Sunday, October 19, 2025
Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
Reading followed by the sermon
Reading, excerpt from The World Exists to Set Us Free
Larry Rosenberg & Madeline Drexler (This material may be protected by copyright.)
“Krishnamurti placed his hands in front of him, cupping them, and kept them there. He said, “Yesterday, I took a walk along Fifth Avenue and some friends brought me to one of the top jewelers in the world. I had in my hands this extraordinary gem.” He described the beauty of the gem, the lines along which it was cut, the color—he went into great detail. We were all wondering, “Has he finally gone senile?” He was in his late eighties at the time. He said, “The gem elicited my total attention. It was that beautiful. Right in the middle of the shop, I went through the gem and came to complete stillness.” He mimed holding the gem, and we were all watching, rapt. Then, in an instant, he took the gem away with one hand and said, “Fear is that gem.” With his other hand, he replaced the gem with fear.
Do you understand what he was saying? The energy locked up in our fears, the uncountable ways in which fear distorts our life, keeps us from doing things that we want to do and makes us do things we don’t want to do—it’s endless.
Sermon, Overcoming Fear
Good morning! Okay let’s get to the heart of the matter. What are we afraid of? (Allow a few minutes for people to share what they are afraid of).
I just want to get all that out there because It’s getting to that spooky season of the year: the ghouls come out, the skeletons rattle in closets, the big hairy spiders wait under our beds- to crawl into our snoring mouths at night and lay their eggs! Masked federal ice agents raid Chicago neighborhoods looking for a little early trick or treat candy.
Yah, I was reading an article that talked about how there are two Chicagos right now: one for the elites as they run the marathon, descending from all quarters of the earth entirely unmolested, while the neighborhood with the bad luck to be known as Little Mexico is having their parents dragged from their cars into ice vans while they wait to pick up their kids from school. Not cool. Not cool.
Can you imagine for a moment, the US like El Salvador in the eighties with its death squads disappearing people without any legal recourse, or Chile with Pinochet, or Italy with Mussolini, or Spain under Franco? Do we not hear the tramp, tramp, tramp of the brownshirts?… Feel the ghastly, glow and eerie suffocation of no freedom, no freedom to be different, no freedom to speak out, no freedom of assembly or press under a president who has been given the power of a king. Our imagination is not far from the truth- our imagination is valuable. But it is as in the words of our reading this morning, about that gem “…Right in the middle of the shop, I went through the gem and came to complete stillness. …Fear is that gem.”
Meditation is a great way to observe your thoughts. As we sit we find that most thoughts are just those normal things that run across your mind, like “my nose itches”, “What will I cook for dinner?”. In times like this we return to the breath, or say the word to ourselves and we experience a deep liberation.
But there are also the thoughts that are there, lodged deep in the heart. Deep peace, deep joy, deep grief, deep fear, deep longing, even anger. The positive feeling have an open happy airy feeling in our body. The negative emotions maybe have a tightness in the throat or the chest or the gut. Sometimes it is even an excruciating pain. As we sit with this without a story, just as they are, we find that the feeling is not quite as monolithic as we thought; the pain comes in waves, the anger, is linked to sadness which is in turn linked to deep love. This is really what wisdom is. To discern the differences between who we are and our thoughts, the differences between our obsessions and our compassionate love. And when we do this we become clear and free, and for the first time whole.
Now, it could be that we really are at the end of the democratic experiment of our nation. It could be. It could be, that the Indivisible movement or even the UUA has been labeled a terrorist organization. It could be. But it could also be that we are simply very afraid that these things are true. And we are not wrong to be afraid. However, fear also distorts us, as Rosenberg says, “…fear distorts our life, keeps us from doing things that we want to do and makes us do things we don’t want to do—it’s endless.”
Fear is something we all struggle with; there’s the fear of being alone, not being safe, being a burden, being dangerous to others, being a part of an unjust society, or being unwell. Sometimes we are lonely, sometimes we are not safe, sometimes we are a burden, maybe we were dangerous to others at times, maybe we are a part of an unjust society, we will not always be well. Life is painful. When we obsess about the pain, (and, let’s face it, pain takes up a lot of space in our minds), we can really be taken for a ride, however. What is painful becomes a catastrophe, because we allow it to be. How do we keep what is naturally painful from becoming a catastrophic event? Overcoming fear is not about avoiding it, so much as observing it closely enough to parse out which parts are a concern bordering on love, and which parts might just be a self-made catastrophe. Clearly seeing fear for what it is and what it is not, helps us respond with clarity and wholeness.
Name a time where you overcame fear and did something new that maybe, in retrospect made your life more whole and fulfilled? (Allow for a few minutes of sharing).
And that is what many of us did yesterday. I had my clergy collar on. I made a sign that on one side said “Christian Nationalism is Heresy” and on the other side said “Empathy Makes Us Human”. And there were a lot of other fantastic signs! We danced and sang with giant rubber ducks and and pink dinosaurs, and clowns. When I came home that night I felt so happy to learn that we had been joined by seven million people. How did you feel about that?
I don’t know what is going to happen from here. But I do know this: We have all been learning to have courage beyond fear. We have learned how to better pull our gaze from fear’s trance. We know what this clear courage looks like, we know what it feels like. And if that is all we have, well… that’s not nothing!
Peace and wholeness everyone! Blessed Be!
