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One fall Sunday, when the students had first returned to campus, I said, “Welcome. This is your chapel. I want you to feel . . .”

What was it I wanted them to feel? I almost said, “I want you to feel at home.” But I didn’t. It’s hard to feel that way in Duke Chapel-Gothic, massive, and dark. It makes you feel small. The organ thunders. The space overwhelms you.

When I climb into the pulpit, I bolster my courage by telling myself I’ve only got to hang on there about twenty minutes, and that this really isn’t that big a deal.

It doesn’t work. I still get the shakes. I keep stomach medicine in my Gothic washroom. The place is threatening.

Some Sundays, even though we’ve got everything planned and the order of worship all nailed down, the Almighty still manages to reach in here, grab us by the neck, and shake us.

It doesn’t happen often. But it does happen. Knowing it can happen keeps me reaching for the Maalox.

So I tell the students, “Back home, in Sunday school, they tell you about the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son and how kind and good Jesus was. But you’ve got to wait until you’re old enough to hear a strange, dark text like this one (Heb. 12): You have not come to what may be touched but to a blazing fire, darkness and gloom, a tempest, the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg it to be silent.”

Such worship is threatening. It was so scary that even a man like Moses said, “I tremble with fear.”

I daresay that’s not a common experience today. We upholster churches like great carpeted living rooms, where every hard edge is cushioned and preachers pad around in slippers lest someone be even mildly disturbed.

Mostly, we exit church no different from when we entered, once again reassured that God is silent, or, if not silent, at least speaking in a voice that sounds like our own: “Friend, are you lonely? Is there something missing in your life? Would you like to have peace, joy, love, self-fulfillment, happiness, good health, good sex, good times? Come to Jesus.”

God: good friend, cheap therapist.

As pastors, we’re mostly relegated to the “helping professions,” chaplains to the occasionally afflicted, strokers of the status quo. The earth is not shaken by such secular silliness.

Even in the time of Moses, some tried to remake God-earth-shaking, fire-filled God-into their own image. While Moses was on the mountain, trying to listen to God without being blown away, others in the valley were recasting gods more to their liking.

We make gods because we need them. We take every dream we wish to be fulfilled, and call that God. Our religion is rated by its utility. “What will this do for me?”

It comes in more sophisticated varieties. Some theologians vote biblical images up or down solely on the basis of their effect. If the Bible’s word clashes with my sensitivities or my needs (as I define them) then let’s change the Bible’s terminology. Not much shaking going on. I don’t tremble if my little god talks just like me.

See that you do not refuse the one who speaks. … Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire.

This is a real God, not some pale, idolatrous projection of our ego. I’ve seen this God drive people out of graduate school and into the jungles of Honduras. I’ve seen people repent of their behavior even in a world that lives by “if it feels good do it.” I’ve seen it!

At the base of the Duke Chapel pulpit is an emblem, three triangles, symbolizing the triune God: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. One student, on parents’ weekend, was heard to ask his old man, “Why have they got the warning symbol for nuclear radiation on the pulpit?” Sure enough, it does look like the international warning symbol for radiation. But it’s a symbol for the living God.

So I tell students, “Take care. Don’t come around here without lead underwear, because I (and the choir, the organists, the architect, and everybody else who conspires to get God in here) intend to do everything in my power to expose you to this consuming fire.”

When I was in seminary, they told us, “The task of the preacher is to close the gap between the Bible and the modern world.” The preacher is supposed to hold the Bible in one hand and today’s newspaper in the other, and in twenty minutes bridge the old, outmoded, irrelevant world of the Bible and the new, fresh, modern world where we live.

No! Whenever we do that, the traffic invariably motors one way over that hermeneutical bridge. It’s always the modern world telling the Bible what’s important.

I’ve decided, since being in Duke’s beautiful, dark, overpowering chapel, that my task is to reverse the traffic, to let the Bible ask the questions, to dare students to listen to this troublesome voice more than to their own, to widen the gap between them and God rather than to close it.

Because it’s in the gaps-the threatening dark, open spaces-where we’re stripped of defenses, our modern secular veneer peeled away, naked and unsteady, that we are free to roam, to hear a new word, to envision a new world.

There, free from the slavery to what is, we’re able to rise above our present situation, to be saved, to soar.

William Willimon is dean of the chapel and professor of Christian ministry at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.