February 9, 2025

A Holy Terror

First of all, let me assure you that this sermon, titled “A Holy Terror, is not about any of my grandchildren.  Nor is it — the record of my own childhood notwithstanding — about myself.  Today, I’m taking my cue from what happened to the prophet Isaiah and the disciple, Simon Peter, when the Divine Will grabbed each of them by the throat and stared them in the eye.  They found themselves in the presence of holiness, and they were terrified.

It was for Isaiah one of those marker points of life so pivotal that it becomes ever-connected in one’s memory to some significant world event.  He makes the connection in one breath: “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord . . .”  He had entered the temple in search of familiar rituals, and comforting surroundings, but was encountered by the last thing he expected — a holy terror.  Isaiah cries out, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”

A similar thing happened to Simon Peter one day while he was minding his own business, doing his day’s work as a fisherman.  He and his partners had been fishing all night with no success, but were nonetheless dutifully occupied.  He had not asked to have his day interrupted, let alone his life transformed.  But a man with other plans stepped into his boat and began to preach.  And at the end of the message he turned to Simon Peter and told him to put out into deep water and lower the nets.  When they came up with more fish than they could handle, Simon Peter looked into the face of this preacher and realized in a moment who he was dealing with.  Scripture says, “he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’”  He was hoping, I rather suspect, that if he kept his head down and his eyes closed long enough, perhaps when he opened them again this majestic and fearsome man might be gone.

Whatever it was he saw in that face or heard in that voice, he knew he was in the presence of holiness — and he was terrified.

That’s not what we bargain for when we anticipate communion with Christ.  Most of us are pretty good at minding our own business, and doing what we can to make life manageable.  We don’t shirk our responsibilities, or presume too much.  We simply would like for the great calamities and trials of life to somehow pass us by, while we do the best we can with those that don’t.

And we approach Sunday worship in much the same way.  We want our religion to be meted out in digestible portions.  We want our Sunday mornings to be pleasant, our church participation to be happy, and our experience of worship to be — well, regular.  Terror is not on the menu.

In fact, if Sunday morning gets too strange or unfamiliar, or if our religious experience is not satisfying, or if the morning message is uncomfortable, we generally have some complaining in store for the pastor, or the deacons, or the musicians.

What if you walked in here some fine Sunday morning, and actually encountered the Lord of Hosts?  What if the encounter shook your world until the pins started to come out, and terror seized your innards dropping you to your knees, until you had to hide your face?

In truth, we don’t know what might happen to us if that Lord ever really got a hold of us.  Isaiah was commissioned on the spot to be a prophet and speak a disturbing word to the people.  Simon Peter was compelled to drop his fishing nets, and become a disciple of this disturbing man who preached from his boat.  Most of what we do in church keeps our lives neatly in order and insulates us against the life-changing power of a confrontation with the Divine.  Carl Jung has written that the function of religion is to protect us from an experience of God.  Commenting on that idea, Joseph Campbell wrote, “Some fifty percent of the mythic tales in Ovid’s Metamorphoses are of characters, ill-prepared, who were unfavorably transformed by encounters with divinities, the full blast of whose light they were unready to absorb.  The priest’s practical maxims and metaphorical rites moderate transcendent light to secular conditions, intending harmony and enrichment, not disquietude and dissolution.”

Campbell has a point.  And the word of scripture confirms it.  The Spirit of Holiness confronts us with “disquietude and dissolution” just as consistently as with “harmony and enrichment.”

Religious types used to talk a lot about the “fear of the Lord.”  We don’t use that phrase much anymore.  But I remember Dadgie saying once that respect is a combination of love and fear.  That stuck with me and really set my mind going.  It’s true, isn’t it?  In order to respect someone, there has to be just the slightest hint of fear involved – even if it’s just the fear of failing or disappointing that person.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to unload the notion of the “fear of the Lord.”  Maybe a little fear of encountering the Divine could be a healthy thing.  Maybe it’s a necessary ingredient in having respect for the holy.  And, believe me, there is a basis for some fear.

The power of Divinity, unleashed in your life, will shake the foundations of your well-structured existence.  The revolutionary ideas blown up by the wind of the Spirit will set your head spinning.  The call of the Lord, if you indeed hear it, will turn you around and send you on a different road.  We touch that power, feel that wind, hear that call so infrequently perhaps because it is more comfortable to keep the power of Divinity well contained in our proper prayers and harmonious hymns.

Martin Luther once said, “The problem with most of us is that we have lost the ability to shudder.  We have lost the ability to feel awe, to recognize mystery, and to fall prostrate at the feet of the holy.”

But the true power of these stories of holy terror, these stories of Isaiah and Simon Peter, lies not only in the terrifying and transforming force of the Lord’s presence, and the fear it inspired, but in the response!  When confronted by that which is so holy and so other that it brings these men to their knees in shameful recognition of their weaknesses and failings, they respond by going where the disturbing word of truth takes them.  Isaiah senses the need for someone to be sent to speak the Lord’s word to the people, and he answers immediately, “Here am I;  Send me!”  Simon Peter hears Jesus tell him that from now on he will be fishing for the hearts and minds of people, and he immediately drops his nets and follows him.

I have two messages for you today.  First of all, don’t get so addicted to comfortable religion, that you avoid being encountered by the Holy.  That disturbing Divine Presence will not necessarily find you in the midst of your comfort.  You may have to be open to a bit of holy terror, if you are to allow yourself to be engaged by holiness.

Secondly, if you find yourself dumbstruck by the voice of all creation welling up from your toes, get down on your knees and pay attention.  Then follow.