival response, and a critical one. If we’re hiking through the forest and come across a bear up on its hind legs, fear tells us that we are threatened and we need to respond. If we’re at the edge of the Grand Canyon peeking over, fear tells us to take a step back so we don’t fall.
I’m going to be blunt: A lot of what the Trump campaign has promised is cause for fear. He has threatened our immigrant siblings with mass deportations, our trans siblings with cutting off access to the healthcare they need to survive and thrive, and any of our siblings who have a uterus with eliminating their ability to make decisions about their own body. Not to mention the ways he has threatened violence against those who have spoken out against him. That’s a threat to democracy itself.
There is no reason to believe that our next President won’t follow through on these promises. And yes, that is terrifying. And that terror, that fear, is a survival response. A critical one. It is a call to respond, to ensure the survival of those who are threatened, to ensure the survival of our democracy.
But it is also fear that got us into this situation in the first place. I think most of us have heard a little something about the part of our brain called the amygdala. It’s the part that registers fear on a primal, instinctual level. When it perceives a threat, it sends a signal to the rest of our body to react, and quickly. Butterflies in your stomach is the amygdala telling your body to stop non-essential functioning, like digestion, so that more energy is available to immediately respond to the threat. Blood is directed to the heart and lungs so that muscles can spring into action. Vision narrows to focus on the danger.
But the amygdala is also often referred to as “monkey brain.” Now there’s a lot to read about this, but “monkey brain” basically refers to how our amygdala hasn’t really kept up with human evolution. That urgent survival response was absolutely essential in the early millennia of human development when we hadn’t gathered together in communities yet, when we had only the most rudimentary of weapons, when we were prey for hungry predatory animals, and shelter from the elements was tenuous. That primal response to threat was absolutely essential to our survival. It is by necessity a reaction of scarcity: only one thing matters—life itself—and it must be protected.
But now, we don’t often face such imminent threats to our lives. But our amygdala often perceives them anyway. Sometimes, your amygdala responds to having to go onstage to publicly speak the same way it would if a lion was attacking you. Or maybe it’s a job interview. Or someone cutting in front of you in a line you’ve been waiting in for a long time. Or when you hear about undocumented immigrants working in the United States. Or when you learn that a trans girl is allowed to play on her high school basketball team.
Your amygdala perceives a mortal threat—even when there isn’t one—and it springs into action. That’s monkey brain. Monkey brain jumps immediately to scarcity and to protecting what is, whether the threat is real or not.
When we can’t slow that monkey brain down, it allows fear to literally overtake our bodies and its functioning.
Whenever I see bullies, I see monkey brain. Whenever I see the hoarding of resources, I see monkey brain. Whenever I see the scapegoating of a certain group of people, I see monkey brain.
Which is to say, underneath all the bluster and the amassing of power and wealth for the sake of power and wealth, underneath the demonizing of difference, I see fear.
Today’s gospel is, to me, a case study in different responses to fear.
Beware of the scribes, Jesus says, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.
The scribes respond to fear, to the perceived scarcity of their world, by making themselves big, by commandeering places of honor that they have not earned, by taking from the vulnerable and performing piety for the sake of convincing people that they’re pious, that they deserve everything they’ve taken.
But then we have the poor widow. She has every reason to be afraid. She is a woman without a husband, and without a man in her life, she is a woman without access to the power structures of her society, without access to many ways of making a living. So she actually lives in a place of scarcity every single day. As Howard Thurman writes, "Fear is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited."
Now I’m not going to praise her for giving the last of what she has to her faith. I don’t think that’s the story here. So often, we demand and praise the much greater sacrifice from those who have so little than we demand of those who give a lot but have even more.
The scripture says, “she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on,” but the King James Version translates it as “but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.” The difference hinges on the original Greek word bios, which you might recognize. It’s the word for life. So yet another translation could be that she gave her whole life.
I read that as: she commits all of who she is to what she believes. Her response to the fear and scarcity of this world is to commit all of who she is to what she believes. Her response isn’t to overpower or to take more than she needs however she needs to take it. It isn’t to scapegoat others for her problems. It is to step into all the abundance God has given her and to share it.
What do you have to share? Every one of us will have a different answer, because God gave each of us a different kind of abundance. Some of us are lawyers equipped to litigate injustice, some of us are artists who were created to help us see the world and its struggles in different ways, some of us speak a greater vision at pulpits, and some of us silently show up in a million little ways to help others.
When you encounter the fear and scarcity of this world, how do you respond?
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Political commentator Michael Brooks once said, “Be ruthless to systems, be kind to people.” I know a lot of our neighbors, and maybe a lot of us, are having a hard time distinguishing between people and systems right now.
Because fear is what we all have in common in this time, no matter who we voted for. And it is our response to that fear that shows us how we believe.
And I think most of us have heard about the four instinctive reactions to fear: Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And in the coming years, we will need all these different responses, especially when we’re dealing with systems. We can fight thoughtfully. We can discern that running away to fight another day is the safest and healthiest option. We can “freeze” or pause, take a breath, and ask ourselves, “What is really needed here?” Or we can say whatever needs to be said in a dangerous moment to keep ourselves and our neighbors safe. We will need all of these, especially when an urgent response to oppressive systems is required.
But I think there’s a fifth option that we need to engage when we’re dealing with individuals, with the actual people: and that’s curiosity. I want to offer a faithful definition of curiosity, which is, “looking for God’s abundance in a person.” Looking for whatever copper coins someone has to offer, even when all we seem to see in them is poverty or scarcity.
And seeing God’s abundance in someone, well, that’s an act of love. It’s an act of kindness.
Because half of us voted differently at the top of the ticket than the other half. And it has become pretty damn easy to dehumanize the other half. So, yes, I do think curiosity about individuals, about one other, will ultimately save us all. Because curiosity is the antidote to monkey brain. It is the response that slows our fear down and helps us to see God’s abundance in a situation. God’s abundance in people we perceive to be our enemy.
That is our work now, like it was the poor widow’s work: to figure out what we’re going to do with the seeming scarcity, the fear, of this moment.
So let us remember: “Be ruthless to systems, be curious with people.”
Amen.
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