Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church

Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 111; 1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28;

How should we relate to God? That’s the question under consideration by a group of young Israelites, guided by their teacher, using what we have come to know as Psalm 111 as a catechism tool. The answer is one that sounds familiar to us: the fear of God is the beginning of true wisdom.

But what does that really mean: to fear God?

On the one hand, we know that scripture, both old and new testaments, calls us to love God with all our being. But on the other hand, this psalm sounds as if we are supposed to be like Adam after he’s eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree, cowering in the Garden of Eden as God approaches. That begs the question: “How can you love someone you fear?”

Well, let’s start by looking more closely at that Hebrew word for fear. In certain places, it does indeed mean to be afraid, but it means something more here. To those young Israelites, it would have brought to mind something more like reverence, awe and, most of all, obedience.

That’s what the Israelites understood to be the proper relationship with God. We do, too. You and I are called to humble ourselves before God, to stand in awe of his great works. Then we are commanded to seek his will, rather than our own, and to obey it.

That’s where things get a little more difficult. Let’s be honest. This takes great humility, and that doesn’t always come naturally to most of us in this culture. We would rather follow our own will than someone else’s. We’ve learned to trust our intellect, our reason, and especially our knowledge. As the saying goes, “knowledge is power,” and we do love power.

This may be even more true of us as Presbyterians. A big part of our reformation heritage is the great value we place on the life of the mind. While that emphasis on the intellect has mostly been a very good and useful thing, it also has a downside.

It’s all too easy to become impressed with how much we think we know. When that happens, pride begins to crowd out our humility. It blinds us to our limitations. That’s a dangerous thing. As an old German proverb says, “Few know how much one must know in order to know how little one knows.” Or, in the words of Shakespeare, “The fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

That was the warning Paul gave the Corinthian congregation. “Knowledge puffs up; love builds up.” He is emphatic that following Christ means striving not so much to know, but to be known by God. He tells them, “Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.”

To be known by God, is to know God’s love and to love him in return.

That’s why Paul reminds the Corinthians that, while there are ever so many gods in that prosperous, cosmopolitan culture in which they live, there is only one God for them: God the Father, from whom are all things, and for whom they exist, who came to live among us as Jesus Christ, the one Lord, through whom are all things and through whom they exist.

The problem is that some of the Corinthians claim to have acquired esoteric, divine knowledge not available to others. They’re using that supposed knowledge to puff themselves up, as Paul puts it, to give themselves status in this already overly-spiritualized congregation. They’re using their knowledge of God to set themselves apart from their fellow Christians.

Paul sees that posturing for exactly what it is, and he’s having none of it. He reminds them that what matters is living in the right relationship with the one all-loving, creating and sustaining God, and with each other. And that is a matter of the heart.

Recently I came across a quote by a 19th century Greek Orthodox monk named Theophan the Recluse. He described the problem this way: “When remembrance of God lives in the heart and there maintains the fear of Him, then all goes well; but when this remembrance grows weak or is kept only in the head, then all goes astray.”

Two friends of mine, who have been reliable mentors in my spiritual journey, recently wrote a book on spiritual formation. They make a similar point.

“When only our mind sees and our heart remains blind, we remain spiritually ignorant... What is the value of well-trained and well-informed Christians...when their hearts remain ignorant? ...When the word of God remains a subject of analysis and discussion and does not descend into the heart, it can easily become an instrument of destruction instead of a guide to love.”

I’ll bet you know people for whom this has become true, Christians who have lost their faith because they let God’s word live in their head, but not in their heart.

I had more than one seminary professor like that. In fact, some of the most renowned New Testament scholars I know of have lost their faith in the competitive pursuit of greater intellectual knowledge of the very same scriptures that, ironically, call us to a deeper, heart-level relationship with God.

That’s precisely what the writer of tonight’s psalm was trying to avoid. That’s what was at stake in Corinth, too.

Like other major cities in the Greco-Roman world, in Corinth, followers of various wisdom teachers argued on every street corner. There were any number of pagan shrines where people made offerings to every god they could think of, and even some they didn’t know–just in case.

The Corinthian Christians had been taught, and rightly so, that these gods aren’t real. But they assumed this knowledge gave them a certain freedom.

For example, some of them felt no compunction about joining in the large communal dinners offered at the temples of these pagan gods and eating freely of the meat that had been sacrificed to the idols there.

But Paul warns them that their love for one another should make them sensitive to the danger in this. In exercising their freedom in Christ, they might in fact be leading some of the weaker Christians astray, pulling them back into the cardinal sin of idolatry.

Paul is building toward one of his main points in this letter. The Corinthian Christians are one body in Christ. Understanding that means they are called to live with love and concern for all the other members of his body.

The lesson for them, and for us, is that love and selfless concern for others is the hallmark of truly fearing God. Knowing in your heart that you are known and loved by God, and holding him in reverent awe, compels us to respond to that love by obeying Christ’s command to share it with others.

That’s what true spiritual formation is all about, for the Corinthian Christians, as well as for us.

For most of us it begins with experience. It begins in a moment of grace–maybe through a heartfelt prayer when we actually feel God is right there listening to us, or simply sitting in silence, contemplating God’s love at work in the breathtaking beauty of his creation, or maybe in the loving eyes of an infant staring up into ours. It’s in moments of grace like these that we experience that God is near us.

It’s what those folks in that synagogue in Capernaum experienced as Jesus taught them with new teaching and a new authority. That day, they experienced something profound and life-changing, when he healed a man with the unclean spirit in their midst. It was a moment of God’s grace and power, unfolding right in front of their very eyes–and they were in awe.

That’s the only faithful response to these moments of grace: awe and reverence at the magnificence and mercy that is God.

Over time, if our hearts are open, we learn to pay attention to these moments, to be on the lookout for them, because we have come to understand we are encountering nothing less than God himself–and they happen far more often than we ever realize. No longer is God “out there,” or “up there.” He is here, present with us and active in our daily lives.

These experiences of God are more than just another objective event we can dissect, analyze and comprehend using our rational, analytical faculties. We pay a steep price for pretending we can: we miss what God is doing in our lives.

Much as I hate to admit it, I’ve been as guilty as anyone of doing that. I realize in retrospect that I dismissed an awful lot of what God was doing in my life as mere coincidence. But as I’ve moved further along in my faith journey, I believe less and less in coincidence, and more and more in divine grace.

I call these moments “God moments.” When we take the time to reflect on them, with not only an open mind but an open heart, we can recognize them for what they are: an encounter with God’s love.

Only then, when we recognize and experience God that way, knowing him not only with our head but with our heart, can we learn to truly trust him, to turn over our will to his, and to act on it. May it be so.

Related Sermons:

• What is This? - January 29, 2012
• Signs the King Is Here - February 1, 2009
• The Ways God Is Among Us - January 29, 2006
• When Knowledge Is Not Enough - February 2, 2003
• A People Set Apart - January 30, 2000