Where are we? Where is the fear?

What in the world is happening to us? What in the world is happening with faith based communities? What is it that we think we ought to be getting from our religion? What do we think we owe to the Holy?

I suspect that religion has always had a very large dimension of what is in it for us. All kinds of various religious practices have been developed to obtain from God what we want. Fertility, Rain, Prosperity, Peace, Victory, Success, have been but a few of the things we have wanted God to give us. We have made the sacrifices and we have fulfilled the vows in the hopes that our behavior would gain God's blessings.

The religious practices which have been performed to obtain what humans wanted have most often, had a large dimension of fear or apprehension as a part of them. We wanted to get on the good side of the gods because we had a very deep and pervasive fear of the Holy ones. We wanted to do it correctly because the gods had a temper and did not take kindly to shoddy work or carelessness.

From what I read in lots of articles and commentaries by others is that some how the fear has gone out of American Religious practices. We act like the Holy is a buddy. We want God to make us happy, we want happy music and successful programs, and lots of smiling faces, and we do not seem to have much fear that God has any anger or power that might be used destructively. We are chummy with God. We are informal and causal and familiar with the divine. From what I read there has gone missing that dimension of fearful thing to be in the hands of the Almighty.

Frederick Buechner, a well respected religious novelist, wrote in a message called Home, about is conversion experience under the preaching of George Buttrick in New York City. Buechner talks about Buttrick, "These were the days before ministers were supposed to be everybody's great pal and to be called by their first names from the word go, the trouble with which, at least for me, is that it's not another great pal that I go to church looking for,but a prophet and a priest and a pastor. I have never met a warmer, kinder man, we never became pals, for which I was grateful, and if there was anybody in his congregation who called him George, I never happened to hear it."

But the word is that few people want to have a prophet who has words of judgment about a self-indulgent society. Nobody wants to hear a prophet who condemns a nation which spends more on military than it does on health, education, and peace. The word is out that we go to church to be made happy and to have the life we are living blessed.

From what I see and what I read, it does not look like those who go receive any blessings.