ADVENT AWARENESS: AWE

Micah 5:2-5a; Luke 1:39-49

December 20, 2009 (Advent 4)

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Rev. Janet Robertson Duggins

In his lovely little book, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas reminisces about the typical Christmas day of his childhood: the snow, games with friends, foods, traditions, the quirks of various relatives, Useful Presents and Useless Presents… all remembered and described through the eyes of a child. He ends his story with bedtime: “I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

A literal-minded person might ask why he didn’t just write, “I said my prayers,” and someone concerned with sound theology might question just what words were spoken by the child, but those folks would miss the point. What’s wonderful about Thomas’s description is that it reaches beyond words to evoke his remembered experience in a way we can feel it, too. It doesn’t matter very much, really, what the words were. What matters is the awareness of not being alone in the dark, but of being enveloped by a holy presence. The child responds. The words are not remembered, but this isn’t about the words. It’s about the feeling of awe – so hard to describe and difficult to define, maybe because the feeling itself is so rare and elusive.

Awe is described as an emotion comparable to ‘wonderful’ but with less of an element of joy and more of fear or respect. Awe is generally felt toward something or someone you consider more powerful than yourself. Another definition says it is an emotion that may combine “dread, veneration, and wonder.” Someone else says it’s an “overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, or fear produced by that which is grand, sacred, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like.”

Perhaps children feel it more readily than adults, I don’t know. Maybe it was an emotion more accessible to people who lived in simpler times. Certainly we are not easily awed anymore, most of us. We’ve flown in airplanes, farther in a few short hours than people could travel in weeks just a couple of generations ago. We have worlds of information at our fingertips through the internet; we’ve seen medical miracles; we watch movies with special effects that cost millions of dollars; we’ve experienced the attractions at Disney World; we’ve cheered astonishing achievements in sports and the arts; we’ve gotten used to a standard of living that’s luxurious beyond what most people who’ve walked this planet could have ever imagined. Not much surprises us. It takes a lot to “wow” us.

Sometimes the beauty of nature inspires awe in us – Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, or a lake Michigan sunset or even the sun shining on trees covered with newly-fallen snow. A magnificent achievement of human art, or skill, or ingenuity might occasionally do it – a cathedral, a new world record, a delicate operation, a ground-breaking invention, a personal triumph over adversity. But mostly this is not the stuff of everyday life for us. Awe just doesn’t come into play that much in the daily routine.

Despite a long tradition and many Biblical texts that describe “awe” as an appropriate attitude toward God, awe isn’t a big part of our religious experience either. Maybe it’s our Protestant heritage that stresses understanding and practical acts of service over feelings and experience. Maybe it’s that we are unaccustomed to bowing to authority. Maybe seeing Jesus as friend and companion is so compelling and comforting that other dimensions of the relationship between human beings and God get neglected.

Whatever it is, we don’t tend to spend a lot of time mulling over Bible verses like these ones from Psalm 33:

“Let all the earth fear the LORD; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.” (Psalm 33:8-9)

You might note that in this verse, as in many Biblical passages in most translations, the words “fear” and “awe” have roughly the same meaning.

Mary’s song reflects that same sense of standing in awe before the holiness and power of God:

“Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him….” (Luke 1:48b-50)

or as it’s rendered in one of my favorite versions, The Message, which uses the word “awe” rather than the more archaic “fear” of many translations, and seems to me to clarify what this “awe” is all about:

“What God has done for me will never be forgotten,

the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others.

His mercy flows in wave after wave

on those who are in awe before him.”

The sense of awe Mary expresses before God is grounded in two things: the mighty acts of God, which include creation, blessings, help, and justice to God’s people (especially the vulnerable), and salvation; and the holiness of God, which has a sense of “otherness” and uniqueness.

You might read these verses quickly and come away with an idea that God is perhaps a bit petty and vindictive, in granting mercy only “to those who fear him.” But reading the verse in The Message gave me a different sense of this common Biblical idea. Perhaps it is only when we approach God with a sense of awe that we are able to let God’s mercy flow over us “in wave after wave.”

The more I thought about this, the more it made sense. If we are too busy or too full of ourselves to notice the beauty of the world or the blessings of our lives, if we forget our dependence on God, how will we remember that we need mercy, let alone be ready to accept it? If we don’t remember God’s holiness, doesn’t that somehow make it easier to forget our own tendencies to sin and selfishness? If we downplay the “otherness” of God, how do we also see God as able to render us the mercy and help we need?

There is nothing wrong with seeing God as loving parent, Jesus as friend and the Holy Spirit as companion. All are images solidly grounded in scripture. The idea that God is present in us is scriptural, too, as is the belief that we are made “in the image of God,” and so are, in some ways, like God. But we are not God. Remembering that is the beginning of awe… which may be the beginning of opening ourselves to experiencing God’s mercy.

But, you may say, we can’t just feel or experience awe because somebody – or even the Bible - says we are supposed to, or even because we want to. Of course that’s true. A “manufactured” religious experience doesn’t take you very far (which may explain why a lot of people come to church at Christmastime, but lose interest again after the new year).

But we CAN practice the attitudes and behaviors that open us up to awe. Wonder is very much akin to awe, and we can develop the habit of looking at what is around us with appreciation, interest and curiosity. We can take a deep breath and pause occasionally to look up from bill-paying, work, chauffeuring children, appointments, chores, planning and the like… and remember that life is a miracle, and filled with miracles of love and grace. We can practice gratitude. We can remember that, as the psalmist says, “It is God who made us, and not we ourselves.” We can remind ourselves that we are not God. We can learn to be more honest about our sins and our needs. We can open our minds and hearts to the possibility that there are wonders and mysteries we can neither explain nor control. We can, for moments here and there, remove ourselves from the center of our own universe. We can bow down and worship. We can stand in awe.

Interestingly, all the definitions of awe speak of being in awe of someone or something bigger and more powerful than oneself. In some ways this does describe the awe that is part of the Biblical and Christian tradition. But the awe of Advent and Christmas, the awe the prophet Micah hints at, Mary sings of, and the shepherds and wise men display goes a little bit further.

The awe of Advent and Christmas is that the Holy and Mighty God is made known in a baby – in seeming powerlessness and vulnerability. That’s more audacious than armies or lightning bolts. And somehow it invites us into a greater, rather than a lesser awe toward the God who loves us in ways beyond our understanding.

The great Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel said this about awe:

“Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine,
to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance,
to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple,

to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”

This Advent, as we are approaching Christmas, I hope that in the rush of things we will nevertheless sense God’s presence in the close and holy darkness, and feel the stillness of the eternal, as we open our hearts again to welcome the Christ child.