Rev. Dr. Joel D. Biermann
Psalm 111:9-10
Psalm 111:9-10
October 19, 2016
Every year it seems to start just a little bit sooner. Like it or not, the decorations appear well
ahead of the actual holiday. Colored
lights are strung along porches and in store windows. Familiar and fanciful characters from
reality, fiction, and myth greet you at the grocery store and in the shops at
the mall. And perhaps most intrusive of
all, giant inflatable creatures sprout on the front lawns of the homes in the
neighborhood. People can’t seem to wait
to flaunt their holiday decorations. Yes,
it’s beginning to look a lot like Halloween.
I am aware, of course, that some Christians have a problem with Halloween. No doubt, the holiday does have some unsavory
associations with things that are dark and even evil, and I understand why some
believers would shy away from the event.
But, it’s worth remembering that well before it became Reformation Day
in the 16th century, October 31st was already “All Hallow’s
Eve,” and the point was preparation for the celebration of all the saints on
the 1st of November. Nowadays,
though, it’s essentially devolved into just another excuse for excessive
revelry, a chance for adults to play dress up with minimal embarrassment, and
mostly benign and ineffective efforts to foster fear. Of course, yard displays don’t provoke any
real fear—besides the fear of having to drive through what some may consider a
garishly blemished neighborhood, for the next three weeks, and more terrifying
still, even into November thanks to procrastinating neighbors. For most of us, the scariest thing about
Halloween decorations is what they might do to property values. Although…my 2 and 3 year-old grandchildren are certainly wary of the creatures
appearing on lawns—a wariness enhanced, no doubt, a couple weeks ago by a
store’s holiday display and a life-size skeleton that started rattling just as
we walked by. They jumped just a
bit! But adults are different. For them, it takes a Hollywood film or a
carefully choreographed haunted house to generate Halloween fear.
It’s strange, isn’t it, that our culture invests so much in
fostering artificial fear, when close at hand there is no shortage of real
things to fear? Life is a tenuous and
precarious thing, and the accidents, and diagnoses, and tragedies that can
upset and destroy life are so common and routine that fear seems to be an
altogether reasonable response. Cancer, cultural
decay, bankruptcy, tornadoes, hurricanes, terrorism, sharks, career failure,
family failure, loneliness, slow and humiliating dying: big and small,
universal and intimate, real threats generate real fear. But, not for you, right? No, you know better. You know that Christians aren’t supposed to
fear. In fact, you know that for a
Christian, fear is tantamount to sin. After
all, in his first little letter, St. John directly asserts that perfect love surpasses
and drives out fear. For a believer,
fear, we believe, is not possible. It is
excluded on principle. And, while we
will all readily admit struggles to live the ideal, and acknowledge the
encroachment of worry and even fear into our lives, we remain convinced of the
basic truth of the idea. We believe that
of all people, Christians, have absolutely nothing that they should fear. So, it’s not surprising that we begin to
believe the idea that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself is actually
a deep and profound Christian truth. Fear,
we are quite sure, should have no place among us; and the noblest and best
Christians, we conclude, simply don’t fear at all.
But this idea is completely wrong. And it’s not wrong because no Christian is
able to do it; it’s wrong fundamentally.
It’s wrong theologically.
FDR’s famous saying may have been the right thing to say to
a nation contemplating the horror of an all-out world war, but he was wrong. Well, he was mostly wrong. He was right that there is only one thing to
fear. But, the one thing to fear is not
fear itself. No, the one thing to fear
is God. Yes, that’s right. Jesus said so…and I’ll take Jesus over
Roosevelt any day. “Don’t fear those who
kill the body,” Jesus said, “fear him who, after he has killed, has authority
to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear
him!” There is only one who has the
authority to damn someone to hell. It’s
not Satan. The only one with that kind
of authority is God himself. God is the
one who condemns people to hell. Eternal
damnation is a potent terror. Hell is a very
good reason to fear. And so, this brings
us directly to the very center of the confusion that Christians have when it
comes to fear. For you and for me, hell
is no longer a threat, right? We have
been redeemed by Christ, claimed in Baptism and sustained in Absolution and Holy
Communion. We are not doomed for eternal
torment. So, it would seem, for us there
should be nothing to fear.
But, that’s not true.
Even now, even as a Christian living in grace, you are still supposed to
fear God. Jesus’ words still apply. He is, after all, still God; and you, well,
you certainly are not God. God is still
the Creator and the Lord of everything that exists; and you are only a
creature. He remains the unflinching
standard of all holiness and justice; and you are still a very sinful person
who can never measure up to his expectations of moral perfection. As long as you live as a broken creature in
this world, your Creator always holds a fitting degree of terror for you. That’s why in the gospel accounts, Peter and the
disciples routinely reacted with crushing fear when they glimpsed the divinity
of Jesus. When Jesus stilled the storm,
they were terrified of him. When Jesus
filled their nets with fish, Peter asked Jesus to leave—his holy presence was
too frightening. And even the beloved
disciple, John, the dear friend of Jesus, collapses in holy fear when he sees Jesus,
revealed in full heavenly glory in the vision recorded in the book of
Revelation. Even Christians, even
disciples, also are still fully creatures, and creatures are built and designed
to fear their Creator and Judge. It’s
the way that it’s supposed to be.
Yes, Jesus is your friend.
Yes, God is your father. Yes, the
guilt you carry no longer condemns you or damns you. It has been wiped from you. That’s all profoundly and beautifully
true. But, there is a tendency among
Christians to focus so much on Jesus’ kindness and love, that we forget that he
is also God and Lord. He is the
righteous judge of all people. When
Jesus becomes only our buddy and God our pal, our theology is in trouble, and
our Christian life will suffer severely.
Far too often such familiarity breeds contempt, of at the least, a
shallow and superficial understanding of God, God’s law, and what it means to
follow God and his ways in your life.
God is you loving Father and Jesus is your caring savior, but that
doesn’t mean fear is now ruled out. Even
for Christians who know the love of God, the fear of God lingers, as it should,
simply because God is God. God, the
Creator, always provokes a healthy and appropriate fear in creatures. C.S. Lewis understood this better than most
people. In his famous Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis presents a
figure who represents the ultimate Lord of Narnia—one who is fully in control
even when not present. This Christ
figure is named Aslan. And if you’ve
read the books, you know that Aslan is a lion.
Even when he is showing perfect kindness and great mercy, Aslan always remains
an enormous and terrifying lion. Those
who know him and trust him are able, when he chooses, to walk with him, talk
with him, celebrate and laugh with him. Some
even embrace him. Yet, all the while he
remains a lion and his very being and presence always trigger a shock and a
shudder in creatures. One fears Aslan
much as you fear electricity or fire or a narrow mountain pass—if you’re not
careful, you could end up dead. So it is
with Aslan. He exudes majesty, beauty,
joy, grace, and kindness, but also always awe and wonder, and at least a twinge
of terror.
This is the relevant point of the strong admonition in Psalm
111—a word of exhortation that appears quite frequently throughout the
Bible. It’s the text I read: “the fear
of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
Right, but, this is not just a thing that’s one and done. You don’t once experience fear and then move
past it. Fear is not left behind once
you arrive at the Gospel. You do not
move through fear and then dismiss it
once you settle into the goodness of grace.
Fear is the beginning of wisdom, but it’s also the middle and the ongoing
life of wisdom. The fear of the Lord
needs to be practiced. It’s an ongoing,
continuing venture. It’s the mark of a good
and right life. With the fear of God in
place in your life, wisdom begins, grows, and thrives, and good understanding
is the consequence. In other words, when
you practice the fear of God on a regular basis, it helps you maintain a right
outlook on God, on yourself, and on your place and purpose in life. The fear of God keeps everything in your life
in the right order—including you.
Knowing that God holds you accountable, knowing that you can
still make a mess of things, knowing that your sinful self is quite able to
squander God’s gift and wander from God’s grace, knowing that God is still God—all
of these things can serve as powerful restraints on your old sinful self and
also help to keep your new self rightly centered on God’s plan for you. Fear has a remarkable way of generating focus
and alert action. You know how that
works. You’re driving down the
interstate on a long road trip. It’s
late at night, and things are getting a bit fuzzy. And then a semi that’s passed you only about
halfway suddenly veers into your lane and forces you onto the shoulder. You ride it out, and get control, quickly
steering back onto the road. Just like
that, you are instantly wide-awake and wired for the duration of the trip. The fear of God works that way. You need that fear to help you stay on track
in your Christian life. So, we need to
salvage and rehabilitate fear as an essential component in the Christian life. You need to give it the place it deserves in
your own Christian life.
And while we’re rehabilitating fear, maybe we should see
what we can do about rethinking the holiday that goes with it. That day is coming. We should figure out what to do with it when
it gets here, and perhaps make the most of it.
Soon we will be confronted with the holiday marked with bodies and
bones, blood and gore, spirits and torture, demons and death. Yes, soon enough, it will be Good
Friday. Odd, isn’t it, to think of Good
Friday in connection with Halloween? The
truth is that of the two, Good Friday is far and away the more terrifying. The image of Jesus’ lifeless corpse nailed to
a cross is hardly appealing—no wonder people would rather not see it. It’s hard to look at it. But the holiday is not only offensive to our
tender human sensibilities, it is intensely and insanely frightening. The cross means death. Of course, that’s the whole point of a
cross. It was a particularly nasty means
of killing someone. But, the cross means
more than the death of Jesus. The cross
also means your death. It’s not safe. The
cross either condemns you in your unbelief and your personal complicity and
guilt in the rejection and death of God, or it demands that you join Jesus on
your own cross in your own agonizing death to yourself. That’s what it means to believe—one must die
with Jesus. There is no escape. The cross is the end. The cross is the end of your self-regard. That’s shattered. The cross means that your
sense of positive self-worth is slaughtered.
The cross means that your autonomous independence is exposed as a
lie. The cross means that your personal
worth is trampled and tossed away.
Nothing is left. The cross forces
every creature to realize his desperate need.
There is plenty to fear at Golgotha, the place of the skull. But, that fear is not the end and only
word. The fear of wrath, the fear of
losing yourself in the cross, the fear of Good Friday is all caught up and
consumed in the feast of Good Friday.
Jesus is a corpse no more. The
grave has been robbed. The demons are
driven away. The horror is gone. All the fears of this world and all the fears
of self-loss are swept up and brought into the new reality of Jesus as
Lord. He is your Lord. He is your God. Fear him.
Love him. The cross reveals the
deep reality that the fear of the Lord is truly the beginning of wisdom—wisdom that
is fulfilled and made perfect on the cross.
You have nothing to fear, my friend, nothing but the crucified and risen
Lord, your Lord. Fear him.
Amen.