All of today's readings center on three human beings experiencing awe in powerful, life changing events. The conversions stories of Isaiah, Paul, and Peter, three of the most pivotal religious figures of all time----began with that incredibly powerful mixture of fear, shame and overwhelming beauty we call awe. Falling in love does too.

Isaiah subsequently became a major prophet whose writings continue to inspire Christian congregations many times a year. Paul became Christianity's most quoted preacher-priest. And Peter served the budding Christian movement as its first world organizational leader. Love however, is more important than all of those great accomplishments. Like Isaiah, Paul and Peter we are all called in different ways to make contributions to the evolution of love.

It wasn't until 1980 that the term "Awesome" became a colloquial, even slang expression meaning "excellent". Before that, from Biblical references, the word "awe" meant "fearful", and "fear mixed with veneration". The word that struggles to express the most powerful human emotion of all, being moved to the core by an experience of the "Beyond the Human", awe carries a sense of unworthiness. The chasm between finite and infinite bowls one over in an overwhelming mixture of fear, joy, ecstatic beauty, unworthiness, and the greatness of knowing a Power beyond the human that stands with us in positive regard.

Awe is the defining characteristic of true worship. Granted, we can never control it, pin it down, or make it happen. Still we seek to promote awe with some success, through ritual, song, story, elocution, memory, and stirring our hearts to address the Deity with authenticity. We can ready the ground in hopes that the seed will grow.

That place of realization of one's relative insignificance in comparison to Transcendence, combined with the experience of that Being's unfathomable love of us, individually and collectively, constitutes the heart of all religious practice. When we gather we either seek to promote that awe or we languish in the results of our inadvertent shielding ourselves from it with patterned neatness, gushy excitement, social superficiality, and dogmatic skirmishing over specific aspects of mysteries we can never comprehend anyway.

The 2007 Academy Award nominated movie The Queen, boldly portrays this dynamism between awe as an unmanageable aspect of human experience on the one hand, and our human penchant for seeking to control, manage, and hold to our finite concepts of it on the other. The Queen tells the story of the few days before and after the death of Princess Dianna from the differing perspectives of Queen Elizabeth and her new and young Prime Minister, Tony Blaire. When Elizabeth hears of the fatal accident she logically concludes the best approach to dealing with it would be a private ceremony preferred by Dianna's family, and she contents herself with the daily specifics of living a royal life, earnestly protecting her grandsons, Dianna's boys, from the media exposure she believes would harm them.

Blaire on the other hand, keeps his fingers on the pulse of humanity and the uncanny way in which the entire world seems to have identified with and cherished Dianna's life attitude. Politely spurning royal special-ness, she enjoyed herself, embraced her natural goodness, and contributed her celebrity to causes she saw as improving the world community. When it finally dawns on the Queen that the Monarchy is being harmed rather that promoted by her failure to take any leadership in the mourning of millions worldwide, she concedes to participate, in effect saving the monarchy from extermination as end to its already fading importance. In order to do so however, she had to overcome the strong opposition from her husband and her mother (The Queen Mother, Mary) who still could not let go of their archaic notions of royalty as rightful leaders regardless of popular opinion.

Experiences of awe are never predictable, but at the same time they are highly available in sunsets, ocean vistas, mountain magnificence, and the arms of a lover who understands your basic human needs and generously collaborates with you in filing them sumptuously. Awe describes the soul movement of a pre-adolescent gazing boy upon the glory of a specific girl's face and bodily movement. Awe fits the way a man feels in proposing unending love to a woman without whom he can't stand visualizing his future life. Awe sweeps many of the people witnessing a reverent and imaginative wedding as the love is conveyed, committed, and celebrated in its infancy and promise. Awe accompanies a woman as she watches her best lover die at any age.

Awe does not end the scripture stories for today however. It begins them. It is naturally and supernaturally followed by a realization of grace, free reception of great abundant, undeserved love from an infinite being who is close and on our side. For Old Testament writers of the Song of Songs and Hosea, carnal love is an exceptional metaphor for Divine love that we can only allow ourselves to experience for seconds at a time.