February 4, 2007
Rev. Rick Haverly
The Wow Factor
We’ve lost our sense of awe. I don’t know where it happened exactly, but I suspect the loss has been most pronounced from the 1960’s to the present. Now being a people who question everything and in general don’t trust authority, there is no one and no institution that we hold in awe. This has been true of our sense of God When we think of God we may think more in terms of “What a friend we have in Jesus” or “I come to the Garden alone and he walks with me and he talks with me,” more than “When I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds thy hands have made.” God has become very familiar to us, our best friend and we are very chummy with Jesus and with God. And I have to confess that for the most part I like this. I like the new translations that make God’s word more accessible and easier to understand with their use of current images and language. I believe we should have a personal relationship with God. But I think we lose something when we forget the awe, power and majesty of God.
It’s hard to even think of examples of awe. There is a scene in the movie The Wizard of Oz where the 4 heroes first meet the Wizard. That scene is filled with the sense of awe that they felt concerning the wizard. They are afraid to even enter the wizard’s hall. When they do, they tremble and fall to their knees when the wizard’s image and flames burst before them and they are called forward. The lion faints and then eventually runs screaming from the presence. They are absolutely in awe of the wizard. Unfortunately, we know the outcome of the movie and it turns out that the wizard is not deserving of that awe, so it plays right back into our modern understanding.
There are still few experiences of awe and wonder. Sometimes we will associate an experience like a beautiful nature scene or the birth of our child or grandchild being awe filled moments but they rarely drive you to your knees because you are overcome by the sense of power and grandeur. We may be awed by the evil and destruction in this world from the falling of the towers on 9/11 to Katrina and the recent tornadoes, or the shock and awe of the destruction we have brought on the people of Iraq or the witness of the genocide in Rwanda or Darfur. These are incredibly awful events but still not worthy of the ongoing senses of awe I am looking for.
The closest example that I could come up with came many years ago in my dorm at Duke. It was a Saturday afternoon and a few of us were hanging out in the commons room of our dorm. My friend, Chris, was in the doorway, when into the lobby comes Muhammad Ali and his entourage. Now this wasn’t the Muhammad Ali you see now overcome with Parkinson’s and barely able to move or speak. This was Muhammad Ali around the time he was fighting Leon Spinx first losing to him and then winning back the title for the 3rd time. Well Chris was a big guy about 6 foot and 240 pounds. Muhammad looked at him and then pointed to him and said, “You see that boy, you could melt him down into butter and pour him all over me and he still wouldn’t be enough to cover me.” About that time someone in the entourage figured out where they wanted to be and off they went down the hall. Muhammad Ali’s presence induced the kind of awe I am talking about. Chris felt like his knees were going to give out and he was going to melt into butter.
It used to be we were better at understanding the awe of God. The old cathedrals helped us understand the incredible size and glory of God. You walk in and they are so huge and overwhelming that it becomes instinctive for us to keep quiet. They were ornate and beautiful conveying the wonder of God. They were huge and immense communicating God’s size to us. Nowadays, the big megachurches are very utilitarian in their architecture and while they may seat 5,000 or more they communicate more about the size of the congregation than about the size of God.
How can we understand the awesome nature of God? We could do one of those zooms you see on google earth that they use on the news sometime but you would have to start out farther. With the entire universe and understand God was bigger and then come in through the stars to eventually narrow on our galaxy and then our solar system to our planet to our continent and on down until you could even see yourself to start to measure the sense of our awe. We would then need to understand that by using ourselves as the large scale and diminishing to the same ratio where we find ourselves with a single cell or even just an atomic particle. Down to the size where we are not concerned. We lose cells all the time how can we be concerned with one cell or one particle.
But the absolute wonder of it all is this immense awesome God is concerned with us. As Isaiah and Peter were called today, their power and authority came not from understanding of themselves to be good enough but from their understanding that this awesome God chose them anyway and sent them. They gained courage because they were not going out in service to a friend where everything depended upon their ability, but because they were going out in service to the creator of the universe who could change the elements to bring in the big catch. It was this awesome god who empowered and sent them.
We need to regain this balance. To understand the awesome wonder of God, but to know that as overwhelming as God is, this same God is concerned with us, makes us worthy and calls us into service and mission. We are sent in God’s name.