Our calendar year has seasons. Can you believe it? We are already halfway through the season of winter. It’s less than three weeks until baseball spring training starts, and six weeks to the first day of spring.
The church year has seasons, too. We have come through the season of Advent, which started the fourth Sunday before Christmas. It is a season of expectation, of watchfulness, of waiting. Then Christmas came and lasted twelve days until the day of Epiphany, which traditionally celebrates the arrival of the magi to worship the Christ child. Epiphany means manifestation or revelation. God’s activity in Christ is revealed to the world, represented by the worldly magi who were not of Jesus’ own people. Jesus is revealed, in the words of Simeon, as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory for [God’s] people Israel” (Luke 2:32).
Epiphany is a season of the church year which bridges the time between Christmas and Lent. The gospel readings almost always point to the character and mission of Jesus as displayed early on in his ministry, whether or not people recognized him or not.
The reading three weeks ago was about his baptism, when Jesus was baptized by John, anointed with the descending dove/Spirit and confirmed by God’s affirmation, “my beloved.” Last week the reading was the beginning of his ministry following John’s arrest and Jesus’ first call of disciples.
So with the beginning core of his leadership team, Jesus began to circulate. When the next Sabbath arrived, they were in Capernaum and they went to the local synagogue, just as people today may drop in to a church in a town they are visiting on vacation.
I don’t know if the local rabbi embarrassed Jesus by asking who he was. Perhaps he was known as the carpenter Joseph’s son. Instead of being given a loaf of guest bread, he was invited to join the adult class and he jumped into the discussion. He apparently didn’t do a word by word, verse by verse discussion of the text. He brought an in depth understanding of the reading and amazed everyone. It was evident that he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t just beating his gums with the same passe explanations which had been repeated for the last fifty or one hundred years.
Jesus was not just revealing something about himself, he was revealing something about his father, something about the God for whom he was the flesh and bone representative living in the midst of God’s creation. Jesus may have been coming into his own as a teacher and healer, but more importantly his revelation was of God. He wasn’t just a representation of God, he was a window through which people could see God, a portal through which people could experience the depth and breadth of God’s never-failing love and grace.
The God that Jesus enabled people to see was both personal, operating within a domain of reality, and distant, lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience. God is complex, so complex that we can only know a tiny fraction of God’s reality at any one time. God operates both within and beyond our reality. God is a close as the next breath we take and as distant as the farthest reaches of the universe, a distance which seems to grow in both time and distance the more we discover about the universe.
This paradox of closeness and distance, of cozy companionship and icy aloofness, of never-failing love and unremitting justice is the God whom Jesus brought close to anyone he encountered. Some welcomed this presence while others refused to welcome it. Some were awe-struck and other were angry. Some people who had no reason to know him knew who he was, and some who should have known him, never caught on to his identity or refused to know him.
The posthumous writings of the 17th century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal included what has come to be known as “Pascal’s Wager.” Pascal posited that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually exists and assuming an infinite gain or loss associated with belief or unbelief in God (as represented by an eternity in heaven or hell), a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God exists, the person gains everything, and if God does not actually exist, the person loses little or nothing.
Believers tend to respond to God in one of two ways: awe or terror. Today’s psalm captures some of this bipolar response to God. The psalmist tries to lay out a balanced view of God. The same God who is both above (distant) and within (near) is also named as a God whose presence and involvement within the faith community can be intimately felt.
God’s transcendent qualities, the ones that define God as very different from human beings are readily evident in the psalmist’s words:
The works of the Lord are magnificent. ...The God described here is so powerful and present that we are enticed to study, to meditate on, and celebrate God in a community of the faithful. The presence of the Divine is so plain that there really is no option but to give witness to it.
God’s deeds are majestic and glorious.
God’s righteousness stands forever.
God is famous for his wondrous works.
The Lord is full of mercy and compassion. ...
God sent redemption for his people;
God commanded that his covenant last forever.
Of course, many of us have some trouble with that. We are very rational. We were bottle-fed on cause and effect, and if God is cause, then we don’t like a lot of the effect that we see or experience. Too often we know just enough science to think that there is no connection between it and God. We doubt the power of God’s works or God’s involvement in things we think we can clearly and unabashedly define as solely human causation.
Being awe-struck by God is not something to be gotten over like recovering from an illness or a bad employment experience. If God is awesome, that awesomeness doesn’t diminish with time or experience. The psalmist says that “fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” That suggests that the awesomeness of God is something that actually grows over time, something that deepens as our relationship with God develops. The “fear of the Lord” is not terror. It is respect, it is wonderment, it is wide-eyed amazement. It is awe.
We see a shift in the middle of the psalm. “God gives food to those who honor him.” This links the faraway-ness God with God’s closeness. Not only does the believer have an experience of awe in the presence of God, that very experience is what leads us into the relationship that intimately nourishes us.
If we are terrified of God, afraid of God, fearful of God, we will work to keep God at arm’s length, pushing God away from us. We will deny God’s intimacy with us and echo what the person imprisoned by an evil spirit screamed at Jesus in the Capernaum synagogue, “What have you to do with us?” That approach wants nothing to do with God nor God’s doing anything with us. On the other hand, awe is an invitation for a more fulfilling relationship, a deeper intimacy from both sides, we with God and God with us.
Jesus – divine and human – Word made flesh – bridges the chasm between terror and awe, between fear and joy, between icy resentment and warm welcome.
“Fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” And wisdom is the knowledge that, in the words of Paul to believers in Rome,
“If God is for us, who is against us? He didn’t spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. ... Who will bring a charge against God’s elect people? It is God who acquits them. Who is going to convict them? It is Christ Jesus who died, even more, who was raised, and who also is at God’s right side. It is Christ Jesus who also pleads our case for us” (Romans 8:31-34).Friends, fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins. It is awe, not terror, it is joy, not fear, it is life, not death.
May God’s praise last forever!
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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