[Sermon] Fear, Silence, and the God Who Breaks In

David Horton, Minister of Music & Worship

November 30, 2025 + First Sunday of Advent

The world of Herod is one where fear is currency and silence is survival. Into that world, Zechariah’s prayer is heard, and the poet of Lamentations discovers the astonishing truth that God comes near even in the pit. This Sunday reminds us that Advent is not sentimental escape—it is the season when longing becomes prayer and fear becomes invitation. God’s breaking-in does not require us to be unafraid; it calls us to be honest. As we open this series, we listen for the God who steps into fearful places with courage, mercy, and new beginnings.

Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.

Grace and peace to you from our God who meets us in our trembling fear, not our perfect bravery.

So, here we are again. It's Advent, and right on schedule, the Christian world calls us to “session.” We are told we must [pause] wait—a concept as foreign to the modern soul as dial-up. I can't wait 18 seconds for the streaming service to load the next episode without checking my router, restarting the app, Googling the error code, while simultaneously plotting a strongly worded complaint to Xfinity. And we all know where that goes.

No, we are not people who wait. We are people who measure our patience in gigabytes per second. We expect instant gratification, quick fixes, and the blessedly immediate glow of our phones to validate our entire existence. Asking us to wait is like asking a toddler to kindly contemplate the subtle beauty of a beige wall.

Yes—Christian waiting: theologically sound, but psychologically impossible.

Advent is also a time we’re told to look for the tiny flickering light in the darkness, which feels a lot like trying to find your phone that’s fallen between the seats of your car while you're driving at high speeds on the freeway—except the phone is on silent, and you're pretty sure you can hear it buzzing right now. It is a frantic, potentially catastrophic search for something invaluable. And we’re given the lighting conditions of a deep-sea cave.

And then finally, the big kahuna: the glorious, impossible command that echoes throughout all of our ancient texts and into our rattling, nervous little hearts—Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid.

We are a generation that gets panic attacks when the Wi-Fi icon turns yellow. I think it's pretty easy for angels to say, “Do not be afraid.” Because they're angels. They glide around illuminated, probably smelling faintly of frankincense and having achieved an inbox zero centuries ago. They don't have to worry about finding parking at Costco in December, forgetting to pay the electric bill, or whether or not the Amazon Prime delivery will arrive while we're in the shower.

But since we regrettably do not possess the spiritual efficiency or stress-free existence of an angel, we have to cope. And how do we cope with the terror and the tension of waiting for a Messiah? Well, we trot out these cute little candles, light them like everything's fine, and sing those kind-of-manipulative-but-very-gorgeous carols, praying for Christ to come and fix this absolute mess.

It's all just a little bit much, isn't it?

So what do we do? Well, we bury ourselves alive in tinsel and sugar and the frantic, desperate belief that busyness equals joy. We load up on exhausting shopping, the mandatory 74 varieties of cookie baking, the social calendar that makes your teeth ache just a little bit too much. And why? Because if we stay busy enough—if we keep our adrenaline levels perfectly optimized for frantic holiday cheer—maybe, just maybe, for four terrifying, sugar-fueled weeks, we can successfully drown out the quiet, terrifying, heartbreaking noise of this actual, disastrous, and yes, deeply human world.

Because this is the nasty little secret in every pew and in every living room at home: we are afraid. We are afraid that the light won't catch. We are afraid that this waiting is hollow. We fear we won't find the missing phone; that the cancer treatments will fail; our children will fall silent; our government will conscript us for war; and the fears roll on and on and on.

This fear is not some polite abstraction. It's a living, breathing thing right inside our chest, tapping a frantic rhythm—the constant internal drum cycle of anxiety.

But I know precisely what happens when somebody asks me what I'm truly afraid of. I pull out a very old theatrical trick. I puff up and get big, embracing the grandiosity of existential dread. And I say, “Well, you know—everything. The total collapse of civil society, global warming, the inevitable heat death of the universe… and also I will scream if I see a spider.”

We list the big things and the small things, the epic and the idiotic. We'd rather discuss the zombie apocalypse than the terrifying, mundane vulnerability of truly being simply present in our own lives. And it's easier that way—to generalize terror. It makes it massive and insurmountable, a Mount of Doom entirely made of anxiety. Suddenly you don't have to look at the small, specific, trembling, tender wound underneath all the bluster.

But the tendency to just scream “everything” is how we build walls. Deeply lonely walls. It's the ultimate coward’s avoidance of the terrifying act of vulnerability. If we won't actually name the specific fear—the fear of failure, the fear of abandonment, the fear of our children’s futures—then it can't be judged. And if it can't be judged, it can't truly hurt us.

Friends, fear is the most contagious disease on earth. Can I get an amen?

Fear is isolating and lonely. And what keeps us lonely is not the fear itself, but our stubbornness—our tight-fisted refusal to share it with somebody else, or even just breathe it out to God.

We often treat fear like a disease that needs to be cured or a weakness that needs to be hidden. But what if fear is not a sign of failure, but the signpost? What if, in fact, the perfect, honest-to-God entry point into the gospel is fear—the gritty, necessary tool for finding the deeper faith and the resilient hope we keep singing about?

Our Advent worship series, What Do We Fear?, is not to amplify anxieties that dismantle our lives, but instead to develop a compassionate relationship with fear—embracing it as a necessary tool for cultivating deeper faith.

This internal shrinking into fear is not new. In fact, our modern, personalized anxieties mirror the deep, systematic terror that framed the first Advent.

Our scripture reading begins with a chilling date stamp: Jesus was born in the time of Herod.

Now, Herod was a ruthless king. He was installed by ancient Rome. These are facts that we learn and file away and kind of promptly forget. But living under Herod was not some dusty history lesson the gospel writer put at the front of this. It was living with the constant, terrifying fear of the knock on the door—the fear of execution, the fear of the massacre of infants that Matthew recounts. Herod's massive building projects led to crushing taxation, debt, and the forfeiture of ancestral land. The fear of starvation and inescapable poverty was a daily reality.

He politicized the temple, appointing and dismissing high priests at will. Even the most sacred institution felt compromised and corrupt. There was a profound fear of losing their God-given identity.

So in a world defined by political instability, economic collapse, institutional compromise, and daily visceral terror—sound familiar? It's essentially a first-century mashup of your Twitter feed and your credit card statement.

This is the context that makes the angelic command “Do not fear” a radical, almost revolutionary statement of hope—spoken into a world governed by Herod's terror and ancient Rome’s fist. It is not polite spiritual advice we're given here. It is a promise that the power structure is about to be totally subverted.

God isn't offering a coping mechanism. God is announcing a coup.

But we, like the ancient Israelites, are stuck aching and longing for that coup to break through our specific fears. We long for God to just shatter the fear and bring us the hope we were promised. Can I get an amen?

Think of the poet of Lamentations. This raw lament of pain was cried out while their homeland was being crushed by Babylon. We share that pain, don't we? Whether your fear comes from a brutal political ruler like Herod or from a crushing personal problem like a failing marriage or a broken dream, the result is the same: the fear takes over everything.

Yet this ancient poet, writing from the absolute lowest point of human experience, shows us the exact mechanism of faith—the very first step out of the terror. They started not by pretending to be brave, but by naming their place of isolation—their specific, crippling fear:

“I called on your name, O Lord,

from the depths of the pit.

You heard my plea:

‘Do not close your ear to my cry for help!’

You came near when I called on you.

You said, ‘Do not fear.’”

This passage is our Advent road map for hope. It confirms that the moment we make the breakthrough call from our deepest fear—from the suffocating depths of the pit—God responds with two promises:

“You came near.”

This is God's grace: unearned, immediate presence meeting us right in the messy, terrifying middle.

And then: “You said, ‘Do not fear.’”

This is peace: God's presence dismantling the terror, not just covering it up.

This transforms the whole raw vulnerability of fear into the bold, resilient, and utterly non-negotiable hope of faith.

So now consider Zechariah, the elderly priest we met today. He wasn't living in some peaceful past. He was in the front seat of this fear—witnessing Herod's corruption and ancient Rome's brutality every day. But he longed for two things: the epic, world-changing arrival of the promised Messiah, and—on a smaller, aching, human scale—a son, the one tangible thing missing from his life.

Zechariah and Elizabeth carry the global heartache and their personal pain—the wait for the promised rescue tangled up like old fishing line.

Our deepest fears often show up exactly like this: as a profound, hollow longing. It's the deep ache inside us for a better world, a different story, a brighter future that we desperately want to start now.

But here is how God—the God of Advent—breaks through this toxic system of fear and force. Herod’s power was based on fear and the sword. It was built on execution and overwhelming debt and the constant, chilling threat of violence. But God's power is based on the most defenseless person imaginable: a baby born not in a fortified palace, but in a humble stable surrounded by livestock. This infant doesn't command armies. He needs a diaper change.

The angelic command “Do not fear” is not just a nice thought. It is a direct subversion of Herod’s whole rotten, fear-based regime. God's presence eliminates fear because it comes in love and vulnerability. Herod’s presence demands fear to be maintained and controlled.

That tiny flickering light in the darkness is not a battle plan. It's an infant’s breath—and it changes everything.

My dear siblings in Christ, do not allow the festive, frantic busyness of this season to be your tinsel curtain hiding the trembling person inside. Do not waste this holy Advent. The only way out of the pit of isolation—the only way to find the peace that shatters Herod's regime of terror—is to choose holy vulnerability. Drop the shield and perform the terrifying act of naming your fears, and get really specific.

When we finally whisper our fears out loud—in the quiet of our hearts, or perhaps into the ear of a trusted friend, or just right up to the face of God—that’s the fear’s power over us… or rather, that's the fear’s power beginning to shrink. It’s like turning on the lights when you think there’s a monster in the room.

We are not waiting for an indifferent God this Advent, but for a God who shows up right in the middle of our glorious human fear. It is the fear itself that pushes us to open the door—and on the other side, we find the only thing that saves us: the enduring promises of God's grace and peace.

And so, my beloveds, here we are in the time of Herod. And in that time of your own specific, heartbreaking fears this Advent, stop covering up your wounds with wrapping paper. If you are waiting for God to blast through your life like a massive, glorious, all-conquering army, you're going to wait forever. God does not defeat Herod with a sword. God defeats fear with a whisper, and a promise, and a baby's cry.

Stop masking your terror with empty shouts of “everything!” It's not brave. It's a willful refusal of sight. Your fear is a weapon until it is named. Only then does it become flimsy inventory. Drag each specific dread into the surgical glare of God’s light—not a light that can be dispelled by dark, but a light that compels the shadow to assume a quantifiable shape it can no longer hide behind.

This week—right now—I ask you to get radically honest with your fears.

Whisper the specific tender wound: the job you might lose; the diagnosis you can’t face; the broken relationship you can’t mend; the doubt in your heart that keeps you awake at 3:00 a.m. Breathe it out: This. This specific thing is what I fear.

Because that act of honest naming is your breakthrough call from the depths. It is the single most defiant act you can offer to the powers of darkness.

And when you call out that specific fear, the promise of Advent is immediate and profound: God comes near. Not next month, not next year, but right now. God breaks through the fear and force—not with a kingdom of violence, but with a kingdom of vulnerability embodied in a child.

That is peace.

That is the child of peace—dismantling the terror simply by showing up exactly where you are.

That is the child of love—a terrifying, radical love that seeks out the lonely and binds up the broken places.

That is the child of promise—of joy. Not the frantic happiness of the holidays, but the deep, resilient joy that persists even when the walls are crumbling.

And finally, that is the child of hope—the audacious, non-negotiable belief that God's power in vulnerability is the ultimate stronger part, and it's stronger than any fear or force the world can muster.

“Do not be afraid” is not a command to stop feeling. It is the ultimate promise that the presence of God is stronger than that feeling.

So may you have the terrifying courage to name your fears this week. And in that moment of holy vulnerability, may you find the God who has already come near.

And for that, we can say: Amen.