Psalm 29: Untamed Holiness

"But holiness is in wild and furious opposition to all such banality and blandness, the specialty of sectarian groups who reduce life to behaviors and cliches that can be certified as safe: goodness in a straitjacket, truth drained of mystery, beauty emasculated into ceramic knickknacks...This God-life cannot be domesticated or used; it can only be entered into on its own terms." - Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire

After many years of church growing up, it certainly seemed that holiness was some sort of synonym for boring. It was static. It was the throne room of God where he sat in perfection and we all sort of stood around watching him be perfect.

But the writer of Psalm 29 seems to have a different idea:

Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness. - Psalm 29:2

Sounds pretty Sunday-school-esque. Safe. But then:

The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders. The Lord thunders over the mighty waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the Lord is majestic. - Psalm 29:3

Holiness is being set apart, whether by nature (as God) or by designation (by God). While it is true that we are made in his image, there is so much more to God that we do not and cannot possess. This gap creates a tension that we are tempted to resolve by imagining God as a bigger, cleaned-up version of ourselves. There is an other-ness-a transcendence-to God that we are not equipped to fathom and this means that every encounter with the holy stretches us and even confuses us. It cannot be tame or bland because it is wholly not our own.

Listen to his voice! Here in Psalm 29, as in Genesis 1, he speaks his creative word over the swirling chaos of the waters and the world leaps. The world responds, not with the gentle dance of the sugar-plum fairies but with visceral leap of the created towards its creator.

The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon. He makes Lebanon leap like a calf, Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of the Lord strikes with flashes of lightning.
The voice of the Lord shakes the desert; the Lord shakes the Desert of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord twists the oaks and strips the forests bare. - Psalm 29:4-9a

Only the cardboard-cutout of God is ho-hum. Sometimes I have enshrined my impressions of God from earlier in my faith walk. Sometimes I have chosen convenient caricatures of God that make him more manageable. Sometimes I have reduced the eternal person-hood of God into a few impersonal principles that can be obeyed and therefore controlled, but not loved.

God, destroy any image in me which is short of yourself. It is a continual breaking of me, finding that my imagination lacks the capacity. At the same time, I am happy because you are so different and so immense and so undiscovered. Let me join in response to the beauty of your holiness where "...in his temple all cry, 'Glory!' (Psalm 29:9b)