HOLY TERROR
June i9, 1988
11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Isaiah 6:1-8
Mark 4:35-41

“And he...rebuked the wind...and there was a great calsm...And they were
filled with awe." -Mark:39 (RSV}

That story makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Part of
the reason is that I've been on a sailboat, and know a little bit, at least,
about the absolute vulnerability of human beings in a boat on a. large body
of water when a storm blows up. We were moored in a harbor in fact when
the worst of it happened. A real "Nor~-easter" roared through in the early
morning. Even though we were relatively safe, it taught me a lot about
the raw power of a storm at sea and about my own fear. So I was
interested to learn that the Sea of Galilee lies 600 feet below sea level
and the mountains surrounding it act as a geological funnel for the
prevailing winds of the Mediterranean Sea (a littie like what happens at
the corner of Michigan and Walton with a brisk wind off the lake funneled
down the street between the buildings). Sudden violent wind squalls were
not uncommon. They were part of the risk of fishing there. They were
dangerous. —

It is very frightening to be caught in a sgual. But there are things
you can do to enhance your chances. You can use a little bit of sail -
unless it is torn off the mast, and the rudder - unless it is broken off,
to keep the boat pointed into the wind so that it presents a smaller target
for waves. In a storm, that is hard work. You must assign some on board
to bail - because the waves are going to break over the bow and a fishing
boat will fill and sink.

So there they were, a storm has blown up. The boat is being
tossed about like a cork. Jesus is sleeping. That's the most difficult
thing for me to believe in the story. If there's a miracle here, it's a
man sleeping through a storm in an open fishing boat. The disciples are
afraid, and with good reason. They awaken Jesus. He speaks to the storm
and it goes away. I love the way Mark tells these stories with economy and
leanness. The disciples should have been relieved, joyful, ecstatic.
Instead they were afraid - really afraid; now afraid in a much more
profound way than they were before. The Revised Standard Version
translates it, "filled with awe." That's not quite it. A literal
translation of the Greek would be "they feared with a great fear." You bet
they did. They were afraid in the storm. But in the presence of a power

with authority over the storm they were really afraid. Holy terror is what
they experienced. And it is what this story is about.

It happens a lot in the Bible. Something supernatural occurs and
people respond in fear. Moses on Mt. Sinai, with lightening and thunder
"...and the people are afraid and tremble." [Exodus 20:18] Shepherds are
in the field outside Bethlehem; an angel appears and they are "filled
with fear"; the Risen Christ appears to his disciples and says "fear not."
The prototype passage is from the prophet Isaiah, our first lesson this
morning. The prophet was in the temple and in an experience which became
his summons to ministry. He felt the earth shake, heard voices and felt a
burning coal on his lips... and his reaction? “Woe is me! For I am lost."
I can understand that. It is disturbing, disquieting, frightening to be in
the presence of the supernatural.

It is also fascinating. We live in a time and a culture, charac-
terized by rationality, reasonability. Ancient men and women lived
in constant terror of the unknown. We live in a time when knowledge has
banished superstition and fear, or at least is supposed to. There are no
things that go "bump in the night" other than creatures of our own
imaginations. When the windows blew out in the Sears Tower the insurance
companies refused to pay because it was "an act of God," but no one takes
that as a serious theological assertion. We know the atmospheric
conditions which caused that to happen. We know about cause and effect.
We know what is possible and what is impossible. And yet, all the while we
keep looking over our shoulders, fascinated, a little frightened perhaps,
but always interested. We had reason recently to acknowledge that many of
us, in many stations in life, from the most humble to the most exalted,
consult the astrological charts. Certainly Hollywood knows that we love to
be scared to death.

The occult continues to be big business. One of the most successful
missionary movements in this century has been the effective proselytizing
of American and European Christians by a collection of other-worldly swamis
and gurus from the Far East representing a kind of mystical piety that
mainline Protestantism intentionally left behind decades ago. In his
recent major work on comparative religion, Hans Kung says human beings
need, want and look for experiences of the holy...and when Western religion
forgot that people turned to the East. John Updike's new novel, S, is
about a middle-aged, upper middle class, suburban woman who leaves the
banality of her neat life in New England for a Hindu commune in Arizona.

We have tried so hard to be rational, reasonable and intellectually
respectable that we have overdone it and actually become more rational even
than the scientists. We are so afraid of what Leonard Sweet, President of
United Theological Seminary in Dayton, calls "Peter Pan-Fairy Tale
Religion" that we have excised all mystery and any sense of the holy from
our faith. We are so appalled by the phony faith healers that we are
embarrassed even to talk about a power that can heal. We need nothing so
much as a "reconstituted supernaturalism." [See Liberal Protestantism,

p. 257ff }

In point of fact, science doesn't know it al] and the scientists are
the first to admit it. It's you and I - scientific lay people - who are

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inclined to over invest our confidence in science as a panacea for all our
ijjls. You and I will hustie on down to Walgreen's and buy a tube of

tooth paste because an actor in a white coat with a three-ring binder in his
hand looks out from our TV screen and intoned with great earnestness says,
“Laboratory tests prove..."

Scientists say that we have only begun to scratch the surface of the
unknown. There is far more that remains unexplained and mysterious
than we lay people can imagine. Jacob Bronowski reminded us that "There is
today almost no scientific theory which was held in the 18th century." In
fact, in the major scientific arenas ~— cosmology, quantum mechanics,
genetics — little that was held just 50 years ago as the whole truth is
still in place. [Ibid., Sweet]

No one ever brought more intellect to his religion that the
philosopher Pascal. He concluded, “If one subjects everything to reason
our religion will lose its mystery and its supernatural character. If one
offends the principles of reason, our religion will become absurd and
ridiculous. There are two equally dangerous extremes, to shut reason out
and to let nothing else in." [See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy,
Preface]

Our Presbyterian religion is reasonable, but it is not only
reasonable. One of the classic texts every student of theology has to read
is The Idea of the Holy, by Rudolf Otto. Otto taught that one of the
common human experiences is awe in the presence of that which is more than
human. He called it the “Mysterium Tremendum" and described almost
poetically —

"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."
fibid., p. 12,13]

The trouble is that life used to introduce us to that dimension of
existence - but for many of us, at least, no longer does. Living in the
city ours is removed from the primal power of nature ordinarily. We read
about the draught — but we surely experience the kind of existential
dread and human powerlessness far less urgently than the farmers 50
miles west of here.

Human beings meet the mysterious at the limits of life, on the edges,
at birth, and death, in ecstasy and in passion. Our way of life, in the
name of progress, has insulated us. Birth and death used to happen
naturally, at home, in full view of the whole family and community. I'm
very grateful every time I'm in a hospital that I'm alive in 1988. I don't
wish to romanticize the medicine of the past. I'm very grateful for the
life-giving miracles that are common place every time I visit the premature

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infant's nursery and see a whole roomful of miracles: alive babies who not
long ago would not be alive. But the price for this progress is that we
are insulated from the limits of life and therefore from a heaithy sense of
mystery and the holy.

Death and birth happen in antiseptic isolation. One of my very
favorite theological observations is by Langdon Gilkey who wrote "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's changing and that is
why his observation is a favorite of mine. My.own fatherhood began in the
time when expectant fathers were a hospital nuisance of the first
magnitude, relegated to a tiny torture chamber called a waiting room - full
of cigarette smoke, a plastic plant, three-year-old issues of Field and
Stream, and a pay phone on the wall —- while the most mysterious, holiest
event in history is happening down the hall. Happily that is different now
and men are able to be in the presence of the holy mystery of human birth.

So with dying. We are learning to be human again: learning that
there is a time to put limits on medical technology and the necessities of
the Intensive Care Unit and allow humans to touch and human love to be
expressed. Too often dying happens alone, apart, in antiseptic isolation.

You cannot witness the extremes - birthing or dying - without an
ancient, almost primal experience of awe, the mystery of the holy, the
holy fear in the presence of that which is unexplainable.

If religion doesn't remember that, you can count on art to celebrate
it. That's what art is about actually, the expression of that which is not
capable of being expressed in simple sentences or diagrams or formulas. A
New York Times article about Eugene O'Neill on the hundredth anniversary of
his birth, concluded that the continuing power of O'Neill is that his plays
explore the limits of human existence and meaning. O'Neill was a Roman
Catholic and once said about his work: "Most modern plays are concerned
with the relations between man and man. That doesn't interest me at all.

IT am only interested in the relations of man and God." [New York Times,
6/12/88] And Archibald MacLeish, “Once the maps have all been made, a man
were better dead than find new continents." [Sweet, op. cit., p. 260] In
Peter Schaefer's Amadeus, Salieri calls the piercing entry of the oboe in a
Mozart Sonata, the voice of God... And who can walk through the Georgia
O'Keeffe exhibit without sensing a woman's striving and struggling to put
on canvas the mystery of existence, the holiness of the creation?

Religion needs to remember that. Religion is about that which cannot
always be reduced to simple, understandable propositions. It was Reinhold
Niebuhr who pointed out that religion is cheapened and vulgarized when it
banishes all mystery. I think one of the greatest theological insights,
and one of the most relevant, was Niebuhr's sense that the cause of religion
is not helped by those religionists who “claim to know too much about the
mysteries of life." With a twinkle in his eye he lamented those who "know
the geography of heaven and hell, the furniture of the one and the
temperature of the other." [Mystery and Meaning, The Essential
Reinhold Niebuhr, p. 237]

6/19/88

Niebuhr taught that what has made Christianity vulnerable to
rationalism is not its sense of mystery but its presumptuousness. Medieval
Christianity left no mystery unresolved, no question unanswered. The same
mistake of trying to know it all is made by contemporary fundamentalism,
the popular evangelical certainty which the televangelists have made so
enormously successful.

I don't want religion to answer all my questions. I don't want to be
so friendly and warm with my faith that I forget that I came here to be in
touch with the Lord of the Universe. Popular piety is not at all
comfortable with a God big enough to inspire awe. We love the thought of
God walking in the garden with us, talking with, telling us we are his own.
But the Bible describes a God who is the High and Holy One who is sovereign
Lord of ali nations. The Israelites were afraid to pronounce God's name.
We've been heard to call God the "Man Upstairs." I don't want to make us
too cozy with the Almighty. I want a religion which reminds me of mystery
and encourages me to be honest in the face of that which I don't under-
stand, but before which I can bow down in worship and praise.

Perhaps you know the wonderful children's writer Shel Silverstein,
author of The Giving Tree. He has a book of children's poems entitled
Where the Sidewalk Ends. Where the sidewalk ends, i.e. where the concrete
or “con'crete' stops is where

“grass grows soft and white

and the sun burns crimson bright,

and the moonbird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind."

Silverstein knows that children and adults become fully human when
their imaginations are free, when they leave behind that which can be only
understood and explained and counted and measured.

The first poem in the book is called Invitation -
"If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope~er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come ini"
{suggested by Sweet, op. cit., p. 257]

Hear that as an invitation to a religious faith which is open to the
mystery and holiness of it all... A religious faith that incorporates the
unknown and is comfortable not knowing all the answers. Our religion
begins there — in the presence of that which is other, holy, mysterious.
But it does not come to rest there. Rather this religion focuses on the
life of a man; one in whom we are invited to place our confidence; one who
prevails over storms; one who shows us the reality of God and the reality
of ourselves in the middie of the storm and in the midst of our fear.

In the face of mystery, this religion is bold to proclaim one who is
Lord and friend, savior and guide. This religion proclaims not the answer

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to all of life's mysteries and dilemmas, but quite simply that when you are
in a boat in the middle of a storm and very afraid, you can count on his
being in the boat with you. This religion is about that finally - that out
of al] the mysteries of life including that ultimate mystery — our own
death, there is one upon whom we can rely ultimately and from whom nothing
will ever separate us ~ not storms, not sickness, suffering, persecution,
not even our own death.

This religion proclaims, not answers to all questions —- but a Lord
who loves us with God's own love - a Lord who deals with the final mystery
of human death, that final and ultimate fear — by being in the boat with
us, by dying with us and for us.

They were afraid in that tiny boat, tossed about on the sea. They
were afraid when they realized they were in the presence of the holy, the
presence of the one who has authority over all the powers of creation.

And one day they were even more afraid - filled utterly - with awe.

It was that day when all the unexplainable, holy mystery of God
was seen in terrible and beautiful clarity.

It was the day about which the spiritual asks, "Were you there when

they crucified my Lord?...". and answers - for them, for us, for the ages -
"Sometimes it causes me to tremble."

Come to us out of the unknown, O Lord. Give us hearts brave enough
to acknowledge mystery...

And faith stout enough to bow before the holy...

Come to us — in all our fears. Calm the storm. Speak your word of
peace to us. Amen.

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