"Taste and See."

Psalm 34.

I.

            When Psalm 34 says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” it draws our attention to the experiential nature of faith.  Historically, we Presbyterians too often imagine that faith is a purely mental, verbal, and auditory thing.  If you look at old, classic Presbyterian, Puritan, and Reformed churches, you notice how unadorned they are.  Sometimes all benches don’t even face the front, because seeing the pastor wasn’t the point, only hearing him was important.  There is very little color, few if any symbols, absolutely no pictures. 

            Even today in some churches it’s like they’re allergic to actually sensing anything.  I’ve seen baptisms where the water was barely more than a rumor, so little of it was used.  And Presbyterians used to only celebrate the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper quarterly, and then only because Jesus said you have to do it sometime, so averse are we to anything as gross and sensory as chewing, tasting, and swallowing in church.

            Fortunately, God’s Spirit has led us away from these neuroses – not that we don’t still have a ways to go – and we are no longer averse to experiencing God with our bodies and with senses other than our hearing.  When we do a baptism now the person gets wet, though we’re not dunking anybody.  And we celebrate the Lord’s Supper almost as regularly as Paul and the early church, not to mention Calvin, intended.  And when we worship, some of us even move our bodies!  So there’s that, anyway.

            Faith is to be experienced.  God comes to us through all our senses, and the effect is to know God’s goodness.  Not just know about God’s goodness, not just know God’s goodness as data or information or facts, but to really know God’s goodness in and with our bodies.

            The context of this Psalm, from its brief introduction anyway, is that David wrote it after an incident where he was in danger from a powerful enemy and managed to save his life by pretending to be insane.  He made-believe he had defective mental qualities and abilities.  (It’s in 1 Samuel 21, described somewhat graphically.) 

            I think that plays very well into the idea that we would do well to get out of our heads, even as David pretended to be out of his mind.  Maybe temporarily letting go of our mental faculties can cause us to be more open to a sensory faith.

            In the face of threats from powerful forces, I wonder if disciples might get some mileage out of putting rationality aside and just doing some apparently crazy and nonsensical things.  Certainly the Lord Jesus, while he never intentionally pretended to be insane, he was accused of insanity, even by members of his own family!  And many thought he was crazy for advocating relationships and practices that were sure to get him into trouble, not, like David, to get him out of it.

            I am reminded of how the line between holiness and insanity has always been rather blurry.

II.

            One of the reasons we are slow to open up to a more sensory and experiential faith is fear.  Fear is a big factor in that story about David.  It is fear that leads him to feign insanity.  And it is because of fear that too often we do not come out of our heads and experience life.  Life can bite.  Not everything we are invited to sense – taste especially – is good for us.  Certainly for a person of my personality, I want to do exhaustive research before I put anything in my mouth to taste it.  If someone says, “How do you know you won’t like it if you won’t try it?”  My response is, “How do I know it won’t kill me if I do taste it?”

            But the Psalm invites us to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”  How do you know how good the Lord is if you won’t take a taste?  That is, we can’t know God without tasting God, without taking God into us, without risk, without direct interaction, without allowing ourselves to sense God with our bodies.  This only happens, of course, in and through creation and the things God has made. 

            We cannot taste the Creator directly; the idea is absurd and even a little heretical.  But we can “taste God” in a sense by tasting the things God has made and placed in the creation for our benefit.  We metaphorically taste God by tasting life, by immersing ourselves in relationships and community, by feeling and sensing and experiencing… by touching the world and letting the world touch us.

            Tasting is trusting.  Tasting is believing.  There is a certain level of trust that is involved every time we put something into our mouths.  But unless we do, we starve.

            David is saying, “Stick you neck out.  Take the risk.  Interact with life.  Do something crazy.  Put your life on the line.  The only way to know how good something is, is to experience it, to taste it, to get involved with it and interact with it, to mess with it and be immersed in it.” 

            David is suggesting that we should assume goodness.  We have to assume the goodness of the Lord, as the basis for our taking a taste of what the Lord has to offer.  We have to trust the one holding out the spoon to us; we have to rest in the assurance that the Creator and Lover of all is not going to feed us poison.

            So when the Psalm talks about the fear of the Lord, it is not terror at the possibility of being punished for screwing up.  That is what we fear from humans with more power than we have.            An early Christian writer named Cassiodorus describes the fear of God this way:  “This is not fear that induces dread but that which induces love.  Human fear contains bitterness, but this contains sweetness.  The first forces us to slavery; the second draws us toward freedom.  Finally, the first fears the bars that exclude us; the second opens up the Kingdom of Heaven.”

III.

            So fear of the Lord effectively cancels out our fear of anything else.  Not only that, but it has a completely different character than our fear of anything else.  We fear things in the world because of the harm we imagine they can do to us.  So we put up our defenses, our fight-or-flight reactions come into play, and we do what we can to protect ourselves.

            But the fear of God is an awareness of God’s immense love and goodness, and the fear is that we will not get enough of it or we will be cut off from it, or that it will annihilate our imperfections so thoroughly that we will be completely dissolved into it.  We use the word fear because language is inadequate to describe this reality.  So we make an analogy and arbitrarily grab a word to use in talking about it, and by the time it trickles down to the level of our normal experience, the chosen word is so completely inadequate as to mean almost the opposite of what we meant to say.  This happens a lot when we try to talk about God.  We choose a word like “fear,” but what we really mean is some kind of transfigured, transcendant, overwhelming anti-fear.  But there’s no word for that.

            So we use the word fear, and it causes people to think that they are supposed to be afraid of God like they are afraid of some violent, cosmic bully, a reaction diametrically opposed to what we are really trying to say, or what God is really about.

            When we talk about the fear of God we really mean we are in touch with what the apostle John knows as the love of God that casts out all fear.  It is not that we are afraid of being in God’s Presence; it is more like we are afraid of falling out of God’s Presence.  So we do everything we can, by grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, to stay with God, to bend our will and transform our behavior, so that we remain in the light of God’s love, and not wander into the shadows, into nothingness.

            So the Psalm says, in verse 4, ”I sought the Lord and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.”  So he is delivered from fear of harm.  Because “the angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear [God], and delivers them,” verse 7.  Fear of God is fearlessness in the world.  “Those who fear God have no want,” verse 9, they don’t lack for anything because in God they, in a sense, already have everything.

            And the last place fear is mentioned is verse 11, where the Psalm talks about teaching children to fear the Lord, and then gives practical advice about what this means.  First of all it appears to have to do with not speaking evil or deceit.  So much of our fear is generated and exasperated by what we say, to ourselves, and others.  The source of fear is when we start talking about and rationalizing about things, rather than simply experiencing them in their created goodness.

IV.

            Unfortunately, there are people and forces in the world who derive great benefit from our fears.  They need us to be afraid of just about everything.  We are supposed to be afraid of other people, especially outsiders and people not like us, or with whom we disagree.  And beware of anyone who makes serious money on our being afraid.  Fear is big business these days.

            The fear of the Lord, however, undermines the power that people who benefit from our being afraid of earthly things have over us.  Fear of the Lord banishes our fear of earthly principalities and powers.  People who don’t fear them make them angry because fear is the way they control people.

            So when, instead of fearing the people we’re supposed to fear, and hate, and exclude, and punish, we help them, advocate for them, befriend them, and support them, the principalities and powers who depend on our fear get nervous and angry, and even violent.  When we stand with the people with whom Jesus stands – the foreigners, the sick, the poor, the excluded and disenfranchised, the imprisoned, the hungry, the children, the debtors – we deeply offend those who depend on people being afraid of these “others.”

            The Psalm tells us “the Lord is near to the broken-hearted, and saves the crushed in spirit.  Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord rescues them from them all.”  To fear the Lord does not exempt one from having to face fearsome circumstances.  It simply means we face those circumstances without fearing them, but with courage, integrity, energy, and trust in God.

            Because in Jesus Christ we know whose side God is on.  And when the choice is between cutting yourself off from fearful human authorities and cutting yourself off from the Creator of the whole universe, well, it becomes clear which way we are bound to take.  But if we in our cowardice are more afraid of getting on the wrong side of the evil powers that we allow to control our world, that means we have forgotten God’s love and excluded ourselves from God.

            God cherishes the righteous, those who stand with God for the weak without fearing the harm that might come from any human authority.  The Psalm uses this image of “keeping their bones,” which I interpret as holding their integrity in love until the resurrection, the ultimate triumph of life.  While making ourselves merchants of fear leads quickly to nowhere.  Fear leads to destruction.

V.

            “O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are they who take refuge in him.”  We can trust the Lord to be good; we can trust everything the Lord made to be good.  That doesn’t mean we can just go and stick anything the Lord made right in our mouths, but it does mean that if we follow the Creator’s will that peace, justice, love, and blessing be done, we will ultimately experience creation as a beautiful and wonderful place.  Not even the ire and violence of fearful human authorities can prevent or change that.  Not even death can separate us from the love of God.

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