Sermon: Lurching Between Awe and Dread          

Text: Exodus 14:19-31

Date: September 14, 2008

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

              United Church of Canada pastor Ralph Milton tells a story of a memorable flight out of his hometown of Kelowna.  The seat belt sign had just gone off, and the flight attendant was smiling her way up and down the aisle with cups of lukewarm coffee, when the pilot suddenly stood the plane up on its wing tip and made a quick U-turn back toward Kelowna.  The pilot on the loudspeaker, sounding very flustered, said “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going back to Kelowna, and…and…as soon as the plane hits the ground…I mean as soon as the aircraft has landed…get out as fast as you can and don’t try to take any luggage with you and for goodness sake, KEEP CALM.”

            The flight attendant kept walking up and down the aisle smiling broadly through clenched teeth.  Nobody was talking.  “Me?” Ralph says.  “I wasn’t frightened.  I wasn’t worried.  Not a bit of it.  I was terrified!!!  Pure, unvarnished scared.  I could feel my heart was pounding away against my ribs.  I was panting as if I had just run a mile, and squeezing the armrest till it yelped.” [1]

            The passengers learned later that the pilot was responding to a bomb scare; some demented soul had phoned in a threat about having planted explosives on the plane.  It was a hoax, and after a thorough search of the plane back in Kelowna the travelers were able to continue their trip.  I wonder if any of Ralph’s fellow travelers got off that plane and decided just to stay put in Kelowna.

            The Israelites fleeing from Pharaoh in Egypt endured a fright that was more than a demented threat.  Pharaoh had agreed to let the people of Israel go, but really all Moses had asked for was permission to go for three days into the wilderness to worship and sacrifice.  The Egyptians probably started to get a clue that this was no mere furlough when the Israelites took all their herds and whatever worldly possessions they could carry and looted the Egyptians as well on their way out of town.  Pharaoh regretted the decision to release the Israelites and sent the Egyptian army after them to fetch them home.

            Imagine the sound of the snorting horses and the clanking of swords against armor, the noise of the chariots’ wheels as they closed the gap between the people of Israel and themselves.  Even though the Israelites knew that it was God’s intention to liberate them, even though they had seen the plagues with their own eyes, fear quickly took over.  “Us?  We’re not worried.  We’re not frightened.  We're terrified!!!”  And who could blame them?  The people immediately turned on Moses, denying that they had ever wanted to be free.  They would rather live in servitude than die in the wilderness at the hand of the soldiers.  They certainly knew the brutality of the Egyptian regime, having lived in captivity to Egypt for generations.

            I presume they speedily reviewed their options, if they were able to hear themselves think over the din of pounding hearts.  They could turn and fight, try to hide, surrender unconditionally…Oh, or put their lives in God’s representative Moses’ hands, and go forward. 

            God doesn’t sound exactly sympathetic to the terror of the people in the verses before the lectionary text today.  The Israelites have realized the threat, done the human being thing and dissolved into a puddle of panic, hysterically blamed Moses for talking them into this venture, and stood there frozen.  Moses says to them what God’s representatives very often say: Do not be afraid.  And then he has a little confab with the Lord, presumably repeating the unrepeatable things the people have been saying about the journey so far.  God answers Moses in what I think of as an impatient tone, “Why do you cry out to me?”

            Well, duh.  Of course people cry out to the Lord for rescue when they are terrified.  Even hard-boiled atheists start praying when their demise seems imminent. 

            Let’s assume the Lord of the Universe knows that.  The next words out of Yahweh’s mouth are pragmatic: Tell the Israelites to go forward.”  You know, keep moving, stick to the plan.  Pay no attention to the large body of water in front of you or the brutal army behind you.  I’ve got it all under control.

            Right.

            You know what happened.  At God’s instruction, Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind, and the waters were divided.  The waters formed a wall on their right and a wall on their left, the story says, and the Israelites were able to go forward on dry ground.

            You’ve seen those walls of water in the movies.  It’s quite a picture.  Conjure the walls of water up in your mind’s eye.  Maybe you can imagine the walls of water that would be formed if Moses parted Puget Sound and led our congregation across Agate Passage.      It would be an amazing thing to experience.  But still pretty frightening, don’t you think?  Walking on that path between the walls of water—going forward would not be relaxing, exactly. 

            I heard a speaker at the Spiritual Enrichment Center a couple of weeks ago cite theologian Soren Kierkegaard’s notion that human beings spend their lives between Awe and Dread.  I didn’t get an accurate quotation, just this idea that we live between Awe and Dread—walking between the WOW! of the mystery and beauty of life, the holiness of God;  and our dread of dying at an unknown time in an unknown way.  As I have been contemplating this story of crossing the Red Sea, this idea of walking between Awe and Dread connected for me with the image of the walls of water the Israelites walked between.  I’ve been ruminating on seeing life’s journey as picking our way across the sea on the dry ground between Awe on the one side and Dread on the other.   

            I know this is a bit esoteric, but I believe as modern people attentive to the Word we are to read these ancient stories not to analyze them as history but to explore them as metaphor.  So let’s think first about Dread.  Kierkegaard and other existential philosophers have a lot to say about Dread, which rises primarily out of our consciousness of the certainty of death.  We humans know we are going to die, but of course it scares the tar out of us, so we go through all kinds of effort to postpone dying and go through all sorts of psychological contortions to avoid thinking about it.  Kierkegaard thought it was important for people not to live in denial of this fact of impending death; he believed consciousness of death was a factor in living life to the fullest. 

            There is more to Kierkegaard’s understanding of dread than consciousness of death.  He also believed that dread in humans rises out of understanding that we are free, and that also scares the tar out of us.  While freedom, free will, is essential to the human condition, we don’t altogether enjoy it or know what to do with it.  Kierkegaard illustrated this with an example of a man on the ledge of a high building: “When the man looks over the edge, he experiences a focused fear of falling, but at the same time, the man feels a terrifying impulse to throw himself intentionally off the edge. That experience is dread or anxiety because of our complete freedom to choose to either throw oneself off or to stay put. The mere fact that one has the possibility and freedom to do something, even the most terrifying of possibilities, triggers immense feelings of dread.” [2]  Kierkegaard summarized this by writing, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” 

            So there we have Dread rising up like a great wall of water on one side, looming; in its watery surface we see the reflections of our faces made anxious both about our death and the dizzying freedom we have in life.  On the other side, Awe.  Also known in rather old-fashioned terminology as the Fear of the Lord, as in “The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”  We are often puzzled by that phraseology, wondering if we are supposed to be afraid of the God we have come to know as Love itself.  Kathleen Norris says she thinks we have lost touch with the ancient sense of fear as “a healthy dose of reverence and wonder…allowing us to explore our capacity for devotion in the presence of something larger and wiser than ourselves.” Fear connected to those things we are afraid of can stymie us, trap us into a frozen puddle of panic.  Fear of God is the kind of fear that can set us free as we recognize the Holy in our midst and “let God awaken in us capacities and responsibilities we have been afraid to contemplate.” [3]

            As people of faith, we have experienced our moments of Awe, haven’t we?  Those occasions when we are abruptly aware of the astounding presence of God, the mystery and unspeakable beauty of the universe, the immense web of Life and our union with it.  Awe—the full experience of the Holy-- is so powerful that most of us ordinary mortals can only take little doses of it.  And, frankly, there is no little anxiety that is generated by contemplating following where God wants to lead us, into more freedom and more radical love than we have ever dared envision.

            So we have anxiety as a companion, a chilly mist from both walls of water between which we thread our way.  I stumbled on a Unitarian Universalist writer, Robert Gerzon, who suggests that we shouldn’t try to excise anxiety from our lives altogether.  For one thing, it’s probably impossible to be anxiety-free as long as we are human.  The task before us is not to eliminate anxiety but learn to live with it, manage it, see it as a stimulus for growth.  He writes about Sacred Anxiety, which comes out of wrestling with our deepest questions and values, the nature of the universe and our place in it.     Gerzon writes, “Sacred anxiety has two paradoxical aspects: Death-anxiety symbolizes our dread of loss, aging, death, and nonexistence, while life-anxiety represents our trepidation of living with full, sensual aliveness, authentic self-expression, and passionate commitment to our dreams.” 

           Gerzon goes on to quote Kierkegaard, who regarded learning to live with and channel the paradoxical aspects of anxiety as the human adventure.  "This is an adventure that every human being must go through," Kierkegaard writes, "to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish. . . . Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate, . . . the more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man. . . . Then anxiety enters into his soul and searches out everything and anxiously torments everything finite and petty out of him, and then it leads him where he wants to go. . . . [Thus] the individual through anxiety is educated into faith." [4]

           The people of Israel did not leave their anxiety behind on the shore when they crossed the Red Sea, of that I am sure.  But they managed to be promoted by a grade or two in their education into faith when they unstuck themselves from abject terror and answered God’s invitation to go forward on the path between the walls of water.  And that is what we, heirs of the promise of freedom, are invited to do as well.  Go forward, with anxiety as our companion.

           One of the great human challenges is to let anxiety be our companion without letting it swell to an overpowering size so that it renders us unable to go forward as God would lead.  I saw the latest movie version of “The Incredible Hulk” earlier this year.  The protagonist in that story grows to enormous size and strength if he gets angry and is unable to control his anger; he loses his ability to be rational and starts smashing up things.  Fear can behave that way; like the Hulk out of control, it can grow to enormous size and start wreaking havoc in our lives.  I think sometimes we allow fear to hulk up and then we get on its back and go for a wild piggy-back ride.  It’s an immensely powerful force in the human psyche.

           Politicians know that about fear, how powerful it is, how it can be goaded into growth so that people leave rationality behind and go off bashing into whatever is in the path.  Politicians know it, and some try to use it to their advantage, employing images and phrases cunningly designed to hulk up the fear of the populace.  Be cognizant, friends, in this election season of how those seeking election may try to manipulate your fear.  You probably cannot be free of fear altogether but you do have some measure of control over how large you let it grow, and whether it will carry you or you will carry it.

          The writer reflecting on the Exodus text on i.ucc.org borrowed an idea from Gerald Janzen who had picked up on an image in Psalm 131, that of the “weaned child.”  These are the verses from the psalm that inspired Janzen: “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.”  Janzen suggests that faith is “the willingness to pick up and carry one’s fear in one’s bosom like a weaned child.”  Why a weaned child?  Why not a nursing child?  I suppose so that fear doesn’t squall and try to suck the life out of us.  Remember, anxiety or fear will be our constant companions; but we may, following God, pick up and carry our fear close to our bosom like a weaned child. 

           I have such vivid memories of carrying a little child of this age.  A bit of a burden, yes, especially when the little one gets frightened and starts gripping you tightly around the neck.  But with a child that size, that age, often you can speak to her in a soothing tone, encouraging her to let you breathe, but not threatening to throw her off.  That is the way we might hope to carry our fear as we walk on the way God has opened up for us.  The fear we carry may throw us off balance from time to time, may make it hard for us to breathe and stay calm once in a while, but with God as our guide we are carrying our fear, our fear is not running pell-mell away with us.

           Listen again to Kierkegaard’s pithy observation, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”  We will not be free of anxiety while we travel on the way God opens up for us; experiencing anxiety is not by itself a sign that we are not on the right path.  We can, in fact, expect to feel anxious, dizzy with freedom, as we leave behind those passions or routines to which we were enslaved before we set out on this journey.  Awakening to the vastness of God and the intense interest God has in how we will lead our lives will stir up some anxiety as we wonder if we can live up to our potential.  Carrying this sacred anxiety like a weaned child in our bosoms, we will pick our way down this path, lurching between Dread and Awe, following, always following the one who leads us into the Light. 

[1] Milton, Ralph  Sermon Seasonings  Winfield, BC: Wood Lake Books, 1997, p. 49

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

[3]Norris, Kathleen Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith  New York: Riverhead, 1998, p. 144-45

[4] Gerzon, Robert  http://www.uuworld.org/2002/02/feature2.html