I is for
Inabililty
St. Luke, through whom we have Mary's song, must have been taken by her theme: God has mercy on those who fear Him. At least, Luke caught that aspect in many stories. So much so that "fearing God," as former editor Bob Bertram points out in the following piece, is a theme of Luke's Gospel. Mary herself is told not to fear. And there are Luke's Christmas shepherds and their "great fear." Will you be surprised to learn that such fearing is a good thing? Actually, it is better than good; it is necessary and life-giving. But do we have the ability to fear, or not? In this article, of which a shortened version appeared in The Lutheran in 1992, Bob helps us understand Luke's insight about the fear of God.
tbcm
Shortly before his assassination Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his mother about the next sermon he was planning to preach. He was entitling it, "Why America May Go to Hell." We may wonder what he would have said had he lived to preach that sermon, or why he was kept from preaching it. Was it that God did not want America to know? And why not? Because there is no hell, at least for America? Or was it rather that if King had preached his sermon, if even all the preachers in America had preached it, America would not have heard it anyway? Could not have heard it? Has America lost the ability to fear God -- not the ability to fear, mind you, but the ability to fear God? The worse for us.And the worse for our Christmases. No wonder we Americans fret so about Christmas. For we fear everything else about Christmas except the One who is truly frightening: the Christmas God. Instead we fear that Christmas has become too pagan or too commercialized or too busy or too soon, all of which it is of course. So we tinker with the celebrations. We even try to "put the Babe back into Christmas," as indeed we should. But putting the Babe back means putting the fear of God back into Christmas. Now if anything sounds un-American, that does. What could the Christmas Baby possibly have to do with the fear of God?
Well, to begin with, take the Christmas shepherds. Luke says of them, "They were filled with fear." And "fear" by the way means just that. It does not mean awe or reverence. That much is clear even without knowing Greek. For the very next thing the angel says to the shepherds, also in English, is "Do not be afraid." Surely that did not mean, "Do not be reverential," "Stop feeling awe." The newer translations say the shepherds "were terrified." And well they might be. Shepherds, as a lot, were not exactly saints. Like most of us they had plenty to hide. But then suddenly the lights come on. "The glory of the Lord shone around them." Their cover is blown. Add to that the Lukan pun: "Shepherds" can also symbolize "pastors," huddled with their "flocks" under cover of darkness. My fellow clergy will understand why, if the "glory of the Lord" suddenly exposed our ministries, we too might fear (as the Greek says) "a mega-fear." We might, that is, if we had the shepherds' rare gift of fearing God.