5-year old Johnny was in the kitchen as his mother made supper. She asked him to go into the pantry and get her a can of tomato soup, but he didn't want to go alone. "It's dark in there and I'm scared." She asked again, and he persisted. Finally she said, "It's OK--Jesus will be in there with you." Johnny walked hesitantly to the door and slowly opened it. He peeked inside, saw it was dark, and started to leave when all at once an idea came, and he said: "Jesus, if you're in there, would you hand me that can of tomato soup?" Well what that boy had was nyctophobia, that’s the posh word for fear of the dark.  There are other rarer fears of course, like peladophobia: fear of bald people; chaetophobia: fear of hairy people;  porphyrophobia: fear of the color purple; levophobia: fear of objects on the left side of the body and dextrophobia: fear of objects on the right side of the body. There’s even phobophobia: the fear of being afraid.  But a very common fear for human beings is theophobia – the fear of God.  And ironically it can often be experienced by Christians.  I say ‘ironically’ because as we just read in the epistle to the Hebrews Christians have nothing to be afraid of when it comes to God – quite the opposite in fact.

But God is so big, so unknown, so invisible, so beyond our power to control or even understand, and so, well, scary.  Isn’t he?  It’s probably one of the reasons why even though most people believe in God we still fear death.  We think of sanding before him and we tremble inside because we are afraid of his judgment and condemnation.  We know all to well that our lives have not been perfect, that we’ve made some bad and foolish decisions, often acted without love, and sometimes behaved selfishly.  And so we can feel a little bit of anxiety because we half believe that because God is holy and perfect then he can’t be pleased with me and my performance over my lifetime.  And even though we believe that God is forgiving and merciful we also lack the faith that his mercy and forgiveness could reach as far as us, with all we’ve done.

And if that describes you today, then this reading from Hebrews is for you.  The writer (incidentally, no one knows who wrote Hebrews – unlike the other letters in the New Testament the author never bothers to tell us his name at the start) says this, “Let us approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”  Let us approach the throne of grace where we will get mercy and grace.  With confidence.   Now this, of course, is not just reassuring for that great day when we stand before God, but it is encouraging now.  It’s a great energizer today - it means we can approach God in prayer confidently, knowing that he loves us and thrills to welcome us and listen to us.  It means we can worship without fearing that he will turn us away.  We can lift our eyes to heaven and not have to beat our chests, and wear sackcloth and ashes and declare ourselves too sinful for God.  So we can sing with gusto.  We can pray with freedom.  We don’t need to grovel before God or go through certain rituals and ceremonies before he will agree to receive us into his court.  Why?  Well, it’s not because we’re perfect, and it’s not because we have a right to enter God’s presence by virtue of our goodness or faithfulness.  No, it is the goodness and faithfulness of Christ that opens the way to God and allows us the confidence to stand before God.  It says “We have a Great High Priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, and he is able to sympathise with our weaknesses.  He was tempted in every way we are yet was without sin.  Let us therefore, approach the throne of grace with confidence.”

A great deal of the fear that Christians have towards God is based on misunderstanding.  Our ideas of God and about what happens  after death are more influenced by writers and painters in the middle ages than by the Scriptures.  Sometimes we can misunderstand words and phrases that we read in the Bible that can make us scared of God.  Like the young Teddy Roosevelt, for example.  As a boy Roosevelt was petrified to go to church.  The church his family attended was Madison Square Presbyterian in New York City.  And Teddy refused to set foot inside it alone.  The reason for his terror, his mother Mittie discovered, of something called the "zeal."  He believed this thing called the zeal crouched in the dark corners of the church ready to jump out at him.  When she asked what a zeal might be, he said he was not sure, but thought it was probably a large animal like an alligator or a dragon.  He said he had heard the minister read about it from the Bible. His mother was confused but pulled a Bible concordance off the shelf and read Teddy those verses containing the word ZEAL until she read John 2:17, whereupon he panicked and shouted at her to stop.  John 2:17 says: "And his disciples remembered that it was written, 'The ZEAL of thine house hath eaten me up'."  Now our fears of God might not be based on misunderstanding of the Bible, like that, but they can be just as damaging to our confidence in God, and just as much based on imagination rather than what the Bible teaches.  If you were brought up with a view of God that said you were in danger of going to hell unless you were good and do what he commanded, then of course you were bound to grow up scared of God and always with that nagging question of whether you’re good enough.  You’ll believe that being right with God depends on you and your goodness.  And sadly, very many people have received really bad teaching and consequently have grown up with this sense of being unacceptable to God, despite having faith in what Jesus did for them.  And I believe that very, very many people in the US who used to go to church as kids or even as adults, but who gave up did so because they were taught this incorrect view of God that he demands this standard of holiness by them before he will accept them.  Parents, Sunday School teachers, and pastors have a solemn responsibility in this respect.  We can put people off God for life because we lay an improper view of God both children and adults.

So does God just not care how we live?  Well, yes, of course he cares how we live.  He calls us to follow Christ.  He lays before us the law of love – he challenges us to love him with all we have and love our neighbours as much as we love ourselves.  But your and my status as Christians is not threatened by our failure to live consistently as Christ’s disciples.  And yes, we do need Christ in order to be in relationship with God.  But Christ is all we need.  We don’t have to add our own good performance in order to make up some deficit.  There’s nothing you could do to make God love you more, and there’s nothing you can do to make him love you less.  There’s nothing you could do to earn his acceptance and there’s nothing you could do to cause him to reject you.

In 1981, a Minnesota radio station reported a story about a stolen car in California. Police were staging an intense search for the vehicle and the driver, even to the point of placing announcements on local radio stations to contact the thief.  Why were the police so anxious to apprehend the felon?  Was he an escaped murderer who put in danger the lives of those he came into contact with?  A psychopathic killer intent on carnage perhaps?  No.  He was just a car thief.  The reason for their urgency was that on the front seat of the stolen car sat a box of crackers that, unknown to the thief, were laced with poison. The car owner had intended to use the crackers as rat bait. Now the police and the owner of this VW Beetle were more interested in apprehending the thief to save his life than to prosecute and punish him.  And so it is, friends, with God.  His voice of instruction is the call to life.  Sometimes we think of his commands are harsh and meant to kill our joy.  So we run from God, thinking we have to escape his punishment.  But what we are actually doing is eluding His rescue. 

The author Annie Dillard has written about her growth in faith from being scared of God to understanding his grace.  One Christmas Eve  when she was a young girl there was a commotion at the front door. “It opened, and cold wind blew around my dress. ‘Look who's here! Look who's here!’ It was Santa Claus, whom I never - ever - wanted to meet. Santa was looming in the doorway and looking around for me. My mother's voice was thrilled: ‘Look who's here!’ I ran upstairs.  Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus, thinking he was God. I was still thoughtless and brutish. I knew right from wrong but had barely tested the possibility of shaping my own behavior, and then only from fear, and not from love. Santa Claus was an old man you never saw, but who, nevertheless, saw you.... He knew when you'd been bad or good. And I had been bad.”  She goes to say that her mother pleaded with her to come. Her father cajoled her; her sister howled at her. But she would not come out from her hiding place.  Santa was in fact a neighbor, Miss White, whom Annie actually liked.  With hindsight, Annie realizes that in her child's mind, Santa Claus and Miss White and God were all mixed up into one. She didn't quite grasp the difference between them. One time, she writes, quite by accident, Miss White was showing her how a magnifying glass focuses the rays of the sun and burned Annie’s hand.  Annie ran home crying.  "Even now, I wonder: If I meet God, will he take and hold my bare hand in his, and focus his eye on my palm, and kindle that spot and let me burn?  If I meet God will he let me burn?... But no. It is I who misunderstood everything and let everybody down. Miss White, God, I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear and pain."

Who do you think God is?  A cosmic policeman watching you and waiting for you to step on the cracks in the pavement so he can jump out at you and arrest you?  A cruel dictator who torments us with sadistic games, who burns our hands with the pure heat of his eyes?  Is what you think of when you think of God as judge?  Or do you think of him as something else?  A loving gracious friend who gives you the freedom to enter his presence and who is thrilled when you choose to take him up on his hospitality?  Fiends let us this morning, and always, pray, worship, take the sacrament, with confidence in his love and acceptance.  As Wesley wrote in the hymn And can it be? “Bold I approach the eternal throne and claim the crown through Christ my own.”