Fear-of-the-Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom

Sermon notes for the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost given at the United Church of Acworth on August 19, 2012.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

"God's Grandeur," Gerard Manley Hopkins

We are united in seeking the religious education of our children and the nurture of their social life.  

United Church of Acworth Faith and Covenant

Two questions are before us this morning.  Why should we seek the religious education of our children? And what does that look like?

In today’s reading from Proverbs we find that wisdom herself has prepared a feast for all those who are hungry.

“You that are simple, turn in here!”

To those without sense she says,

“Come, eat of my bread

and drink of the wine I have mixed.

Lay aside immaturity, and live,

and walk in the way of insight.”

Apparently all that’s required of those who want to become wise is to respond to the invitation and eat of the goods.
The apostle Paul gives us funny advice:

 “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise.”
There, that’s easy enough.  Don’t be unwise, be wise.  That should solve your problems.  Or the equally question-begging phrase from the Psalm:  Depart from evil, and do good.
Very well.  It’s simple.  Eat of the feast of wisdom.  Don’t be unwise, be wise.  Depart from evil and do good.
But I think we already gather as much.  To say the word wisdom implies that there’s something called foolishness or unwisdom that we’re trying to get away from.  To say Depart from evil, implies pursuing good.  And most of us from an early age have understood those basic messages.
So if we’re to not be unwise, but wise, if we’re to depart from evil and pursue good, what does that mean more specifically?
If we’re going to eat from the feast that wisdom has prepared, how will we know the address of the door to walk through?
Where does wisdom begin?  How do we gain proper orientation in the spiritual path?
The book of Proverbs, the Old Testament repository of wise sayings, has this as its thesis statement:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
  fools despise wisdom and instruction.

I think many of us will at first blush not like this answer.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge??! Many of us have heard it and perhaps heard it abused in the places and by the people that wielded it.  But nonetheless it is the biblical answer and so we will by necessity need to wrestle with it.  And if we’ve learned anything from encountering a new person, we must hold off our judgment until we have a better understanding of who they really are.

One of the first things we should do whenever we encounter a difficult text in scripture is lay out honestly our knee-jerk reaction to it.  Be honest.  God can handle our doubts and revulsions -- God’s not as easily offended as we are.

So, many of us honestly feel after reading “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge”:  “that’s not the God I believe in -- the God I believe in is the God of love, not a fearful God.”

And as long as we don’t stop there with our knee-jerk reaction, we haven’t become bigotted readers labelling and rejecting a portion of a text because of its appearances.
We need to be honest about our apprehensions when we read difficult texts, but we must keep reading and trust that there is a better, deeper, more true and real understanding to this than what it may appear as.
So we dig a little deeper.
In today’s Psalm we encounter the fear of the Lord.
After we are invited to wisdom’s feast in Psalm 34:8:
“O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him.”
We are given this exhortation:  “O fear the Lord, you his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want.”

“those who fear him have no want.”

Our breathing gets heavier and our face begins to turn red.  “Let me get this straight, if we’re promised utter satisfaction just as long as we start groveling before God and live in fear of God’s displeasure?”
That sounds convenient for those who want to manipulate us into doing “God’s will.”

In fact many of us find that we are repulsed by the idea that the proper response to God is fear because we see how much awful manipulation goes on in communities that are driven by fear.

But just because this phrase is misused and abused by religious communities doesn’t mean it shouldn’t gain currency in our own community.

In fact this verse itself might turn out to be one of the better antidotes to those who wield it so malevolently.

We first have to follow Eugene Peterson’s lead in not misreading or mishearing this phrase “the fear of the Lord.”

The phrase is only a phrase in English translation.  The original text has one word which means what our English phrase “fear of the Lord” communicates.
So in an effort to help communicate that reality Peterson writes it as fear hyphen of hyphen the hyphen Lord.  He writes:

“The four words in English (two in Hebrew) are bound together, making a single word.  Its function as a single word cannot be understood by taking it apart and then adding up the meanings of the parts.  Fear-of-the-lord is not a combination of fear + the + the + Lord.  Fear-of-the-Lord is a word all its own.  So we don't look up "fear" in the dictionary, then "God," and then proceed to combine the two meanings: "fear," a feeling of apprehension, plus "God," a divine being worthy of worship, is not fear-of-the-Lord.  Pursuing that analytical route gets us way off the track.”

So if it doesn’t mean “a feeling of apprehension toward God” -- the logical meaning from analyzing the meanings of the individual English words -- then what does it mean?

Fear-of-the-Lord does not mean groveling before a capricious and easily offended all-powerful genie.  Rather it is the appropriate reverent way of responding to the sacredness of life, the enchantment of the universe.  The fear-of-the-Lord is the recognition that this world is not ours for the taking, that life begins and ends and is sustained quite beyond our control and will.

It is a realization that despite the fact that science has found a way to outline the processes of nature, to categorize the species, to manipulate the observable patterns and create technologies that harness the various energies of the planet, that despite all that we know there is much that we don’t know.  That even a person who has studied a phenomenon in the natural world for his whole life (in fact especially this person) will find that the object has more and more mystery and enchantment and beauty than ever anyone would imagine who simply read the textbook entry on it.

Fear-of-the-Lord is an awe at the majesty and grandeur of God flaming “out, like shining from shook foil;”  gathering “to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed”.

Fear-of-the-Lord is a humble recognition of our place in the magnicifently complex and every-mystifying universe.  It’s the recognition that as we curiously study and explore Mars, that there are planets that exist that we have no knowledge of.

Fear-of-the Lord is the recognition that this world is not controllable, containable -- that it is much bigger and deeper than we might imagine.  And that behind this elusive creation is a majestic creator who behind the clouds of mystery sustains and guides it all.

Fear-of-the-Lord is the recognition that we are humans and God is God.  That we are not God and that God is not a thing.

That the world is God’s, that God is the one who creates and sustains the molecules, even the quanta which mystify the scientists, means that we need to learn a healthy bit of modesty in our way of relating to this world and to other human beings.

Perhaps another way to consider it is that it is a recognition of the limits of human existence and the unbounded character of God’s abundance.

so the Psalm calls our children and says, “Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord.”
And perhaps at this point we’re not as up-in-arms about this exhortation to fear the Lord.  Instead perhaps we see it as the avenue through which a healthy perspective of our humanness and God’s divinity might be found.
Perhaps fear-of-the-Lord, the humility before the grandeur of God, the reverence for the majesty of the sacred shining through the everyday -- perhaps the fear-of-the-Lord is the beginning of properly relating to the world in which we live and the people with whom we share this life.

It is a change in orientation towards the world and the people of the world that is the first step toward becoming wise, toward becoming mature.  And that change of orientation enables us to depart from evil and pursue good.  It enables to understand the time that we have, the time that has been given and so we can follow Paul’s exhortation to redeem it for the days are evil.

So if we are united in seeking the religious education of our children, we must remember that the most important thing is not knowledge of God, but relationship with God.  that what we need to learn first is to be reverent toward God and then what we learn about God will be learned in the right spirit.

*quotes of Eugene Peterson are from his book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places