Sermon preached on Sunday, July 11, at Deer Isle Sunset Congregational Church …

Father, we adore you,
lay our lives before you,
how we love you.

Why do you come to church? Or, maybe a better way to put it is this: When you do come to church, what do you hope to find here? What to you hope to do here?

There are many reasons for coming to church, many different expectations that each of us bring with us. I cannot speak for you, but I can speak for myself and share with you some of the reasons I have for coming to church, and I expect that some of my reasons may be yours, too.

I come to church to be connected. In other words, I come to church to be with you! I come to church to be part of a community, part of a community of believers, a people joined by faith, by our common experience of being loved, of being loved by God and of being loved by each other.

I come to be connected to a community of mutual help and encouragement, where I will be welcomed and befriended and supported, and to be connected to a community of mutual dedication, where we look for ways together to support and encourage people outside these walls, to bless them as we have been blessed.

I come to church to be connected and to make connections.

Second, I come to church to hear a word, a word that is different from the many and noisy words that fill most of my days. A word that carries authority. A word that addresses me, challenges me, enlightens me. A word that puts things, everything, into perspective. A word that helps me make sense of a world that is often so confusing and bewildering, to know what I can know and to acknowledge what I cannot know.

A word that makes me look at myself and my place in this world with a critical eye, not to be critical, but to look past appearances and pretenses, to see things as they are, to know what I am and who I am, and to know what I am for and who I am for.

I come to church to hear a word, a word that puts everything into perspective, like the view from the top of a mountain.

And, third, but most importantly, I come to church to experience the numinous. Do you know that word, “numinous?” I know exactly what I mean by it, but it is hard to explain!

Numinous is what is beyond me, above me, something very real, overwhelmingly real, but at the same time mysterious and elusive and unreachable. Numinous is wonder-ful, full of wonder, awe-ful, awesome, full of awe, holy, not holy is the sense we often use it, as something surpassingly good, though the numinous can be and certainly is surpassingly good, but holy in the sense of uncommon, set apart from the everyday, something heavy, deep, glorious, overwhelming, awe-ful.

Numinous is what Moses encountered in the fire and cloud and thunder atop Mount Sinai. Numinous is what Isaiah saw in his vision of the Lord Almighty filling the Temple. Numinous is what Job heard in the voice that spoke to him out of the whirlwind.

The numinous is the One who cannot, must not, be seen, the One whose name cannot, must not, be spoken. The numinous is God, the God who is. When I come to church, I come to encounter God, to experience, be touched by, come close to, the presence of the living God.

If God is, then God is, and God is who God is, not whatever we might wish or want God to be. God is something, someone, standing over against us, apart from us, awesome, awe-ful, wonder-ful, holy, beautiful, overwhelmingly real, more real, more substantial, simply more there than any of us, more real, more substantial, simply more there than the universe itself. God is something, someone to find and to be found by, someone to acknowledge, to worship, to love.

The Covenant Box is numinous. The Covenant Box, also called the ark, was built by Moses according to God’s instructions. The stone tablets on which the laws binding the people of Israel to God and God to the people of Israel were placed inside the box and two winged creatures adorned each end of the lid of the box. That place atop the lid between the two winged creatures was thought to be God’s throne, the place where God met the people of Israel, the place from which God spoke to them.

Sometimes both fable and parts of the Bible itself seem to attach “magical” properties to the Covenant Box — think “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — but it has nothing to do with magic. It is not that the box contained God or that God lived there or that the box itself is God. The box is simply the emblem, the reminder, of God’s presence among them, and the place where God, by God’s own choice, chose to meet them, just as God may choose to meet us here.

When the people of Israel tried to use the box as tool of magic, when they tried to control and manipulate its supposed power, they failed miserably. They carried the box into battle with them and were utterly defeated and the box was captured by the Philistines. The Covenant Box is no talisman, no good luck charm, no magic wand. God is no tool, no idol, to answer to our beck and call.

The ark was absent from Jerusalem for some twenty years, and now, as we heard read in the scripture, David is ready to bring the Covenant Box home, to “put” God back at the center of their lives. David leads the procession, all of them singing and dancing and playing musical instruments to honor the Lord, and then …

And then, suddenly the oxen pulling the cart on which the box was laid stumble and Uzzah reaches out to steady the box and … he is struck dead.

Oh, my!

You should know, my friends, that this text from 2 Samuel is the designated Old Testament reading for this Sunday, that is, most of it. The lectionary lists 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12-19 as the Old Testament reading, omitting verses 6-11, conveniently leaving out — timidly leaving out! — the whole part about Uzzah and the stumbling oxen. That’s not right! That’s not fair! We should have to deal with the hard parts of scripture, too, shouldn’t we? I saw that this was the text for the Sunday I was preaching and said to myself, “Oh, no!” But I knew we had to read the whole story!

So what’s going on? What sense do we make of this? Perhaps we can’t. Perhaps we cannot make sense of this. And that is okay. We do not have to have everything figured out to our own satisfaction to be able to put our trust in the God who is.

In my mind, this is not about some moral transgression on Uzzah’s part or some capricious, vengeful act on God’s part. It’s about a God who cannot, must not, be seen or touched, who cannot, must not, be trifled with, a God who cannot, must not, be treated as we might treat anyone or anything else, a God utterly holy, wholly numinous, a God who is not “safe,” a God who is … God.

Would you want a God who was “safe,” harmless, innocuous, impotent, toothless, entirely understandable, entirely predictable, entirely controllable? We do often want such gods! And I call them gods (lowercase “g”) because the gods of our own choosing are not God.

There are parts of the church that treat God almost as a cosmic “buddy,” a friend who gives me whatever it is I want, whose sole purpose is to make my life better, happier, more fulfilled.

And there are parts of the church that use “God” as an emblem, a symbol, a name to lend credence to our own political and social ideologies, whether conservative or liberal. This “god” becomes a means, to motivator, to use in the pursuit of our own political ambitions.

There are parts of the church that see God as a guarantor and defender of the lines they have already drawn, between friends and enemies, insiders and outsiders, good guys and bad guys, a god who is always conveniently on their side.

And there are parts of the church that see God everywhere, God in everything, indiscriminately endorsing and approving of whatever it is we want to endorse and approve, asking nothing of us, not asking us to change anything about ourselves.
There are many, many, many more such “gods,” but what all these gods have in common is that they are a means to an end — money, power, health, wealth, happiness, fulfillment, control, peace of mind — ends of my own choosing. What all these gods have in common is that they are not God, but idols.

God is … and we can only come into the presence of the living God as David did, with fear and with joy. Fear and joy? Can these, do these, belong together?

They do! Fear, because God is fearful, awe-ful, glorious, powerful, mighty, all-mighty, and joy because God is — because God is! — because God is the source of all that is, because God is the source of all that is good, because God is good.

What happens when people come into God’s presence? What happened to Moses, to Isaiah, to Job? They are humbled … and healed. They are overwhelmed with their own insignificance … and they are made to understand their true identity, their true calling, their true value as children of God. In getting a glimpse of who God is, they better know who they are, finally leaving behind that endless compulsion to have to be the ones in control, pulling the levers, manipulating the strings, fashioning the future, ensuring the outcome.

My friends, we are not God … thanks be to God! And we are doomed to misery and to failure whenever we try to be God or to worship a god of our own making. We are not God, but God chooses to come among us, to be among us, to grant us access to God’s own life-giving presence, to invite us into relationship, into covenant, into communion, into life.

Fear and joy. May we come to church expecting to meet God here and may we come to worship in that spirit, the spirit of fear and joy. May we tremble like David trembled and sing like David sang and dance like David danced. With all his might! With all our might. That’s how Jesus said we were to love God … with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our might.

Father, we adore you,
lay our lives before you,
how we love you.