"Anxiety - What Is It Good For?"

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on October 12, 2008

Text — Psalm 23

Before the sermon, in the Time for Children, I showed the sugar bowl I’ve been looking at for my whole lifetime.  On the side are the words, “Don’t worry, it may never happen.”  As I told the children, that sugar bowl and those words have saved my life more times than I can count.

Lately, my attention has been drawn to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the credit crunch, the sagging economy, the various bailouts, and the stock market panic. I decided that this would be a good day to talk about anxiety.

What should you do with your anxiety? Is it justified? Is the level of your anxiety in proportion to the level of real danger? Or is your anxiety exaggerated?  

Eric Sevareid was a broadcast journalist.  He died in 1992. I’m not sure when he wrote this statement, but here’s what he said: “The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television.  It is the manufacture and distribution of anxiety.”

It’s an interesting statement. Who benefits when people become anxious?

I think it might be helpful to look back to something we used to be anxious about but aren’t anymore. When I was in grade school we were taught to fear the Russians. One of my teachers told us that the Russians were atheists and that they didn’t have any trees in Russia.  I don’t know how she picked out those 2 details to share, but they scared me. Any day, when we least expected it, the Russians might drop thousands of hydrogen bombs over the whole the United States. They intended to “bury us.”

We had practice drills in school to get us ready. We were taught to get under our little desks and cover our heads with our hands so protect us from falling atomic bombs. It sounds silly now, but that anxiety was very real.  But was it justified?

During that same decade, Dwight Eisenhower issued a different warning.  Toward the end of his presidency he warned against the looming power and influence of the military-industrial complex that he feared was taking over our society. He was concerned about the growing influence of corporations on government.  That warning made very few people anxious, but I think we realize now — after the past couple of weeks — that that was a very valid anxiety.

In the early 1980s, the scare was AIDS. In this decade, the scare has been terrorism. Here’s a question: Has our reaction to Sept. 11, 2001, been in proportion or out of proportion to the real danger posed by terrorists? 3000 people died on Sept. 11, 2001. That’s a lot in one year. But every year, over 40,000 people die in traffic accidents. No one makes much of a fuss about that.

Anxiety generation is not a business per se.  But it’s a tool that businesses and governments and other institutions, including some churches, use to get people to act a certain way, or spend their money in a certain way.

Think about all the things we’re told to be anxious about: crime, sex offenders, people with mental illness, inner city gangs, identity thieves, computer hackers and viruses, medical malpractice.

Let’s focus on crime for a moment.  In the U.S. at any one time, more than 1 out of every 100 Americans between the age of 17 and 62 are in prison. That’s supposed to keep us safe.

What we don’t read about so often is that prisons are very crowded, punitive, psychologically damaging, and a training ground for criminal behavior. And they’re expensive. It costs more to keep someone in prison than send him to Yale. The vast majority of the people in prison get out of prison in a short period of time. Do you think that illions of young males through the experience of prison make our society safer or less safe in the long run? 

In the past weeks we’ve felt a lot of anxiety about the economy, our jobs, our retirement accounts, and the financial condition of the church. This comes on top of our anxieties about our energy, global warming, and whether our political system is up to the challenges we face.

Then we have our personal anxieties — social anxiety, shyness, and awkwardness. What will I say in a certain situation? Will I make a fool of myself? What will people think of me? We’re anxious about our health. We’re anxious about how we look and how we smell.

Back in the fifties, makers of soap and shampoo deliberately starting putting ads on TV recommending their particular soap “for your daily shower.” No one took a daily shower in those days. But they subtly convinced everyone that we should take a daily shower.  And pretty soon the daily shower became the rule. They sold a lot more soap and shampoo that way. The repetition of the phrase “daily shower” convinced people that they needed a shower e very day or they’d stink.

There are things we should be anxious about. If your doctor says you have a coronary artery disease, or you need to stop smoking, or exercise more — that’s something to pay attention to. Anxiety over some things could save your life. And that’s why we’re wired to be anxious.

But not all anxiety is justified or helpful. Most of it is exaggerated and excessive compared to the real danger.

You’ve often heard me say that there are major contradictions or ironies in human beings, and anxiety is one of them.

We are built to feel anxious so we’ll be careful and avoid danger.  It’s our nature. But anxiety doesn’t feel natural. Anxiety is the feeling that something is wrong. So we’re in a confusing situation.

Of course we don’t want to be too calm either.  Then we’d get bored. And many people go looking for danger because anxiety is exciting too, and that’s one of its appeals.

But isn’t it strange that, for all the things we do these days to make ourselves safer, we seem to be, if anything,  more anxious than ever? Parents today seem more anxious about their children’s safety for example. They are more aware of dangers because those dangers are constantly being put in front of our faces. But does all this focus on danger really help children over-all?

I can’t tell you what you should be afraid of and what you should be afraid of. Some anxieties need to be listened to and some need to be ignored and disarmed to the extent possible. 

I do have 2 basic recommendations. First, acknowledge your anxiety. Admit you’re anxious.  It’s a reaction in your body to what’s going on in your mind. It doesn’t feel good. But your anxiety doesn’t necessarily reflect real danger. Most of the things we’re anxious about will never happen.

The 2^nd point is, admit that we’ll always be anxious.  We should try to reduce our excess anxiety, but we’ll never be without anxiety. My sugar bowl says “Don’t worry, it may never happen.” But let’s face it, someday it will happen. Sooner or later something bad happens to all of us.

But we need faith and trust so that, even when something bad does happen, it’s okay. We are loved by God just as we are. And we will always be loved by God no matter what happens. And God provides in ways we can’t imagine or foresee. We’re in God’s hands.  And to be alive at all is an extraordinary blessing.

We are anxious creatures. We can live our lives controlled by anxiety.  Or we can live our lives by faith. 

Psalm 23 tells us what living by faith is. If I may paraphrase, “The Lord is my shepherd, and the Lord provides. Even though I walk through darkest valley, I may feel anxious, but I will not live by fear.