The other day while I was searching for something on the internet I found a really neat TED Talk on Youtube that had a lot to do, in my opinion, with Pentecost and the current situation in our community, state, nation and world. It was by Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut that had flown 2 NASA shuttle missions, who was the first Canadian to do a space walk and visit the Russian space station Mir, and who flew the third mission on a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station. His talk begins with the question, “What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done? Or, What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done?” and at that point he began to differentiate the two. It turns out the two questions are not the same. Hadfield talks about the odds of the earlier shuttle missions and how when you blasted off that there were two possible outcomes, awesome or dead and that the odds in the early days the dead odds were one in nine. He shares his experiences of boarding the shuttle and feeling everything shaking and swaying, of traveling at 5 miles per second, of going around the earth 16 times a day, of staring into the blackness of space and at the earth below, of the training, of going out on a space walk and having the only thing linking you to the 7 billion people below be the one hand that was holding on to the spaceship.
He also shared his unique experience of being on a space walk and having the defogger from his face shield get in one eye. It produced tears which clung to his eye in a ball until it crept across his nose into the other eye and he went blind on a spacewalk. While listening, I felt terror creeping into my gut. He then shared a saying that they have in the space program, “There’s no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse.” Fear often drives us to make mistakes, misunderstandings, accidents, failures or situations worse. It turns out that danger is very different from fear. Hadfield used the example of spiders. Is there a deadly spider that’s getting ready to bite and kill you? How do you know? My friend Scott was sharing with me a statistic, that spiders are so prevalent that statistically there is always one within four feet of you. Hadfield pointed out that there are over 50,000 types of spiders. That sounds a little scary, BUT you have to know the other facts. There are only about two dozen venomous spiders, and where he lived in British Columbia there are only about 730 types of spiders and of those there is only one venomous spider, the black widow, which does it’s best to stay away from people. On average, only four people die in the US every year due to spider bites and none of those deaths are caused by black widows to give some perspective. One of the most recent fatalities from a black widow bite was in Spain in 2003.
The real level of danger is different from the fear. Hadfield talked about all the spiders that are as harmless as a ladybug and that if you set out to walk through 100 spider webs you begin to realize the true level of risk, your behavior begins to change and that primal fear will subside. That is why astronauts, and many different occupations, practice things going wrong over and over and over in order to not make bad situations worse.
I was working in a charity house restoration and I was pulling down dropped ceiling tiles and the plaster and lathe from a ceiling. I was up on a ladder and dropping the lathe and the nails down to the floor. I took out a tile and a rubber snake a previous resident had put there to scare away mice, fell down across me to the floor. I panicked and sort of jumped slash sprawled from the ladder to the floor. In doing so, I somehow ripped my pants from one knee through the seat to partway down the other leg. And by the way, did I mention that I landed on a nail that went through my foot. Primal fear and panic were my true enemies that day, and as any astronaut would point out, I could have made it worse. When Chris Hadfield went blind outside the ship in outer space, his training, his rationality, and his practice took over and he made things better not worse. His gut, his instinct, his response was not to give in to the primal fear and panic but to work the problem and find the way out.
The Gospel today begins with, “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews.” They were Jews. Jesus was a Jew. No, they were locked in a room out of fear of evil and the people who killed Jesus and were trying to stifle his message because of their fears, their fear of losing power or status or control or whatever. But Jesus came and brought them Peace. It’s Pentecost, the day when we celebrate the coming of the Spirit, the Spirit that empowers us to faith, to love, to change and to live lives free of fear in the truth of Jesus Christ. This is God’s Holy Spirit, the Spirit that binds us together in communion with one another and empowers us to love one another and bears God’s peace on and within us. This is no spirit of fear, it is the Spirit of Truth.
Astronauts talk about the unique view that they get to have, a top down, God’s eye view of our world. They say that they can see that we are all one, all of us earthlings whizzing through the universe, space travelers ourselves. We have far more similarities than our differences, including our fears. There are real dangers out there, but we must not let our fears drive us into their jaws because of spontaneous, irrational reactions to our primal fear of the unknown or the “different.” So as inspired as I was this week with seeing this TED Talk and an amazing Lutheran hymn presentation on Youtube and thinking about Pentecost and community and all of the wonderful ways that we can help and encourage and inspire one another, there was an interruption. I saw a man kneeling on another man’s neck and crushing the life out of him, out of a fellow space traveler, out of a child of God, out of a sibling in the family of Christ, out of George Floyd. I saw the evidence of primal fear.
The problem is racism, a big problem. “There’s no problem so big that we can’t make it worse.” Ain’t that the truth. A person so caught up in the reactions to an irrational fear, a fear of the different, a fear of the color of another person’s skin, a fear coming from who knows where, but knowing that this is not God’s Spirit. This fear, this racism is not the Truth. It’s primal, it’s irrational, it’s the spirit of evil that seeks to drive us apart, prowling like a roaring lion seeking who it will devour. Is it just a primal fear or is it that evil that seeks to hang on to power at all costs? Is it action or reaction? Either way a it is that spirit of divisiveness not community that is keeping us from our dreams and from the reality of the kingdom of God and leads us to commit atrocities upon one another.
For the part I have played, for the times I have been silent, for all the things done and left undone to all of God’s children, I am truly sorry and I pray that the Spirit of Peace will propel me to live for and stand for and strive for and work for justice, equality, courage against divisive irrational fear, and peace. We must work together to overcome our problems and elude our fears. We must help one another back into the spaceship and wipe one another’s tears. We must speak out against injustice and not just the big ones that hit the news cycle but the ones that so often go unnoticed in everyday life. There’s a hymn coming up in a moment. Watch and listen and notice what happens when people work together, when people bring their time and resources and talents to ride the dream.
Chris Hadfield concluded his remarks by speaking about confronting and dealing with real risks instead of primal fear and that when we do we are freed by the truth and that in that freedom we can then see a beauty that otherwise never would have happened. I quote,”Dreams can be dauntingly scary and terrifying, but put them into practice, reprogram and change your primal fear and come back with a set of experiences and be an inspiration for other people. Here’s the good news though. There’s no problem so big that the Holy Spirit can’t help us make better. That Spirit is calling us to action, rational action, problem solving against this actual danger, the danger of the ramifications of not loving one another as Jesus first loved us. This Spirit is calling us to demand equal justice for all regardless of the fears that assail us. The Spirit is calling us to walk into some spider webs, a lot of spider webs, and forge relationships with people of all cultures, races and orientations and see that we are, by-in-large, ladybugs. Then as Chris Hadfield put it When we overcome fear we will see a beauty that otherwise never would have happened. Amen
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