HOLY TERROR John M. Buchanan
Isaiah 6:1-8; Luke 5:1-11 Broad Street Presbyterian Church

February 10, 1980 Columbus, Ohio

The Exorcist is on television this week. After several years as one of Hollywood's
top money-makers, the film, about a little girl progressively possessed by Satan,
continues to elicit something more than sustained interest - something bordering on
fascination. The American people may say they do not believe in the devil or assorted
demons, but we are certainly enamoured with the subject. As a matter of fact, if we
didn't keep denying it, a perfectly objective observer might conclude that we were
utterly obsessed with it. We can't wait, it seems, to pay our money to Hollywood to
scare us to death.

It is one of the significant curiosities of our time. On the one hand we appear to
be entirely rational, logical, skeptical people who have created a highly technilogical
culture and sophisticated way of life. Superstitions have no place among us. On the
other hand we dearly love movies like The Exorcist. The occult is big business, the most
bizarre forms of witchcraft are experiencing a renaissance, millions of us consult
astrology columns and buy books on astrology. We have made Jeanne Dixon into a celebrity
and Science Fiction is acknowledged to be serious literature. In religion, we are
fascinated by Transcendental Meditation, Yoga and other mystical Eastern theologies and
one of the more dynamic and perplexing phenomena in the Christian Church is the Charis-
matic movement; so named because its adherents become possessed by the Holy Spirit and
exhibit mysterious behavior, like speaking in tongues.

There is something in us, it seems, that needs a dose of the supernatural: we will
express that need in one way or another, if not in our religion, then elsewhere. The
phenomenon has certainly been around a long time. Biblical scholars are utterly fas-
cinated with references to the supernatural, the mysterious, the divine manifesting
itself in human experience: Moses and the burning bush, for instance, or on Mt. Sinai,
covered with clouds, with lightning and thunder, a vivid experience of the reality of
God, shepherds in the field outside Bethlehem hearing the angels, the disciples of
Jesus experiencing His transfiguration, the conversion of Saul on the Damascus road. All
of these experiences have been accompanied by fear on the part of the people who have
witnessed them. The prototype passage is the one from Isaiah we heard this morning.
The prophet was in the Temple and in an experience which became his summons to ministry
saw God, and felt the earth shake and heard voices and felt a burning coal on his lips.
Isaiah's reaction is important: "Woe is me! For I am lost." JI can understand that.
There is something about the experience that was disturbing, disquieting, frightening.

In the New Testament lesson this morning, Jesus' disciples were fishing at night
and had caught nothing. When he suggested they put into deeper water they encountered
a shoal of fish and caught so many they almost capsized the boat. That phenomenon so
affected Peter that he fell down on his knees and said, "Depart from me, for I am a
sinful man, O Lord." Peter sensed something going on here beyond the normal human
phenomenon. As he did throughout, Peter seems to have been sensitive to the holy, the
divine in Jesus. And, frankly, it scared him to death. He didn't want to have anything
to do with it. It was literally, "holy terror".

Ancient people lived with a kind of primal fear. Afraid of wild animals, storms,
disease, they lived in terror of the unknown which, for them, encompassed almost every-
thing they perceived. In addition to this primal fear, people have always been afraid
of the deity, His wrath and punishment. Martin Luther, for instance, began his spiritual
pilgrimage in terror at God's anger over his sin. Perceptive people, intellectuals,
have written about it. The philosopher Pascal, for instance: "When I consider the
briefness of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after it...I am afraid...
Who has set me here? By whose order and arrangement have this place and this time been

allotted me?" (@ensee's).

Every Seminary student must read the definitive study by a very scholarly German,
Rudolph Otto, under the title, The Idea of the Holy. Otto called it the "Numen - or
Numinous", the "Mysterium Tremendum" and observed: "The feeling of it may at times
come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest
worship. It may burst in sudden eruption from the depths of the soul...It may become
the hushed trembling and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of ~ whom
or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all
creatures." (Ibid., p. 12/13).

The testimony of history is that human beings sense, somewhere deep inside them-
selves, that which is greater: that which cannot be explained by the mind alone. In the
face of the Holy, the "Mysterium Tremendum", or God, if you will, the response most
common is awe, reverence, fear, dread, "holy terror", The experience is authentic and
perhaps even very healthy. In fact something important about us gets lost when the
experience is no longer available.

The trouble is that the culture in which we live is secular to the point of either
denying all of that or outrightly contradicting it. We are first of all, altogether
too rational, Nurtured on the scientific method, we have concluded that if you can't
weigh and measure it, it can't be true. Scientists, by the way, don't believe that.
They deal with things like quarks, quasars, and black holes. They know, that is to say,
about the unknown. It is the lay person who is persuaded to buy toothpaste because an
actor in a white coat pulls a three ringed binder from the shelf and intones the
sacred litany, "Laboratory tests show..."

British theologian J.S.Whale wrote: "The greatest danger we run is that we put a
pipe in our mouth and our feet on the mantle and sit down in an armchair to discuss
theories of atonement instead of bowing down before the wounds of Christ; that we SCULKY
round the burning bush taking photographs from suitable angles instead of taking the
shoes from our feet because the place whereon we stand is Holy Ground". (Christian
Doctrine).

Na one brought more intellectual muscle to bear on religion than, Pascal. No one
struggled harder, And he concluded: "If one subjects everything to reason our religion
will lose its mystery and its supernatural character. If one offends the principle of
reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous. There are two equally dangerous
extremes, to shut reason out and to let nething else in." (Rudolf Otto, ob.cit.,
Preface to). TI argued last Sunday for common sense in religion: for theology based on
the very best thinking we can do. I suggested that truth commends itself and that we
should examine every idea with great care. This week, I want to suggest that we are
required to balance intellect with emotion, what we know and can understand with the
reality of what we don't know and can't understand, I want to argue that the wisest
thing we can do is be open to awe, mystery, perhaps even a_ tittle fear. We do nat,
in fact, know if all. Lewis Thomas, President of the Memorial Sloane Kétfering Cancer
Center in New York has published an absolutely delightful collection of essays, ''The
Lives of a Cell", most of which make that point. In one of them he suggests that we
agree to suspend all further research into how best to destroy Life until "we have
acquired a complete set of information concerning at least one living thing". Then
at least we will know what we are killing. He proposes a simple one, the protozoan,
Myxotricha papadoxa which lives on the digestive tract of Australian termites. Dr.
Thomas knows that we really don't know much at all! P,26).

In another essay Thomas pokes gentle fun at the presumptuousness of modern humankind.
Nothing is so arrogant, and so wrong, he suggests, than the ecological warning that we
are endangering life in the ecosystem. Life is durable, he suggests. Life will go on.

-3-

We are the delicate part. the weak link. Human life is transient, vulnerable. Fear
for the snail darter, that is to say, but reserve your holy terror for the fact that
we are in the process of committing determined suicide ecologically.

At the same time the respectful fear people have always experienced in their
religion is slowly being replaced by cozy cliches, which is perhaps the reason we will
pay Hollywood for the same experience. One critic put it this way, "When each sermon
becomes a children's sermon, the taste for spiritual junk food expands until faith is
a lollipop and theology is a Twinkie." Instead of struggling with the real issues such
as peace, survival, economic equality, modern Christians are out "encountering where
it's at in group gropes, or getting drenched in Pentecostal downpours of the spirit.
Whereas Peter cried out, 'Depart- from me, 0 Lord’, today we cry out, 'O God, you make
me feel so good'," (Theology Today, 1/80, p. 535, Religion By Cliche, Leonard Sweet) .

I, for one, don't want to be so friendly and warm that I forget that I'm here to
get in touch with none other than the Lord of Creation. American piety is not at all
comfortable with the idea of a God mysterious enough to inspire awe. We talk piously
about Him walking in the garden with us, and talking with us, and telling us we are His
own, whereas if the Bible is to be trusted He is also the High and Holy one who is the
sovereign Lord of all nations. Certainly He walks with us but He is also striding
through the filthy streets of our slums demanding to know what we're doing about
justice. In the place of Jahweh, whose name the Israelites were afraid to pronounce,
American piety has substituted the "Man Upstairs".

People have met the mysterious, and have felt awe or fear - in encounter with the
limits of life: both birth and death, and again our culture tilts in an opposite
diredfion. In every age before us, both birth and death happened naturally, at home,
in full view and with much personal involvement on the part of other members of the
family. Today both happen, in isolation, antiseptically, rarely at home, too frequently
without any contact from other members of the family. It is quite possible to live all
of life and never encounter personally, birth or death - except one's own. We are in-
Sulated against the holiness ~ the mystery inherent in both events. Langdon Gilkey;
University of Chicago theologian, who will be here for our Lenten Lecture Series, writes:
"Any person who has witnessed the birth of a child has experienced the wonder, terror
and ultimacy of that event...it is almost unavailable to modern men." (Naming the
Whirlwind, p.318}. Happily, that is changing. Yet, not long ago, hospitals relegated
expectant husbands to small torture chambers called waiting rooms, full of cigarette
smoke, plastic plants and three year old issues of Field and Stream ~ while the greatest,
holiest, most awesome event in history was happening down the hall.

You cannot, I propose, witness the extremes - being born or dying - without the
primal, religious fear that is elicited every time we stand at the edge of mystery. Our

life, too often deprives us of it, and we need it, “Thyespatd Syjew—~

People have experienced God in the past in the form of an absolute moral imperative.
I wish to suggest that in our concern to moderate the theological extremism which
believes that God Loves to send people to hell, we have, in fact, come up with a God
who doesn't seem to care at all about how we behave. People before us were afraid of
what would happen to them if they misbehaved, and that was not always healthy. But the
reverse, the total moral neutrality of current theology may be worse. It is not a
very popular topic, but may IT venture to suggest that we are accountable to a just and
sovereign God, and that there is every reason to fear the consequences of violating
His will. My, that sounds archaic, doesn't it?

Thomas Jefferson once remarked that he shuddered for his nation when he remembered
that God was just: a prophetic comment, I would suggest. We paid dearly and are still

-4a

paying dearly, I believe, for the historic evil of slavery. We have paid dearly and
are today paying dearly for supporting tyranny and oppression and torture in other
nations. Jran is teaching us a lesson we do not want to learn and that is that we,
along with every other nation, are ultimately accountable for our behavior. tf believe
that is reason for fear. 1 believe when Peter encountered Jesus he was afraid because
of the demand of overwhelming moral superiority. And I believe the idea that we are
accountable to a sovereign God is viable and relevant and a matter of life and death
today,

ft believe we are accountable for violating, systematically and defiantly, the
ecosystem ~ and that the law suits six states are filing against Ohio for dumping coal
waste all over their farm land is only a small part of the cost. We, our children, and
their children will pay. I believe we are paying and will pay for our infatuation with
violence. The front page of the paper last Wednesday morning tabulated the cost: a
police shooting with no explanation, a horribly violent prison riot, and in the corner
of the page, the announcement that a highly paid football player - known best for
injuring other players - will come to town to autograph his book Some Call Me Assassin.
We're hooked on violence. We can't get enough of it. We have more guns in our bedroom
drawers than anyone else in the world ~ and more violence, and more murder and we
simply refuse to learn that it is related.

Religion might, it seems to me, venture a little old fashioned fear of God into the
common life of the culture by suggesting that the Lord of Creation is just, and that
He cares about peace, compassion, love - and that we are accountable for our behavior.

Life, if seems to me, may depend on our recovering the experience of Holy Terror.
But the need essentially, is not external. We need the sense of a transcendent God
and the awe of the Holy Terror which goes with it - in order to be fully human, Artists,
poets, misicians, have always known that about us. It is true, I believe, to confess
it about ourselves. We never stand taller than when we are on our knees in prayer. We
are never stronger than when we confess our need for God. We are never bigger than when
we acknolwedge that which is greater than we are.

Jesus Christ scared Peter to death. The good news is that when Peter, in Holy
Terror, said, "Depart from me"; Jesus didn't depart. Rather He stayed, stuck it out
with Peter through thick and thin. Peter's fear in the face of Christ was an important
step in his growth as a man, He could come to grips with himself honestly only by
acknowledging the great distance between Jesus and himself. He didn't get there with
his arrogance or his presuming that he knew it all, or his physical strength. He
opened his life to Jesus Christ in the very words "Depart from me, 0 Lord, for I am
a sinful man.!

So our faith, it seems to me, is best, strongest and most full of possibi.ity when
it generates what can only be called Holy Terror - when we can hear the question posed
in a very wise old spiritual -

"Were you there when they crucified my lord?"
and respond honestly -
"Sometimes it causes me to tremble."
Amen,

O God, forgive us our presumptuousness. Teach us humility. Grant us grace to
acknowledge what we don’t know: to confess our need for you. Grant us faith to
delight in your mystery and rejoice in wonder at your love: through Jesus Christ

our Lord,
Amen,