Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 6, 2011

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.

Have you ever noticed how in the Bible the first reaction people have when they encounter a particularly direct manifestation of God is fear? There are tons of examples. In Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus, for example, angels appear to the shepherds, the “glory of the Lord” shines around them, and they are terrified. The first thing the angels say to them is do not be afraid. In Mark, when Jesus comes walking on the water to his disciples in the boat, the disciples are terrified, and Jesus has to tell them not to be afraid. We see the same dynamic in our story this morning of the Transfiguration. In that story, when the three disciples who went up the mountain with Jesus hear the voice of God speaking from a bright cloud they fall to the ground and are “overcome by fear.” Jesus has to tell them to get up and not to be afraid. In all of these stories and a great many more throughout the Bible someone—God, or an angel, or Jesus—has to tell the people who see a powerful manifestation of God not to be afraid. Throughout the Bible there seems to be something frightening about God or about any powerful manifestation of God.

Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd? It does me. After all, we Christians don’t tend to be afraid of God much. We say “God is love.” We believe that God is a God of grace, mercy, and forgiveness. We say that we see God most of all in Jesus, and there isn’t anything scary about Jesus, is there? He loves everybody, so what’s to be afraid of, from Jesus or from the God we know in and through him? Yet there it is. It’s undeniable. In the Bible people react to God with fear all the time.

Why do you think that is? Why are biblical people so often afraid of God? I think maybe we can see an answer to that question in our story this morning of the Transfiguration. Consider this: What happens in that story is pretty weird. Jesus takes his three closest disciples with him up a mountain. Right from the start they must have been wondering what was going on, why Jesus was taking them away from the others to go mountain climbing. Then when they get up the mountain Jesus turns all white and glowing on them. Then two guys who have been dead for centuries, Moses and Elijah, appear next to Jesus. That’s not something you see every day. It’s just plain weird, but at first the disciples aren’t afraid. Peter wants to build houses and stay up on that mountain, a suggestion Jesus doesn’t even bother to respond to. Then it gets weirder. A “bright cloud” covers the place. Clouds aren’t usually bright. They usually make things darker, so that was another strange thing the disciples had to reckon with. Then, weirdest of all, a voice speaks out of the cloud and says nice things about Jesus. That was more than the three disciples could handle. They fell to the ground, overcome by fear, and Jesus has to come and tell them not to be afraid.

All the strangeness in this story points, I think, to the reason biblical people are so often afraid of God. The manifestations of God that produce the reaction of fear are extraordinary events. They are outside the realm of our usual experiences. They are difficult or impossible to explain. They seem to come from somewhere beyond, somewhere we don’t know, somewhere we don’t understand. We fear things we don’t understand, and the people who have these experiences of God in the Bible don’t understand them. They don’t understand the experiences, but they sense that the experiences have something about them of great power, of great mystery, of an otherness, a transcended-ness, that plays into their reaction of fear. These experiences point to something the witnesses not only can’t explain but that they can’t control, and we fear what we can’t control. All in all, our biblical forbears reaction of fear in the presence of God turns out, I think, to be pretty understandable after all.

Yet we don’t fear God. We say that we get it that God is, as the theologians say, totally other, totally transcendent, totally beyond our realm of created being. We say that we get it that God is and always must remain ultimately a mystery. We say that we understand that we can never grasp God in God’s fullness, in God’s essence, with our finite, limited minds. We, or at least I and a lot of other people, pay lip service to those truths about God; but none of that stops us from reducing God to something we can grasp, that we can define, that we can understand, even that we can control. That’s why Christians are always trying to lock God up in the Bible. We can grasp a book. We think we can understand a book. We do everything we can to tame God, to reduce God to something like us, something finite and understandable.

When we do we lose, I think, an important element of the total experience of God, one to which all that fear in the Bible points. Maybe you, like I, have a negative reaction when we hear conservative Christians say “our God is an awesome God.” When they say it they probably mean something like our God is really, really good; but that isn’t what awesome means. God really is awesome in the proper meaning of that word. Awesome means inspiring awe, but what is awe? Awe, according to the dictionary, is an “emotion in which dread, veneration, and wonder are variously mingled.” It means “fearful reverence.” Awe is a complex emotion. It has many elements. Among those elements is fear, but awe is not merely fear. It is, as the dictionary says, also wonder; and it is also reverence. When we are in awe of something we may fear it, but we also stand in wonder before it, and we revere it at the same time.

In this sense awe, including the fear element, is a, or perhaps the, appropriate human reaction to God. God is the power behind the universe, a power utterly beyond our comprehension. God is sacred. God is holy. God is completely other than and beyond anything we can grasp, anything we can comprehend. When we really get how powerful and how transcendent God is, awe, fearful reverence, is the only appropriate response. If we don’t feel awe before God it’s probably because we have made God less than God. Maybe we’ve done that precisely because we want to avoid the fear element in true awe; but if we really get it that we can never fully understand God, awe—fear and all—is the only appropriate response.

Am I saying that we have to be afraid of God? No, not really. Not afraid in the sense of something we must run from, something we must avoid, something we think can hurt us. We must, however, let God be God; and that means that God must remain always beyond our grasp, always beyond our full understanding. It means that God must always remain ultimate, holy mystery. Before divine mystery we can only stand in awe, stand in fearful reverence. In our western rationalism we really want to reduce God to propositions we can understand, but those propositions aren’t and can’t be God. Before God we must stand not in understanding but in awe. Awe—fear and all. So let’s God be God, and let us relearn the lost art of awe. If our God is truly God and not something of our own making it cannot be otherwise. Amen.