By Justin Crisp
As readers may know, I’m a fan of Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang. I especially love this scene from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Charlie Brown goes up to Lucy’s booth—the one that says, “Psychiatric Help. 5¢. The Doctor is In.” And Charlie Brown tells Lucy he’s struggling with fear.
Lucy says, “Are you afraid of responsibility? If you are, then you have hypengyophobia.”
“I don’t think that’s quite it,” says Charlie Brown.
“How about cats? If you’re afraid of cats, you have ailurophasia.”
“Well, sort of, but I’m not sure.”
“Are you afraid of staircases? If you are, then you have climacaphobia. Maybe you have thalassophobia. This is fear of the ocean. Or gephyrophobia, which is the fear of crossing bridges. Or maybe you have pantophobia. Do you think you have pantophobia?”
“What’s pantophobia?”
“The fear of everything.”
“THAT’S IT!” Charlie Brown exclaims.
Who hasn’t been Charlie Brown at one point or other? Who hasn’t, as Charlie Brown does in another comic strip, woken up at 3AM, and said, “Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong?’ Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.’”?
We may not be able to settle all the angst we might feel, Charlie Brown-style, from time to time. But one of the points of Christianity is, in fact, to settle all our angst so far as God is concerned.
You can see this in a powerful way in the story of Jesus’ baptism. In a moment that’s remembered in some form in all four of the gospels, after Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist in the river Jordan, the Spirit of God descends on him. The Gospel of Luke says the Spirit looked like a literal dove landing on Jesus. Accompanying the Spirit’s descent is a voice from heaven, which says to Jesus, “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”
It’s a powerful spiritual experience, and it launches Jesus into his three years of public ministry: the three years in which Jesus healed, taught, died, and was raised—everything we remember him for. And it’s striking to me that the one Jesus calls “Father” says he’s well pleased with Jesus, before Jesus has done any of that.
We might think God’s approval would be contingent on Jesus’ performance in all he’s about to do, but for this God, anyway, that’s got it the wrong way around. The Father’s pleased with Jesus before he’s done, really, anything at all—and this gives Jesus the strength to do all that he’s called to do subsequently.
This is how God addresses us too, in Christ: God is well-pleased with us, well-pleased with you, before and regardless of what you do. God has adopted you as his child in Christ, baptizing you into Jesus’ baptism, anointing you with the same Spirit, telling you he’s well-pleased with you (often, in traditions like mine, we ritually enact God’s adoption by baptizing people as little babies—one point of which is to catch them before they’ve done much of anything).
This is a revolution in religious thought, one that I think we have to work a whole lifetime to learn.
I think it comes far more naturally to us to think of God as John the Baptist himself often does in the New Testament: Fire and brimstone. Angry. The early-twentieth-century philosopher Rudolf Otto said that all religion begins with an experience of what he called the mysterium tremendum, the awesome but terrifying experience of something Wholly Other to this world, which we call “God.” We tremble in the presence of this Other, as we do when we hear ghost stories as little kids. Our innards freak in the presence of the Holy. And that’s where a lot of religious impulses stop. We tremble in fear of this mystery that transcends us, and we suspect we’re afraid because this mystery must be angry with us. We imagine God as capricious, demanding. We think, if we want our lives to go okay, we have to make sure the mystery likes us.
Religion develops all kinds of elaborate ways to placate the mystery’s anger, including sacrifice. In Greek mythology, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter to the Greek goddess Artemis. He’s does so because he’s made Artemis angry by hunting deer in a place he shouldn’t have, and Artemis punishes Agamemnon by sending high winds which prevent him from sailing to Troy.
We may no longer believe in the Greek gods, but I suspect we’re not much more sophisticated than those who did. Personally, every time I get a stomach bug, and I’m on the bathroom floor, I reflexively re-run the tape of the last twenty-four hours in my mind trying to figure out what sin I’ve committed that made God punish me. Even if you’ve never gone that far, I bet the same voice speaks inside your head that occasionally speaks in mine, the ghostly gramophone whose music is anxiety and other people’s expectations.
The message of Jesus Christ, friends, is that there’s zero need for this anxiety in our relationship with God, who, though a mysterium tremendum, revealed himself in Jesus Christ to be well-pleased with us—with you. Period.
As it was for Charlie Brown, pantophobia, or the fear of everything, can be a natural response to a world like ours. But God wants us all to know we don’t have to be scared of him.
The Reverend Dr. Justin E. Crisp is a husband, dad, music lover, and priest. He serves as the priest in charge of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church and lives with his wife, Jewelle, their pug, Val, and their daughter, Beatrice, on the St. Barnabas hilltop in backcountry. He also teaches Anglican history and theology at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.
