Today is a day for awesome stories.
Do you remember when “awesome” broke into our everyday vocabulary, a few decades ago? When it started to be applied to TV shows, cars, and anything Californian? I remember being baffled when my brother came home talking about an “awesome” game, or time playing with a friend.
It wasn’t until much later that I found out that awesome – in scripture and in traditions outside of American slang – didn’t mean “really good, man!”
That, in fact, it comes from Old English and Scandinavian root words for fear. Fear that comes with overtones of pain and grief. And it’s the Bible that’s responsible for the traditional English meaning of awesome: inspiring reverence, fear and wonder.
That’s the kind of awesome that’s about the shifting tides deep inside me when I stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon and looked down.
Reverence, a bit.
Fear – deep in my gut, more than I wanted to admit to myself, and not at all responsive to my mind’s explanation of the railing near at hand.
And wonder. Because that dizzying view is breathtakingly gorgeous, and the depth of that Canyon seems impossible.
And that’s the awesome that’s in these stories.
On the way to Elijah’s ascension into heaven – on the way to wonder – his student and successor Elisha is pushed toward anxiety and fear when the other prophets keep saying to him, “Hey, don’t you know that God is taking Elijah away from you???”
“I know!” Elisha says. “Shut up!”
You might feel some sympathy for Elisha if you remember that kind of fear and grief – the knowledge that you’re about to be alone.
Sometimes, it’s grief at losing or being left by someone we love.
Sometimes, it’s the peculiar anxiety of being on stage, or in charge, for the very first time.
And when the reverence and wonder come, with the glimpse of heaven’s fire, that fear must still be there, too.
There aren’t logical explanations for Elisha’s odd exclamation about Israel’s chariots. The only thing that explains it is awe: Reverence, fear, and wonder, well-mixed.
Awe isn’t supposed to make sense.
And then there are the disciples on the mountain. Jesus glows with eye-blinding, painful light. He stands talking to the two greatest men of God ever to walk the earth – men who have been gone from the earth for centuries.
Have you ever been stunned by the transformation of someone you thought you knew?
There’s wonder. And fear.
Mark points right to that experience when he describes the confusion and fright that lead to Peter’s bizarre construction proposal.
Those men stunned into chaos and nonsense by awe in our stories today are great leaders of faith, but they didn’t start out that way. Elisha is called away from farming in the middle of plowing a field, to follow the prophet Elijah. Peter, James and John were all fully occupied as commercial fishermen when Jesus invited them to follow him.
And all of them also offer shining examples of what not to do as a man of God.
Peter tells Jesus to cut it out when he talks about death and resurrection, and famously denies any acquaintance with the dying Son of God. James and John start a campaign for the best seats at God’s table, trying to cut out their fellow disciples before they get any ideas. And Elisha, just a few days after receiving Elijah’s power, has a run-in with some heckling boys and sets a couple of angry bears on them.
Ordinary. Flawed.
But we know that they lived into God’s work, that their stories reflect the glory of God, and that they shaped the faith that you and I learn and live today.
What if that’s what they realized in those awesome moments? What if Peter and Elisha, seeing all that glory, actually came face to face with the power God was about to entrust to them? To their imperfect, mostly competent, but very ordinary selves.
Because God does that. Puts awe-inspiring potential into really ordinary, limited, breakable people like you and me.
Spiritual author Marianne Williamson is quoted as saying, "Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light and not our darkness that most frightens us."
When we discover power within us, when we discover that the limits we’re comfortable with can be broken, it can be glorious, and it can be terrifying.
Like when we learn to walk. Or learn to parent. Or discover nuclear fission.
Because if you have the power to change the world, then just might have to.
And change and transformation are cliff-hangers, unpredictable and risky, even when they offer glorious opportunities and abundant life.
It happened to Peter, and James, and John. And Elisha.
And to ordinary people in our own lifetimes. It might be happening to you.
Most of the time, we turn to God for healing and help in the ordinary needs or dark places of our lives. But sometimes God turns to us with a burst of light and glory, and in that light, lives can change.
Sometimes that happens when the darkness seems to be closing in, like it happened to Elisha and Peter when they were facing a tremendous loss.
This is a day of awesome stories, and that makes it a day to consider our own fears of the light.
Are there talents within you that you’re afraid to exercise, out of simple stage fright, or the dread of new responsibility?
Are there dreams you’d really rather not dream?
Dreams about a healed world, an end to suffering, because they’ll demand your whole life if you want them to come true?
This is the day to acknowledge it. To embrace that light and the perfectly reasonable fear and wonder.
Because God is in that light, that light that shines within you, the light that sometimes surrounds you with power you may not want to use, hope you may not want to trust, and glorious opportunities that seem like too much work.
God is there, reaching out to embrace and strengthen us, to teach us, if we’re listening.
To invite us into the awesome story.
Awesome in every sense.
Amen.
