Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 17, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

One of the most striking, and also one of the most distinctive phrases in Hebrew Scripture, and frankly one that has always given me a lot of trouble, is the phrase "the fear of God." The Psalm we just heard as our Hebrew Scripture reading is full of that phrase: "O fear the Lord, you his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want." v. 9 "I will teach you the fear of the Lord." v. 11b Clearly in these verses the fear of the Lord is a good thing. Hebrew Scripture tells us again and again to live in the fear of the Lord. You can almost get the impression that the ancient Hebrews who produced these texts thought that the life of faith consists of being terrified of God.

The problem is, that just doesn’t sound right to us, or at least to me. It seems so inconsistent with the God that we know in and through Jesus Christ. True, judgment belongs to God. Our God does judge our faithlessness, our sin; and if that were all there were to it there would be good reason to be afraid. However, we know our God primarily as a God of love, mercy, and forgiveness. Our God seeks the lost sheep and throws a party for the returning prodigal. Our God embraces those whom society and religion reject and, in the person of Jesus, dies on a cross for love of us. Our God is not a God we particularly need to fear, at least as we understand the word fear.

So we have to ask: Is the God the Hebrew authors told us so often to fear really so different from the God we know in Jesus Christ? I mean, that God is also our God. The Christian tradition rejected the idea that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is a different God from the Christians’ God something like eighteen hundred hears ago. The Hebrew God is the God Jesus knew as Abba, Father. Israel knew that God as judge to be sure, but Israel also knew that God as liberator, defender, and redeemer. Israel knew that God as advocate for the widows, orphans, and strangers in their midst and as an ever present help in time of trouble. So why do Israel’s religious writers keep telling us to "fear" God?

Well, as you might suspect by now, the answer lies in the fact that we are dealing here with a language problem. Go back to this morning’s call to worship in your bulletin. It is a portion of Psalm 111, which is one of the alternative selections in the lectionary for this morning. Near the end, in the last line for the leader, you’ll see the statement "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Ps 111:10a. Now, if "fear" here means what we usually understand it to mean, that statement doesn’t make much sense. How can fear lead to wisdom? What does being afraid have to do with being wise? Maybe when we were in school we crammed some knowledge into our heads out of fear of flunking a class, but I doubt if we gained much wisdom that way. I suppose it is a kind of wisdom to know when it is time to "be afraid, be very afraid." Still, I don’t see how fear, as we understand that term, is a path to wisdom, as that line from Psalm 111 says.

Well, the truth is that the author of Psalm 111 wouldn’t have seen how fear was a path to wisdom either if he or she had understood the word fear the way we do, but he (or she) didn’t. Therein lies the solution to our problem with all of these injunctions to live in fear of the Lord. The scholars tell us that the Hebrew words translated as "fear of the Lord" in these passages mean something quite different from " be afraid," as we understand the word afraid. The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary says the term fear of the Lord means "the awe that a person ought to have before God." It is essentially a synonym for "true religion" The Oxford Companion to the Bible says that "The fear of God involves worshiping the Lord with deep respect and devotion. It is a religious expression and as such implies obedience, love, and trust...." These definitions remind me of the best explanation of the phrase "the fear of the Lord" that I’ve ever heard, although I must admit I don’t remember where I heard it. That explanation is that to live in the fear of the Lord means to live in right relationship with God.

Of course, that leaves us with the question of what it means to live in right relationship with God. That, of course, is an enormous question. It is the subject of all of Scripture. It is the issue with which the Christian tradition has struggled from the very beginning. There is no way I can cover it adequately in one sermon, or in a whole career of sermons for that matter. And yet our Scripture readings this morning do give us some pretty good clues to what it means.

Let’s start with Psalm 111. It is a Psalm of praise directed toward God. Its message is stated right at the beginning: "Praise the Lord! I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart...." Psalm 111:1. The Psalm ends with the line I quoted a minute ago: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom...." The Psalm is telling us that living in the fear of the Lord, that is, living in right relationship with God, begins with praise, with thanksgiving. The author of Ephesians makes the same point, calling on us to give "thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything...." Ephesians 5:20 Life in the fear of the Lord is a life of praise and thanksgiving. It is, as this letter says, a life of singing and making melody to the Lord in our hearts. Ephesians 5:19b That means, I think, that it is a life that puts God first, that knows that God is God and we are not, a life that knows it comes from God and returns to God and that therefore God is to be praised and thanked no matter what may happen to us in our lives. As I’ve said here many times before, living that life of faith isn’t easy. There are times when giving God thanks and praise is absolutely the last thing we want to do. A wise life, a life lived in the fear of the Lord, knows however that giving God thanks and praise is always appropriate, even when we can hardly bring ourselves to do it.

Our Scripture passages this morning know, however, that there is more to life in the fear of the Lord than that. Psalm 34 gives us some additional advice. To live your live in the fear of the Lord, it says, you should "keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit. Depart from evil, and do good, seek peace, and pursue it." The Psalm is telling us, I think, that living in the fear of the Lord is about how we act toward each other as well as being about our attitude toward God. To be in right relationship with God means also to be in right relationship with other people, to live honestly, doing good and working for peace.

And for us Christians, living life in the fear of God means at least one more thing. Ephesians tells us that our life in the fear of God actually involves a kind of intoxication; but it is not the earthly intoxication brought on by wine or other chemical spirits. Rather it is the intoxication of being "filled with the Spirit...." Ephesians 5:18b Being filled with the Spirit can look a lot like being drunk. Recall the Pentecost story from Acts, where Peter had to tell the crowd that the disciples, having been filled with the Holy Spirit were not in fact drunk as they supposed, for it was only nine o’clock in the morning. Acts 2:15 Being filled with the Spirit looks like intoxication because it is a life lived exuberantly, joyfully, without inhibitions that hold us back from truly witnessing to the Good News of Jesus Christ in our lives and in the world. Alcohol removes inhibitions that it is usually better to leave in place. The Holy Spirit frees us from the inhibitions of doubt and fear that keep us from being truly faithful. Life in the fear of God is exuberant, liberated life in the Spirit.

Now if that’s what it means to live in the fear of the Lord, then it isn’t so hard for us to understand how the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, as Psalm 111 says, and why the Ephesians passage also talks about living as wise people rather than unwise. Wisdom is indeed living in right relationship with God. It is not living in fear. Neither is it living in exclusive reliance on human knowledge and abilities. Rather, wisdom is living in reliance on God, doing good in the world as we are able, filled with the Holy Spirit, and giving thanks always. Those ancient Hebrews were right. The good life is indeed life lived in the fear of God. Amen.