Epiphany 5 (2/4/07) “The Fear of God”

Isaiah 6.1-8, Luke 5.1-11

“We are to fear, love and trust God above anything else.” There is great wisdom in those words from Luther’s Small Catechism, but sometimes it is difficult to see clearly. The stumbling block comes with the first verb in the trio: We are to fear God. That is one that causes us trouble. It is troublesome with confirmation class students—“Why should be we afraid of God?” It is no less difficult with those of riper years. Many times I have heard adults ask with some puzzlement, “What does it mean exactly that we are to fear God?”

I suspect one reason it is a difficult concept for grown-ups is that the answers we give to confirmands are not always the right answers! I once did a survey of some of the various confirmation class curricula on the market, to see just how different writers have described what it means to fear God. I confess to being rather unimpressed! “This means,” one book says, “respecting God so much that we do not want to disobey him.” Or again, “To fear God means to have a feeling of awe and adoration.” Or again, perhaps a more conservative view: “As sinners, we must fear God’s anger.” Most of the confirmation books I consulted don’t even attempt to describe what it means to fear God, but concentrate instead on love and trust, which seem a bit easier to understand.

So what does it mean to fear God? I’d like us to think about that this morning, in part because our Scripture lessons give us a couple of wonderful examples. In the first lesson, Isaiah the prophet sees a vision of God, “high and lifted up,” and he responds by saying, “Woe is me!” And in the Gospel lesson, Simon Peter has just witnessed the power of Jesus Christ by hauling in an incredible load of fish, and his response is to fall at Jesus’ feet and say, “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man!” If we can put ourselves into the place of either Isaiah or Peter, and try to feel the emotion that they feel, then perhaps we can see that words like “respect” or even “awe” don’t even come close! These men are filled with fear—heart-beating, boot-shaking fear, at what they have just witnessed!

Perhaps a way to understand it is this. Theologians think about God as being both imminent and transcendent. Those are fancy theological words that simply mean God is both very close to us, and very far away. We have to know both of those realities if we are to understand the Christian doctrine of God. And when we talk about the transcendence of God, about God being far away, that begins to get at what it means to fear God. It is the fear that we feel in the presence of something that is absolutely overwhelming to us, and before which we realize that we are nothing.

When I was a very young child, my parents took me to the Grand Canyon. Do you know what I remember of that experience? The sense of fear! I stood at the edge of that wonder of nature, and it completely overwhelmed me! One misstep, it seemed, and I would be history.

Or think about it this way: There’s a wonderful old prayer I love called the “fisherman’s prayer” which says simply, “O God, your sea is so big and my boat is so small!” Can you picture yourself out in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean? The vastness of the water is simply overwhelming!

Now that sense of being overwhelmed by the power and the vastness of God is really what this “fear of God” is all about. It isn’t just respect—that’s much too tame a word. Respect is an important virtue, but it is one due to police officers and others much more mundane that God.

And it isn’t just awe, either. Awe can be a powerful feeling, but it is largely directed at something external, something magnificent, something we know we couldn’t have done.

A few years ago I was up at NU for a basketball game, and I had to parallel park in a space that was only about two feet longer than my car. This was when I was driving to Berkeley every week, where skillful parallel parking is a necessity of life, so this was really a piece of cake. The young lady, perhaps about 17, who belonged to the car in front of me was just walking up, and she witnessed this magnificent feat of parking. “Wow, mister!” she said, “you really know how to parallel park! That was awesome!” Her reaction may have been just a bit overblown, perhaps, but even so, fear of God is a bit bigger than appreciation for some wondrous feat like parallel parking at an NU basketball game or even flinging the stars into the sky.

The fear of God, you see, has this element of personal response. It isn’t just, “Wow, that’s pretty incredible!” It’s more like “I can’t even face that! It frightens me!” And it isn’t a fear that comes out of believing something or someone is going to harm you, but one that arises from the sudden sense that you have no control, no standing, nothing to say, nothing to do, that you are completely at the mercy of someone or something else. It is that kind of sense that drives Simon Peter to his knees and brings about his plea, “Depart from me, O Lord! I cannot stand before you!”

Now he gives, as his reason, that “I am a sinful man.” I think we have to be careful how we understand that. It is not really that he is afraid that Christ will punish him for his sins. That isn’t what we mean by fear. Fear of God does not mean that we have to cower before God, like a dog afraid of a brutal master’s beating.

No, this idea of fear expressed by Isaiah and Peter is the realization that when you are a sinful creature, it is simply overwhelmingly painful to come into the presence of God. Paul Achtemeier puts it this way: “In the light of [Christ’s] grace, the dark corners of our lives come into view, and we are forced to admit we are not what we pretend to be, or even what we want to be.” And so we are afraid—not so much of what he might do, but more of what we might be forced to see in ourselves.

Now what we need to understand and keep in mind is that for us, for human beings, this fear of God is fundamental to our relationship with him. It is more comfortable to talk about loving God, but we cannot truly love God unless we also know what it is to fear God. It is a kind of paradox, but one that is at the heart of Christian faith. For unless we fear God—unless we understand the great distance between God and us, unless we sense the overwhelming gap between God’s holiness and our sinfulness, then the fact that God, from his great distance, has come to us in Jesus Christ to be with us, close to us, intimately near to us, won’t really mean very much.

In the Middle Ages, the fear of God was a big deal. If you think about medieval cathedrals, you can see it in the architecture. The altar was high and very clearly separated from the people. The art was ornate, there was a kind of darkness and mysteriousness in the building. It proclaimed that God was indeed high and lofty, as in Isaiah’s temple, far above mere human beings. In the 21^st century, our churches tend to be comfortable, welcoming, speaking of a God who is close. I would not like to go back to medieval cathedrals, and yet I often lament the loss of that sense of mystery! In our desire to bring God close to us, we too easily lose the sense of what it means to fear God. That is a great loss indeed, for without that fear we cannot truly know God.

Yet with the fear goes the love and especially the trust. “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man!” But Jesus does not depart. “Do not be afraid,” he says to the fisherman, “from now on you will be catching people!” That is the promise that no matter how overwhelmed we feel in the presence of God, no matter how sinful we know ourselves to be, still God loves us and stands with us; and still God has a task for us to do. May God fill us with that fearsome sense of his might and holiness, and may he speak to us those welcome words, “Do not be afraid,” so that we may learn to fear, love and trust God above anything else.