Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 29, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.Exodus 17:1-7; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:28-32 Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
Philippians 2:12
Fear and trembling. Paul seems to be saying you can't work out your own salvation without them. Therefore fear and trembling are good for you, like vitamins and minerals.
I wonder if you have ever thought of it that way before. I wonder if you come to church to fill up your reservoir of fear and trembling to the recommended weekly allowance. That sounds flippant, but I'm actually serious about it. Maybe some of you actually do come for that.
Or maybe you come precisely to get away from fear and trembling. Who needs to go looking for it when we've already got September 11, Afghanistan, North Korea, Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda, the stock market, the American health care system, Ariel Sharon, and George Bush to tremble about?
But the fact is, the sort of fear and trembling inspired by the things of this world, even the horrors of this world, is not the sort that's good for you. We're really talking here about that unfashionable and outmoded notion, the fear of God. We're talking about the one kind of fear and trembling that trumps all other fears and tremblings.
And I do admit freely, even proudly (and so does Jane), that we consider it our pastoral duty to do our best to put the fear of God in you on a regular basis. We want you people to get religion! More accurately, we want religion to get you.
In the churches of the Congregational heritage, like this one, we go about this with one hand tied behind our back, as it were. We have to do it with out benefit of stained glass windows, without the awesome liturgy of the Mass, without the kneeling, without any claim to the aura of St. Peter, without the props that invoke holiness, except for two: The Word, and the music. There's the Word of Scripture, the Word who is Christ, and the word of the preacher. We affirm all those, as we affirm music by calling it sacred music. Word and music, that's all we allow ourselves here.
A lean diet, you may say, but the Puritan ministers who filled pulpits like this one in the 17th and 18th centuries had a God-given gift for preaching the fear of God. Jonathan Edwards could make his listeners feel on their very skin the heat of the licking flames of hell. Of course, his church fired him, as churches in the Congregational way can do. This didn't cause him to change course one bit. He had the fear of God in him, even if he couldn't get it into them. So he could do no other.
That's the thing about the fear of God; when it gets into you, there are certain things you just have to do. Some things become non-negotiable.
Which brings us to the parable of the two unworthy sons, the one who didn't do what he said he was going to do, and the one who did do what he said he wouldn't do. Jesus asked the chief priests and the elders of the people, the pillars of the church, in other words he asked us, "Which of the two did what his father wanted?" And they all said: the one who refused to do it but changed his mind and did it anyway. It's so obvious that even the establishment types can see it.
But suppose these father-son conversations happened in public, which is where they would happen in a society that offers practically no privacy. And suppose the father and his sons belonged to a culture that placed a huge value on such virtues as respect and honor where courtesies, gestures, and rituals really count. In a context like that, the son who openly refuses to obey his father is dishonoring him, embarrassing him, humiliating him, making him lose face, and the son who says Yes, Sir, here I go! is showing him the respect he deserves, regardless of what either of them does or doesn't do afterwards. And the culture of the Middle East, then and now, is exactly that sort.
The commandment, Honor your father and your mother --we'd all say that if you're going to keep that commandment, you have to keep it in both word and deed. It's not an either/or. Both sons are out of line. Both of them were less than fully committed to doing the right thing by their father. Everybody can see that. The only debate is about which of them is relatively worse than the other.
This is the sort of thing that happens when people don't have the fear of God in them: Lacking a sense of the cosmic significance and preciousness of every moment of their lives and of everything they do and say, they let moments slip through their fingers, they think it doesn't matter how they behave at least some of the time, they begin to think everything is relative.
Let me offer you a secular analogy. I know some people who wouldn't bother to look up a Zip code if they don't know it or have it handy, they'll just stick the letter in the mail without one. They think of Zip codes as an optional aggravation. The Postal Service people get hysterical and homicidal at the very idea, but some people do not fear the Postal Service, and what's more, some people do not realize that Zip codes have become a cultural absolute. You can't put something in the mail without one any more than you can smoke a cigarette without lighting it.
There is a good old-fashioned English word for this tendency to ruin important things by going about them haphazardly or halfway. It's called hypocrisy. From the Greek hypo, meaning too little or not enough, and krisis, meaning judgment. A hypocrite is someone who goes easy on himself or herself when it comes to things like accountability, consistency, follow-through, and commitment.
The Israelites in the wilderness were hypocrites: They asked God to deliver them from bondage in Egypt, but as soon as God actually did it they immediately decided they had been better off in Egypt where they didn't have to trust God so much. Religious establishments of all sorts are notoriously full of hypocrites like unto the son who said Yes to his father and then didn't do what his father asked him to do. If I were to ask you to look around you now and find a hypocrite sitting near you and point your finger at that person, I'm sure you would have no trouble doing so, but I wouldn't dream of asking you to do that.
What's more, even a quick scanning of the Scriptures, and especially the Gospels, makes it obvious to anyone with half a brain that it's almost impossible to say Yes to God and then make good on it. I mean, look at what God wants! It's a whole lot more than just Son, go and work in the vineyard today. God wants us to love enemies, renounce payback for the evils done to us, give our best clothing to people who don't have what we have, take the homeless into our homes and feed them at our dinner tables, put other people's interests ahead of our own, regard others as better than ourselves, drop whatever we're doing to minister to a stranger's need, and do it all with joy and thanksgiving and mutual encouragement. God wants the impossible.
So we're all hypocrites of one sort or another. Hypocrisy is an essential aspect of life on this planet in this sinful age. It's the necessary compromise we all make between divine possibility and earthy reality. Jesus of Nazareth may be the only non-hypocrite who ever lived or ever will.
I myself have developed a natural gift for hypocrisy and, in my old age , I'm getting quite good at it. It works for me, and I imagine it works for you too. We all learn, with time, to strike some equilibrium, some reassuring stasis, in the tension between obedience to God and survival in the real world. We don't call this hypocrisy. We call it maturity. God help us, we even call it wisdom. And the key to it is, of course, to fear God but not too much, so that we can work out our own salvation with just the right amount of fear and trembling. It doesn't pay to get carried away.
But the mind of Christ, as Paul calls it, is loose in the world and is not content to let us strike this happy balance, but hounds us with dreams and visions, with holy word and sacred music, with bread to eat, wine to drink and rivers to cross, bedeviling us, if you will, with inconvenient Good News and with all the impossible possibilities that follow from it. This is always unsettling, usually anxiety-producing, often infuriating, and once in a while transforming.
But that is what it feels like to have God working in us. So when it happens, don't blame the words or music that triggered it, the musician, the poet, the preacher, the prophet, the painter, whoever. Of course they're all hypocrites. Thats beside the point. Your actual quarrel is with God, who is only using them to get at you and could make the same use of you. Work out your own salvation with all the fear and trembling available to you.
Amen