On Reverence and Respect

Often one meets clergy deserving of respect; seldom does one meet clergy deserving of reverence.  Reverence is defined as deep respect and by that simple definition the foregoing premise is proven inaccurate.  However, there is something about the word that places it far above “respect” and the attitude or the emotions conveyed by that word should be reserved for something more than mortal humankind. 

All too often we give “reverence” to persons undeserving of such.  There always seems to be some clergy, man or woman, who demands reverence and thus claim a special status for themselves.  And they demand that their pronouncements are more meaningful than others’.  Those pronouncements, however, seem to defy reason and logic, and, for those who are concerned about the state of religion, they leave one cold, wishing the “reverential” person would have remained silent.

Pat Robertson comes to mind, with his pronouncements that natural disasters are the result of God’s punishment on offending persons.  It reminds us of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”  We often wish such people would worship the loving God of Jesus and quit delighting in their belief that God has not only set up a hell in the afterlife for those who don’t do precisely what He says, but has also flung hell-like retributions on people while they are still alive for not doing precisely what He says.  The immediate problem is that those hell-like retributions hurt, harm and kill the just and the unjust, and regardless of how one tries to spin it, that is a very real problem.

It has always been this way.  Increase Mather said, in commenting on the great fire that swept through Boston in 1711, “Has not God’s holy day been profaned in New England?  Has it not been so in Boston this last summer?  Have not burdens been carried through the streets on the sabbath day?  Nay, have not bankers, carpenters and other tradesmen been employed in servile works on the sabbath day?  When I saw this, my heart said, ‘Will not the Lord for this kindle a fire in Boston?’”  The God of Increase was hardly the God of Jesus.