Exodus 19-20 "Reverent Love" Scott Hoezee

Recently the American Film Institute conducted a big survey to determine the top 100 heroes in cinematic history. Happily (and somewhat surprisingly) the number one movie hero was not some gun-toting, violent figure but instead the character of Atticus Finch from the film To Kill a Mockingbird. The recently deceased actor Gregory Peck played the role of Finch and he did so with a kind of noble simplicity that managed to convey a tremendous amount of moral heft, gravity, and power. In the story Atticus Finch is an attorney who defends a black man against a false rape charge made by a white woman. Although he ultimately loses the case, Finch throws himself into that trial with such ardor, compassion, and conviction that he wins the reverential respect of the entire black community.

The one scene in that movie that always makes tears leap to my eyes comes after the unjust guilty verdict is handed down by the all-white jury. The trial is over and so the main floor of the courtroom has emptied out. But the balcony, where the black people of the segregated community had to sit, is still packed. The only white person up there is Atticus' daughter, Scout. While Atticus silently packs up his briefcase at the defense table, one black man nudges Scout and says, "Stand up, Miss Scout, stand up!" The child asks, "How come?" And the answer comes back, "Your father's passing by." And as Atticus Finch exits the courtroom, every black person in the balcony stands at attention, both silent and reverent before this white man whom they have come to respect and adore.

Reverence like that is something we see very little of now. Ours is a society that will lampoon, satirize, and poke fun of just about anyone and anything. In fact, the higher up a person goes politically, the more likely it is that he or she will become the target of the irreverent humor that has become the staple of late-night comedians. Often these days you may hear someone ask, "Is nothing sacred anymore?" and the answer is clearly "No."

As Roger Shattuck notes in his book Forbidden Knowledge, it seems that nothing is any longer considered taboo. In older societies the things that were deemed taboo or off-limits usually were places where holiness and pollution were not yet differentiated. That is to say, you could better avoid something altogether rather than run the risk of, even accidentally, mixing up the sacred with the profane. Because confusion (and probably lots of social and personal harm) could result if people were not careful. But even a quick glance at television reveals that there are no taboos in American society. In the name of free speech we allow anyone to say anything he or she likes. There is no subject, act, or person we dare not approach. Once you lose your sense for the sacred, you also lose your fear that you might, even accidentally, pollute that holy thing to the harm of many.

And so reverence withers, too. A sense for majesty and the mystery of the divine fades. We can scarcely imagine encountering something so grand that it would either stun us into respectful silence or cause us to cover our eyes because we deem ourselves to be unworthy of seeing something that is too beautiful for us. Even in contemporary Christian music when there is an effort to make a nod in the direction of reverence, the effort often fails. A popular recent song has been "Awesome God" but although the refrain proclaims rightly that "Our God is an awesome God," the tune is so bouncy, so foot-tappingly springy and trite, that there is nothing awesome about it. The same could be said about songs that have incorporated the word "majesty." The cozy feelings the tunes elicit are so non-majestic as to do an end-run on what the song is about. It's like trying to sing a sad song at a funeral to the tune of "I'm a Little Teapot" or "Pop Goes the Weasel." It just doesn't work.

But most folks don't notice because we have succeeded in domesticating even God. Maybe we do not deny God's Other-ness, the fact that he is different from us. But still we find it possible to talk or sing about God in ways that are so mundane, so personal, so cozy that practically we have closed the gap between who we are and who God is.

All of this is prelude to our look at a key part of Exodus 19-20. A good bit of these chapters is consumed with God's very careful regulations of the whys and wherefores of keeping the people off the holy mountain. Dire warnings are given as to what would happen to the man, woman, child, or goat that touched the mountain. Detailed instructions are given as to how to fence the mountain so that no one would get too close even by accident. Ironically, however, it turns out that there is no chance whatsoever that anyone would get too close! For in the end Moses and Aaron do not need to beat the people back but rather they need to encourage the people not to stay too far away! If anything, the people were too terrified to come anywhere near God.

Perhaps this can provide us with a reminder of something we tend to forget these days. Of course, as Christians we don't want to scare people away from God. In fact, in our recent mini-series on Romans 8 you heard me talk very boldly about the fact that we are now "in Christ." God desires this kind of intimacy with his children. Jesus told us to call God "our Father" and to do so regularly, lovingly, and without hesitation.

So given all of that, you may be wondering why a few minutes ago I was critical of certain warm expressions of the faith. Obviously if I am going to stay consistent with lots of other facets of the Christian life, this idea of reverence for God is going to have to end up meaning something other than the kind of terror that led the Israelites to keep their distance from Sinai. But that is why Exodus 20:20 is so intriguing.

Because there Moses says something that at first blush looks contradictory. Moses himself had strung up the ancient equivalent of that bright yellow "Do Not Cross" tape that police use to cordon off a crime scene. The people needed to stay behind the tape. Again, however, once God's presence did descend on Sinai, keeping the people behind the tape was not a problem. So in verse 20, after the people beg Moses to meet God so they won't have to, Moses says, "Do not be afraid because God has come here like this so that your fear of God will keep you from sin."

Don't be afraid. But then again, be afraid. Moses says both. But perhaps this was a way to say that although the people needed to have a healthy level of fear where God is concerned, they did not need to fear God too much. I suspect reverence lies somewhere near the midpoint between complete terror and chummy over-familiarity. Reverence exists at the intersection of love and respect, of grace and awe. God does not want to terrify us to the point of stupor yet he does want to impress us enough that we will know that this God is not someone to be trifled or toyed with in some casual manner. At least part of our motivation to serve this God is exactly because we take him so seriously.

But if that is so, then generating reverence requires at least an inkling of the very terror that, left unchecked, would make you run for your life. God's grandeur gets your reverential attention, God's love keeps your fear in bounds. God's holiness means you need a fence in front so that you do not presume too much in approaching God. But God's grace builds a fence behind you, too, so that you won't run away.

Moses tried to allay the terrifying side of fear so as to make room for a nuanced and respectful fear. But as verse 21 tells us, the people nevertheless remained "at a distance." But things could not remain that way forever. Because a proper piety is one that helps us to remain reverently humble before God's power and yet it keeps us close enough to this same God so that he can embrace us in his everlasting arms.

Reverence is a balancing act. In Exodus 19-20 the people fall short of reverence because they are scared to death of the sheer might of God's presence. And so they stay "at a distance." But there is one other famous portion of the Bible where people are said to stay "at a distance" and it comes near the end of the gospel when the Son of God is lifted up on a cross. Mark in particular makes clear that when Jesus was lifted up to die, all those who had once been close to him remained afar off, "at a distance" as Mark puts it.

So there you have it from the Old and New Testaments: there are two things that could frighten us into keeping our distance: one is the presence of God in all its splendor and terror and the other is the complete absence of God in the dereliction of the One who cries, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!?" Both the fullness of God's presence and the Godforsaken sense of his absence can be too much for us.

Yet I opened this sermon claiming that within the church and certainly outside the church, there is very little reverence now. We no longer see the smoke on the mountain and have perhaps become all-too-familiar with even the cross. In any event, we do not often make room for reverence. When I recently visited a Greek Orthodox church and participated in a worship service, I was struck by the fact that in that church there is an area at the front of the chancel where no unordained person is allowed. And although any member of the church who wanted to could enter that area, no one does, including the children. It is a sacred, set-aside space designed to remind everyone of God's grandeur. And in seeing that, it struck me that we don't typically have that sense about our own worship space here.

In one sense I like that. I don't want my children growing up afraid of God, afraid of church. Also, our Reformed theology is very helpful in making us see the sacredness of the everyday and so we don't want to convey the notion that God is only here. God is also in your kitchen at home, in the boardroom at work, at the video store where you need to make choices as to what you will watch. So there is a part of me that is glad we do not have forbidden places here at church as it could send any number of wrong messages.

Then again, do we go too far the other direction in failing to communicate any sense of sacredness, reverence, holy sobriety? And by that I mean not just in terms of physical spaces at church but also just generally in terms of how we perceive the presence of God in our lives. Reverence, I said earlier, is a balancing act, striking a pose somewhere in between the kind of terror that could make you run for your life and the proper appreciation for God's grace that makes you want to stay close enough as to serve this God in love.

So perhaps among the implications of all this is that in worship we enter into this place prayerfully and with the up-front expectation that we are going to meet our God here. It's wonderful to have fellowship with our brothers and sisters in Christ before the service and one of the joys of our expanded facility these last months has been precisely the way people linger to be with one another. That is so vital a component of what it means to be the Body of Christ! But even so when we enter this sanctuary, we need to focus on the act of worship before us and the God in front of whom we do that worship. If we slide into our pew still chuckling over something Jerry or Frieda just said to us in the narthex and then casually open the bulletin to catch up on the news yet without even pausing for a moment of prayer or thoughtfulness, then we may as well be taking our seat for a movie or plopping down in the stadium for a Whitecaps game.

Years ago people made a habit out of offering a prayer as soon as they were in the pew. And although that practice is as subject as anything to becoming a rote and empty ritual, we could try to recover the reverential motivation behind such an act. Similarly throughout the course of the liturgy we should bend our minds toward the Holy One who called us here and who receives our praise, our petitions, our every gesture of worship.

Another implication may have to do with our prayers even in private. Once again we need to find the balance between terror and over-familiarity. On the one hand, we should be able to pray at a moment's notice because we know how near to us our God in Christ is by the Holy Spirit. If you are stuck in traffic, walking to the office, or waiting in line at the grocery store and suddenly you recall that today is the day of Jimmy's outpatient surgery, you should be able to fire off a prayer to God to be with Jimmy. As the one old hymn puts it, "As I breathe, I pray" and there is something right about that.

At the same time, however, perhaps there are ways in even such quick prayers, and certainly in our more "formal" prayers, to rehearse language that will remind us to be reverent. Perhaps finding non-artificial ways to incorporate the elevated speech of classic prayers or of the lyrics to certain hymns can remind us that familiar though we are with God and familiar though our God is with us, still there is a difference between the God of the universe and all the other beings to whom we talk in the course of any given day.

Although some of you might not be comfortable with this practice yourselves, I have lately taken a cue from my Lutheran friends who, unlike we Reformed types, did not give up the ancient Christian practice of crossing themselves whenever the Triune Name of God in invoked. So for me one way I have tried lately to rehearse reverence is to cross myself in prayer in asking for the blessing of Almighty God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The majestic invocation of that Name as well as the powerful symbol of the cross, reminding us what Jesus did, can focus the mind and sober the heart as to what prayer is properly about.

Few challenges in life are as great as the ones that require us to draw together disparate, nearly opposite, emotions or facts. It is far easier to be one extreme or the other--so easy, in fact, that without thinking about it, we tend to fall into extremes. So for worship, we tend to be either rigid and stiff or completely casual. We tend either to be tight-lipped and formal or so relaxed that we spend the pre-service time chatting amiably across the pews while sipping a cup of coffee. (And isn't it interesting to note that a good number of contemporary churches have lately modeled themselves on Starbucks instead of on anything resembling a traditional church?)

The challenge comes in trying to do a both/and--to find manners of thinking, behaving, and speaking that have enough holy terror in them as to make one utterly serious and humble and yet enough knowledge of this holy God's love as to inspire us to stand before God completely vulnerable and trusting and without the slightest desire to flee because you would never want to wriggle out of those everlasting arms that embrace you.

When the Lord God Yahweh descended on Sinai, there was smoke on the mountain, and it got the people's attention. In these latter days our God has come to us through Jesus who ended up dead on a cross. Yet all the splendor, glory, might, and fierceness of God is within also Jesus As the disciples saw on the Mount of Transfiguration, as the apostle John saw in his apocalyptic visions in the Book of Revelation, Jesus contains the effulgence of glory. When he opens his mouth, it is the sound of rushing waters that is heard. When he pulls back his cloak, it is the light brighter than a thousand suns that blazes forth. Yet when he looks you straight in the eyes with his piercing gaze, what you see is not just fierce intelligence but also the font of all love, mercy, grace, and compassion. His divine smile draws you in as you reverently worship him and fellowship with him in the splendor of holiness and in the delicious knowledge that this majestic God is also your dearest Friend. There is mystery enough in all that to keep us humbly reverent forever. Amen.