Mystic Fear (Sermon)

“Mystic Fear”

Psalm 111

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

8/23/15

         In chapter nine of his book A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren quotes a Walter Brueggemann essay entitled, “Poetry in a Prose-Flattened World.” In that essay Brueggemann writes: “The gospel is…a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane. Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. But more than that, our technical way of thinking reduces mystery to problem, transforms assurance into certitude, [and] revises quality into quantity…”¹

         Throughout chapter nine, McLaren carefully exposes the faith community’s understandable tendency to rely on the tangible and repeatable technicalities of reason to bring some kind of order to the wildly varied ideas about that subjective Truth some of us choose to call God. But God defies reason.

As an unverifiable reality, God cannot be explained through logic. The best we can do is to express our encounters and involvements with God. Nor is God containable. God cannot be housed, only inhabited. And to do that, say McLaren, Brueggemann, and others, we need the poet, the psalmist, the artist.

About a century ago, G. K. Chesterton wrote: “The poet only asks to get his head in the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And…his head…splits.”² Brueggemann adds that when we try to reduce God to a manageable project, “There is then no danger, no energy, no possibility, no opening for newness!³ The poet behind Psalm 111 would probably say that when one tries to reduce God to something reasonable and manageable, there is no “fear.” And without that poetic, mystic fear, there can be no wisdom.

Collectively, psalmists demonstrate that the appropriate response to the Mystery called God is not logically-argued doctrines, but lively praise. And praise takes many forms. It is far more than soaring Alleluias. As books like Genesis and Exodus, Samuel and Kings, and all four gospels illustrate, sacred storytelling is memorable and transforming praise. Serving, witnessing, and loving as we are loved also constitute praise. Whether offering celebration or lament, psalmists and other spiritual poets praise God, as well.

Now, praise is not political rhetoric screaming, “My god is greater than your god!” In its purest form, praise expresses humble and grateful awe. It is that high road where we stand before an incomprehensible Creator offering, as Anne Lamott says, the only prayers that matter: Help! Thanks! and Wow!⁴ Through praise we put speech to speechlessness.

As speakers of praise, poets caress words into images the way painters spread colors and textures onto canvas. So when the psalmist suggests the odd pairing of “fear of the Lord” and the gift of wisdom, he asks us to imagine much more than feeling afraid and being clever. He asks us to allow ourselves to be drawn to the very limits of human experience. He invites us to stand right up close to the fire, to swim as far from shore as we dare. He invites us to love our enemy, to pray for those who persecute us, to lose everything about our lives that feels safe, secure, and certain so that we might discover our true selves and our deepest and broadest fullness.

The last twelve verses of the Gospel of Mark, the so-called longer ending, are almost universally recognized as an addition to the original work. This addendum encourages the followers of Jesus to do irrational things like handling deadly snakes and drinking poison. I will never commend such endeavors as true devotion, but I am beginning to hear the poetry in them. They invite us to imagine ourselves engaging the mystic fear that ushers us toward the limits of trust. We may not survive all those limits, but only on such a journey do we discover a truth without which we may never truly live.

Think of it this way: If our primary objective as the Church is to get everyone to believe certain doctrines and to be “good,” the most dangerous thing we will teach our kids to handle is pizza! I cannot imagine the psalmist imaging junk food as the food God provides for “those who fear him.”

The psalmist, like Jesus himself, invites us to far more than mere “belief” in God. These and other mystics dare us to live differently in, with, and for the Creation. They challenge us not simply to regurgitate pious platitudes or to shovel money at causes. They dare us to live dangerously. They goad us to discover joy and to share hope by following the Spirit to the boundaries of personal comfort and common sense.

Don’t just tell someone that God cares for widows and orphans, says Jesus. Show them! Go to the least of these. Listen to them. Eat with them. Suffer with them. In person. And in my name.

In a “prose-flattened world,” we will choose not to follow Jesus where he leads. We will choose, instead, to memorize information and call that faith.

In a “prose-flattened world,” we will not just rationalize entitlement and systematize prejudice, we will declare that excess is a sign of God’s favor and that injustice reflects God’s judgment.

In a ‘prose-flattened world,” we will settle into the reasonable illusions of safety, separateness, and certitude. And we will call that “heaven.”

But God calls us to be poets in a suffering Kingdom of God. God calls the Church to be a sign of shalom in the chaos. When people of faith isolate ourselves inside comfortable, “prose-flattened” boundaries, our poetry loses all substance. Praise, then, becomes a kind of denial – like a child sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting, “I can’t hear you!”

The realm of mystic fear is the realm of faith. In a life of mystic fear, we take all manner of chances for the sake of both receiving and offering the kind of fearless Love embodied in Jesus of Nazareth. Once again, it boils down to the Love called agape. When the psalmist speaks of fear, he means self-emptying, limit-testing, awestruck Love.

To live in Love with and for one another in our suffering, and to live with and for the Creation in its suffering – this is to follow Jesus. This is to practice wisdom and to learn true understanding.

¹Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, Zondervan, 2004, pp.161-162.

²Ibid., p. 165.

³Ibid., p. 162.

⁴Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Riverhead, 2012.