Delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Hudson Valley, New York

January 23, 2022

By Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder

One of the clear memories I have of growing up in the 80s is of the Valley Girl Fad.  I realize that this revelation probably dates me.  For those too young, or too old to remember it, Valley Girl talk, which I will NOT replicate you, featured various colloquialisms such as “Rad!” or “Gnarly!” or “Oh my God.”  Growing up in a small town in Michigan I was never sure which valley this was supposed to be from, but I remember many of my female classmates and no small number of the male classmates imitating this form of speaking.  Now of course, by today’s standards, it doesn’t take Betty Friedan to tell you that this was deeply sexist cultural stereotype about women in California.  Back in the 80s we just seemed to roll with it.

One of the lasting linguistic legacies of that fad was the use, and I will soon argue overuse, of the word “awesome”!  Today, awesome is an adjective for nearly anything from sneakers to what you had for lunch.  We use the word awesome to describe the most mundane and ordinary objects.  When in point of fact the word is intended to mean the very opposite.

At the risk of really sounding like an old man who shoos away pesky kids on my front lawn.  The word “awesome” means literally something has inspired awe.  That is not to say that such an object was good or excellent, necessarily, but merely that it has an aura of unbelieveabilty about it.  It is literally in-credible – not to be believed.  Something that has inspired awe within you has sort of blown your mind; you can’t place it in any of the mental categories of your worldview.  That is not always a pleasant experience nor a complimentary thing to say about someone or something.  Rarely is it, in fact.

Awe, in the literal sense of the word, is the response we have when in the presence of the Holy.  Something is holy when it is totally other or different from our mundane experience.  That is part of what it means at least.  Awe is the feeling or emotion we experience in the presence of something larger than ourselves that encompasses more than just us.  The renowned scholar Rudolf Otto wrote a classic in the field of religious studies entitled “The Idea of the Holy.”  In it, he tried to put a name to this feeling of experiencing the wholly other (with a w).  Otto described the Holy using Latin or course.  He said it is the “Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans” – “A Tremendous Fascinating Mystery.”  Taking my cue from Rudolf Otto, I thought we would unpack, if you will, his three key ideas about the Holy: that it is mysterious, tremendous, and fascinating.

Mysterious.  There is an old joke that notes all theologians believe God is ineffable, and yet they go on effing!  (I didn’t promise that it was a good joke!)  My old teacher and mentor Roy Rappaport used to say that the Holy is a “Mystery properly so-called.”  Meaning that when we say the Holy is a mystery we don’t mean that it is a mystery like a mystery novel or an episode of Murder She Wrote.  In those cases, there is a detective, like Jessica Fletcher, who follows clues to uncover the unknown murderer or criminal.  And in the case of Murder She Wrote, she is always successful.  Theologians are not detectives following the clues to find God.  God, which is one of many names that can be given to the Holy, is unknowable.  It is impossible to know the mystery.  Which is another way of saying that religion is a combination of the rational and the non-rational.

Otto called the non-rational experience of religion the “numinous.”  The numinous are things or experiences that we can’t fully explain or make sense of.  That is because you feel the numinous more than you think it.  Sure sometimes, maybe more than sometimes, religious folks have resorted to supernatural explanations to makes sense of these feelings of the numinous.  However that is not inevitably the case. 

I remember one day in my youth, it was the middle of winter and I caught the flu or something.  At any rate, I was sick enough to have to stay home from school.  Coincidentally it happened to be the day that the space shuttle Challenger exploded on takeoff, killing everyone on board including Kristine McAuliffe, a teacher who was going to do lesson in outer space.  These were days when there were only four or five channels, and I am pretty sure my parents didn’t even have a VCR yet, so there was NOTHING else to watch on TV but a replay over and over of this explosion.  I couldn’t believe it had happened.  The pundits on TV couldn’t believe it had happened.  I would not see anything like it on TV again until the September 11 attacks many years later.

That emotion, that feeling of, “I know what I am seeing but I can’t really process what I am seeing” is awe.  We overuse the word awesome.  Rarely if ever have tennis shoes ever invoked that feeling in me.  But at the same time, it isn’t a fully rational experience, is it?  In fact, there is a disconnect between what I am seeing and what I know to be the case.  At one level we know that at some point we will be able to wrap our heads around the space shuttle blowing up, but at the time it didn’t seem so.  How much more awe-inspiring, dare I say awesome, would it be to encounter the Holy.

Indeed our Unitarian ancestors had this very debate about the rational and the non-rational elements of religion.  The Unitarians, who broke away from their Calvinist brothers and sisters, did so based on reason.  Calvinism, despite being a tightly formulated and internally consistent theological system, was not what you would call “rational” in the purest sense.  Reason lead to heresy, the Calvinists claimed, and heretics were to be excommunicated or burned.  The early Unitarians like Channing argued that God made us to reason, and therefore expects us to use reason.

Ironically it would take only one generation before that stance was challenged.  Folks like Emerson and Parker and Thoreau were disillusioned with a religion that sought mostly to be rational.  “Corpse cold” was the term Emerson used to describe such a church.  The Transcendentalists were romantics in the truest sense.  They found the Holy not in well-reasoned syllogisms but in nature, in poetry, in love.  That yearned for an experience of something real.  They wanted to feel the numinous, and if it meant living in a cabin by the shores of Walden Pond to feel it, then that was what they were going to do.

In addition to being mysterious, the Holy is tremendous.  That is to say it is powerful and scary.  There are tons of examples of God’s power in the Bible.  Every time I think of the power of the Old Testament God, I can’t help but think of the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis are destroyed by God’s wrath.  It is a powerful image that somehow never could be matched by any of my Sunday school lessons growing up.

Steven Spielberg aside for the moment, the Bible underlines that God’s power is something to be afraid of.  Perhaps that is nowhere clearer than the book of Job.  The very first verse: “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”  There follows a debate between God and Satan over just how much Job fears God.  And so, much like Trading Places with Eddie Murphey and Dan Aykroyd , God and Satan have a gentlemen’s agreement to destroy Job’s life, to see if he curses God.  It is a long book, one of the longest in the Old Testament.  But there is one key section where Job recounts the power of God.  This is Job 26: 7-14.

“He stretches out to the north over the void, and hangs the earth upon nothing.  He binds up the waters in his thick clouds, and the cloud is not torn open by them.  He covers the face of the full moon, and spreads over it his cloud.  He has described a circle on the face of the waters, at the boundary between light and darkness.  The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astounded at his rebuke.  By his power he stilled the Sea; by his understanding he struck down Rahab.  By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.  These are indeed but the outskirts of his ways; and how small a whisper do we hear of him!  But the thunder of his power who can understand?”

That is quite an impressive resume!  No wonder God points out how much Job fears him.  Job, at least at this point in the story, has a pretty clear understanding of all the things God can do.  Later on, God comes in the whirlwind to remind Job of all the things God has done and can do.  Indeed, those words to Job in the whirlwind are the last words God ever speaks directly to anyone in the Old Testament.  They are about God’s majesty and why you should be afraid.

That is one example of the tremendous power of the Holy.  But remember I said that God is not the only way to understand the Holy.  I thought of non-theistic ways to experience the power and fear of the Holy without resorting to God or some other form of theism.  That was very important to Otto – he felt his analysis of the Holy applied to all religions, and he was known for traveling extensively in Asia to study Eastern faiths.  So the Holy isn’t just about find and encountering God.

There is a great episode of the Simpsons in which there is a Christian Rock singer who befriends Homer.  At the end of the episode she says that she and her band are going to cross over from Christian rock and go mainstream.  Homer asks, “Won’t that be hard?”  No, she says.  “All we have to do is change all the times we say Jesus and replace it with the word ‘baby.’”  I sympathize with this approach sometimes.  What if we replaced God with the word “Love.”  Love can be a powerful experience of the Holy.

Huey Lewis and the News famously sang: “Don’t take money, don’t take fame/Don’t need no credit card to ride this train/Tougher than diamonds and stronger than steel/You won’t feel it until you feel/You feel the power, feel the power of love.”  To fall in love, I mean really fall hard in love, is an experience of the Holy.  It is non-rational that is for sure.  That is part of what Otto meant by the numinous.  You don’t have control over who you fall in love with; nor do they.  That is a scary thing because you are making yourself super vulnerable when you try to connect to another person at that deep a level.  So scary, in fact, that some of those who have been burned by the power of love don’t seek it anymore.  But that is a great tragedy to cut oneself off from such a tremendous mystery as the Holy.

Fortunately, the Holy is also fascinating.  Despite its mystery; despite its power; despite even the fear and awe we may experience in its presence, we are fascinated by it.  It has an allure.  We are drawn like a moth to the proverbial flame.  We want to know what that is like.  We want to have an experience of the Holy.

In our reading this morning Brad Warner recounts his experience of encountering the Holy as he was walking to work along the streets of Tokyo.  He is something of a Buddhist rebel and likes to call stories like the one we heard in our reading today as “Enlightenment Porn.”  Experiences that are meant to tantalize and excite.  But, he says, you can’t chase after someone else’s experience.  You have to go have your own.

Before I left Chicago after graduating from seminary, a friend of mine gave me tickets to see Sting and Tracy Chapman at the United Center.  It was a combination birthday and graduation present.  It was probably the best concert I have ever been to.  The United Center is where the Chicago Bulls play basketball, and the arena was packed.  There is something about Rock and Roll, isn’t there?  It is music that is not particularly in depth.  It is not complex like Mozart or Wagner.  The guitar riffs aren’t nearly as elaborate as Buddy Guy or BB King.  A couple years back there was a comedy routine a band in Australia did where they pointed out that there are dozens if not hundreds of pop songs, hits throughout the decades, which are the same four cords repeated in the same order just with a different rhythm and speed.  But the energy, the bassline, the hook that Rock and Roll brings grabs people at a primitive level and gives them that experience of the numinous.  People have been attracted to it for generations, and conservative Christians have feared it for that long, perhaps with good reason.  Rock and Roll is the fascinating element of the numinous.

Rudolf Otto teaches us that there is a mystery to life that we cannot know; yet gives us energy and passion to live.  We feel the hunger for it, even as we are scared and repulsed by it.  For Unitarian Universalists, I think we need to acknowledge the Holy without necessarily falling into the easy assumption of theism, or flatten it out so much that we think a new sweater is “awesome.”  Lots of things can be Holy or at least a gateway to the Holy.  Most of all I think it is important to be open to the transformative power of the Holy.  To risk being transformed by its power, even if it is scary at times.  Life can be scary even while it is worth living to the fullest.  And like our fellow iconoclast Brad Warner, we need to be skeptical of it.  We must not fully abandon reason lest we be overwhelmed or coerced in dangerous ways.

Yes, I have probably dated myself this morning.  If you happen to get the chance to watch this sermon on YouTube, I suggest counting the number of references to the 1980s I have made in the past 17 minutes.  So while I maybe old in the eyes of some of our youth, I hope I never cease to search, and perhaps find, a window to the Holy.  May we all have an open heart to the numinous that shines forth throughout our lives.  I love you.  You are all awesome!  Amen