Matthew 17:1-9
Recovering Awe and Intimacy
James Sledge March 6, 2011 - Transfiguration
When I was in seminary, I got to go on a three week long trip to the Middle East. From students who had been in previous years, I knew that one highlight would be an early morning ascent up Mt. Sinai where we would watch the sunrise. Our group assembled in the darkness around 4:00 a.m. Guides looked us over and decided if we were the right size for their camel. We then road the camels for about 45 minutes to a large flat area not too far from the summit and then hiked the rest of the way to the top. There, along with fifty or so other tourists and pilgrims, we waited as the pink glow of sunrise gradually gave way to a fiery, orange-red sun slowly emerging from behind the mountains of the Sinai peninsula.
I had seen pictures of this event in a seminary chapel service. I had heard a classmate speak of what a moving, “mountain-top” experience it was. I was all ready for my own experience, my own epiphany. But nothing happened.
Don’t get me wrong. It was a stunning view. I have some incredible pictures, and I cherish the memories. But God did not seem to be especially there. I did not encounter God’s presence in any profound way. I was hoping for a spiritual high, and all I got was a Kodak moment.
It seems to me that worship often suffers a similar fate. On some level, worship is supposed to be an encounter with God’s majesty, a brush with God’s holiness that inspires awe, praise, and commitment. But often, too often I fear, it is a collection of words and music, some of it perhaps beautiful, maybe even inspiring, but not because of God. Too often, many of us seem unaware of God even being here.
In our staff meetings we have been wondering a lot lately about this problem of encountering God, perhaps better, of failing to encounter God. And it’s not just a worship problem. Many people want to draw closer to God. The spirituality section at Barnes and Noble bespeaks a population desperately longing for the holy, the divine. There is a deep human yearning to connect with God. So why does this search so often seem to go awry? There are surely many reasons, but I found myself thinking about two that may seem a bit contradictory: an awe problem and an intimacy problem.
Annie Dillard has famously commented on the awe problem, noting how we come to worship blissfully unaware of what we are doing, like early polar explorers who carried with them fine china and flatware but neglected to bring warm winter clothing. She writes, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does not one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”[1]
Dillard laments how casually we often come into worship, into God’s presence. We think nothing of sipping our coffee and checking our iPhones. We act pretty much as we do every other moment of every other day. We don’t really expect God to show up, at least not the God of the Bible who causes Peter, James, and John to fall on the ground trembling in fear.
Sometimes I think that worship fails to encounter God because it seeks a small, trivial god we can manage and control, a god we can carry around in our back pocket, a god whose only concern is whatever little existential crises we may be having that day. We’re not looking for a God who might rattle us to our core, turn our lives upside down, and call us to become something new and different and wonderful that gets the world ready for God’s new day.
But if part of our problem is that we’ve lost the capacity to be thunderstruck by God’s presence, equally problematic is that we have forgotten the language of intimacy with God. We know how to talk about God, perhaps even to send requests to God now and then, but many of us have become terribly deficient in communicating with God.
Last fall during the Sunday education hour, we had a class for worship leaders. One of those mornings we were talking about what made for a good public prayer, and several people pointed out a common problem in the prayers they heard in worship. Too often those prayers seemed aimed more at worshippers than they did at God. They used the language of explanation and description, talking more about God than with God. A lot of us pastors deserve to be skewered by this critique. We’re far too fond of using prayers to reinforce our sermons or demonstrate our verbal prowess.
But the prayer language Jesus taught us is intimate language. It addresses God not with formal titles but with a child’s familiar Abba, Daddy. And I think I hear God’s side of this in our reading today. We tend to translate the Bible in an overly formal manner. Abba, Daddy, becomes Father. And when we hear God speak on the mountaintop today, to my ear it comes across a bit too much like a royal decree rather than a Daddy’s joyful utterance, “This is my son, my beloved, my delight.”
Watch a mother or a father with an infant sometime, and listen to them “talk” with one another. There’s not a lot of information in such interactions. Such intimate language is often without grammar or even words. But no one would deny that they are communicating with one another. No one would deny that they are sharing powerful emotions, solidifying their bonds to one another, delighting in one another’s presence, influencing one another’s behavior, even if not a single intelligible word is spoken.
Lovers sometimes use similar “language,” a language that can sound like gibberish to one not caught up in the throes of love. And for centuries, this sort of talk was part of the language of Christian spirituality. But in our modern world, where language is used mostly to inform, explain, and influence, the Church has often forgotten how to join in the intimate “gibberish” of lovers, infants, and poets. And we have impoverished ourselves immensely.
Awe and intimacy might seem to be so far apart that they couldn’t possibly go together, but then you might say the same of Jesus being “fully human, fully divine.” And I am convinced that meaningful faith requires both awe and intimacy. We must encounter the awesome, even fearsome presence of a holy and other God that makes us dive for cover; otherwise we will imagine that God’s job is to serve us and meet our needs. And we must also encounter the grace of God that touches us and says, “Do not be afraid. I love you, and I long to show you life, true human-ness, in all its wonder.”
All praise and glory to the God of mountain peaks and oceans’ depths, who created far flung galaxies and the vastness of space, and who reaches out to touch us in the person of Jesus.
Thanks be to God!
[1] Annie Dillard, quoted in Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989) p. 83.
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