A Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
September 15, 2024 at Holy Communion
Deuteronomy 7:6–9, Ephesians 3:13–21, Luke 7:11–17
“Fear seized them all, and they glorified God” (Luke 7:16). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.
I’m going to tell you four quick stories.
Story 1: I had my conversion experience when I was thirteen at a Christian summer camp. During a time of worship in their teepee chapel, I was overwhelmed by a sense of presence, taking me almost up and out of the tent, and pressing into and on me, demanding that I give up my pride and surrender to it.
Story 2: In grad school a friend went on a study trip to Jerusalem during Holy Week, and he visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place where Jesus was buried and rose. He said that, from the moment you step into the tomb, the air becomes thick like water and the quiet can be heard like a loud noise.
Story 3: Last week after the service, and then again at the Bible study, Marg told us about an experience she had on her vacation in Alberta. After coming down from an area of mountains she had not seen before into the rolling countryside, she felt small, felt the the vastness of the earth under her and of the mountains and sky above.
Story 4: A century ago, a poet walked into the Louvre museum in Paris and saw the remains of ancient Greek statue. Its physical perfection and almost timeless antiquity made him feel like the statue was looking at him more than he was looking at the statue. It seemed to be telling him, “You must change your life.”
The reason I tell these stories is that I have been reading short book called *The Idea of the Holy* by Rudolf Otto. It is an attempt to describe what is the experience of encountering holiness. Because the experience of holiness is so singular, he says, the person who has never encountered holiness at all could not possibly understand his book; you have to have at least a little personal experience to recognize what he is giving words to. I’ve told four short stories in the hope that one of them stirs something in you.
Otto argues that in church and in society we have sanitized our idea of holiness. We talk about “holy living” as if “holy” simply meant “good, but also religious”. Instead, he invents a Latin term to describe holiness: it is a *mysterium tremendum et fascinans*, a “mystery dreadful and enthralling.”
And by “dreadful,” Otto means the old sense of the word. Holiness is not “bad, malicious” but “full of dread.” A dreadful mystery is something beyond our capacity to comprehend or rationalize, before which we tremble and feel small. He talks about “creature feeling” in the presence of holiness, the awareness that your life is dependant on a higher principle that you have come to face-to-face with. Next to the immensity of the holy, you are just a breath, and you feel it. You feel the need to humble yourself.
But holiness is also an “enthralling mystery.” For all the dread we feel, the Holy One does not destroy us. Instead, after an encounter with holiness we are filled with a longing to encounter it again. We feel that only the Holy is real, and ordinary life is unreal, secondary. As that poet, Rainer Rilke, said when he encountered an ancient beauty that enthralled him: “You must change your life.”
We see an encounter with holiness in our Gospel reading. Jesus raises a dead man, and when the crowd sees it their reaction is not joy or even simple surprise. If we expect these reactions, it is proof that we live in a society with a sanitized understanding of holiness. Their reaction is fear. “Fear seized them all, and they glorified God” (Luke 7:16). They experience both sides of the dread and enthralling mystery: fear and worship.
But what first grabbed my attention in these readings was the first line of our Old Testament Lesson: “You are a people holy to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 7). In the past, I have blithely glossed over this as if it meant, “God really wants you in particular to be work hard at being good.” That’s not incorrect, I suppose, but it’s not what is meant.
If Israel is “holy to the Lord,” that should evoke for us how sacred objects were also made “holy to the Lord” for use in the Temple. I think of the ark of the covenant. In one episode a man named Uzzah touched it without the proper respect, and he was struck dead immediately (2 Samuel 6:6–7). He had presumed to treat the Dread Mystery like another box. As sharers in God’s holiness, Israel is a sign of dread and fascination to the nations of the world, a people among among whom God in his awesome and beauty is alive and shows himself.
The church is also a dwelling-place place for God’s holiness.—In fact, this is not even an “also”: the church is Israel, and the church is the Temple. The earthly Temple in Jerusalem was only ever a copy of that Temple on high (Hebrews 8:5) which is the body of the eternal Word, a spiritual building made of living stones which we are (1 Peter 2:5).—Just as the Temple was indwelt by God, in today’s Epistle St Paul tells us that we are to be filled “with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19). The dread God lives with us, making us holy, making us contact points for the mystery before which the world trembles.
But what I notice is this: Paul describes our union with Christ as either beyond or below us. We are either “rooted” and “grounded” in God (v 17), and our point of contact with him is in our “inner being” (v 16); or else the mystery of God is an immense “breadth and length and height and depth” (v 18), and this mystery is “beyond mind” (v 19) and “far more abundant than all that we ask or think” (v 20).
I am reminded of St Augustine, who said that God was “more interior to me than my most intimate intimacy and superior to my highest summit.” The Holy One is not something like us, something that can be grasped and known, but a different kind of reality towards which we yearn in our inmost spirit, and towards which we reach when we pass beyond ordinary thinking into spiritual contact and pure intuition.
For us, the point is this: Christians do not live on the surface. Yes, we go about our daily business in much the same way as everybody else. But our real work is inward, as we cultivate our connection with the God who is both the ground in which we are rooted and the immeasurable sky above us. God is both below and above the rational concerns of everyday life. What shows on the surface—our behaviour, our words and deeds—is just the out-working of the principles to which we are joined in our inwardness.
A holy person is not just one who is good, but one whose outward show displays that he is moved by a divine principle which is both disconcerting and enthralling. A holy person makes you feel seen, like Rilke felt seen by a statue of ancient beauty. A holy person enthralls you, because you want the inexplicable abundance of life that flows out from him.
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