Holy Fear John M, Buchanan
Mark 4:35~-41 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
June 12, 1977 Columbus, Ohio

Every so often an experience is given to us, wholly unexpected, unplanned,
unstructured which momentarily, at least, lifts us above ourselves, and the very
goodness of which confirms our deepest theological convictions. Something Like
that happened to me last week,

I was in the Hocking Hills at a summer home for a dinner meeting. Before the
meal I was taken on a walk through the woods to see a long and winding valley from
a vantage point high up on a bluff, It was truly a magnificent view, In the soft
light of early evening the valley was an emerald green, the hills gentile and roil-
ing, one of the most pastoral scenes I have experienced for some time, On the way
back, still filled with the beauty of that picture, my eye was attracted by a flash
of red in the woods. No great thing for an accomplished bird watcher, but for me
the Scarlet Tanager has always been an exotic picture in elementary schooi bird
books, Whenever, as a child, we were instructed to draw pictures of birds I would
invariably turn to the Scarlet Tanager, And now, for the first time in my iife f
was looking at one: my old friend - who really did live and move and have being
beyond the book plates.

I thought about the experience later, It was so refreshing, so full of good-
ness and Life. I remembered a paragraph I had read once that suggested that one is
very close to the ultimate source of things when he finds himself saying: "God,
it's good to be alive!" I looked for the paragraph and found it in a major work
under the title, Naming the Whirlwind, by Langdon Gilkey, a University of Chicago
theologian,

In the chapter in question Gilkey suggests ways in which you and I are given
experiences of Ged, It's one of my favorites and I'd like to share it with you.

"Common aspects of our experience: our deep joy in living, a sense of the
pulsating vitality and strength of life that every creature knows: the awe at the
common wonder and beauty of Life - perhaps in the creatures of nature or at the
birth of a child; the precious sense of meaning and of hope when we find some
purpose of activity that draws out our powers, and we know who we are in history
and why we are here at this time and place; the wonder of community and of personal
intercourse with another human being - these common experiences are given to us
and not created by us, but it is they which buoy us up, that make us glad we are
alive, that fill us with deep joy and refuel our existence with a felt power...As
gifts they reflect the power of Life - from beyond ourselves, from the ultimate
source of power and meaning." (Naming the Whirlwind, p,311).

Now the reason a paragraph like that is in a book of theology, Naming the
Whirlwind, is precisely because modern consciousness has rather completely banished
the idea of a God who is Ged. Traditionally, God has been conceived as a being who
exists apart from humanity: who created life in the first place and may be perceived
by the mind of man in a way not too differently from the way a tree or mountain is
perceived, Even if no one actually saw God, He remained an object to be observed,
in imagination at least, Thus the proverbial school boy could confine his theo-
Logical imagery to the picture of an old man, with white beard and flowing robe,
seated on a throne high above the heavens, busying Himself with lightning and
thunder and blizzards and earthquakes, God was transcendent, His existence was
not ours, but very real nonetheless. God, in the Westminster Confession is

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“infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body,
parts or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most
wise, most holy, most free, most absolute."

Then came the twentieth century. And it took a Soviet cosmonaut to verbalize
the demise of the traditional, transcendent idea of God, Back from space he told
reporters that he hadn't seen God at all - nor angels for that matter. Suddenly,
traditionalists had to face what they had known all along; namely, that God wasn't
“up there" - at Least in the sense that people had been believing he was "up there"
for thousands of years,

The theologians jumped into the fray. Bishop John A,T, Robinson wrote a little
book in the Sixties under the title Honest to God which suggested that it made no
sense at ali to think about God in terms of space and time, He is not "up there”
er "out there", Robinson said, He is “in here", And the new motif for modern
Christian thought was born, The name for it is immanence. God is "in here", If
He exists at all it is in the depths of the individual's spirit and somewhere
vctveen people in the deepest, most intimate relationships, The result of that
radical shift was that God simply ceased to exist for many people.

At the same time Life in general was becoming radically secular, We talked
about this a bit last week. Modern science pushed back the perimeters of the un-
known, mysterics were solved and what people once attributed to God was suddenly
understood in the laboratory vocabulary of cause and effect. Insurance companies
may still insist that a viohent and destructive windstorm is an “act of God", but
most people know better,

Modern history, likewise, shattered the comfortable old certainties, How,
Rabbi Richard Rubenstein asked,can you believe in a God who has anything remotely
to do with human life and human history, after Auschwitz? There is nothing but a
void, Rubenstein said, where God once stood, And in Gilkey's book I cited earlier,
he writes: "The most significant recent theological development has been the steady
dissolution of certainty, the washing away of the firm ground on which our genera-
tion believed we were safely standing. What we thought was solid earth has turned
out to be shifting ice ~ and in recent years as the weather has grown steadily
warmer, some of us have in horror found ourselves staring down into rushing depths
of dark water,” (Op cite, p,5),

Now the professional theologians spend their lives thinking those kind of
thoughts. [I have taken you on this excursion because it is a climate in which
every thoughtful person participates, The theological certainties of the recent
past are gone and there is abundant evidence that the demise of the traditional
God has set off a frantic, scrambling search for something, anything, to take
His place,

And so - to the Bible. God, in Scripture, is both transcendent and immanent.
He is both ruler of the universe and loving, intimate companion, Our generation
may have reason for focusing on His inwardness - but to overlook His transcendence
is to miss at least half of what the Bible says about Him,

Our New Testament Lesson this morning is a delightful illustration. Jesus and
His disciples were on the Sea of Galilee in a small fishing boat. That body of
water lies 600 feet below sea level, The mountains surrounding it act as a

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geological funnel] for the prevailing winds off the Mediterranean Sea, Sudden,
violent wind squalls are common, They come without warning and leave as quickly
as they come, I am told,

Jesus had fallen asleep during the crossing, The account in Mark's Gospel is
spare and lean, uncluttered with the kind of scientific questions we ask automat-
icly. A storm descended and the little boat was tossed like a piece of driftwood.
The fishermen - disciples were afraid: they woke Jesus: He spoke to the storm: it
went away, He was critical of them for being so afraid of the storm, End of
story? Not quite. The disciples should have been greatly relieved but they were
not. Mark says they were "filled with awe''’, The New English Bible translates
"awestruck", J.B.Phillips renders it, "sheer awe swept over them", A literal
rendering of the Greek word is "they feared with a great fear". That is to say;
they were afraid of the storm, but in tHE -pEeSence of a power with authority over
nature they were really afraid, with a deeper, more profound, and essentially
different kind of fear. That, I think, is the point of the passage. I am far more
impressed with the anecdote about the disciples’ fear thatn I am with various

simplistic explanations of how He managed to still the water, I think their fear
. has something to teach us,

The very next incident in the Gospel according to Mark, by the way, continues
that theme. Jesus healed a man thought to be possessed by a demon, a man held in
great and irrational fear, But when the people saw him fully clothed, calm, serene,
appacently whole, they were really afraid; so afraid, in fact, that they begged
Jesus to leave,

Fear has always been associated with religion; an association that has not
always been healthy, Ancient men and women looked out at a world full of mystery
and threat and forces they did not understand. Anthropologists tell us that this
primal fear, this dread of the unknown, is one of the basic building blocks of
religion, This fear is banished by knowledge. The more we understand the less We
have to fear, Tt is not the same emotion experienced by the disciples.

Fear can be irrational and very powerful, Religion, too consistently, has
used the Fear of God to motivate people to be faithful and loyal and obedient.
Martin Luther left for posterity his formative religious feelings which included
his stern, demanding father in front of him, and a stern, demanding God behind
him - both of whom filled him with terror.

Feat can become paranoia, It can literally paralyze a person or a community
or a nation, Fear prevented Generali George McLelland from attacking the armies of
the Confederacy even thaugh his troops vastly outnumbered his opponents, Fear
gripped the entire nation in che 1930's until the President rightly cbserved,
"There is nothing to fear but fear itself." Fear of Communism prompted this
country to make some decisions that history continues to question and currently,
in our own community, irrational fear fueled by rumor and untruth, is threatening
to damage a school desegration plan before it gets off the ground,

Fear can paralyze an individual until he or she is rendered ineffective. The
little leaguer who is afraid of the ball isn't going to hit it very far, And the
individual who is afraid of life isn't going to Live it very much,

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The Gospel of Jesus Ghrist banishes fear, In a very real sense the Good News
may be reduced to two words "Fear Not!" In the birth narrative the shepherds, you
will remember, were "filled with fear", and the angel's first word to them was
"Fear not", Likewise, im the accounts of the resurrection, the women who came to
the tomb were advised not to be afraid which suggests that they were terrified, In
Christ we have nothing to fear. In His love nothing can harm us. In the memorable
phrases of St. Paul, "I am certain that neither Life nor death, nor principalities
nor powers...not anything else in all creation, can separate us from the love of
God in Jesus Christ, our Lord."

And yet religion, I propose, begins with something that can only be called
"Holy Fear". It is what the disciples experienced on occasion in the company of
Jesus. it is the deep awareness of an other, a totally other, with whom we have
to do ultimately. It is what the Psalmist meant in words we read this morning:
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; an idea echoed in the Book of
Proverbs. It is that sense that we are not alone, that the universe is inhabited
by someone whose being and wisdom and power far exceed our ability to conceive, It
is not unlike that good experience which I tried ta describe at the outset,

Biblical religion insists on the transcendence of God, Modern life seems
unable to cope with that idea. And one of the most important functions of the
Church, it seems to me, is to keep the idea alive: to remind a secular world that
there is a God,

J.B, Phillips noted, in God our Contemporary, that, ",,.for vast numbers of
people the capacity for awe, wonder and humility has been exhausted or numbed by
the bewildering advance of modern knowledge..." (p.34).

I believe that the institutional church has served well when it has pointed
to the rudimentary fact of human life; nameiy, that it Lived within the sovereignty
of a God who created it. I believe individual human iife is completely human only
in light of that fact, I believe Life without God is not really life at all.

But there are implications beyond the spiritual health of individuals.
Lesslie Newbigin, Bishop of the Church of South India, writes that the insistance
upon the reality of God is central to the struggie for the dignity and sanctity
of humankind, From his particular perspective in India he observes: "A view of
the world from which this has been eliminated can have no safeguard for the human
person," (Honest Religion for Secular Man, p.62).

That is what is so repugnant about both Fascism and Communism, Neither has
xoom for a transcendent God: neither is bothered much by a personal deity who
gives solace to the individual: bute neither can survive beside the idea of a
just and sovereign Lord of history, Totalitarianism - in which the individual
counts for nothing, always depends for its existence on the elimination of the
Biblical idea of God, ‘The front line of the struggle today is heavily theological,
IL was interested to read in the New York Times Book Reivew Last week an article
about trends in contemporary Literature-which suggested that the best writing
today is happening, not in the west, but in Russia, We have the luxury of
debating and discussing the sexual revolution, the "Me Generation", the morality
of drugs., But behind the Iron Curtain a real struggle is going on, At issue is
the integrity and sanctity of the individual human life, The writers and poets

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know it as a theological question: a matter of the existence and transendence of
God Himself,

The brave New World of the 1970's and 80's will need nothing so much as a
little Holy Fear: a little reverence for life: a little humility before that
power which comes from outside, And our personal faith, our deeply personal
spiritual pilgrimage depends, I believe, on an openness to something best described
as fear of the Lord,

I'm for cultivating it intentionally within ourselves: I'm for intentionally
nurturing a precious sense of awe, wonder, reverence, I'm for laying aside our
grim attempts. te pin God down intellectually and simply, bumbly, getting down on
our knees before Him with whom we ultimately have to do,

Our faith begins, like the growing awareness of those men who sat in a
little boat in the Sea of Galilee, with Holy Fear. It grows in us as we
acknowledge that the One who is Holy, and Sovereign and Omnipotent has shown
His face in Jesus Christ and has come among us to Live and die. Our faith comes
to firm ground when we can hear the question posed by the old Spiritual, "Were
you there when they crucified my Lord?", and respond with a confession terribly
and profoundly true - "Sometimes it causes me to tremble!"

That is mature Christian Faith, That is Holy Fear.
Amen,

Father, forgive our arrogance that so often follows our knowledge. Grant
us grace to know our humanity and your sovereignty. Grant us faith to rejoice

in wonder at Your gocdness, Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,